Stay by Nicola Griffith Read Free Book Online Page A

plantation that was part of the reason my greatgrandfather had bought this land in the first place. As the evening wound on, I took the flashlight down from the nail near the door and kept talking. He listened patiently for hours, as friends do.
    Outside, it was almost dark.
    “Espresso, I think,” Dornan said, and went into the trailer. I sat on the log, stoked the fire back to life.
    He brought two cups and a carafe outside, sat next to me on the log, and poured for us both. We stared at the fire. Far away, wild turkeys gobbled.
    “I’ve told you what happened my first night in this country,” I said.
    He nodded. “The man who broke into your apartment. That you killed.”
    “Yes.” Fourteen years ago. “I never told you how it felt.” A hot night in a new country. I’d fallen asleep naked and woken with a gun in my face. “It was like a dream—how could it be real to wake up with someone pointing a gun at you?—but I knew it wasn’t. Under my pillow I had my father’s flashlight.” Old. Heavy. Polished steel. “I hit him with it. It was easy. I just stood up and hit him with it, and his neck broke. I didn’t have to think, because the adrenaline took me to a place where—” I couldn’t tell him, after all. “It took me to a place where you don’t think. And that’s what happened in Oslo. I didn’t think.”
    Julia walking down the street to my Aunt Hjørdis’s house, oblivious to the two men right behind her, lifting their guns. Me leaping from the car, smiling, almost floating, getting one before he could shoot—crushing his spine where it met the skull—but reaching the other a split second too late. If I had been five seconds earlier, if I had not forgotten I had a gun.
    “I could have saved her. ”
    “Drink your coffee,” he said eventually. We sipped for a while. “That night you brought her to the café, you and she hadn’t, you weren’t yet—”
    “No.”
    “But I knew you would. It was as plain as day.”
    I remembered. Julia had excused herself at one point, and when she walked to the bathroom we both watched, and Dornan said
Very nice, Torvingen
, and I said—I believed—
It’s all business, Dornan
, because I hadn’t understood. Not then.
    “Just six months ago,” he said. “All four of us under one roof.” He shook his head.
    “How tired are you?” I asked.
    “It depends what you have in mind.”
    “Before I leave, this cabin has to be weatherproof. That means getting tarps up at the windows. I could do it tomorrow, but if we both worked tonight for an hour or two, I could leave early in the morning.”
    “Just a bit of hammering?”
    “We’d have to fire up the generator and hang a few lights, but, yes, just a bit of hammering.”
    We split the night open with noise and light and the stink of diesel and it felt good, it felt human, and although the tarps were heavy and the nails awkward, although Dornan hit the knuckle of my left index finger once and his own thumb twice, I think we both had the most fun either of us had enjoyed for months. It was a single, simple, discrete task, and we did it well.
    When the generator had been turned off and the tools stowed in the hogpen, we went into the trailer. In the steady, yellow-white fluorescent light, Dornan’s shoulders were no longer hunched; the lines at the corner of his eyes were not as deep. I felt tired, and peaceful.
    “Time for bed,” I said. “Tomorrow I want an early start.” I did not sleep for a while. From the woods to the west, a screech owl hooted. Another answered from the north. Calling to each other in the dark.

----
CHAPTER FOUR
    « ^ »
    I shook Dornan awake just before six. “I have a long drive today. I want to be out of here in an hour. Clean the shower after you’ve finished.”
    While he blundered about getting showered and dressed, I poured coffee, then unplugged and cleaned his espresso machine. I unloaded the fridge and put the perishables in a cardboard box.
    Dornan peered