The Couch Where It Happens

3. The male of the domestic fowl

Chapter 3

The male of the domestic fowl

The forty-five minutes after Hank fled felt to Emma like a hangover morning, even though it was night and she was slowly drinking her first bottle of pale ale and making dinner for one. The tasks of boiling the remainder of a box of penne, topping it with the scrapings from a previously opened jar of red sauce, and microwaving frozen peas didn’t require concentration.

The peas spilled on the kitchen floor and rolled under the fridge, little round fuckers.

While she ate, she searched websites for potential end tables, sighed over prices, and then over her phone’s low battery. Leaving it charging in the kitchen, she wandered through the house with no interruptions to distract her from the topic of the evening: the erection that had definitely, absolutely, no question, been under Hank’s shorts. And her matching wet panties.

One minute, they’d been moving a couch and having cold drinks; the next, they’d been like the couple in Dirty Dancing , and then he’d sprinted away.

Her feet took her upstairs, even though her brain told her to tackle a chore. She sat on the couch they had carried together. Maybe he would return, and they could sit here and laugh about the absurdity of the two of them, best friends, being hot for each other.

Funny. Haha.

It wasn’t absurd, though. Being with Hank wasn’t at all absurd.

It might be kind of perfect.

She rested her head on the cushions she had gripped earlier. He’d probably never climb the stairs again. Her plans for a bed and breakfast and all the work to realize this midcentury modern theme were a mistake. A fucking expensive mistake, according to her bank balance. Although not as big of a mistake as thrusting herself at Hank’s cock. That was borderline psycho. The fact of his erection didn’t mean she was free to rub on it, not when they’d always been Donkey and Shrek.

Punching the couch didn’t make her churning thoughts magically organize into orderly sparkling ideas. It merely dented the cushion. She lifted the orange rectangle to fluff it back into shape.

There was a bunch of paper stuck between the padding and the frame. A partially crumpled magazine, so obnoxiously colorful and simultaneously suffused with a yellow-green hue that it must have been vintage, had been stuffed under the cushion. She smoothed the crinkled cover. Hot Shortz was the name of this magazine she’d never heard of, and smaller print below the title proclaimed the contents to be shocking true confessions. While she doubted that anything from the eighties could shock in this internet century, all these exclamation points were exactly what she needed tonight.

The edition was dated September 1984 and showed a woman with long, dark hair wearing tiny white denim shorts and an unbuttoned pink oxford shirt tied at her waist, apparently without a bra. The photo managed to conceal the parts that weren’t supposed to show on grocery store racks. “My Hot Summer Break” one of the bigger headlines read, with a smaller type underneath that asked, “How can I find that Princeton guy?”

A mindless trashy magazine was a mediocre distraction, but since her phone was still in the kitchen and she was on the balcony, she might as well flip through it. At the spot where the partially crushed pages ended and the smooth, undamaged ones began, a half-page photo showed the same woman from the cover, this time spread on her back across a rumpled bed with a shirtless man facedown beside her. Her pink shirt had come untied, and the man’s hand caressed her stomach. Fucking sexy photo, even if his eighties khakis were far too loose.

Emma glanced at the article below the picture. The headline proclaimed it to be a special triple-length bonus letter.

Dear Editor,

I need advice about whether I should try to find last night’s guy or let fate handle it for me.

But first, I should tell the Readers what happened. I spend summers as a live-in house manager in Sag Harbor, part of the Hamptons, for owners who come out from Manhattan on weekends. Lovely people, as long as you pretend the dribble you get from their trickle-down Reaganomics is Dom Perignon rather than flat Mello Yello.

During the week, I supervise the pool cleaners, housekeepers, and landscapers, schedule maintenance visits, and keep the cars, boats, and bar gassed and ready. On Fridays, I set up the kitchens with drinks and food for a weekend of Wall Street entertaining.

That would be the difference between running her own bed and breakfast and being a house manager, Emma thought. She would be the house cleaner, the landscaper, the linen changer, all of it. No hiring out.

She continued to read.

After three summers here, I have a system: work my ass off Monday and Friday, then read, research for my dissertation on eighteenth-century shipwreck literature, swim, and tan for the three days in the middle of the week.

This sweet gig ends after Labor Day, when I head back to New Jersey for grad school.

