Inukshuk Read Online Free PDF

minutes.”
    She gave a crooked smile and nodded. Shivered once and blinked. Was she forgiving him? Understanding her effect on him and forgiving him for that, too? She turned her hands over so they lay palms downward in his. In all their time together, he’d never touched her this openly or long. Their last walk together, the walk of his foolish forthrightness, he’d finished with his arms folded hard across his chest, whether to contain his hurt and embarrassment, to prevent himself from saying more, or to keep himself from touching her, he couldn’t have said. Had it always been this easy, and the only thing hanging them up had been his own hesistancy—his own good manners and marriedness?
    Part of him stood aside, wondering about this—if it meant
something, anything, nothing . . . a new permissiveness opening between them, yes, but because of the time apart or something else? And anyway, what did permissiveness signal? Mostly, he enjoyed the pressure of her hands in his, the unexpected weight and warmth.
    â€œPromise?” she said.
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œPromise you won’t become a stranger again, stranger?”
    â€œHa.” He laughed falsely. “Doubt there’s a remote possibility there, honey. We’ll, uh, what do they say in the movies. See you in court?”
    â€œThere won’t be any court. My son fights his own battles, and he can’t afford my husband’s fees. His father’s way of dealing with things would be a little more personal, shall we say. Primal?”
    He blinked to bring her better into focus—see if she really meant this or if it was code for some other information. More coyness or flirtation? No. She was serious. You didn’t get to look that self-contained and radiant fighting anyone else’s battles: She was a one-wick woman, solo candle composed all of self and slowly burning itself out. Not unlike Jane in that way, really. He understood, too, that the person whose attention Jeremy must most want and whose limits he’d been testing (and would likely never find) was her. Of course. All of this made perfect sense for about a millisecond, until he considered his own feelings: how to sort out the distractions and distortions there—what did his desire stir in her or cause him to imagine; how could you ever sort any of it, one thing from the other? No saying. Absolutely no saying or knowing on any of it. A mirage like the illusion of distance on a snowy, sunny day.
    â€œYou’re a hard one,” he said.
    â€œNowhere near hard enough, I’d say.”
    â€œWhat’s that supposed to mean?”
    â€œYou don’t have time now, remember? Class?”
    He groaned. “Here,” he said, sliding from his wallet one of the stash of slightly bent business cards he’d been given by the school when he came on board the previous year, and for which he’d never found much use—part of some senior’s Print and Media final project, he suspected: cheap paper stock and monster Gothic print that
looked as if it might have been lifted from one of his boys’ D&D books. “Cell number’s there at the bottom. Call. . . .” He went loping back across the lot to the side entryway, past his bent cigarette in the snow, still barely half-smoked. The same stretch of ground crossed once and now hastily jogged back over in the opposite direction—emblematic of absolutely nothing, he knew, and yet in the time between the one trip and the other, everything in his life seemed to have shifted course. Glimpsing his reflection in the upper window of the doorway as he yanked it aside, he wondered, That man, high school teacher and aspiring poet, windblown, shirt collar open in the middle of winter, beaming, desire clanging in his heart like the final rhyming couplet of a sonnet—who was he?
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    SHE CAUGHT UP WITH HIM just past the turnoff from the main road onto their