Zeke
Zeke
There goes “committing to the long-term in both thought and action.” There goes “dedicating oneself to the pursuit of authentic connection.” I leave Surviving Modern Love on the bar as Lexi and I move to the armchairs by the window—looking at it just makes me feel guilty. It’s the dumbest one of these books I’ve read so far anyway. What the hell are the “artifices of modernity”?
Truth is, it’s been so long now, and I missed it, I guess. This easy back-and-forth with someone who really only wants one thing from me, something I know I can give. It means breaking all my rules, but…what’s one more one-night stand, really? What’s the harm?
Outside, the streetlights have come on, bright gold against the silhouetted masts of the marina. Lexi puts her feet up to rest on the old-fashioned radiator underneath the window, and I do the same, my black boots beside hers. Almost-but-not-quite touching.
There’s a quiet promise of where the night’s going in the air between us. I feel myself slipping into the rhythm of it all. The way our gazes meet, flit away, then join again, and how our bodies lean toward each other. Her saying I want one night keeps going around my head, and the way she looked as she said it, like even speaking it out loud was enough to turn her on.
“Are we wearing the same shoes?” Lexi asks, looking at them over her glass.
I knock her foot gently with mine. “That a problem?”
“Only because you wear them better.”
I laugh. She stays deadpan—she’s hardly cracked a smile since we started talking. Even sprawled out with her feet up, she still has one arm drawn across her body like a shield. Everything about Lexi’s like this—kind of hemmed-in, muted, like someone’s dialed her down. You can tell she’s complicated.
I am such a sucker for complicated.
“I can’t believe we’ve agreed to spend the night together before we’ve even kissed,” she says, eyeing me. “This is extremely out of character for me, just so you know.”
“Is that what kissing is, for you?” I say, amused. “Like an audition?”
The look she gives me says, Yeah, duh. What else could it be? And I think, OK, so someone’s never kissed you like you deserve to be kissed, then.
“Come here,” I say, tipping my chin.
She raises her eyebrows. “You come here.”
I smile. She’s actually making me a bit nervous, in that butterflies-in-the-stomach kind of way—something about this night feels different from the nights I’ve had before. Maybe it’s me, changing. I hope so.
I drag my chair right up to Lexi’s, arm to arm, then twist in my seat so I’m facing her. She looks back, tense and kind of defiant, almost as if she’s daring me to do it. I don’t say anything; I just wait and watch her from a few breaths away. I want to see her relax before I move to touch her.
She takes a swig of wine, holding my gaze. She’s breathing a bit unsteadily now, and I feel my body tighten in response.
“Go on, then,” she prompts.
I just tilt my head. Keep looking. Trace over her features, those extraordinary, icy blue eyes, the strong set to her jaw. I watch her lips part, feel her gaze touch my mouth, and I keep waiting.
She huffs. “Fine,” she says, and leans over to kiss me.
I can tell from the way she kisses that Lexi thinks I’m a kid who doesn’t really know what to do—she thinks she’s going to have to show me how. It doesn’t take long to fix that. I slant her mouth to mine, ease back, feel for what she likes. She lets out a surprised hot breath when I brush my tongue lightly against hers, so I do it again, and smile against her mouth when her fingertips tighten on my forearm.
“Huh,” she says, breathless, as I pull back a little.
She’s looking at me differently. I swallow, glancing away toward the bar.
“Do that again,” she says, reaching up to turn my face back toward her.
I pull her in. After a few minutes of kissing her, I can feel the impatience in her body, that buzz she’s holding in.
“Let’s go,” she breathes.
I shake my head.
“We’ve got all night,” I say, smoothing back a loose strand of her hair. “I promised you stupid and reckless and fun. So…”
I raise my eyebrows at her, like, What does stupid and reckless and fun look like to you?
Lexi’s eyes dial a little brighter. “All right,” she says. “Let’s do shots.”
We finally leave The Anchor when a crowd of pub-crawlers arrive on a coach from Newcastle just before closing. I nick a brown trilby off the table as we go, and Lexi looks disapproving, even though it’s a tacky dress-up one and all the kids in costume are too plastered to care.
“It’s wrong to steal,” she says, leaning into me.
“Not stealing—rehoming,” I say. “Probably only cost him about two quid anyway.”
