22 Liney To Wish
Liney
To Wish
I didn’t kiss Bridget on that first day she knocked.
Not at our next meeting in the cave, nor the rest of the week in the lighthouse, even after Elle would go upstairs for the night and leave us two giggling girls together.
Yet my gaze keeps drifting to Bridget’s lips when she speaks, and I imagine leaning forward to capture them.
Is it pure folly to see similar interest in her gaze?
Elle’s first kiss was months into her engagement, and even that felt scandalous. She came squealing to my room, gushing about the smell of his cologne and warm hands on her neck. Why didn’t I notice that she never did so again?
It’s not appropriate to hope for a kiss.
But I don’t have the luxury of convention.
Is there somewhere on Bridget’s maps she could point to that we could have a courtship?
I imagine bringing her flowers and chocolates.
Walking along riverbanks arm in arm, Elle a respectful distance away to keep an eye on us.
If tomorrow is a clear day and Elle brings us both to the mainland, will I have another chance? Maybe Bridget will continue on her journey, and I will return to my sister.
We lay out the blanket in the cave and imagine adventures together.
On horseback running through prairie fields or camping atop mountains.
Treks through the desert, glowing lights in an arctic sky, sloshing waist-high in bayous.
Meeting the people of those lands, finding places we can help, or learn, or rest. Every story is better than the last, and none of them involve church services or high teas.
“Why do you want to be a cartographer?” I ask her. “How do you know you want to?”
Bridget brushes her hand through my hair. My head is in her lap, my eyes closed. She told me she could braid hair. She can’t with mine so short now, but that doesn’t stop her trying.
“Part of it is to honor my father,” she says thoughtfully. “It’s what I’ve known since my first trip to ‘map out’ a frog pond down the lane that I was fond of. We lived in my mother’s village outside Lismore. Barely two dozen people.”
“And you went wherever you wanted?”
Bridget shakes her head. “Some folks in town didn’t take kindly to the freedom my father gave me. I was allowed to study languages, mathematics, everything he needed on his travels. We sold the house after my mother died and took off. We weren’t always safe, or welcome, but it was always new.”
I nod with every word. She’s lived in ways I never knew I could wish for.
“Behind every hill could be another hill,” she continues, “or it could be a wonder no one’s ever seen.
Those years sailing across the Mediterranean were my happiest. Researching texts, searching bogs and olive trees, marking down ruins and rivers.
It was harder, after. Captains respected my father but didn’t know me.
I booked passage here instead. Maps that get back home of these territories are full of assumptions and mistakes by men with egos larger than their drafting pencils.
If I return to Ireland with my own maps, maybe they can carve out the respect of a patron, or I could start my own guild, or continue west instead, or—”
I tug on a strand of her dark hair. “You’ll hyperventilate if you speak any quicker!”
“Enough about me then.” Bridget taps my nose. “What about you? What do you want?”
My throat is suddenly dry. “Are the crabs still here? We could—”
“There must be something,” she urges. “You can’t be so dreamy-eyed for nothing.”
Bridget doesn’t understand. My world has never been big enough to hold my hopes. Pretty dolls are meant for tea times, not adventures. And I surely can’t admit she’s become the object of my dreams.
“You’re going to think I’m daft,” I warn. This has Bridget sitting straighter as a grin spreads across her face. “I’ve always been fascinated by—”
“Sea creatures?” Bridget interrupts, then grimaces. “Sorry.”
When she gets excited, she jumps in and blurts out what she thinks I’ll say before I do. The strange thing is that she’s usually right, even if it annoys me. Am I an open book? I thought I was good at concealing my emotions. Not from her.
“In essence,” I agree. “Since I can remember, I’ve always felt the most at home in the water.
Baths when I was small or in the rain before I’d get ushered inside.
I joined a local enthusiast’s club to catalog seaweed and learned some more on the side whenever I could about whales and deepwater fish, all sorts of things.
Did you know we have red seaweed species here as the water gets so cold, but there’s also green and brown varieties? ”
Bridget brings me up into a hug. “There’s nothing less understood on earth than the sea. I think it’s marvelous you’ve got such an interest.”
Bridget weaves a future that wraps around me like a blanket. The two of us exploring coastlines and islands, never stuck in one place too long—yet together. Her sketching out crags and bays, me searching the tides for animals no one’s cataloged before.
“Wouldn’t I slow you down?” I ask. It’s been burning on my tongue for hours.
“What’s wrong with slow?” she asks back, winking. “I’ve been on my own long enough, Liney. I know what I shouldn’t let go of when I see it. See her.”
I thought I dreamed too large, but Bridget’s opened my eyes. I’ve never dreamed far enough. I can’t hide my blush. I move my face away, but her hand cups my cheek and gently nudges me to look at her.
