Chapter Nine #2
Maybe the current will carry me to another shore—Ireland, perhaps.
Or Iceland. And when the tiny boat scrapes against some foreign coastline, I’ll feel only the hollow ache of regret.
This mistake I’ve made—leaving the place I spent my whole life trying to find.
I shake my head, in disbelief, in anger.
Why did I climb into the boat? Why did he let me go?
A cold certainty sinks through me. Even if I survive.
Even if I reach land. I won’t return to James.
The woman who left Seattle all those months ago is gone. What’s left… is someone else entirely.
Tears leak from my eyes, disappearing into the rain.
My body begins to shake. I couldn’t see what I had become.
I couldn’t see that the old me was long gone—she drowned at sea the moment I left the Faroes and swam toward the island.
She died a watery death, and I became someone else when he carried me up from the shore to the house, placing me in his bed.
And there’s no going back to my old life.
I scream into the rain, into the storm, hating it for carrying me away from the island. Why would it let me wash up onto its shores, only to rip me away so easily? But my anger turns into terror—and now I beg.
“Take me back,” I whisper, I plead, tears streaking my face.
I remember once, standing in the living room, watching the rain stream down the windows from the wet Seattle sky. James had come up behind me, hardly making a sound, but he didn’t touch me. Like he knew I was somewhere far away. “You think about it, don’t you?” he asked.
I knew he meant the island. I knew he could see when my mind carried me back to that night. I didn’t like to talk about it, but in my silence, I was always remembering.
He exhaled, was quiet a moment, then said, “That island will take you away from me one day.”
He had said it so swiftly, as if it were nothing at all.
A whisper in the dark. Then he turned and walked back into the kitchen, like he hadn’t said a thing.
But the memory surfaces now, and I think he always knew—I would leave him one day, I would go in search of the island. And I likely wouldn’t come back.
After that first night, after I stepped onto the island, I became bound to it, tethered.
And everywhere else would always feel wrong.
Even my own heartbeat ached against the relentless rush of each second, each hour I spent on the mainland—a painful cadence that moved much too fast. I craved the drag and lull of every slow minute on the island, every second that stretched into lifetimes.
That long, endless pause that calmed my thoughts.
In Seattle, I struggled to remember how to breathe, how to think, how to sleep, while my body resisted the swift pace of a clock that didn’t feel like home.
I longed for a place I couldn’t forget. A steady, deliberate rhythm I once knew.
Just like Clay said, anything taken from this place will always return.
I wipe away the rain from my eyes, and the ocean settles a moment.
A brief calm, the wind stilled. I lean forward against my knees, peering across the black surface of the sea, and there, in the distance, a tiny, almost imperceptible mass.
A dark shape rising from the water, as if the sea itself were surfacing for air.
The island.
I almost laugh. I almost tilt my head back and let out a howl of relief. But instead, I tighten my grip on the oars and drive them back into the water.
I row hard, knowing I can’t lose sight of it again, using the last of my energy to pull the little boat forward.
But unlike before, the tide seems to carry me, as if it never wanted me to leave the island after all.
With each wave, the boat skids toward the island, faster than I can row.
I cover the distance in half the time it took me to row away.
And in another few strokes, the belly of the boat scrapes up over the lower rocks, and relief—disbelief—shudders through me.
I made it back.
On shaky legs, I drag the boat partly up the embankment, then drop it in the sand. I no longer care about the boat. The waves can take it away. I don’t give a shit.
I scramble up the shoreline, my clothes heavy with rain and seawater.
Scanning the island, I don’t see Clay. He’s not in the garden, or at the barn. I follow the dirt path to the house, banging up the steps and pushing through the front door.
I’m about to shout his name when he appears at the doorway into the kitchen—his eyes raw and red, betraying him.
“I couldn’t leave,” I whisper, breathless, hair dripping down my shoulders.
“Yer drookit,” he says, a word I now know to mean soaked to the bone. But I hear the tremor in his voice. Something soft and distant.
My heart bangs against my ribs, uncertainty pushing against my vocal cords, but I force myself to say what’s been inside me for too many days. “I don’t want to go back to Seattle, back to James. I want to stay here. With you.”