She narrows those round eyes, looking up at me. “Am I being led astray right now, young man? Are you what astray looks like?”
I ignore the twinge in my chest and smile, kissing her again, my hands finding the dip where her leather jacket nips in. We stumble away from the bar, not wanting to break apart, until we reach the marina fence and press against it, first my back to the wire, then hers. Every centimeter of us is touching. Just the feel of her is enough to make me want her so much I’m aching, especially after making out in the pub like teenagers all evening. It’s been a while, and I like this woman. A lot .
When we finally step apart, we’re standing in a cloud.
A sea fret. A sudden fog coming off the water. I remember there was one when I visited my dad here as a kid. Like someone’s taken an eraser to the world and left nothing but us.
Lexi pulls back, the fence bouncing a little against our weight, and says, “Am I drunker than I thought, or…”
“It’s not just you. The world’s gone.”
“Oh. Well. I won’t miss it,” she says, and fists my waistcoat, pulling me in for another kiss as the fog smokes around us.
My lips feel burned and my chest’s tight, as though something’s winded me and I’m only just getting my breath back. Everything else that matters to me—work, those books, all the shit with my family…it’s as though it’s drifted away and tonight there’s just Lexi.
I love this feeling. Nothing clears your mind like this kind of wanting.
“What the fuck are you doing to me, Zeke?” she whispers. “I’m literally shaking.”
“Shall we go to my boat?” I ask, glancing in the direction of the marina gate and already fumbling in my pocket for my fob. It’s the first time I’ve ever called it my boat . It feels kind of weird. I’m not a boat person. My dad was the boat person, and I was the person trying not to be my dad.
Lexi is leaning into me. “Let’s go to mine.”
“Sure, OK.”
The moment I press my lips to hers again, she lets out a moan that sears right through me, turns me hard in an instant. We break apart when we reach the gate. She stumbles into the fence just as I reach to fob us in, and I think I’ve missed the sensor, but then the gate swings open and we’re falling through the fog, already grasping each other again.
“Hang on,” she says, pausing for a moment to squint into the darkness.
We’ve ended up right by Dad’s—my—houseboat, its blue paint dim in the fog. You can’t see much: the shape of an old-fashioned bicycle strapped to the roof, the thin metal chimney for the wood burner, The Merry Dormouse painted in white on the bow. I remember Mum carefully touching up those letters with a paintbrush, back when the boat was the family holiday spot, before the divorce—before it became Dad’s home, and somewhere Mum was never welcome. In retrospect, it surprises me that he didn’t rename it.
“Let’s just…” Lexi begins, stepping toward the boat.
I do the same, then remember she wanted to go to her place, so I say, “Are you sure?”
She frowns at me. “Yeah. I’m sure.”
“Your stern rope’s snapped!” a voice calls down the pontoon.
Paige Something-or-other. I can’t believe she’s still kicking around this marina—her houseboat was always moored next to The Merry Dormouse . She’s a bit…annoying. She would wander into our family evenings on the deck, “popping by” with a mug of herbal tea in her hand, hanging around until it was borderline uncomfortable. The kind of person who can’t read a room. Her brother died, and after that she was never the same again , that’s what Dad used to say—one of those meaningless phrases he trotted out all the time, like his favorite one about the split from my mum: Some things are too broken to be fixed .
“A snapped rope sounds bad?” Lexi says, pulling away from me to look.
“This boat always was too long for this pontoon. Here, it’ll be all right, you can reconfigure your head line into two springs,” Paige says, appearing suddenly through the fog. “That’ll be fine for the night. If your friend gets the center of the rope looped around the cleat on the pontoon, I can make fast at the bow and stern if you just hold on to the boat for me. Tide’s completely slack right now, so should be a super quick job.”
“Thanks,” Lexi and I say in unison.
I’m lost, to be honest. Dad wasn’t particularly good on nautical lingo, and he never taught us this sort of stuff.
“I’ll check in on you again in the morning with some spare rope, so we can get you properly moored,” Paige says. “But this should do you for now, all right?”
She beams at us. She’s probably quite nice, really. I bet she was just lonely, all those times she crashed our evenings. I can see it now that I’m not ten.
“That’s really kind. Thank you for your help,” Lexi says.
