Lara Vapnyar - The Scent of Pine

She spread her legs a little more. If somebody told Lena just three days before that she’d be doing something like that, she would never have believed it. She didn’t know it was possible to be that intimate or that comfortable with a man. She didn’t know it was possible to feel that good. And she wasn’t even drunk anymore. Not really.

“Yes. Like that. Perfect.”

Ben would glance up at his model, then drop his gaze back to the paper, the movements of his hands fast, confident, and precise. He crumpled the first piece of paper, saying that he’d gotten the proportions wrong, but then went back to work right away. He was especially thorough with shading, which he did with the “pillows” of his middle and index fingers.

“Shading is fun,” he said, raising his eyes to her face. “It’s as if I was stroking it with the tips of my fingers.”

“Are you almost done? I want to see it!”

“Almost. Patience!”

The expression on Ben’s face turned into one of studious concentration. He was putting on the finishing touches.

“Okay, ready,” he said, and lifted up the drawing for her to see.

Lena squealed in delight.

“It’s beautiful! Oh, it’s so beautiful. And you know what, it does look like a hedgehog!”

“Does it?”

Ben took the drawing from her, studied it for some time, then pressed it against his cock.

Lena moaned. She wanted him like crazy, but what she wanted even more was for this drawing session to continue.

“Come here,” he said.

“No!”

“Why?”

“I’ll draw you first.”

And then it was she sitting cross-legged, holding the notebook and the pencil, staring at him.

“I haven’t drawn anything in ages. It’s a nice pencil, though. Soft. I took this one art class in college. I turned out to be very bad at it. Okay, just put your arms behind your head. Perfect.”

She put her index finger forward, squinted, and measured it against his cock. Then she held her finger horizontally and measured like that.

“I’m trying to remember how they taught us about proportions. I think you do it like this.”

Lena shook her head and moved away to continue working on her drawing.

She was holding the pencil in the tips of her fingers very close to the paper. Ben was staring at her fingers fluttering over the contours of his cock in the drawing. She moistened her middle finger’s tip and rubbed it against the paper to make the lines a little smudgy.

He moaned.

“It looks more realistic if you smudge,” she explained.

She held the notebook in her hands and admired the drawing. She looked at his cock, then at the picture again.

“It’s absolutely perfect.”

“Can I look?”

She handed him the paper.

“Well, I’m not sure about the proportions—”

Lena threw a pencil at him: “Hey! It was done with love!”

“I can see that.”

Then he pushed the drawings away, grabbed Lena by the ankles, pulled her right up to him, and said:

“Enough art talk, okay?”

His damp hair stuck out in all directions. His eyes were dark, bright, and happy.

“Okay!” she said, laughing.

Afterward, they fell asleep. When they woke up, a couple of hours later, it had gotten dark outside, and the fire had almost gone out, and they were no longer drunk.

“Is it still raining?” she asked.

“I don’t know, I don’t think so.”

“I need to pee.”

She put on his jeans and shirt, filled a mug with water, and ran out to the outhouse. The rain had stopped, and it wasn’t that cold, but it was misty and windy, and not particularly welcoming outside. She peed, then washed herself as quickly as possible so that mosquitoes couldn’t get to her. She couldn’t really do it well, with just a mug in her hands, in the dark of the outhouse. How she longed for a warm bath! The first thing she would do when she got home would be to take a warm bath. This was a lovely thought, until she remembered that this would be tomorrow. She would get home tomorrow. In one day. In an instant she felt sober.

Ben had revived a fire in the stove and put the kettle and the big pasta pot on. When the pasta was ready, they emptied the whole jar of sauce onto it, and since they couldn’t find a cheese grater, crumbled some cheese with a fork. After the pasta they had tea. And after tea they went back to bed. They both felt that this had been such a long day, and they were too exhausted, too drained of energy, to move, or even to sleep, so they just stayed like that in each other’s arms. Listening to the rain fall onto the cabin’s roof.

“Tell me the rest of the story,” Ben asked.

The rest of the story. So this would be the rest of the story.

Lena sighed and started speaking in a soft voice.

“Where was I? Oh, I had just gone out to meet Danya. He was waiting for me at the picnic. When I came out, he stood up, grabbed my hands, and pulled me close. We kissed standing up for a very long time, and then he pulled me toward the woods.

“We walked to the spot where the barbed wire was trampled and broken. We passed the pool and headed onto the path that led to ‘the end of the woods.’

“I was wearing sandals. The strap on the left one was broken, so I had to clench my toes to keep it in place. The soles were so thin that I could feel every tree root. Blades of grass and hemlock leaves brushed against my ankles, and the warm mushy ground sloshed against the back of my heels. I thought a garter snake might crawl over my foot at any moment. Or I imagined a squirrel jumping right onto my foot, scratching me with its tiny claws, brushing against my legs with its tail. I looked over at Danya to see if he was worried about the same thing, but Danya was wearing his black army boots. I had no idea what he was thinking about. He was silent, far away, despite walking next to me with a firm grasp on my hand. I stayed silent too.

“I couldn’t believe how different the woods felt at night. We were walking down the same path that I had walked with the kids many times before, but I didn’t recognize it at all. Without the visual markers, like that fallen tree or a certain blackberry bush, I lost my understanding of location and distance.

“The woods were quiet. No creepy noises. Whatever sounds we heard were so soft and unaggressive—the dull rumble of a plane far above, a rising rustle of wind in the trees, a mosquito buzzing—that they strangely seemed to be part of the general silence.

“Something small darted off a log and into the bushes. I shrieked. ‘It’s only a squirrel,’ Danya said. I wanted to tell him about my phobia of squirrels. I wanted to tell him many things. I desperately wanted us to talk, because I was scared of what might happen if we didn’t talk. I was much more scared of that than squirrels.

“And then we heard some distant shouting. Danya stopped and listened. ‘It’s coming from the camp,’ he said.

“Back the way we’d come, I saw flickering lights in the distance, as if people were brandishing flashlights.

“I had a momentary ridiculous thought that all the commotion was because of Danya and me, and that they were coming for us. I looked at Danya in a panic.

“He said, ‘Something happened, we should go back.’

“We ran most of the way, stumbling over the roots. I even fell once and cut my knee against a sharp rock.

“When we got closer to the camp, we could see that there were people with flashlights looking for something in the woods. I recognized Galina. I asked her what had happened, and she said, ‘Some fucking kid ran away.’ I asked her if she knew who, and she said that she didn’t, but she thought it was one of the little ones.

“I turned to Danya.

“He said: ‘I need to report to headquarters now. I’ll be at the base tomorrow, but I’ll come by the day after tomorrow, okay?’ I nodded and ran to my unit.