Chapter Nine #3
His hand slides along the inside of my thigh, tracing my flesh, moving higher, and I don’t want him to stop. His fingertips are reshaping the valleys and soft hills of my body, forming a new terrain, erasing who I used to be.
“Ellie…” he says, only a few inches from my lips. I can see the question in his beautiful eyes. He wants to know that I’m sure, that this is what I want.
I smile and plant a careful kiss against his mouth, tasting the sea on him, the chilled air. Answering his question with my hands in his hair, pulling him closer.
He keeps his eyes on me, steady, as if he wants to see every flutter of my eyelashes, every quiver, every sound that escapes my lips.
And when he slides himself inside me, gentle at first, I know with certainty—like a hum beneath my skin, unmistakable, alchemical—that this, here with him, in this bed, inside an old wind-weathered farmhouse, on this island, is right where I want to be.
I wait for the guilt to find me. But it doesn’t come.
My head on his chest, I listen to the slow rhythm of his breath while he sleeps. I watch the shadows scattering back into dusty corners where they will wait out the daylight. Until it’s safe to come out again.
I match my inhale to his and slide my hand along the strong muscles of his shoulder—formed by the hard labor of daily work—thinking of how it felt to have his body over mine, to look into the blue of his eyes and see myself reflected back.
Again, I imagine the guilt bubbling up in my chest, but it doesn’t materialize. My hand arcs down to his stomach, and my eyes catch on the diamond ring gleaming in the soft morning light. It feels like a hoax, like it was put on the wrong woman, and it needs to be given back.
I slide the ring around my finger, unsure if I should remove it—place it on the bedside table. A letting go.
But before I can move, Clay wakes.
His hands find me before his eyes do, sliding across my ribs, around my back, pulling me to him—an unconscious motion, as if he’s woken beside me before.
He kisses my forehead, breathing in my hair.
“I didnae think I’d see ye again,” he whispers.
His fingers tremble softly against my ribs, like I still might slip away.
Like he’s dreaming. “I couldnae say it before. When ye asked what I want—” His hand stalls at the small of my back, his chin tilting down so his eyes meet with mine.
“I was afraid to tell ye how I felt, thought I might lose ye if I did. That I didnae deserve—” He swallows, releases me a little.
“But I know what I want now, I know that watching ye drift out to sea hurt worse than I could’ve thought.
” His voice settles, finds a different rhythm, losing a touch of the Scots.
“I want you here with me, on this island, in this house. I want you.” He breathes, his mouth over mine, suspended there, like he’s unsure if he’s said too much.
Like maybe I’ll confess that I’m going to leave again.
But I only want one thing now.
I used to think I wasn’t any good at love. I used to think I was broken, missing some vital organ. But it wasn’t that. I was just in the wrong place. Wrong time.
My lips brush his in answer: I’m not going anywhere. I won’t leave him again. He shifts slightly, and I feel the hardness of him. I press my hands against his chest, raising myself over top of him, and letting him ease back inside me.
Last night wasn’t enough.
His eyes spear through me, his fingers count my rib bones up to my breasts, a shudder falling from his lips—like he’s thought about this countless times, touching my flesh, moving against me with each exhale.
As my core tightens around him and I feel myself unspooling, I fear that it won’t ever be enough. Whatever this is, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever known. Being with James was never like this. Not even close.
Whatever this is, it feels fated.
Primal and inevitable.
Like he said before, I’m the only other person to ever step foot on the island.
Maybe I would always find my way back here.
Maybe this house, this bed, his mouth against the swollen tip of my breast—rain streaming against the windows, sunlight making crosshatch patterns through the trees, streaking across the bedsheet and over his chest—is the home I have spent a lifetime searching for.
I wake in his arms each morning.
Our naked bodies wound together, the shell of my ear pressed to the hard muscle of his chest, listening to his heart beat out of time. Blood through veins, keeping him alive. This anomaly of a man.
When he sleeps, in the coldest part of night, he often reaches for me, hands that long for my flesh, planting kisses on my collarbone, my neck, with his eyes closed.
