6. Willow
— ? —
Willow
For one day it worked.
Michael left his phone in the house. On the hall table, where I could see it, all day, going dark.
We took Levi’s boat out, which is an act of faith. It is held together by a system Levi describes as craftsmanship and everybody else describes as luck, and it makes a noise on startup that has made grown men put their drinks down.
“She’s fine,” Levi said.
“She made a noise. Tell me how much you need for a new one, I’ll write you a check.”
“Why would I need a new one? She always makes that noise. You want your girl to make a noise when you ride them, don’t you?”
“I don’t want my girl squealing like she’s being tortured. That’s the sound this makes.”
Pia leaned over to me. “If we go down, save the child and me, in that order, and let the men sort themselves out.”
“Noted.”
“I’m serious. Levi can float. It’s the one thing he’s good at. Probably with all that air in his head.”
“I heard that,” Levi said.
“You were meant to.”
“I have kept this vessel in the water for years.”
We got out past the jetty and Michael took the wheel off his brother without asking.
“Help yourself,” Levi said.
“You were going wide.”
“I was going wide on purpose.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s my boat and I like it out there.”
Levi let him keep the wheel. I have watched them do this dance since they were boys. Michael steers. Levi pretends to mind. The boat goes where Michael wants it to go. That is how it works. That is how everything works.
Archie sat on my lap in a life jacket and screamed with pleasure every time we hit anything.
“BOAT!”
“You’re on the boat.”
“BOAT!”
“Yes. This is it. This is the boat you’ve been going on about for months.”
Michael looked back over his shoulder at us and he had the face on. The one I fell in love with when I was fifteen and have never stopped falling for, even when I know better.
***
We landed at the beach and Archie ate sand.
He ate it deliberately, with intent, having reviewed his options and made an informed decision.
Michael got to him first and hooked it out of his mouth with a finger and my son bit him, hard, and Michael said a word he should not have said in front of a two-year-old, and then Pia said it back at him twice as loud to make it worse.
“He’s got teeth,” Michael said, inspecting his hand.
“He’s had teeth for a year.”
“Not like this. This is a career development. This is commitment.”
“He bit Pia at Easter.”
“Pia had it coming.”
“I did have it coming,” Pia said. “I took his spoon.”
“You took his spoon?”
“I took his spoon and I put it on my head, and I stand by all of it. It was an excellent bit. He has no sense of humor.”
“BOAT,” said Archie, through sand.
“You’re off the boat, mate. This is the beach. Different thing entirely.”
He carried him down to the water and stood there holding him under both arms, dipping his feet in and out, and Archie made a sound of pure, uncomplicated joy.
Levi was arguing with Pia about a sandwich.
My mother-in-law was up at the house being cold about the weather.
And Michael was ankle deep with his pants rolled and his son’s whole body shaking with laughing.
I sat on a towel and did nothing at all for the length of an afternoon, which is a thing I had forgotten was available to me.
***
The outdoor shower at the boathouse is boards and a latch and a pipe, and it has been there since before either of us was born.
I went to rinse the sand off before dinner and I was not alone in there for very long.
I had the water running already, cold enough to make my shoulders jump, when the boards creaked behind me.
Michael stepped in, shirt already off, pants unbuttoned and hanging low on his hips, salt drying in the dark hair at the base of his throat.
He looked at me the way he does when the rest of the island has been temporarily deleted from his mind.
“Somebody will come down,” I said.
“Nobody’s coming down.”
“Your mother is in that house.”
“My mother has never walked down here in her life. There’s a slope.”
“Pia will come down.”
“Pia is drinking my brother’s gin and telling him about a dream she had. Nobody is coming down.”
He got the latch across behind him without looking at it. Then he just stood there for a second, eyes dragging over me slowly. Wet tank top clinging, sand still freckled across my collarbones, water cutting paths down my stomach.
“You’ve got sand everywhere,” he said, voice low. “Been watching you all afternoon on that towel, trying to behave. Failed spectacularly.”
