Jeep,” I said. “Getting behind the wheel turns you into a seventeen-year-old boy with his baseball cap on backwards.”
“Not me, ma’am,” Becker said. “I drive like a cop.” Lug-nut jumped up and put his paws on Becker’s chest, wagging his tail.
“Down!” I said, but it was too late to save the shirt. “Sorry. He likes you.”
Becker patted the dog’s head. “It’s only a shirt. So, medicine woman, you got the cure down here or in your cabin?”
“Are you up for the hike?”
“No problem. I’m tough. I own a Jeep, remember?”
He slowed down halfway up the hill. The stars were out, in a navy blue sky.
“Hey, Polly, come here a sec,” he said.
It was dark where he was. There was moss and bracken on the ground. We stayed there a while.
“Mmm, Bkrr?”
“Mmmmn?”
“You’re still bleeding.”
“How come you’re still calling me Becker?”
“I hardly know you.”
“Oh. You have a thing in your hair. Wait.”
“Mmmmn.”
Later, we finished the climb. At a trot. I lit the lamps and put the kettle on.
“You cleaned up in here,” Becker said.
“Yeah, well. Sit here where the light is. We’ll fix that eye.”
“Now?”
“There’s clean pillowcases,” I said. “I don’t want blood on them.” It was a lie, but still. Tending to the wounds of a devastatingly handsome officer by lamplight has got to be the biggest Florence Nightingale wet-dream in the world.
“Don’t move.” I washed the cut with a goldenseal solution to disinfect it, then mixed up a bit of myrrh and goldenseal into a paste.
“What the hell is that?” he said.
“If we had gone to the hospital, they would have given you a couple of stitches. This is cheaper, and you won’t have a scar.”
I used a couple of tiny strips of surgical tape to close the wound, which was a split just above the eyebrow. Then I dabbed a bit of herbal paste on, added a scrap of gauze and a band-aid.
“I did this a while ago when I slashed my finger with an Olfa knife,” I said. “It works. Trust me. Just don’t wiggle your eyebrows for a couple of days.”
“Whatever you say, ma’am. As long as I don’t wake up with three eyes in the morning. Some kind of spell involved here?”
“You’re not religious, are you?”
“No.”
“Thank heaven for that,” I said and poured a couple of brandies.
“It’s quiet up here,” Becker said. “How do you stand it? You listen to music at all? Have you got a CD player? Tunes?” There had been CDs in his Jeep. I hadn’t thought to look at them.
“There’s no hydro and batteries are expensive,” I said. “I do have a radio that winds up like clockwork, though. It gets the CBC.”
“You’re kidding. Clockwork?”
“Yeah. They were designed for the third world. I figure we’ll all be third world soon enough, so I bought one.”
“Where? Is this it?” Becker walked over to the clockwork radio which held pride of place over the sink, by the window.
“How does it go on?”
“Crank the handle at the side, then press the ON switch. Don’t worry about over-winding it, they’re indestructible.”
Becker turned the crank until the coiled spring inside was tight, then pressed the button and Margery Doyle’s genial Newfie drawl came on, introducing a string quartet.
“Perfect,” I said.
“You like this stuff?” Becker said.
“Don’t you?”
“I listen to MEGA FM most of the time. This is fine, though.”
He returned to the table and started to massage the back of my neck.
“I feel like I should be wearing a suit and tie,” he said.
“Why? The music?” There was a long pause. The cello spoke of caramel passion and the violin sang like spring.
“It’s kind of high-brow,” he said.
“We could turn it off. Nobody says you need music.”
He turned it off, then came back to me.
“Mmmn. That feels wonderful,” I said. “Cop fingers. Strong.”
My shirt melted off.
“Aren’t you cold?” Becker said.
“Come this way. It’s warmer under the covers.”
He had a body like sculpted granite, but his skin was soft and smelled wonderful. We lay there, staring at each other, nose to nose, just grinning. It was the kind of shyness that occurs when two people, who have chosen to act on a mutual attraction, are finally confronted with a delicious expanse of willing, unexplored flesh. It’s dizzying. Where to begin?
Going to bed with someone for the first time is nerve-wracking. I’ve never been thoroughly engulfed in the moment, the way the heroine is in romance novels. There’s no “suddenly they bonded together like liquid fire, she opened herself to his throbbing manhood and their passion exploded so that she swooned with pleasure” stuff.
That isn’t to say that it wasn’t good, but rather than Bolero, ours was an intricate Slavonic folk dance, where every gesture held particular meaning.
Everybody has a specialty or two and our moves were introduced one-by-one, like characters in a play, presented with bashful pride. After all, the audience had never seen the show before.
I’ve never believed that sex was an entirely mutual act. There’s a certain selfishness to it that requires tiny, electric moments of wordless negotiation. If things are going well, the back-and-forth pleasure is seamless and wonderful. With Becker, it was. We kept our eyes open. We fit. We even managed the absurdity of the condom with dignity and humour. After the first tentative rehearsal, we didn’t need to ask each other for an encore, it just happened.
When first sex is satisfying, you feel like you’ve just won a medal for your gender—there’s no other way to describe that “I’ve