The people who own the house next door have a college-age son. My first clue to the drip’s intentions came on a mid-August Wednesday afternoon, when a car gunned its engine up the driveway on the other side of the hedge. I’d assumed the earlier vehicles I’d heard crunching up the gravel were staff—because, Wednesday, duh—but “We’re Not Gonna Take It” booming out of the car meant Boy Wonder was throwing a party. On one of my peaceful Wednesdays. Shithead.

I apologize to you, Readers, but it is a truth universally acknowledged that I swear too much.

Emma thought that was a good way of describing her mouth too. She might deploy that phrase on Hank, since she swore more than he did, and six months ago, they’d watched Pride and Prejudice together, so he wouldn’t be clueless. This magazine was almost, almost, keeping her from thinking about Hank.

I refastened my bikini top, as one should when near the offspring of junk bond traders or leveraged buyout kings, and left my lounger.

By nine o’clock, the party next door had been blasting long-ass guitar riffs for over two hours. Although scheduling a bash at a time when no neighbors were in residence to call in a noise complaint indicated a primitive cunning in their frontal cortexes, nevertheless, I did not admire their planning for the basic fact that it upset mine. There I was, huddled on the dock, arms around my knees, watching a full moon on the rise and sulking in the certainty that these rich douchebags had the booze to get through hours upon hours of badly shouted versions of “Cum On Feel the Noize.”

I was not rocking these boys.

Then an indigo shape on the moonlit water caught my attention. One of the neighbors’ boats drifted between their dock and ours, about fifty feet away. I decided to retrieve it, which turned out to be a most excellent decision.

Given both the darkness and my disaster-filled dissertation research, I donned a life jacket, stepped from the dock into our dinghy, and cast off. The loose boat was about the same size and scarcely bobbing, so I used the oars instead of the outboard. No need to add to the decibel count. In moments, I came alongside, snagged it with a boat hook, and fastened a towline around a bow cleat. The rubber fenders hanging on my dinghy thumped quietly against the other one.

I love being on the water, where the sounds and rhythms of the sea saturate your bones and remind you that you are small. While you may succeed at a task like catching a meandering dinghy in a calm bay, the ocean is large, larger than a nav chart can render or a photo can express, larger than motes of dust such as we are can comprehend, and it follows none of our rules. Maybe epic disaster paintings like Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa come close to rendering the ocean into an idea that we can grasp—

“Over here.” A male voice interrupted my night-on-the-water mental meandering.

I jerked on my bench, thumped an oar into the hull of the captured boat, and made both boats rock. One of the dickwads, fuck him.

“Can you tow it in?”

I shouldn’t have been annoyed by his question, but I didn’t yet know that was how the hottest night of my life would begin.

Rowing one boat while towing another meant I worked up a glow before I slipped next to the neighboring dock. The guy waiting for me seemed to be over six feet, broad-shouldered and lean-hipped, but I was sitting low in a dinghy, so I could have been wrong. He was dark blond, but moonlight could be tricky. Maybe his hair was light brown.

“Toss me the line,” he said. “I’ll tie you off, and then you can push the other one forward.”

Since he was able to catch it and stand at the same time, this douche was plausibly sober.

“Why are you messing around with the boats?” My question was sharper than I intended.

“I wasn’t.” He looped the line around the base of the cleat, made two crossovers into a figure eight, and finished with a flawless half hitch.

When he stretched his arm for the stern line, I wanted to forget about my responsibilities and grab his hand for myself. But I flicked the second one to him like the lobsterman’s daughter that I am. When those big hands caught it almost tenderly, I felt a surge of jealousy for that inert nylon. “A dinghy doesn’t have thumbs to undo itself.”

“But the three guys staggering back to the house did.”

We used the boat hook to maneuver the escapee to her spot on the dock and, within minutes, shook out the lines that had been dragging in the bay, secured them to dock cleats, and coiled them neatly. By this point, I didn’t have to watch him to check his work, so I watched him for pure enjoyment. He knew how a length of wet rope chafed and kept it from slapping into his khaki shorts or snagging on the edge of the wood planks. Better yet, he knew his half hitches. He liked working the lines, and I liked watching him.

“Thank you again,” I said.