“You looked like you were managing.”
“I was managing not to haul you behind the dunes in front of our son and my entire family.”
Then he kissed me like he had decided on it hours ago and had been carrying it around all afternoon. Slow at first, tasting of salt and the beer he’d had on the boat, then deeper, hungrier.
“Turn around.”
“Ask me nicely.”
“Please turn around.” A pause, mouth against my ear. “Before I forget how to be nice.”
I turned around.
He got one arm across my chest, palm open over my sternum, and brought his other hand up over my mouth, flat. I bit the side of it. He made a noise against the back of my neck, half laugh, half groan, and said, “Don’t,” which meant do that again.
The water went cold and neither of us stopped. It went past cold and neither of us stopped. He worked me open with his fingers while his other hand stayed firm over my mouth, muffling the sounds I couldn’t keep in. Every time I got a moan out he laughed against my shoulder, absolutely wrecked.
“That’s it, take my fingers. Fuck, you’re gripping me already. Need to get my cock in you before I lose my mind.”
He shoved my shorts down just far enough, freed himself, and rubbed the thick head of his cock through my cunt once, twice, coating himself in me. Then he pushed in, slow at first, letting me feel every inch, until he was buried to the hilt and we were both shaking under the freezing spray.
“God - Michael-”
“Yeah. Feel that?” He rolled his hips, deep and filthy. “Been hard for you since you sat on that towel in those little shorts. Spent the whole afternoon thinking about bending you over and ruining you.”
He started fucking me in earnest then, one arm banded tight across my chest, the other braced flat against the wall, hand still half-covering my mouth because I had given up on managing the noise myself. Every thrust drove me forward onto my toes.
“Harder,” I gasped, pushing back to meet him. “If you’re going to fuck me in your family’s shower, do it like you mean it.”
He laughed, dark and delighted, and gave me exactly that. Deeper, rougher strokes that punched little broken sounds out of me. “Mouthy thing. Love it when you get demanding. Love how you take me like you can’t get enough. Tell me how it feels.”
“Full,” I managed. “So fucking full-”
He angled his hips and slammed into that spot until my vision went white at the edges. “Yeah, I feel you fluttering. Going to come on my cock already? Do it. You’re so beautiful like this.”
His hand slid down my stomach to rub tight, filthy circles over my clit in time with his thrusts. I came hard, muffled against his palm, clenching around him so tightly he cursed and had to grit his teeth to keep from following me.
He didn’t stop. He fucked me through it, relentless, praising me in that low ruined voice.
When I was shaking and oversensitive he pulled out, spun me to face him, lifted me like I weighed nothing and put my back to the boards.
My legs went around his waist and he sank back in with one smooth thrust.
“Want to see your face when I fill you up,” he muttered against my mouth. “Want to watch those eyes go hazy. You’re mine, Willow.”
“Then prove it,” I said, nails digging into his shoulders, rolling my hips down to take him deeper. “Come in me. I want to feel it.”
That broke him. He groaned into my neck and fucked me harder, desperate strokes until he buried himself deep and came, hot pulses flooding me while the freezing water kept running over both of us. He kept grinding through it, like he couldn’t stand the thought of leaving my body yet.
Afterwards we stood under the pipe with the water running over both of us and his forehead down on my collarbone. His hands were still on my hips, thumbs stroking absently, like he hadn’t quite remembered how to let go.
“We could just be this,” I said.
He lifted his head.
He started to say a thing. I watched him get to the front of it and stop and put it away somewhere.
“Your hair’s got sand in it,” he said.
“No.”
“Michael.”
“Somebody’s coming down,” he said, and somebody was, because Pia was on the path shouting that dinner was in twenty minutes and that she did not want to know.
***
Archie had the dog book three times before bed, and I did all four voices, and the dog remained a disgrace to his species.
Michael sat on the floor with his back against the crib and let his son put a hand flat on his face while I read.
“He’s asleep,” I said, from the door.
