An exclusive bonus scene. Set in mid-May, a few weeks after the epilogue, at Elias’s small lake cottage in the Adirondacks — the cottage Margaret inherited from her parents in 2014 and that Elias has not been to since the November after she died, six and a half years ago. Elias POV.
⚠️ Heat 5/5. This bonus chapter contains explicit sexual content, two on-page group scenes, and grief work woven throughout. 18+ readers only. If you have not yet read Library Daddy Prof & The Book Club Lads, this scene is set after the events of the novel and contains spoilers.
The Cottage Weekend
It is the second Friday of May, and we are an hour out of Tupper Lake on a two-lane road I have not driven in seven years.
Theo is asleep in the passenger seat with his curls flattened against the window and one hand limp in his lap, snoring very lightly through his open mouth in a way I am, for the rest of my life, going to find devastating. Riley is in the back, behind me, with a paperback open on his thigh that he has not turned a page of in forty miles, watching the pine wall of the Adirondacks unspool past the window with the steady quiet attention of a man who has not, in his life, been to the mountains. Jaxon is on the other side of the back seat in one of my old gray cardigans — a thing he pulled out of my closet at six this morning at the cottage, looked at me with his eyebrow raised, and put on without asking — and he is, with a small portable speaker on his thigh, playing a record-quality recording he made last weekend of himself reading the first chapter of Riley’s almost-finished fourth novel out loud, low, through the speakers, so that all four of us can hear it on the drive.
The chapter is called Yeast.
The chapter is, as Theo informed Riley two weeks ago in the kitchen with a deadly serious face, the only acceptable title.
Riley protested for approximately eight minutes. Riley lost.
Jaxon is reading. Theo is asleep. Riley is watching the pine. I am driving.
The road in front of me has, this time of year, a faint green at the very tip of every tree, and the pavement is cracked from the winter, and there is, at exactly mile marker eighty-two, a small dirt turnoff that I have not, in seven years, driven down.
I drive down it now.
The dirt road goes a quarter mile through second-growth maple and pine and dips, at the end, down a small rise to a clearing on a lake.
The lake is Tupper. The cottage on the lake is mine.
The cottage on the lake is mine because Margaret’s parents bought it in 1987 the year they retired, and they left it to her in 2014 when they died within four months of each other, and she left it to me in 2020, and I have not been to it since the November after she died, when I came up alone for three days, drained the pipes, locked it, and have not, in the six and a half years since, come back.
I have, this past week, called a man named Hank in Tupper who has been the caretaker of the cottage since 1996, and I have asked Hank to open the cottage. Hank has opened the cottage. Hank has, by his report on the phone yesterday afternoon, swept it, refilled the propane tank, run water through the pipes for twenty minutes, made up the bed in the master bedroom, laid a fire in the wood stove, left a casserole in the fridge from his wife Bonnie because Doc, I figured you boys would be tired, and put a bottle of red wine on the kitchen counter from his own cellar with a small handwritten card that read, when I read it three minutes ago at the kitchen counter: Welcome back, Doc. About time.
I am, sitting in the driver’s seat at the foot of the dirt drive, looking at the cottage for the first time in six and a half years, doing the thing I have learned to do in the last seven months, which is to not discipline the small animal in my chest. I let it move.
Theo, beside me, makes a small sleeping sound and pushes his face deeper into the window. Jaxon, in the back, very softly turns the volume of his speaker down.
Riley, in the back seat, says very low: “Elias.” I say: “Riley.” He says: “Take a minute.”
I take a minute. I take it with my hands on the wheel and the engine off and the lake through the gap in the pines at the foot of the property, dark and flat in the late-afternoon May sun, with the small dock and the small overturned canoe and the small green-painted Adirondack chair on the end of the dock, where Margaret used to sit at six a.m. with a cup of tea and a book in her lap and refuse to come back to the cottage until she had finished a chapter.
I take it with my eyes closed. I take it with the small hand of Riley on the back of my shoulder through the gap between the front seats. I take it. I open my eyes.
I say, very quiet: “All right.” Riley, very quiet: “All right, Elias.”
I get out.
The cottage has, in seven years, not aged a day. It is a small two-story shingle thing with a green metal roof and a stone chimney and a small front porch with two rocking chairs Margaret’s father caned by hand in 1991. The porch has, on the right rocker, a small pillow Bonnie has put out, embroidered with a single trout. The front door is unlocked. The wood stove is going.