“No problem. Glad I came down.” In the glow from the lights back on land, I could see him checking me out. It had been several months since someone who hadn’t stepped out of Lisa Birnbach’s Preppy Handbook had looked at me with that much interest, and I wished I wasn’t swaddled in the bulky life jacket. I’ve been told I have great tits. At least the orange canvas-covered foam blocks didn’t conceal my legs.

“Wise beyond your years.” I had no game.

“Doubt I’m much younger than you.”

He was right. He was probably twenty or twenty-one, and I’m twenty-three. It’s the house responsibility that makes me feel older. “So why are you here?”

“Here, meaning the dock, or here meaning—” He gestured behind us toward the mansion.

“That.” He wore socks, the sign of a guy who probably never had a gin and tonic at four in the afternoon, definitely not the type for blowout parties in the Hamptons. He seemed more like he belonged on my side of the equation, maybe working at a marina for the summer or using those big hands to wrestle lawn equipment.

“I’m subletting in Manhattan with a guy who went to Exeter with our host.” He said the boarding school name with the slight amusement of a person who has met at least three graduates of that institution. “Nice enough during the week. My internship ended last Friday, but I don’t have to be back on campus until Monday.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his shorts and shrugged.

“You gave up having a peaceful apartment in the city all to yourself?” On Mondays, when I got the whole property back, I reveled in the solitude. It would end soon enough when I returned to grad student housing.

“I’m from Seattle. I miss the water.”

I felt the slight rock of gentle waves licking the sides of the dinghy. We both knew it was nicer down here on my seat than standing there or going back to the house party, where blazing lights backlit about fifteen male bodies in and around the pool.

He turned to look behind him too. “They said they’re waiting for call girls. Apparently, Sag Harbor is pretty far for them, thank God.” Then he slumped. “I didn’t think it would be this awful.”

Someone cued up a galloping riff on the house stereo, and I recognized Iron Maiden’s “The Trooper.” My sigh must have caught his attention.

“Not a metal fan?” He looked at me.

“The opposite. It annoys me because I know they don’t understand the source material.”

His eyebrows rose. “For ‘The Trooper’?”

If I could feel the pulsing lyrics pouring down the hill, so could he.

“It’s a legitimate anthem against senseless war, with well-known literary antecedents.” I realized I had used my instructor voice, which differed from my house manager voice more in content than in tone.

He raised his right arm and propped his chin on the back of his hand, letting his elbow point down at me in a vaguely Rodin-inspired Thinker way. “Literary antecedents, you claim?”

Looking up at him, I thought he might be flexing, but his button-down shirt hid his muscles. My pulse beat underneath my skin, and I wanted to cause trouble. “I said what I said.”

A long riff, heavy and fast with guitar, ended. Another verse began.

“It’s about getting shot down,” he began. “But it’s not Johnny Cash.” A smile played around the corners of his mouth, and he dropped his arm. “Muskets, sabers, Russian guns, I think they wave a Union Jack on stage, so it’s British soldiers dying in the dirt…” The faint glint of moonlight reflecting from his eyes disappeared as if he’d closed them to better trawl deep memories. “Into the Russian guns, into the valley of death rode the six hundred…maybe the Light Brigade? Is that, uh, Tennyson?”

Watching him, that melodious muttering to himself and the way he rocked between the balls of his feet and his heels as he worked through the language, he had me. Sure, it was ninth-grade poetry, hardly a dissertation, but we English lit grad students take what we can get. I was mentally throwing my panties at him, and I’d never even seen him in full light. To be fair, I was still sitting below him, and looking up at his expression meant my gaze had to travel the length of his body, so my mind was addled.

“Are you going back to the house?” I wanted him to say no.

“Fuck no, it’s a cock party up there.”

And he had the same dirty mouth I did. This was happening. “Not into cock?”

I like that word. Occasionally I say it to myself, over and over, because I really like the firm Old English feeling of the two-letter digraph at the end. A large part of the world has a similar word for the male of the domestic fowl, whether it’s Old Norse kokkr or Malay kukuk, and I enjoy the associations.

Who am I kidding? I enjoy cock.

“Prefer the water.” He shrugged and turned to the bay, but he looked lonely and bored, annoyed with the dudes up the hill and, I thought, with himself. Mostly with himself.