I grip the side of the boat as Lexi heads off to follow the instructions she’s been given, and Paige works around us. This, I’ve done plenty of times—holding the boat steady for Dad was my and Jeremy’s specialty, as kids. Lyra less so. It’s always been hard to get my sister to do anything as obliging as helping out.
Things are spinning—I’ve had a shot or two too many, maybe. I take a breath, tasting the fog on my tongue, my body aching with heat and desire. I can’t even see Lexi—can’t see further than a meter or so now, the fog’s so thick—and the weird lost feeling freaks me out a bit.
“Nearly there!” Paige shouts cheerfully from somewhere in the fog.
Almost everything I recall about The Merry Dormouse is from the time after my parents’ divorce—I was only four when Dad came to live here permanently. For a moment I feel as though I can hear him playing his crappy homemade ukulele, or humming his way around the kitchen, or puzzling over a sudoku with Lyra and Jeremy. I remember sitting on the deck with the two of them, Dad hovering behind us as he taught us to fish. Even at that age I could sense how desperately he wanted us to enjoy it, and the pressure of it all had made me sweat, because of course I was shit at fishing, and the others caught so many we had to freeze some.
“Paige’s done, apparently,” says a warm, throaty voice behind me.
I turn to see Lexi appearing from the mist, lips bee-stung, cheeks flushed. She stumbles slightly and her body collides with mine, and just like that we’re kissing again. Within seconds, my mind is one hundred percent her. There’s…I don’t know, there’s something about this woman. She’s different, I think, and then I tell myself she can’t be. She just wants one night.
“Sleep well, you two!” Paige calls, distant in the darkness. The fog whirls and steams, quieting the other sounds of the marina.
“Thank you so much for helping us out,” I call, my hands still resting on Lexi’s waist.
I make a mental note to take Paige a bottle of wine tomorrow as a thank-you, knowing already that I’ll forget. I’m not good at that kind of stuff even when I’m sober. Mental notes just drift out of my head—I’ve always been that way.
“So,” Lexi breathes, pulling back a little. “Bedroom?”
She cranes her head to look through the boat’s windows.
“Yes. Definitely.”
I help her up onto the deck. She tries the handle as I’m patting my pocket for the key, but it’s open. I must’ve left the door unlocked earlier—habit, I guess, as Dad never used to lock it. We tumble down the steps into the living area. First time I walked back in here earlier today, it shocked me with its smallness, maybe because I was a lot littler when I used to stay here, or maybe because it is small—twelve meters long, low-ceilinged and cramped. The sensation of the floor shifting underneath my feet makes me feel sick, and I have to grip the wall as I step through into the bedroom. I’m getting déjà vu again. I turn to Lexi and shut the old thoughts away.
Once we’re in bed, there’s no danger of anything tugging me away from her. She’s so fucking beautiful. I feel her hesitation as I pull back to look at her body under the covers, even in the near-blackness—we hit the light switch, but it didn’t work, so all we’ve got are the foggy lights of the marina and the full moon in the center of the skylight above us.
“You’re incredible,” I tell her, my hand tracing a gorgeous rolling line from breast to waist to hip to thigh. “Do you know that?”
She’s keen to press herself against me and I’d bet half of that is to stop me looking. She meets my gaze squarely, hot and fierce, but I’ve not forgotten that she said, I’m not but thanks when I told her she was beautiful. One night’s not enough to undo whatever’s made her feel that way. I can give her what she asked for, though: reckless fun. A night to escape the real world.
As I kiss my way across her collarbone, I settle in. Let my mind clear. She moans, and my body heats in response. I taste her skin, touch her, try to show her what I mean when I say she’s incredible. Our bodies seek a rhythm together, and I already know how to please her, how to take the slow, teasing, meandering path to where we want to go. I press hot kisses to her stomach and feel her writhe.
But then I look up. Her unraveled hair, open mouth. Those smart wide ice-blue eyes. Our gazes meet, and it sends this jolt through me. Like I’ve burned myself. It knocks me out of rhythm. I hear my own breath catch.
I can’t seem to switch off.
It doesn’t usually feel like this , says my head, but I duck down, kiss the fine skin of her upper thigh, ignore it. One night, one night, one night. Surely if I know how to do anything right, it’s that.