Chapter 7 — The Tide Sitting.34
@solena.rising
“The light here at four in the afternoon does something I don’t have language for, and I’ve made language for a living. So I’m putting the phone down and just being in it. No caption can hold some things. Back tomorrow, loves.”
She put the phone down because she had to. They collected them at the door of the thing, into a basket, and that was the first time it occurred to me that whatever happened at four was not going to be content.
The Sitting was held in a grove on the bluff, a ring of wind-bent trees around a floor of woven mats, the sea laid out below us going gold.
It was, like everything here, staged within an inch of its life and beautiful anyway.
The new pairs filed in barefoot. Don caught my eye on the mats and gave me the face of a man who has read the brochure and is now meeting the appliance.
There was a woman at the edge of the grove I hadn’t seen before.
She stood apart from all of it, near the tree line, in gray where everyone else wore white, and she did not glow, and she did not beam, and she watched us settle onto the mats with the patience of someone counting a till.
Older than Coral, younger than the Reader.
Still in a way nobody else on the island was still.
I didn’t know who she was. Nobody introduced her.
She watched, and I felt watched, and then Coral clapped and I forgot about her, which I would later understand was the whole point of her.
“Tides,” Coral said, glowing at the front. “The Gazing taught you to see your partner. The Sitting teaches you to stop being two.”
She explained it the way she explained everything, like a recipe for joy.
One of you sits. One of you takes the other’s lap, chest to chest, knees down on the mat, close as you can fold.
And then you don’t perform anything, you just breathe, and you let the tide come up through the floor and move you, two waters seeking one level, until you can’t tell whose rhythm is whose.
Around the grove, couples folded into each other. Whitecap’s wife climbed into his lap and he held her like she was the last warm thing on earth. The linen people assembled themselves with the competence of the long married.
My mother looked at my lap. I looked at the sea. Then I looked at her, and I put everything I had into my eyebrows, a whole sentence of eyebrow, a brow that said absolutely not, find another way, I will pay money.
She leaned in under the cover of arranging herself and breathed it against my jaw. “It’s fine.”
It was not fine. It was not in the same postal district as fine.
But the grove was folding into itself all around us, pair after pair, and a man across the mats had already begun to weep with his wife in his lap, and there is a specific cowardice that only blooms in groups, the one that would rather do an unspeakable thing than be the single rigid holdout everyone turns to look at. I ran out of brow.
She gathered her skirt and climbed astride me, knees to the mat on either side of my hips, and lowered herself down.
And there it was, immediately, before either of us had moved a muscle on purpose.
The warm settle of her weight onto my thighs.
The give of her where she met me. Chest to chest, close as the kiss had been but longer, with no end coming to rescue us, her breath at my collar and the heat of her coming through two thin layers like a hand held near a coal, and low in me something stirred, unhurried, interested, beginning to pay attention.
I had maybe a minute before it became a fact.
I spent the minute thinking about the ferry schedule.
The ferry schedule did nothing. The ferry schedule had never been weaker.
“Now flow,” Coral called.
We did not flow. We sat there, the two of us, rigid as a bus stop, my hands hovering an inch off her back because I did not know where on this earth I was allowed to put them, and my mother holding herself a careful degree away from me, and the two of us breathing on completely different schedules out of spite.
“You two.” Coral was suddenly crouched beside us, delighted, the way a teacher is delighted by the worst handwriting in the room. “Oh, you’re fighting it. You’re so far up in your heads. Here. Let me show your tide what it feels like.”
And then Coral climbed into my lap.
I have run the footage many times and I still cannot tell you the order of my objections.
She simply folded herself onto me where my mother had been, white cotton and coconut oil, twenty-five years old and warm and entirely unbothered, took my hovering hands in hers and set them flat on her own waist, and began, slowly, to move.
“Like this,” she said, gentle and unbothered, rolling against me in a long patient wave, holding my eyes with the serenity of a woman to whom it had genuinely never occurred that this might do something to me. “You feel that? You’re not doing it. You’re allowing it. Match the tide, Squid.”
“I’m matching it,” I said, from somewhere very far above myself.
“You’re not,” she said, smiling, grinding, “but you will.”
My mother sat on the mat beside us where I had dropped her, watching a child she raised get demonstrated on by a woman half her age, and something crossed her face that she would have denied to a court.
She tried, in a bright voice, to file it under my fault.
“He’s always been stiff. He doesn’t let go of anything, you should see his room. ”
“It’s both of you,” Coral said serenely, not stopping. “You’re each waiting for the other one to start. The tide doesn’t wait.”
Then she rose off me as smoothly as she’d come, restored, unrumpled, and gestured my mother back into place like a host reseating a guest.
And my mother climbed back into my lap with something different in her face.
I knew that face. It was the one she put on right before she beat a brand rep down on a rate, the one that meant she had decided to be good at a thing.
She had just watched Coral do to me, easily, in public, the thing she had been white-knuckling away from for three days, and whatever flickered behind her eyes was not anything either of us would ever say out loud, and she settled her hips down onto mine and she started to move.
And God help us both, we found it.
I don’t have the flat language the rest of this requires, so I’ll use it plainly.
We synced. Her chest against mine, her breath gone short and warm at my ear, the long slow roll of her against the front of my linen trousers, her weight, her heat, the friction of cotton on cotton building somewhere with no off switch.
The grove fell away. The sea fell away. There was just the rhythm we had finally, catastrophically, stopped fighting, hers and mine and no daylight between them.
“This is the exercise,” she breathed at my ear, like something she was reminding both of us.
“This is the exercise,” I said.
Neither of us slowed. If anything she took it deeper, a longer grind, settling her weight so she dragged the full length of herself along me on every pass, the skirt rucked up between us to almost nothing, just the thin cotton of her underwear and the thinner linen of my trousers and the ridge of my cock riding right where she was softest, slow and deliberate and finding the angle, and I could feel the heat of her soaking through to me, could feel exactly where she was open and pressed and moving, and my hands had stopped hovering and gone to her hips and were helping, God help me, pulling her down into each roll like I had any business setting the rhythm.
“Sean.” Half a warning, half something with no name.
“I know.”
“We can’t stop now. They’ll see.”
We could have stopped. No one was watching that closely. We did not stop.
Her hands found the back of my neck. A sound left her that I felt more than heard, low, one she would have denied was a sound at all.
I was hard against her, and she rocked over it like she’d found the place she’d been looking for, and it was wrong, and my body did not care even slightly, and somewhere in there it stopped being a thing I could steer.
I came in my trousers in a grove full of strangers, gripping my mother’s waist, with my face in her hair and her rhythm carrying me all the way through it while a twenty-five-year-old said “there it is” from somewhere I couldn’t see.
She felt it. Of course she felt it. She did not stop and she did not gasp and she did not look at me, she just slowed, gentled, rode it down to stillness the way you bring something safely to a dock, and held me there, breathing, her cheek against my temple, for a few seconds longer than the exercise could possibly have required.
“Beautiful,” Coral said, to the grove, to all of us. “That’s the tide. The tide doesn’t make mistakes.”
We unfolded. We did not look at each other.
I was wet and ruined and trying to walk like a man who had achieved spiritual breakthrough rather than the other thing, and the trousers were dark linen, thank a God I no longer believed lived here, and we left the grove four feet apart through the gold light with the sea going on about its business below.
We were almost back to the building before she said anything, eyes ahead, voice light, wrecked underneath it.
“Well,” she said. “We’re very good at faking.”
I didn’t laugh. Neither did she.