27. Willow #2
He laughed, quiet and wrecked, and rolled us with care so I was on my back beneath him on the narrow berth. He settled between my legs and pushed back into me in one smooth slide that made us both sigh.
“Hi,” he said, smiling down at me.
“Hi yourself.”
He started to move then. Long deep strokes that filled me completely. No rush. No performance. Just the steady sweet drag of him inside me while he kissed my mouth, my cheek, the edge of my jaw. His weight was a comfort. His hand found mine and laced our fingers together against the pillow.
“I love you,” he said into the small space between us. “I love the way you look at me when you stop being angry. I love that you brought me down here and told me off until I admitted what I wanted. I love being the man who gets to have you like this.”
“Keep going.” My free hand stroked down his back. “All of it. Don’t stop talking and don’t stop moving.”
So he didn’t. He told me I was home. He told me nothing in any city had ever come close to the simple fact of my body under his on a boat that still had no name.
He told me he had thought about this exact quiet every night he spent on the bad sofa.
His rhythm stayed deep and sure. Every time he bottomed out he stayed there a second longer, like he couldn’t stand the distance.
I wrapped my legs around him and met every thrust.
“Harder now,” I whispered. “I want to feel you tomorrow when I’m walking around pretending to be respectable.”
He gave me what I asked for without ever turning rough. Deeper. Fuller. The angle shifted until every stroke dragged over the place that made my breath catch. His forehead dropped to mine.
“Come with me,” he said. “Please. I need to feel you. I need to know this is real.”
I broke again with his name in my mouth, clenching around him in long sweet waves that pulled him straight over the edge.
He buried himself deep and came with a quiet shattered sound, hips stuttering as he spilled into me.
He kept moving through it in small helpless circles, kissing me the whole time, like he couldn’t bear to stop being as close as possible.
We stayed joined while our breathing slowed. He brushed damp hair off my face with careful fingers and looked at me like I had handed him something he still couldn’t quite believe was his.
Afterwards we were on our backs in a space too small for two people, and the water was doing the thing it does under a hull, which I have not slept next to since I was seventeen.
“I’m going to say a thing.”
“Don’t.”
“It’s not a big one.”
“They’re never big ones and then I have to lie here about it for two weeks.”
“You’re on my arm and it’s gone completely dead and I’d rather lose it.”
“That’s your problem.”
“That’s my whole position, yes,” said Michael, and did not move, and neither did I, and somewhere in the small hours I heard him laugh at nothing in the dark, which is a thing he has never once done in a room with other people in it.
He asked me two weeks later, in a kitchen, on a Tuesday, badly.
Half past eight in the morning. Archie in a chair doing something appalling to a banana.
Me at the counter with my back to him and a pen behind my ear, because I have a job now and have had one since the autumn, and I have never in my life had a pen behind my ear and have had one there every morning since.
“Marry me again,” he said, to the back of my head.
I did not turn around straight away.
“Say that again.”
“Marry me again.”
I turned around.
“Michael, we’re married.”
And I watched a man who has negotiated with governments discover that he had not thought about it at all.
“Right,” he said.
“I never went through with it. I held it. It’s been held since before the fog, and I never told you, and you have spent a season being decent to a woman you thought was divorcing you.”
He went very still with the pan in his hand.
“You held it.”
“The morning of the fog. I rang Boston, and then I got on your brother’s boat, and there has never been a right day to say it since.”
“There’ve been a hundred days.”
“There have, and I didn’t use one, and I’m using this one.”
“So what are you asking me?”
“I don’t know.” He put down the pan he was holding for no reason.
“I know what I meant. I don’t know the words for it and I’ve had two goes and both were worse.
I’d like to do it again. Not the divorce.
The other thing. The bit at the start, where we did it in a room with two people off the street and a clerk who couldn’t spell you, and then I had a call, and we never had the lunch. ”
I went completely still.
“That’s what you meant.”
“That is exactly what I meant, and it took me until just now to know it, and I have been standing in this kitchen for two weeks thinking about a pen.”
I said no.
I want that written down properly, because I have told this twice since and both times somebody has said oh, but you didn’t really. I did. I said no and I meant it.
“Not yet.”
“Right.”
“Don’t do the face.”
“I’m not doing a face.”
“You’re doing the face where you’ve taken it and put it away and you’re going to be extremely gracious about it for six weeks.” I came around the table. “Sit down. Here is what I want, and it is not a big thing, and you are not to improve it.”
“I won’t improve it.”
“You will absolutely try to improve it. Pia has a name for this.”
“What’s the thing, Willow?”
“Do you know what happens on this island in November?”
“The ferries go down to-”
“That is not what I asked and you know it isn’t.”
“No.”
“Nothing happens,” I said. “The shops shut and the sidewalks are empty and it rains sideways from Christmas until March and there is nobody left on this rock but the people who live on it. That is the island I am from. You have never once been on it.”
“I’ve been out at Easter.”
“You have been out at Easter and you were in the boat shed on a phone and your sister photographed it.”
He did not argue.
“Stay for the winter,” I said. “Anybody can do the summer. The whole island can do the summer. I want you at that gate at six o’clock in the dark in January when there is not one single person here to be impressed.”
“Rotterdam-”
“I know about Rotterdam. So work it out. I am not asking you to sell anything or write me a document about it.” I sat down opposite him.
“And the second part is that you never mention it. Not once. It does not go on a chart, and if you ever say the words as I said I would to me in a kitchen I will put you in the sea.”
“And then?”
“Then ask me in the spring,” I said, “and I’ll probably say yes, and you can be smug about it for the rest of your life.”
He said, “All right,” and got up, and put the pan back on, and did the eggs.
I am going to say the thing about the job, because he never will.
Dee Coffin has done the Folger lettings since before Michael could walk, and she is not a young woman, and she has never let anybody near that book.
She offered it to me in the autumn, at Ruth’s table, over a folder, on the grounds that I have been on that island my entire life and know which houses take water and which boilers are temperamental but not wicked.
There is a version of my husband - a recent one, one from about six months ago - who would have found out and been delighted and rung somebody.
Pia told me what actually happened, because Pia tells me everything.
He did not ring anybody. He did not offer to look at the contract.
He has not asked one question about the money, and when Levi asked him at the yard what I was on he said he had no idea, and Levi said you’ve no idea, and he said no, and Levi looked at him for a long moment and went and did something to a winch.
“He came and stood in my kitchen about it once,” Pia said. “He got as far as saying so, the lettings, and then he picked up a tea towel and dried things that were already dry, and then he left.”
“That’s the most restraint he’s ever shown.”
“Willow,” said Pia, “that is the most restraint anybody in that family has ever shown, and I include the funeral.”