I unlock the trunk. I take out the duffels. Riley takes Theo’s duffel. Jaxon takes mine and his. Theo, who has woken up in the driveway in a state of slight confusion and is now standing in his sweater on the gravel rubbing his face, says, very small: “Elias.”
I say: “Theodore.” He says: “Where are we.” I say: “Tupper Lake.” He says: “Whose cottage.” I say: “Mine.” He says: “Yours.”
I say: “Mine. Margaret’s parents’. Mine since 2014. I have not been here in seven years. I am, gentlemen, formally giving back to the four of us tonight, the small cottage on a lake I have refused to be in by myself for too long.”
Theo, very wet, very small, in the driveway, in his oversized sweater: “Elias.” I say: “Bring the casserole in, please, Mr. Lang. Hank’s wife made it.” He brings the casserole in.
We eat dinner on the porch. We eat at the small wooden table on the porch with a single lantern lit, with the lake going slowly purple in the May dusk, with Bonnie’s casserole, which is a chicken-and-rice thing that has, I am reasonably certain, two whole sticks of butter in it; with a green salad Riley assembled from the cottage’s small herb garden; with the bottle of wine from Hank, which we have opened and which is excellent; with a small loaf of bread Jaxon made in the cottage oven in the forty-five minutes since we arrived from a recipe I did not know he had memorized.
Jaxon, eating bread: “Elias. Why have we not been here every weekend for the last seven months.” I say, very low, at the table: “Because I was not, until February, ready to bring people here.” He says: “Are you ready now.” I say: “Yes.” He says: “Good.” He, very serenely, eats more bread.
Theo, at the table, in the lantern light, with the wine in his glass: “Elias. May I do something stupid.” I say: “Yes, Theo.” He, with the absolute level dryness of a man who has spent the last forty miles asleep, raises his glass to Riley, then to Jaxon, then to me, then to the empty fourth chair at the table where, by an arrangement none of us have spoken aloud, we have left a small place for Margaret — we are not going to call her, in this air, the empty chair — and Theo, at the table, with the lantern light on the side of his face, says, very low, very level: “To the cottage. To the four of us. To the chair we keep for her.”
Riley, very low: “To the chair.” Jaxon, very low: “To the chair.” I, with my voice catching slightly: “To the chair.” We drink. The wine is good.
Theo, who has approximately one and a half glasses of wine in him, says, into his glass: “I love you, Elias.” I say: “I know, Theodore.” He says: “I love you, Riley.” Riley says: “I love you, Theo.” He says: “I love you, Jax.” Jaxon says: “I love you, Theo.” He says: “I love —”
Theo’s hand, holding the glass, knocks against the small ceramic bowl of olive oil I have set out on the table for the bread. The bowl tips. The bowl spills. The bowl has been Margaret’s mother’s — a small green-glazed thing from Vermont, 1991, hand-thrown by a local potter at the Shelburne Museum — and the bowl, hitting the porch floor, breaks. It breaks in three pieces. The oil goes everywhere.
Theo, in his glass, with his mouth open in a small horrified circle, freezes. Theo says, very small: “Oh. Oh, Elias.”
I look at the bowl. I look at the oil. I look at Theo. I look at the lake.
I think, in the level voice I have been thinking in all my life: Margaret’s mother loved that bowl. Margaret loved that bowl. I have not, in nine years of living without her, broken that bowl. I think, half a second later: And I have, tonight, brought the bowl out to a porch on a lake with three young men I love. The bowl was, in fact, for tonight. The bowl has done its job.
I look at Theo, who is, in a small registered way, about to start crying. I say, very level: “Theodore.” He says, very wet: “Elias.” I say: “It is all right.” He says: “Elias.” I say: “Theodore Lang. It is all right.”
I get up. I cross to him. I take his face in both my hands. I say, very low, into his eyes, with Riley and Jaxon watching: “It was Margaret’s mother’s. Margaret loved it. I have not, in nine years, broken it. You have, tonight, broken it. The breaking, Theodore, is not what I am holding tonight. The fact that I had it on a porch on a lake with the three of you is what I am holding tonight. The bowl has done its job. We are going to put the three pieces together with epoxy tomorrow morning, like Hank and Bonnie do everything in this town, and we are going to keep the bowl.”
He says: “Yes, Elias.” I say: “Drink your wine.” He says: “Yes, Elias.” I kiss him on the forehead. I clean up the oil. I keep the three pieces of the bowl in a saucer at the kitchen counter. We finish dinner.
