Chapter 10
CHAPTER 10
When I was about fifteen, my cousins from Toulouse came to stay. Twin girls, no more than toddlers. It was a hellish week. I was at the awkward age when respecting my personal space felt of paramount importance, and nobody had clued them in; my baby cousins barged right through it. Every morning, I’d wake to the disarming sensation I wasn’t alone, and open my eyes to find two more pairs of big brown ones about three inches away from my face, staring at me like I’d landed from an alien planet.
I was reminded of that now, except the pair of eyes smiling into mine from the other side of the bed, not brown but flecked a cool silvery-grey, were a welcome sight. Below them, a grinning mouth revealed the world’s most famous chipped incisor.
“Oh God. Was I snoring?”
“No.” She hesitated. “Well, maybe a bit. I prefer to think you were dreaming about tractors.”
Great impression, Nico.
Dressed in the flowery pyjamas I’d seen hanging on the back of the door the night I’d helped her home from the beach, éti was propped up on her elbow alongside me, under the bedclothes. She smelled clean. She’d applied light makeup too; it saddened me that she felt she had to do all that before I woke.
“How long have you been lying there?”
“Um… since about… ah… half an hour after we went to bed?” She gave me a sheepish smile. “I mean, I got up twenty minutes ago to take a shower and then came back.”
“So, we… um… we’ve slept together now?”
“Yeah.” A hint of blush coloured her cheeks. “We have.”
I indicated with my hand down her hidden body, skilled, honed, worshipped by so many across the globe. But so, so wrong for her. “You really hate it, don’t you? All of this.”
“I do, yeah. But I wanted to spend the night with you.”
So, we had; I just hadn’t known it. I hoped the first of many. Like gravity and the tides, I was pulled unstoppably towards this woman.
At some point in the night, I’d pushed the duvet down to my navel and became very aware of my bare-naked torso.
éti trailed a cold finger across it. “What does this tattoo mean?”
She seemed fascinated, which was a good thing, because if she cast her gaze any further south, she’d spot the effect her innocent caress was having on my morning wood, creating a tent in the duvet big enough for a family of small mammals to shelter beneath. Which, after reassuring her we were going to take things slow, wasn’t the vibe I was aiming for.
I squinted down at the wave design swirling up and across my right pec, finishing at my shoulder. My earliest professional tattoo—I’d driven all the way to a tattooist in Bordeaux for that one, frittering a whole month’s wages on it.
“It’s supposed to be Hokusai’s great wave. He was a famous Japanese artist, and this was his most famous painting. The three little boats here,” I dragged her finger across, “represent how much we small humans are the mercy of the tides. I had it done after my dad’s friend’s fishing boat capsized in a storm and he drowned. A long time ago now.”
“That’s sad.” She stroked her finger lower, to a smaller tattoo cupping my left pec. “And this one?”
“That’s an outline of this island. Can you see?” With my chin on my chest, I moved her finger to the spot. “That shaky X marks where our farm is. Right here, over my heartbeat. One of my friend’s inked that, years ago. We were both drunk after a party on the beach. It’s pretty amateurish. I had the compass above added later—it points in the direction of the island from due north.”
“I like it,” she remarked. “I like all of them. And the stories.”
“Each one has a story. My mum says my tattoos are like a timeline of my life. I add another one every year. These words climbing my neck were done after we bought the extra hectares over near Ars. They cost us a lot of money—we took a big risk. It’s Latin for trust the seeds you’re planting .”
She stroked a finger up it, making me shiver, and laughed. One of those rare folk able to find joy in the tiniest things. Maybe my next tattoo would be of something pure and good, to represent her. Her finger hovered at the end of the string of words. “Your ink is like a diary, or a treasure map. You join the dots and voila , you create a Nico.”
Before she took them away, I grasped her fingers and brought them to my lips. “You’re funny, you know that?”
“Yes.” She grinned, with that mouth made for mischief. “As a matter of fact, I do.”
“Do you have any tattoos? My dad swears that if footballers spent more time practising and less getting their arms inked, they’d score more goals.”
“Tell him he’s right.” She laughed with delight. “Most of our team look like they’re auditioning to be drummers in a heavy metal band. But no, I haven’t got any, and it’s not for lack of them trying to persuade me. I’m not against having tattoos. I just haven’t thought of anything I want as a permanent mark, that’s all.”
“No big football or red-and-blue Eiffel tower on your bum cheek, then?”
“Buerk. Definitely not.”
Her fingers drifted lower, coming to rest over the drawings on my flank.
“You may have noticed my tats have a theme.”
Her fingers walked across a few little fish to another small boat. She rewarded me with a glimpse of the incisor. Early morning éti, before her dynamo had been wound, was very appealing indeed.
“The ocean, yes.”
She ran her palm over each inked outline, her lush lips pursed in concentration. Nope, she had no fucking idea how turned on I was.
“Ooh, I know what these are down here. They’re oysters, aren’t they? I love the detail. They’re beautiful. Being an oyster farmer must be so cool.”
I laughed. “You think?”
“Yeah, of course! Running a family business that’s been around for a hundred years? Very cool. And I like oysters.” She tapped her fingers on a group of four tiny ones inked onto my left flank. “These are my favourite, these very cute babies here.”
She circled each of them, almost reverently. I had a couple of bigger oysters on my back and some more on my arms—I added to their number every time I got a proper new design.
Putain, her gentle stroking was nice. I bit my lip to stop an inappropriate noise escaping. Reaching out, I tucked a clump of hair behind her ear, and she hummed with pleasure.
I needed something to distract myself from the pressure building in my dick. “Shall I tell you an interesting story about baby oysters?” Putting my hand over hers, I interlaced our fingers. “Well, first of all, they aren’t called baby oysters. When the larvae are big enough to latch onto something, we call them spats.”
“That’s quite an ugly name.”
“Spats are quite ugly creatures. I must take you down to the spat racks and show you them sometime.”
“?a alors , that will be a romantic date.”
I tugged another clump of thick hair. “Anyhow. They all start life as baby boy spats. Every single one. But then, some of them, over time as they grow bigger, realise they aren’t supposed to be little boy oysters any longer. And they grow up to be very happy girl oysters instead.”
The fingers circumscribing the shellfish tattoos on my belly stilled. In fact, the rest of éti stilled too, as she stared hard at her hand.
A single tear trickled down her cheek, unchecked.
Another tear chased after the first. I thumbed them both away.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“You haven’t.”
“Oysters are also sex-crazed horndogs, by the way—they’re the most fecund creatures on the planet.”
She snorted through her tears, and I opened my arms wide. Tucking her under my chin, I kissed her soft curls. For a while, we lay that way, her hair tickling my nose. I stared at the ceiling, watching the shadows fade as daylight crept across the room. I’d have to make a move soon; I hadn’t yet checked my phone. My dad would wonder where I was. Or, rather, wonder why I wasn’t at work. At twenty-eight, I’d lived away from home for years, until recent events, so my nighttime comings and goings were no one's business. Nonetheless, he still expected me to turn up to work on time.
“Thank you, Nico,” she whispered. She tilted her head, and soft lips landed on my cheek. “I told you oyster farmers were cool.”
The complicated individual using my chest as a pillow noisily blew her nose on a tissue. I even found that adorable. Mon dieu, I was in so deep my feet no longer touched the bottom. I should have been floundering, panicking, fighting for air. So why did I feel as if I was breathing more freely than ever?