44. Forty-four
Ethan does, in fact, sleep naked.
It’s one of the many things I learn in the next twelve days in Bar Harbor that are blissfully similar to our first one.
He works a few hours every morning at his restaurant, and we spend every night together. Every night, I think it might be the time that finally satisfies my appetite for him, but every night, he proves me wrong. He becomes the drug, and I need just one more hit.
I teach him to make cocktails, but the things he teaches me can’t be boxed in by words. He pushes me, in that playful way of his, to be just a little bit uncomfortable, all the while waiting with a hand reached out until I get there.
“It’s beautiful here,” I say as we hike one of the last afternoons we have alone together.
The trail we’re on feels like a secret—we haven’t seen another person. Most of it had been tall trees and jagged rocks, but now we stand in the open at a lake that reflects the sky like a mirror. Trees cover the hills around us in a serene beauty that spreads as far as the eye can see.
“I love it here. I’m always alone—best spot to clear my head,” he says as he unties a boot by the edge of the water and pulls it off.
My eyes narrow as I watch him.
“What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
He slips off his other boot and works to unbuckle his belt before pushing his jeans down his legs.
My mouth drops.
“You’re swimming?”
I look around, like maybe I missed something. Like a pool. And bathing suits.
He peels off his socks.
Then shirt.
Then briefs.
When he stands in front of me wearing only a cocky smile, my heart stutters.
“We’re swimming. Strip,” he says, making a quick swiping motion with his index finger through the air.
I shake my head. “You’ve lost your mind. I’m not swimming! This is a public trail, Ethan. Anyone could walk up! And God, we’re adults—adults don’t swim naked in lakes. I have kids!” I sound as panicked as I feel.
“I’m an adult, and I’m swimming naked in a lake. And in case you haven’t noticed, your kids aren’t here.”
As nonchalantly as he says the words, he walks toward the water, the muscles of his bare back flexing with every step.
I can’t do this.
Can I do this?
When he’s up to his shoulders in the water, he turns to look at me—still fully clothed on the shore.
“What are you waiting for, Penelope?” His echoed voice is a taunt across the flat water.
What am I waiting for?
Maybe it’s the way he looks naked in that lake, or maybe it’s because it feels daring and scandalous, but I do it. I do it without thinking or trying to talk myself out of it. I kick my boots off, shed my clothes, and laugh wildly as I run into the water with a splash.
Naked.
I’m forty-one and skinny dipping, and I’ve never felt so ridiculous or alive.
I swim out to him. He lifts me up, and my legs wrap around him and his nakedness. Then, in a lake in the middle of nowhere in Maine, he kisses me.
If I weren’t leaving in days and a mile wasn’t so far, I might think I’ve just fallen in love with him. I might think for the first time since Travis died, this is the happiest I’ve been. As fast as the thoughts invade me, I push them away. Because I know love takes longer than weeks to happen, and a mile really is far, especially when there are nearly two thousand of them linked together.
Even when the hikers he promised me would never come walk by and obscenely catcall us, we stay in that lake. We swim until our fingers wrinkle and our stomachs growl.
It’s one of the best days of my life.
***
On the second to last morning, before Marin and Finn are back, I watch Ethan sleep and study how the warm light reflects off hidden strands of silver in his hair. I watch him for so long my eyes start to burn.
When his eyes flutter open, it’s with a sleepy, “Hi.”
He half yawns and reaches his arms overhead in a stretch before turning to face me. Lines of shadow and light stripe across his beautiful body, half-covered with a sheet.
I hug the pillow underneath me and face him. I try to smile, but the sadness carved on my skin moves like concrete.
“Hi.”
“What’s in here this morning?”
He gently taps my forehead as his bottomless eyes search mine.
I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling.
“On the east coast of Mobile Bay, there’s this thing that happens that they call a jubilee. I won’t even bother trying to tell you the exact details of what has to occur for the whole thing to happen because I’d butcher them, but it involves tides, temperature, oxygen levels, and winds doing all the exact right thing. Anyway, when all these things cooperate, the shallow shoreline is flooded with gobs of fish and crabs, and the people all come together and celebrate the harvest in the middle of the night.” I don’t know why I think of that night in Alabama lying in Ethan’s bed that morning, but I do. “As you can imagine, it’s an extremely rare phenomenon, but we got to see it by some weird stroke of luck.” I almost laugh thinking of us wading through that dark water in the middle of the night with those ridiculous washtubs.
