Conspiracy Theorist and the Mill Carpenter

His hand left her hip.

Not a slide. A lift, then the rest of him went with it—left shoulder rotating first, the cage of his ribs stacking after it, the long unbent line of his spine drawing itself vertical against the dark—until his back filled the space between her body and the mill. His ass, the backs of his thighs, the dusted plane of his shoulders: those were the last of him she had. Then there was only the width of him, two feet of bare back at arm’s length, and nothing of the nave past it.

The click had come from the far end of the nave. In the dream’s logic he had heard it the same instant she had, and he had put himself there.

Blaire’s palm was still open on the place his hip had been. The air where his skin had been was colder by a degree she could measure. She did not sit up. She watched the muscles along his spine hold. No device in the joinery. No second click. He turned his head a fraction, listening with the side of his face the way he listened to timber, and then he turned the rest of the way back to her in one piece, the same sequence reversed: spine, ribs, shoulder, and his hand found her hip again as if the interval had been a cut in film.

His mouth came down on her sternum.

Straight line. No wandering. She was on her back on the cot and he was over her, and the wet heat of his mouth traveled the bone to the soft give below it and kept going, a single track to her navel, his tongue a pressure she could have drawn with a rule. He stopped there. He straightened onto his knees between her thighs, and her left thigh came up over his hip at a clean ninety degrees, shin locked behind him, the angle holding without adjustment. His left hand spanned her far hip and held it flat, forearm running clear of the line between them. He set the head of himself against her and pushed in on one line, full depth, one stroke, no search, no correction. The right hand—the one that had left her—came up between them, fingers spread, and he offered her the palm the way a man offers a tool he knows is clean.

She took it.

In the dream the center of it was dry, warm, unmarked. She put her mouth there. The seal was exact. Her lips found the cup and stayed, and his fingers did not curl. They remained open around her face, a frame, while his hips drove in on a rhythm that did not slip or search. She was already close. The friction was even, the fit was even, her clit dragged the same path against him on every stroke. She could see it as if a camera had been set at the foot of the cot: the ninety-degree lock of her thigh, the straight wet line his mouth had left down her belly, the held close-up of her mouth in the exact center of his palm. She came on that image. The sound she made went into his skin. His hand did not close.

The click came again.

Harder. Closer. Not in the nave.

Blaire sat up.

The cot’s canvas popped under her weight. The unused office of the mill was the color of unfinished pine and mill dust, a single high window letting in a low, side-on afternoon that lit every floating mote from the left. Her phone was still vibrating on the crate she used as a table, analog alarm through a Faraday pouch she had not opened. The click was the plastic of the pouch against the crate.

She was alone in the room. She was dressed: thermal, jeans, socks. The space between her legs was wet in a way the dream had not accounted for, a mess, not a line. Her mouth was empty. She pressed her tongue to the roof of it and tasted nothing.

From the next room: the long, even hiss of sandpaper on oak.

The smell that came with it was identical. Oak. Sweat. A little linseed. She sat with her feet on the floorboards and catalogued her own pulse the way she catalogued drafts and camera angles. Then she reached under the cot for her boots, shoved her feet into them, and yanked the laces tight, two hard pulls each, and knotted them fast because her hands needed the job and a loose lace was one more thing she’d have to think about later. She stood because sitting was a posture that could be watched.

Dominic did not look up when she stopped in the doorway.

He was on one knee beside a timber bent, a sheet of 120-grit in his right hand, working a scarf joint that had opened a sixteenth in the last freeze. Sawdust had gone pale on his forearms and darker in the creases of his knuckles. His shoulders moved in a short, repeating arc. The mill around him was all original joinery and the scaffolding he had thrown to keep it honest. No cameras that she had found. No cavities that were not mice or settling or a 1970s electrician who had not given a damn. He had shown her every one of them. He had not laughed.

Blaire stayed in the doorframe, weight on both feet, eyes doing the slow inventory of his belt, his pockets, the battery pack on the shop radio, the seam of the window behind him.

*

Dominic felt her there the way he felt a wall that was out of plumb: not a sound, a change in the air’s pressure. He kept sanding because stopping would make it a scene, and he did not do scenes. Three more strokes. He straightened up off his knee, the sandpaper still folded in his fist, and looked at her over his shoulder.

She was standing too still. She always stood too still in doorways. He had stopped taking it personally in the second week. It was not about him. It was about the building, and he was in the building, and that was enough to put him on the list. What he had not stopped taking was the ferocity of it. Nobody had looked at his work like that. Nobody had looked at his hands like that.

“Joint’s proud on the left,” he said. “I’ll take it down. You want to see the mortise before I close it?”

She stepped out of the frame. Not a nod. A decision. Her boots held their tension against the floorboards, no drag in the laces, just the flat complaint of leather on old wood. He stood to give her the angle, and when he did, the air between them was the same temperature as the air in the office, which meant nothing except that he noticed it.

*

Blaire crouched. The mortise was empty. Wood, old peg-holes, a smear of hide glue he had not cleaned yet. She put two fingers in and ran them along the back wall of the pocket, feeling for a seam that was not grain. Nothing. She pulled her hand out. Oak dust on her skin, named, ordinary. She hated how much that settled her.

“It’s a mortise,” Dominic said. Not mockery. Just the fact.

“I know what a mortise is.”

“I know you do.” He turned the sandpaper once in his hand, resettling his grip on it. “There’s another one on the north bent. I can leave it open till you’re done with it.”

She looked at his mouth when he said it, then at his hands again, close now, at the low angle the crouch gave her. The grit in the lines of his palm was oak and nothing else she could prove. She had watched those hands for weeks. Second Tuesday, ten past nine in the morning: he had been marking out a tenon at the bench with a paring chisel in his right hand and a carpenter’s pencil behind his ear, and when he wanted the pencil he had not kept the chisel and reached. He had set the chisel down first. Flat on the bench, bevel down, edge turned away from where she was standing, and only then had his hand gone up to his ear. She had written it in the notebook. 9:10. Puts the blade down before he picks up the pencil. She had told herself it was tradecraft on her side, that she was logging a man’s habits the way she logged a building’s. She had not written down that she had wanted, even then, to know what that same care would feel like turned on her.