“He’s not. He’s pretending. He does this.”
“He’s asleep, Michael.”
“Watch the foot. He’ll do the thing with the foot and then he’s gone. Until the foot happens he’s still in there working.”
“You’ve been out here two days.”
“I’m a fast learner. Ask my board.”
Archie did the thing with the foot. A small twitch, then stillness.
“There,” Michael said, delighted with himself, and came out and shut the door with the care of a man defusing a device.
We got a bottle of wine and sat outside where you can hear the water and nothing else, and he told me about Prentice.
“He said your father would be pleased you’re still there.”
“He did.”
“That’s a horrible thing to say to a person.”
“Is it? I’ve been turning it over all week and I couldn’t get it to come out horrible.”
“It comes out horrible immediately. He means you’ve survived. Nobody says survived about a job somebody’s good at. Nobody says still there about a man who’s thriving.”
Michael looked at the water for a bit.
“Say that again in October,” he said, “in front of him.”
“I’ll say it in front of anyone. Give me a chair at that dinner and I’ll say it with the starters.”
Then I told him about the woman in the shop who has decided I am somebody’s niece and cannot be talked out of it, and he laughed so hard he had to put the glass down.
Then the phone went in the house.
I heard it before he did. My whole body has learned to listen for it.
“Leave it.”
“I’m going to leave it,” he said, and he sat there and left it, for a bit.
“You’ve gone quiet.”
“I’m leaving it. That’s what leaving it looks like.”
“That’s what listening to it looks like.”
“It’s the same face, Willow.”
Then he got up and went in and got it and took it out onto the grass.
I could see him from the chair. Standing, then pacing, then stopping to push a hand through his hair. Then standing still with his head down, listening to a long stretch of something.
I put the glasses in the sink. I put the bottle in the fridge. I looked at the tide chart on the wall for no reason at all, and turned the outside light on for him, and he was still out there.
When he came back the easiness had gone out of the evening the way heat goes out of a room when a door opens.
“Sorry.”
“What was it?”
“There’s a dinner in October. Rotterdam people. She wanted to know if I’d sit at the top table or in the middle.”
“That took you twenty minutes. For a chair.”
“That was the first thing she said.” He rubbed his face. “Then her sister’s had a scan and it’s not good, and she hasn’t told anyone at work, and she needed to say it out loud to somebody.”
He said it plainly, with no idea he was handing me anything, because it was not a lie and it was not a defense.
It was just true, and it was awful, and there was nothing in it I could be angry at without becoming a person I do not want to be.
That is the problem with Krystal. There is never anything I can point at.
There is only a shape, and shapes don’t count.
“Is she all right?”
“No. Not really.”
“That’s rotten.”
“It is.” He picked up his phone off the table and turned it over in his hand.
“Does she have people out here? Her mother’s still at the Head, isn’t she.”
“They don’t speak.”
“Since when?”
“I don’t know. A while.” He shrugged. “It’s not a thing she goes into.”
“No,” I said. “It wouldn’t be.”
“Look, I was going to say this tomorrow, but I’d rather not have it sitting there overnight. She’s coming out Friday. The cottage at the top, the one with the mice. It’s the integration, it’s all calls, and it makes no odds where she does them from.”
“You told me she was coming. You never said when.”
“Friday. It’s got its own drive and its own gate. You won’t know she’s there.”
“That’s not what I meant. When did you ask her?”
“She asked me. She wanted somewhere quiet and I offered.”
“When, Michael.”
“Thursday. After Rotterdam signed.” He heard it a beat too late and put the phone down. “That’s not what that is.”
“I didn’t say what it was.”
“You said it with your whole face.”
And he went in to put the glasses away, and I sat outside on my own with the light on and the water going, and thought about the fact that he had asked her before he asked me.
I sat there until the wine was gone and the light had changed and I could hear him moving around inside, getting ready for bed, waiting for me to come in.
I came in. I always come in. That is not the same as being all right.