“Hop in,” I said to a stranger I’d known for thirty minutes. “Guys who can recognize Tennyson’s influence on British metal get a free ride.”

We both let that hang unanswered, but I couldn’t repress my smirk.

He returned it. Then he stepped aboard and cast us off. Despite his size, he had enough balance that the dinghy barely rocked, although it did dip once his weight settled closer to the bow.

“It’s a perfect night, but just in case.” I gestured at the extra vest peeking out from under his perch. “Put it on.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He didn’t insist he knew better than I did, or that he was a great swimmer and didn’t need a life vest, so I fired up the outboard.

I don’t know how long it had been since I went this hard after a man. I’m careful here in the Hamptons because of my position, and at school, hookups with other grad students happen without much effort. But this guy had strayed into my life with a hint of sadness and a big dose of shoulders, and he charmed me, making it logical for me to try charming him with a tour of the bay.

With the outboard grumping behind me, we couldn’t talk. I guided us north, parallel to the ribbon of beach. The not-yet-leveraged-up cottages of Actors Colony slipped past on our port side. Moonlight silvered our wake and bleached the color from docks and sand, stark in contrast with the dark trees layered behind the sea walls. Even most houses were dark in the middle of the week. I liked the solitude and the feeling of being a castaway, and I liked sharing it with the guy in the bow.

From the end of the peninsula, we angled across to Smith Cove on Shelter Island, and I cut the engine. We drifted a little, splashed a little, laughed a little, until an unspoken agreement sent us back. When I throttled down near home, I didn’t head to the neighboring house. “Your dock or mine?”

The full moon at this angle illuminated him well enough for me to see his eyebrows rise. “You’re asking?”

“Mine, then.” In moments, the fenders were down, the outboard was up, the spring lines tied and tidied, and we were standing next to each other at the juncture where the wooden boards met land. This was the first time all night I’d stood next to him, and I realized I’d underestimated his height. He towered over my five foot seven inches, so he must be well over six feet. I liked it.

The sound of the party on the next property was muted, either by the actual distance or the bubble we’d built around ourselves, to a vibrating bass line that pulled at the deep spot between my legs. “Want something to drink? I can’t compete with the Seven-and-Sevens next door, but I do have Diet Coke and maybe a couple of Rolling Rocks.”

“It’s not a competition. You’re so far ahead, they can’t even see your wake.”

“Come on.” At the boathouse, I fumbled with the clasp on my life jacket. I hoped he didn’t see my trembling hands.

“Want my help?”

He’d have to get close to my breasts to work the fastener, but ultimately, that’s what my invitation was about, so I said yes.

He stared at my face while he lifted both hands to the clasp. Without looking down, he slipped his fingers behind the chest straps, and I felt the press of his knuckles on my clavicle. His thumbs stroked the small distance across my exposed skin above the clasp. His fingers were chilled from being on the water, and my skin was so much hotter than his touch. It felt like I was feverish.

I shivered.

The tab made a small snick when it unlatched, then he moved his hands to grasp the bulky floats at my shoulders. This time, he let his thumbs rest on either side of my throat, brushing like the lightest noon breeze across the tendons there. My knees wobbled, and I swayed closer to him.

He lifted the life jacket away. I heard it hit the gravel path.

I felt as if he had undressed me, even though I was wearing all my clothes.

“It’s sort of adorable that you wore that all night and made me wear one too.” His voice was deeper than it had been during our cruise along the shore. Slower.

“Liability avoidance is one of my managerial responsibilities.” Speech came out of my mouth with the breathy quality of Farrah Fawcett, but because words had no meaning to either of us except as a means to continue the evening, whatever I said didn’t matter. Only the movement of my lips so close to his mattered.

“I kept wanting you to take it off so I could really see you.”

“Now you can.” I shifted to stand taller, moving my chest almost close enough to him.

“Yeah.”

Kiss me, I was certain I was emoting. Grab my face and mash our mouths together, big guy.

He should have gripped my shoulders and yanked me across the last inch and pressed our bodies into one being, but instead, he stood there. Oh-kay.

“Come back with me?” I whispered into the quiet.

In response to my tilted head, he nodded.

“Follow me.”

As I led him across the lawn to the faux carriage house and up the stairs to my apartment, it seemed like he’d lost his voice. The outdoor security lights cast enough illumination to show that he hadn’t lost the contours shaping up behind his zipper, though.