We are in the cottage’s main room at 9:14 p.m. with the wood stove going and the small radio Margaret bought in 1992 quietly playing the public station out of Plattsburgh, when Riley, sitting cross-legged in front of the stove with a small skein of wool and a pair of knitting needles he has, without telling any of us, taken up as a hobby in March, says, very softly: “Elias. There is a cookbook in the kitchen drawer. Bonnie left a note on it. It is, Bonnie says in the note, the notebook of every recipe Margaret made in this cottage between 1989 and 2019. Margaret left it here. Bonnie wrote on the note that we are welcome to use it.”
A pause. I say: “Riley.” He says: “I would like, if you are willing, to make Margaret’s pot roast tomorrow night. The one that is, on page forty-seven, dated October 1996, with a small note in Margaret’s hand at the bottom of the page that says — Riley, I am going to read it from the cookbook — the first dinner I made for E in this cottage. The first dinner E ate in this cottage. The first dinner of the rest of our lives.”
I close my eyes. I open them. I say, very level: “Yes, Riley.” He says: “Yes?” I say: “Yes, Riley. Tomorrow, the pot roast.” He says: “Elias. I love you.” I say: “I know, Riley. I know.”
Theo, sitting on the floor beside Riley, with his head on Riley’s shoulder, says, very softly: “Elias. Tonight.” I say: “Tonight, Mr. Lang, the four of us are going upstairs.”
The bedroom upstairs is, in the way of country cottage bedrooms, simple. It has a four-poster bed of unfinished pine that Margaret’s father built in 1987 from local timber. It has a single window that looks out over the lake. It has, on the bed, a quilt that Margaret’s mother made in 1989 — a large square of white cotton with small embroidered loons in the corners. The bed is a queen. The bed is, for the four of us, enough, but only just.
I light the oil lamp. I turn the electric off. The room goes warm, low yellow.
Theo, in the door, very small: “Elias. Tonight. I want it to be slow. I want — I want to take Riley, with you watching. I want, after, for Jaxon to take you, with all of us watching. I want, after that, to lie down with the four of us and not move until morning. I want it because we are at a lake, and because Riley is going to make me cry tomorrow with a pot roast, and because we have, the four of us, earned a slow night.”
I look at him. I look at Riley. I look at Jaxon. I say, very low: “Yes, Theo. Yes to all of it.” Riley, very low: “Yes.” Jaxon, very low, in my cardigan: “Yes.”
We undress. We undress the way we have, in seven months, learned to undress — slowly, in turns, with the quiet small attention of four people who have, in the small private architecture of a household, learned each other’s clothes.
I take off the gray cardigan from Jaxon last. I take it off by lifting it over his head while he stands on the pine floor in front of me with his eyes closed and his arms up; and the cardigan comes up, and over, and off; and he is, naked, in the lamp light, and he is small, and warm, and entirely here, and I lay the cardigan across the back of the bedside chair, and Jaxon, opening his eyes, says, very low: “I am going to put it back on tomorrow morning. I am going to wear it for the rest of my life.”
I say: “Yes, Jaxon.” He says: “Take me to bed.” I take him to bed.
Theo lays down on his back in the middle, with Riley between his knees and Jaxon at his right side and me at his left. Riley undresses Theo with his slow patient hands. Riley, who has not topped Theo in a long time, kisses Theo’s mouth slow.
Riley, very low, into Theo’s mouth: “Theo. I am going to take a long time. And I want, while I am doing it, for Elias to read.” Theo says: “Yes.” I, on Theo’s left, with my hand at the side of Theo’s face, say: “Read what, Riley.” He says: “Anything, Elias. Anything, but read.”
I look at the bedside table. There is, on the bedside table, a small paperback book Margaret left here in 2007 — The Country of the Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett, 1896. I have not, in twenty years, read aloud from it. I take it down. I open it to the first chapter. I begin to read.
I read, the way I read in the loft, in my own slow careful curator’s voice, by the lamp light, with my hand at the side of Theo’s face, with Jaxon’s mouth at my hip, with Riley between Theo’s knees taking him slow.
Riley takes a long time. Riley takes him long enough that I am, on the third paragraph of Chapter Three, moved by the sentence about the village street that led up from the harbor was an avenue of beautiful elms, the way you are moved when a sentence you have read fifty times in a different decade of your own life turns out to also be a sentence about your own current life; and I do not, in any sense, stop reading. I keep going.