“There’s a fish called the ghost pipefish,” I say, reverting to spouting marine knowledge because the distance between us is far too close for me to say anything else comprehensible. “They mimic seaweed to hide from predators and sneak up on shrimp. They’re spiny all over and usually bright red.”
She gulps. With all her worldly travels, am I making her nervous? With my fish fact?
“This has been such a comfort to me.”
“This?” I repeat, the word nearly caught in my throat.
“You. Here. Us.”
Cold surges through my veins despite the warmth in her voice. Can’t we stay in this vague possibility? I don’t want tomorrow to come. And if I don’t ask, it can always be true. We can dance around each other, close but not too close. Separate but connected. No wonder Chamomile worked so well on me.
But if I don’t ask, I’ll be haunted. If Bridget doesn’t understand, perhaps she won’t believe I care enough to go with her. I’d lose her forever because of my cowardice.
“Bridget, do you…? I’m sorry, I’ve never asked this before.” If she’s my angel, I’m heaven’s fool. A churn deep in my chest draws it out of me, unanchored from my shame. Pull, pull, pull. “Do you hold affections, for me?”
“Yes.”
So simply said! But not enough. Even as her gaze moves from mine to my lips and back, I need to know, exactly, or my heart might burst.
“Romantic affections?” I clarify.
My head pounds with my heartbeat. Every muscle tenses. Ready to run. Affections are silent things. In the open? Unfathomable.
“Yes.” Her voice hitches up. “Does that scare you?”
I want to hold her yes so close that it nestles into my heartstrings forever.
“Yes,” I admit, then rush to add when her gaze casts down, “in the best possible way.”
She breathes out a shaky sigh and looks up again, eyes bright as the blue center of a flame. Then she closes her eyes, mine follow, and her lips press against mine.
Bridget isn’t the first girl I’ve kissed.
That honor went to Miss Young when I was thirteen.
We snuck out of a luncheon at the church and walked through the nearby gardens, giggling together.
It happened after we’d ducked behind a large hydrangea bush to hide from her chaperone.
Light, chaste, two friends. She meant it as practice.
We weren’t caught, thank God, but it was our only kiss.
The Youngs moved back to England only a month later.
But this is my first kiss born from admiration.
Bridget’s gentle hand on my cheek leads me closer to her.
I reach my hands up and hold her jawline, cradling my fingers behind her ears and into those curls I’ve pictured in restless nights and cave-hidden days.
Her nose presses against the edge of my own.
I never knew lips could feel like such sweet pressure.
She moves forward, presses against me until I’m pinned between her form and the cave wall behind us.
“Wait,” I breathe.
She leans back, and I open my eyes. Ours are so different, mine near black and hers gray in the low light. Her breath comes quick and shallow like mine, her cheeks red. A line down her neck quivers beneath the surface with each beat of her heart. “Did I—”
“You did nothing wrong,” I promise, smiling to prove it. “This is sudden, and I don’t want you to feel… We should consider—you mustn’t feel obligated to—”
“Obligation is the last thing on my mind, Liney,” she says, low and husky.
It takes every pound of self-restraint I have not to lean forward and continue. I look away to the tattered blanket beneath us. While it’s our paradise, it’s another kind of pretend.
In the world outside, affection is slow. Not a thing born of desperation or reduced to convenience. And while this is the polar opposite, my body remembers my last kiss, forced on me under the eaves of the theater.
I don’t want either of us to regret this.
“Think on it. Overnight.” I grit my teeth. I don’t want to delay. Why must I make everything difficult? She’s here. She cares for me. But flights of fancy run through my veins. I’ve been alone so long. I run into storms—into the arms of anyone who shows me the slightest affection.
I can’t ruin this because it’s what I want. She must know we’re destined for different lives. Brief stars in each other’s constellations before the lines are redrawn.
Bridget lowers her hand and weaves her fingers with mine.
“I will think much on this, trust me,” she agrees, smiling in that heart-wrenching way to make this all the harder.
“And you consider that if you wish to stay here, I’ll stay.
But if you wish for the adventures you listen to with stars in your eyes, perhaps the world is big enough for us to find a corner to escape into.
We could start with my hometown and work our way out. ”
She pauses, gulps again, and massages the tops of my fingers with her thumbs.
“I’ll need another kiss before we head back,” she adds, leaning forward once more. “To ensure I have all the evidence necessary for a clear assessment. Don’t you think?”
We are a hair’s breadth apart. Inside me the want has crested into a tidal wave. Bridget is my riptide, pulling me under.
“Perfectly sensible.”
It’s late when we pop our heads out of the cave. Too late, yet I can’t care. Whatever need be said to Elle, I’ll say it. My future seems so vast, I could fall into its depths and be lost.
And oh, do I so wish to be lost with Bridget.