The landing at the top of the stairs couldn’t fit both of us, so he stopped one step below me. Before I could twist the doorknob, I felt his finger draw a line down my back, and I shivered in the muggy August night.

“Hey,” he said.

I turned. With me on the landing, our faces were almost even.

“On the dock.”

I held my breath.

“I should have done this.” He kissed me.

Soft lips over hard teeth echoed what I imagined his whole body would be: soft skin over hard muscle. His tongue taunted my upper lip, but standing here, we couldn’t get close enough. I wanted to climb his body and feel all that glorious man wrap around me, but we were outside and on the stairs. The building sheltered us from the shore breeze, so his scent wrapped around me. A hint of ocean from the water we’d splashed on each other, a little sweat, a little Old Spice, all mixed alchemically to create a man. I wanted to strip him and kiss him and feel his mouth all over me, but all I did was part my lips for him and use my tongue to push him to take this kiss further. His hands wrapped around my upper arms, not pulling, not grabbing, just supporting, while those warm lips tugged and worshipped.

Now, my lower lip was his focus. He wasn’t even pressed against my chest, and already my breathing sounded like a wild thing and my senses screamed for more. I stroked the hair on the back of his head. He had a short cut, almost military, growing out into soft strands but not long enough to grab. It set him apart from the layered fashion cuts of the Hamptons visitors and the mullets on local guys, and the difference was my new kryptonite.

We broke apart to breathe. Our chests rose so full when we inhaled. They almost touched as we stared into each other’s eyes. His might normally be gray-blue, but right now, his pupils were big and dark and fixed on my face. He had stupid-long eyelashes.

I needed to exhale. Well-remembered lines tumbled out along with my breath and, apparently, my brain. “They looked up to the sky, whose floating glow spread like a rosy ocean, vast and bright.” I heard another of my own ragged inhalations, but I couldn’t stop. “They gazed upon the glittering sea below, whence the broad moon rose circling into sight. They heard the wave’s splash.” I knew these words by rote, and after our time on the water, and this kiss, I knew how they felt beating in my chest, how they flowed across my lips as he stared into my face and our breath rose together.

I licked my lips and backtracked because I’d lost my place while looking at him. “They heard the wave’s splash, the wind so low, and saw each other’s dark eyes darting light into each other.”

I swallowed, then continued.

“Beholding this, their lips drew near.” I did. I drew near again.

My voice dropped into a whisper. “And clung into a kiss.”

This time, he yanked me hard into his arms. His chest felt like a wall, and when his mouth hit mine, I was lost. My hands found his cheeks, the slightest rasp of stubble under my palms making me gasp with sensation as I bracketed his face. I wanted that. I wanted it on the ticklish curve of my neck, and I really wanted it on my breasts and on my thighs. Fuck, I wanted him.

“What was that?” He breathed the question across my lips.

“A kiss?” I didn’t even open my eyes.

“No.” His hand squeezed my butt, hard enough to lift me to my toes. “The poem.”

“Byron.” I whispered it into the corner of his mouth. My tongue tested the curve of his lower lip. “ Don Juan. ”

“I’ll read it tomorrow.” His mouth shifted to the spot where my jaw turned into my neck, and I shuddered against him.

“It’s over five hundred pages.” I shivered, because his lips had reached a spot behind my ear.

“It’s a poem, not thermodynamics.”

That could not stand. I couldn’t help myself; I squeezed the arrogant jock’s shoulders harder than I’d intended, but he was too solid to dent. My little gesture made him snort into my hair. Truthfully, I knew I would cut him slack since he had identified Iron Maiden’s Tennyson reference, and I was anticipating getting a lot closer to what he pressed against my thigh. “Wait until I tell you about the Scottish poet who inspired ‘The Number of the Beast.’”

My collar had shifted enough to permit his lips to access my clavicle. At the same moment I heard him, I felt the vibrations of his reply cross my taut skin. “Robert Fucking Burns.”

I was so gone. Those three words would earn Mr. Melting-My-Panties an A even if I were a thermodynamics professor, but they slayed this English lit teaching assistant.

My hand groped behind me until I found the doorknob and managed to turn it. “Inside.”