Theo, between us, keeps his eyes on me. Riley moves slow above him. Theo comes, on the fourth paragraph of Chapter Three, with my voice in his ear and Riley’s body inside him and Jaxon’s hand at his throat and a small clean wet sound out of him that is Elias and Riley and Jaxon, in that order, slurred together. Riley follows him a long beat later.
Riley withdraws, gentle. Riley moves off, down the bed, to the foot, and lays himself across Theo’s ankles like a warm weight. Jaxon shifts up to take Riley’s place. Theo, between us, is half-asleep and entirely loose.
Jaxon reaches across the bed to me. Jaxon takes my chin in two fingers. He turns my face to him. He says, very low, in the lamp light: “Elias. It is your turn.” I say: “Yes, Jaxon.”
He takes me on my back, with my hand in Theo’s sleep-soft hair on my left and Riley’s hand resting on my ankle on my right, with the lamp going low yellow on the unfinished pine ceiling above me, with the loon-corner quilt pushed down to the foot of the bed.
He takes me slow. He takes me with the absolute level patience he has, in seven months, made his calling. He works me open with his small clever hands and the warm oil from a small bottle I have, in February, started keeping in the bedside drawer because Jaxon has, in February, asked for it; and he opens me with the small steady murmur he has, in the last several months, refined into a private vocabulary of mine, yes, Elias, and good, Elias, and here, Elias, and we have you.
He pushes in. He pushes in slow. He stops, halfway, and breathes with me. He pushes the rest of the way. He stays still inside me for a long count of perhaps eight breaths, with his forehead at my forehead, with his eyes closed, with my own hand at the back of his neck.
He moves. He moves the way Riley moved — slow, unhurried, with his eyes on mine. The lamp is low. The radiator is off; the room is heated by the chimney from the wood stove downstairs. The pine of the floor below us creaks once, somewhere, on its own. The lake outside the window is, by the small change in the air at ten p.m., beginning to send up a faint cold mist that is going to, by morning, be a low ground fog along the dock. The loons are, somewhere on the far side of the lake, calling.
The loons. I had forgotten the loons. I had forgotten that this lake, in May, has loons. Margaret used to wake up at five a.m. to hear them. Margaret used to come back to bed at six and put her cold feet on my ankles and tell me, in her warm Yorkshire voice, they sang for me, E. They sang for me. They are saying we should not, you and I, leave this lake too long.
I close my eyes. Jaxon, inside me, very low: “Elias. Stay with me. Tell me where you went.” I say, very wet, very low: “The loons.” He says: “Yes. Yes, Elias. They are still here.” I say, very low, very small: “Yes.”
He moves. He keeps moving. He moves with the absolute level patience of the man who, on a Monday in late October, sat at the foot of my chair while I read his own letter back to him in the loft, and he is, tonight, in the bed in the cottage at the lake, narrating me to myself again — not in words, in his moving — and I am, on the bed, with his body and Theo’s hand and Riley’s palm and a loon on the lake, let.
I come quietly. I come the way I have come in the loft on the chesterfield in the rain six weeks ago and the way I have, in seven months, learned to come, which is to say, at the four of them. I come on a long slow exhale, with Jaxon’s mouth at my throat and Theo’s name in my mouth and Riley’s hand at my ankle and the loons on the lake and the small paperback book closed on my chest, and Jaxon follows me a beat later with his face in my collarbone and a long shaking sound out of him that is, in the small private register I have been keeping, the lake-sound, and we lie still.
Jaxon withdraws, slow. Jaxon kisses me on the temple. Jaxon, with the absolute level patience of a man who is, in seven months, the most reliable narrator I have ever known, says into my hair: “Elias. Sleep.” I sleep.
The four of us sleep on a four-poster bed in a small cottage on a lake in the Adirondacks under a quilt with embroidered loons and a small green-glazed bowl in three pieces on the kitchen counter and a notebook of eighty-six recipes in the drawer and a small handwritten note from Hank on the kitchen table and the loons on the lake calling and the wood stove ticking and the lamp going slowly out at our own quiet rate, and we are, for the first time, all four of us, here.
I wake at 5:14 a.m. I wake because I know, with the steady certainty of a man who has not been to this lake in seven years and who, in his bones, remembers the lake, that the loons are about to do their dawn thing, and I do not want to miss it.
I extricate myself, gently, from the pile. Jaxon, on my left, makes a small sleeping sound and turns his face into my pillow. Theo, in the middle, has rolled onto Riley, and Riley, at the foot of the bed, has not moved at all in five hours. The quilt is half on, half off. The lamp is out. The window is gray.
