22. Blair #2
I laughed until tears streamed down my face. The absurdity of it all, the cheese and the interruption and the cheerful harbor patrol officer, was too much.
Then the patrol boat was gone around the point, and it was just us again, and I was still lying half under my husband on a blanket in a private cove with my body wound tight and unfinished.
The laughter died in my throat. His eyes had gone dark again.
I could feel him hard against my hip, could feel my own pulse still throbbing between my legs where his mouth had been thirty seconds ago.
“Below deck,” I said. “Now. Before another boat decides to say good morning.”
He didn’t need telling twice. He hauled me up and half carried me down into the little cabin, low-ceilinged and warm, and I was already dragging my dress over my head.
He crowded me back onto the narrow bunk, stripped his shirt off, and I got my hands on him finally, the flat muscle of his stomach, the sharp jut of his hipbones above his waistband, the trail of hair leading down.
My mouth watered. I got his shorts open and wrapped my hand around his cock and stroked, and he dropped his forehead to my shoulder and groaned.
“Blair.”
“You started this.” I guided him to me, slick and ready and past waiting. “Finish it.”
He pushed into me in one long slow stroke, filling me until I couldn’t breathe, and the boat rocked under us and drove him deeper.
I gasped. He set a rhythm the sea helped him keep, every sway of the hull rolling him against the spot that made me clench, and I hooked my leg over his and took all of it.
“Feel that?” His voice was ragged against my ear. “Every wave. You’re going to come around me while the whole harbor sails past.”
“Harder.”
He fucked me harder, one hand braced on the bunk above my head, the other sliding down to work my clit in tight circles, and I bit down on his shoulder to keep from crying out loud enough to carry across the water.
It didn’t take long. I was already so close, had been close for an hour, and when I came it rolled through me in waves that kept time with the boat, everything in me pulling tight and fluttering around him.
He followed a few strokes after, driving deep and emptying into me with a groan muffled against my throat, both of us sweat-slick and shaking in the small warm dark.
We lay there tangled in the bunk until our breathing slowed, the water lapping at the hull, the light coming gold through the little porthole.
“We should head back,” I said when I could finally breathe.
“Probably.”
“We’re having dinner tonight, right? Chowder on the wharf?”
“Six o’clock. I made a reservation.”
“Then we have all day. We can continue this later.”
“Is that a promise?”
I kissed him instead of answering.
We docked flushed and giddy, nineteen again, two people who had somehow found their way back to the beginning. Will helped me off the boat, and we stood on the dock for a moment, just looking at each other, the morning sun catching the gold in his hair.
“Tonight,” he said. “Six o’clock. Chowder.”
“Tonight.”
***
That evening he was waiting in the booth at the back of the restaurant on the wharf, the one we’d gone to when we were dating, before marriage and parenthood had sanded us down into two people who ordered the same two things and talked about the calendar.
He stood when I came in. He always stood now.
It was a small thing and it undid me every time.
We ordered the chowder. We talked for two hours about nothing, and I felt fifteen years fall away somewhere between the candle and the bread basket. He was reaching across the table to steal a bite of my roll when the shadow fell over us.
“Blair Beaumont. And William.” Corinne Ashby stood beside our table in head-to-toe navy, a smile stretched thin enough to slice bread.
Her husband hovered behind her, already looking like he wanted to be anywhere else.
“Well. Isn’t this cozy. We’d all rather assumed you two were finished. The columns were so certain.”
“Corinne.” Will’s voice was pleasant. His hand found mine on the table.
“I think it’s wonderful. Truly. That you’d take her back after everything that was said.
” She tilted her head toward my stomach, and the smile she turned on me went sharp enough to cut.
“Though I suppose a baby does complicate an exit. Was it the baby that brought him around, or did you two work out some other little arrangement? People do wonder.”
The restaurant went quiet, the way rooms do when they smell blood. Heat crawled up my face. I opened my mouth and had no idea what would come out of it, and I never found out, because Will stood up.
He didn’t raise his voice. He never had to. He just rose, unhurried, buttoned his jacket, and looked at Corinne Ashby the way I’d only ever seen him look at men who’d crossed him.
“Corinne. I’m going to say this once, and I’d like you to carry it back to the club with the rest of your gossip, because I’m tired of correcting it one dinner party at a time.
” He let his voice carry. He wanted it to.
“Every word ever printed about my wife was a lie, bought and paid for by a bitter old man who wanted to hurt her. There was no affair. There was never an affair. The only person who ever betrayed this marriage was me, when I was fool enough to believe people like you over a woman who has never given me a single reason to doubt her.”
Corinne’s mouth opened. Nothing came out of it.
“And I’m not taking her back,” Will went on.
“She is deciding whether to take me back. If she does, it will be the great fortune of my life, and it will be in spite of every person in this town who spent ten years whispering that she wasn’t good enough for the name.
Including you.” He paused. “Enjoy your dinner.”
He sat down. Picked up his spoon. Asked me if I wanted dessert.
Corinne Ashby retreated in a rustle of navy silk, her husband trailing after her, and the restaurant slowly remembered how to breathe.
I stared at my husband across the table.
He had spent his whole life managing what Newport thought of him, and he’d just set a match to his own reputation in a crowded room to defend me.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I said. My voice came out unsteady.
“Yes, I did.” He reached over and caught a tear off my cheek with his thumb before I’d felt it fall.
“I let them whisper about you for a decade because I was too much of a coward to make them stop. I’m done being a coward.
Let them talk about me now. Let them say William Beaumont lost his mind over his own wife in a chowder house.
It’ll be the truest thing they ever repeat. ”
I held onto his hand across the table like it was the only solid thing in the room.
***
A few days later Delphine cornered me over coffee she’d insisted on, because she “had to hear everything.”
“I’m thrilled for you,” she said, in the tone women use right before they aren’t.
“Truly. I just want you to go in clear-eyed. You know he’s been having dinners on Spring Street?
Twice this month that I’ve heard of. Late.
Some woman I didn’t recognize, dark hair, very put together, lots of paperwork on the table.
” She stirred her latte. “Probably nothing. I just would want to know, if it were me.”
“It’s probably work,” I said, and I believed it, mostly. Will had a hundred deals in a hundred stages. A woman with paperwork was a Tuesday.
I filed it away anyway. That was the thing about a mind that had spent months being lied to. It kept a drawer open, just in case, even when you’d sworn you were done being afraid.
We were married ten years, and we were dating.
It should have felt strange. Redundant, maybe, going through the motions of courtship with someone I’d already pledged my life to. But it didn’t feel redundant at all. It felt necessary. It felt like we were building a new marriage on the foundation of everything that had come before.
By Friday night, I was exhausted and happy and more hopeful than I’d been in months.
Nan caught me smiling at my phone for the third time in an hour.
“The man again?”
“His name is Will. You’ve known him for fifteen years.”
“I’ve known him for fifteen years. Doesn’t mean I approve of him.”
“You don’t have to approve. You just have to be civil.”
“I’m always civil.” She paused. “He’s here, by the way.”
“What?”
“Pulled up five minutes ago. Been sitting in the car, probably working up the nerve to come to the door.” She glanced out the window. “There he goes. He’s got flowers.”
I looked up. Nan was watching me with an expression caught between approval and resignation, hard to read as ever.
“Go,” she said. “Before he loses his nerve and drives away.”
I smiled all the way to the door.