“The man that took us out that night told me jubilees weren’t any more special than anything else in life. That everything is a magical phenomenon of one kind or another. He told me that what makes jubilees fun is they are rare and eventually stop, and we shouldn’t pass anything up just to avoid the pain of the ending.
“For some reason, this morning, I was thinking after looking back on everything I’ve seen this summer, jubilees really are everywhere. The way Sedona has red rocks, and the lonely saguaros grow for hundreds of years in the desert. The way mystery lights dance in Marfa and the Colorado River made the Grand Canyon. The way we make a perfect series of unrelated choices that hand deliver us to something that feels like the rarest magic in all the world.”
I don’t need to clarify the last part. We both know what I’m talking about.
Us.
His fingers interlace with mine as I blink back the tears that want to fall.
“Let’s have coffee on the roof this morning,” he says.
I nod. “And feed the birds,” I say.
Because I’ll miss that, too.
***
Ethan doesn’t go into the restaurant that day.
We go through the motions of doing everything we had done in the days before, except there’s a somber undercurrent that won’t be ignored. We speak less and stare off into the distance more. I’m so lost in my own head I can’t exist in the present, no matter how little of it we have left together.
Marin and Finn will be back tomorrow, and before they left, we planned it out to spend four days in Bar Harbor before flying home. All I can think about is the end.
I cling pathetically to his side as we walk around downtown that afternoon. As if the more I touch him, the longer I’ll be able to feel him when I leave.
There’s a game people play where they ask what you would do if you only had one week to live. I’ve always answered it by stating grandiose plans of seeing something exotic or doing something crazy with the people I love. I now know I would just mope, exactly the way I’ve been doing since I woke up this morning.
I’m not seizing the day. I’m losing it.
I stop in the middle of the sidewalk.
“Cancel the dinner reservation, Ethan. This day has been awful. You know it just as much as I do. As much as I hoped not talking about it would make it better, it feels worse—like we are in some kind of depressing funeral march on a treadmill that won’t stop.” I blink through the burn that’s piercing my eyes. “I can’t share you with anyone tonight. Not the strangers we walk by on the street or the waitress who will take our order or anyone else. The bubble we’ve lived in for the last two weeks is going to pop the minute I pick my kids up tomorrow, and I hate myself for how sick it’s making me feel and how needy I’m acting.”
He smiles, but it doesn’t meet his eyes. He knows.
In the middle of the busy Bar Harbor sidewalk, he cups his hands around my face and pulls me into a kiss that’s so devastatingly heartbreaking I almost collapse.
“If you weren’t leaving next week Nel—”
I shake my head. “Don’t,” I say firmly. “Let’s just go to the house.”
Hand in hand, that’s exactly where we go.
That night, after he cooks us salmon, and I study every move he makes in the kitchen, there’s a heaviness in the air.
When we strip off our clothes and crawl into bed, we’re silent—sadness digs its claws into every ounce of pleasure. Ethan touches and kisses me with a gentle intensity he hasn’t before. It isn’t playful sex with laughter or a quick slam against the wall. He makes love to me in a way that wrecks every cell that glues me together.
More than once, I have to look away from the way his eyes burn into mine and pull every secret out of me without a single word. When his gentle rocking pushes my body to a shattering climax, the sob that escapes my throat is mixed with hot tears that stain my face.
I’m destroyed.
He stays quiet.
He knows.
Whether he feels what I do or not doesn’t matter. He knows the losing battle I’m fighting.
He kisses every tear that streams down my face until they stop.
With my head on his chest, nearly asleep, he swirls circles across my bare back with his finger.
“Penelope?” His voice is barely above a whisper.
I keep my eyes closed and pretend to sleep. I don’t have the strength to say what needs to be said.
“If you weren’t leaving, I would have loved you.”
Then, my newly mended heart shatters into a million pieces all over again.