I put on a flannel I have not worn in seven years that is hanging on the back of the bedroom door. I put on a pair of work jeans I have, in the last seven years, kept in a hook by the door of my own cottage two streets from the university because some part of me has, evidently, been waiting. I put on the boots. I go down. I make coffee.
I take a mug of coffee in both hands and I open the front door of the cottage at 5:32 a.m., and I step out onto the porch, and I cross the small grass to the dock, and I walk to the end of the dock, and I sit down on the green Adirondack chair where Margaret used to sit, and I watch.
The lake is still. The mist is on the water. The pines on the far side are dark in silhouette against a sky going slowly violet behind them. I sit. I drink coffee.
At 5:47, the loons do the dawn thing. There are four of them out near the small rocky island in the middle of the lake. They sing the long low call — the yodel, Margaret called it, although Margaret was wrong about that, the yodel is something else, but I never told her — and they sing it back and forth across the still water in a small four-channel chorus that goes, for almost six minutes, completely uninterrupted.
I sit. I do not, for the duration, move. When the loons finish, I sit for one more long minute on the chair. Then I hear, behind me, a small footstep on the dock.
I do not turn around. I do not turn around because I know who it is, and because the man behind me, by the small specific cadence of his step, is Theo Lang, in his bare feet, in the flannel I have, last week, given him, with a coffee in each hand, walking very slowly down a damp dock at 5:54 a.m. on a Saturday in May.
He sits down beside me on the dock at the foot of the chair. He puts the second coffee on the wood beside my left foot. He puts his head on my knee. He does not speak.
I, after a long quiet minute, with my hand in his hair, say, very low: “Theodore.” He says, very low: “Elias.” I say: “Did you hear them.” He says: “I did.” I say: “Margaret used to wake up for them.” He says: “I know.” I say: “How do you know.” He says: “Aoife told me on Wednesday.”
I close my eyes. I open them. I think, in the small level voice I have been thinking in all my life: of course she did.
I say, very low: “I am glad you came down.” He says: “I am glad you did not leave the bed without me. I would, in fact, have known. I have, in seven months, learned to know.”
I say: “Yes, Theo.” He says: “Riley and Jaxon are still asleep. Riley is going to make us pancakes when he wakes up. And later, the pot roast.”
He says: “Elias. I am going to write the dedication to my dissertation tomorrow afternoon, here, on this dock, with my laptop in my lap. I have not yet written it. I have, on purpose, saved it for this weekend. I am going to write it here because the dock is the right place, and because I will, in writing it, be looking at the lake, and the lake is where Margaret used to come at six a.m. to read, and the dedication, Elias, is going to name — it is going to name, by name, all five of you. Margaret. Riley. Jaxon. You. Aoife. Five names. I have decided.”
I close my eyes. I open them. I say, very low, with my hand in his hair: “Yes, Theodore.” He says: “Yes?” I say: “Yes, my Theodore.” He says: “Drink your coffee, Elias.” I drink my coffee.
He puts his arm around the back of my chair, low, with his head on my knee, and we sit on the dock in our flannels in the May dawn at the end of a small wooden dock on a lake in the Adirondacks, with the mist going off slowly, with the loons settling on the water, with two cooling mugs of coffee.
After a while, very softly, Theo says: “Elias. I am going to go up and wake the others. We are going to make breakfast, and we are going to walk along the lake, and we are going to take the canoe out at noon, and we are going to make Riley’s pot roast at five, and we are going to drink the rest of the wine, and we are going to come back to bed at eleven, and we are going to do the rest of this weekend the way we have, in seven months, learned to do this, which is to say, together.”
I say, very low: “Yes, Theo.” He says: “Yes?” I say: “Yes, my Theo.” He gets up. He kisses me, lightly, on the top of the head. He walks back along the dock to the cottage, in his flannel, in his bare feet, with his coffee in his hand, and he goes up the small wooden steps of the porch, and he opens the door, and the door closes behind him with the small specific thunk of a 1987 country-cottage door.
I sit on the chair for one more long minute. I think, in the small level voice I have been thinking in all my life: Margaret. We are here. The four of us. The five of us. I am, my love, no longer hiding from a lake.
I drink the rest of the coffee. I get up. I walk back along the dock. I go up the porch steps. I open the door. I go in. The four of us, in the cottage by the lake, do the rest of the weekend. We are, all of it, here.
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