He doesn’t speak, doesn’t smile. In his eyes, there is only silence—turbulent and unnamable. I don’t know what he’s thinking, and I feel the tears coming. I need him to say something, tell me I’m crazy, I’m wrong.
But he steps forward, closing the gap between us. Boots against the wood floor.
The seconds pound in my ears. Blood drains down to my toes. And then—he lifts his hand, careful, deliberate—touching my cheek with his palm. He is warmth and relief, the scent of him like salt air and woodsmoke against my skin.
Wind sails through the open door behind us, scattering raindrops across the floor. And somewhere inside me, a half-remembered part of me—small, shriveled from neglect—stirs awake. Craving the light. Craving something only he can give.
His thumb glides down my cheek. Absorbing the rain. He’s closer than he’s ever been.
“Ellie,” he whispers.
And I know there’s no going back. Nothing will ever feel as good as the weight of his eyes on me. Drenched in his stare. A shiver slips down my spine, and his eyes darken, devouring me—a nocturnal animal. Hungry, starved. Near death.
I’m gasping for air, staring at the soft shape of his mouth. And there’s hardly any space between us, hardly any reasons left to keep us apart.
My legs sway beneath me. Time falters.
And he watches me—like he’s memorizing the raindrops on my lashes. Like he can’t breathe. Like he’s been holding his breath since the day I washed ashore, fighting some quiet need inside him. And there’s nothing he wants more, nothing he wouldn’t do, to finally kiss me.
His thumb glides softly over my upper lip. And then his mouth brushes mine.
Delicately, patiently, fracturing all my doubts. All the seconds I stared at him in the garden, unable to look away. All the years I dreamed of the island, certain I’d never see it again. All the mistakes, the near misses—every one of them brought me back here.
The island. The Atlantic.
Time slipping off course, defying the stars, defying physics, and bringing me to him. To now. I rise onto my tiptoes, kissing him back, deeper, needing him to never let go. He is what I want. My hands inch beneath the worn cotton of his shirt, feeling the sturdiness of each muscle up to his chest.
I feel like I’m awake for the first time. Truly awake. Ripped from the pages of a book. His fingers trace the hem of my sweater, beneath the shirt I wore when I first swam to the island, and his hands are trembling. Like he’s using my skin to keep himself steady.
We have both waited too long. Nights when we lay awake in our beds—wondering—while the wind ripped at the eaves of the house. While the cold settled around us. And we knew there was only one way to keep warm.
One way to calm the ache inside us.
I am becoming someone else.
A woman who risks everything—my old life, who I used to be—just to be here with him.
To feel his heartbeat against my palm, his lips sliding down to my throat, burying kisses in my flesh.
And then he’s hoisting me into his arms, my legs wrapping around him, and he’s carrying me up the stairs—like he did the other night when I drank too much of Neil Hagdorn’s whiskey—but this time my mouth is on his.
My arms around his neck. I’m breathing him in, all of him, and I feel like I’m falling from a great height. But I don’t care.
He kicks open the bedroom door with his boot, crossing to the bed—a bed where I have slept alone.
His bed. But time seems to slow, and his breathing softens along with his eyes.
He places me on the edge of the bed, and my heart rises suddenly, unexpectedly.
It’s been a long time since I was with anyone other than James.
But his eyes lower, looking at me like he did that day on the front porch—when my fingertips touched his jawline, when he gazed at me like I am the storm and the sea, like he has waited a lifetime for me—and my heart settles.
I pull my soaked sweater over my head, dropping it to the floor.
I remove every last piece of my clothing.
And he watches me as if we have all the time in the world, each motion careful, deliberate, as he steps free from his boots, then eases his shirt over his head.
The air is gone from my lungs; seeing him like this, only inches between us, makes me feel lightheaded.
But the roar in my ears is louder, and I reach up, my fingers sliding along the ridged muscles of his neck, and I pull him down to kiss him harder.
Fuck. I can’t believe this is happening.
I’ve thought about this, about him—secretly, stupidly, naively.
Never imagining my mouth would trace lines across the slope of his chest as he eases me back onto the quilt.
Never imagining I’d feel his breath against my ear.