Free Inside by Alix Ohlin

saw no need to pretend not to know what she wanted. He ordered a martini for her and a beer for himself. She kept smoking, lighting one du Maurier off the flaming stub of the last, as they exchanged bare-bones information: names, professions, the neighborhoods in which they lived and worked. Her hair continued to slip free from its moorings, half of it now hanging down.
    “Were you married a long time?” he asked.
    “It felt like a very long time,” she said. “But the last few years we were living apart anyway.
Fait que
, this isn’t really a very big change.”
    “But it is.”
    She nodded. “Yes.”
    He bought her another drink, and another. By ten o’clock they were in bed in her apartment off Pie-IX, her eyes closed, his T-shirt still on.
    “J’ai besoin,”
she murmured against his neck.
“J’ai besoin de toi.”
She made it clear she needed a very specific part of him. He pressed himselfagainst her in response, and she guided him inside. At eleven o’clock she thanked him, as sweetly and impersonally as you might thank a waiter for good service, and asked him to leave. Afterward he stood shaking his head in the icy street. The road was deserted, dark. Above the cluster of apartment buildings to the east, the tower of the Olympic Stadium seemed to be saluting him. His heart sang. He wondered if any of it had really happened. Wanted fervently to make it happen again.
    He left for Iqaluit two weeks after breaking the news. From his window seat, the land was obscured by a thick layer of clouds, and he tried to imagine the rock and ice beneath, hoping to feel loose, set free. He had been happy there once before, during the summer he had separated from Grace, when the Arctic had been a refuge, a clean slate. After failing so miserably at marriage he had been determined to succeed at his job, and he’d thrown himself into it with wild energy, working twelve to fourteen hours a day. The worst thing about the divorce was that he had lost any sense of himself as a decent person. After all, he loved everything about Grace—her values, her personality, her dreams. He just didn’t love
her
. Confronting this fact was humiliating, disastrous. Mitch had always been the nice guy who wryly accepted that nice guys finish last, and now he discovered that he wasn’t all that nice, and that he was finishing last anyway, with only himself to blame. To make up for all of this he turned to his job and to the Arctic. When he wasn’t working he founded and coached a boys’ basketball league. It was the most exhausting, industrious, and ultimately rewarding time in his life. For a while, after returning to Montreal, he’d kept in touch with a couple of the kids, but gradually—and naturally enough—correspondence on both sides fell off. The invitation to return had come so suddenly, and he’d been so consumed over the last couple of weeks by his arguments with Martine, that he hadn’t had much time to think about the place itself.
    It was June, still light when they landed after ten o’clock. The buildings of Iqaluit lay scattered like pebbles dropped from a casual hand, inconsequential to the vast expanse around them. Here and there in the landscape rose gray slabs of rock, half covered with moss,that looked like the backs of whales rising up from a choppy sea. The sky was a brilliant blue, untouched by clouds, and the air felt clear and thin. The other passengers, most of whom looked like they were coming home, filed silently across the tarmac into the small terminal.
    He’d arranged for a taxi, and the drive was his first clue that he didn’t remember as much as he thought he did. It wasn’t that the place looked better or worse—the same prefab buildings balanced on their stilts, some of the rocky yards neat, others strewn with snowmobiles and assorted debris—but that his sense of direction and layout had diminished over a decade. Only the rough, bruise-colored expanse of Frobisher Bay oriented him, its