But sometimes I worry he’s thinking of his wife. I wonder if it’s her he’s reaching for. Clawing at the hard soil, trying to pull her up.
This thought could untether me, so I keep it tamped down. Just out of sight.
One afternoon, I remove James’s ring and hold it in my palm. The gold band, the diamond still shimmering bright—like a beacon, a warning, an eye watching me.
I open the bedside drawer and tuck it in the far back, among the dust.
James won’t know I have taken it off. He won’t know what it means.
He won’t know what I’ve done.
With another man.
I close the drawer, exhaling.
Piece by piece, I let my old life go. I forget who I used to be.
Four months pass, then five, the days skittering by like thin-legged insects, uncounted, unnoticed.
Clay and I work together in the garden, knees in the damp soil, sun against our necks.
During the day, we let the sheep wander the island yanking up the fresh grass, and sometimes I feel Clay watching me.
Sometimes his hand slides along my calf, beneath the linen skirt I wear on days when it’s warm.
And I pull him to me, craving him. My hair tangles in the dirt as he makes a map with his mouth up my thigh, slides his fingers beneath my underwear, spreading me open, and whispers, “I imagined kissing ye like this fer so long. Imagined what ye might feel like.” And we make love in the garden, beneath the sun, our cries carried out on the wind where no one will hear.
It’s only us, and the loyal sea, who will never tell a soul what we’ve done.
It feels undeserved. This stolen, pilfered time. This quiet. This man’s hands.
I watch him from the kitchen. He is shirtless, using a heavy iron plow to dig a new plot of land where we’ll plant more cabbage and kale, enough to feed the two of us, and the sight of him—sunlight and muscle and grit—unsteadies something deep inside me.
He’s mercilessly, unbearably handsome. In a quiet, ruinous kind of way.
If I had met him in the real world, at some corner bookshop in Seattle, I never would have spoken to him.
A man like that would have seemed too imposing, elusive—a man meant for wild lands and distant seas, too unpredictable, too dangerous for someone like me.
But I had chosen predictable back in Seattle, with James, and it made me edgy, anxious, trapped in a life that was choking me to death.
Clay wipes the sweat from his forehead, glances out at the great swell of the ocean, and I think of walking out there, pulling him down to the newly tilled soil and making love to him under the afternoon sun, our bodies shimmering in the waves of heat.
He wouldn’t stop me; he’d lay his mouth on mine with the same greed.
But some part of me doesn’t want to break the slow fragileness of the moment, watching him like this, time dulled but also somehow pinwheeling out of control.
Like I know these afternoons can’t last forever.
The sea is too unforgiving. Time is too ruthless and underhanded.
Something will change.
It always does.
Clay wades into the water up to his shins, using a rake to sweep up the long, algae-coated tendrils, then plops them in a bucket, which I carry up the rocks to the sandy bank.
We’ll fertilize the garden with seaweed and brown kelp we dredge up from the shoreline.
We will dry some on metal screens, cook it over a fire, then boil it down to extract the salt.
We work in silence; the heat and labor of it makes it too hard to talk.
Once we’ve gathered half a dozen buckets, Clay climbs up the bank and we stand for a moment, breathing heavy, drinking from the canteen I brought down from the kitchen.
The afternoon feels stretched, brittle, and I sense something in him.
His razor-sharp eyes stare past me, up the shoreline, as he rubs the back of his tanned neck.
“Let’s get it up to the garden before it dries. ”
And the moment is gone. Maybe it was nothing at all.
That night, my fingertip traces his collarbone. His arm draped across my hip. It’s well after dark, the bedroom window open, but there’s not even a breeze. Only a carpet of stars and no moon.
He is quiet, eyes lidded, drowsy.
I plant a soft kiss on his shoulder. “Tell me about her.”
His eyebrows come together, chest rising with a long breath. “Who?”
“Her. Your wife.” I don’t say her name, and I’m not sure why. Alice. It feels sacred, a name only he can speak. Her initials were carved into the locket I stole and kept hidden for years.
He shifts beneath me but doesn’t get up from the bed. “What do ye want to know?”
“You just never—” I know I might be tiptoeing into territory he won’t want to discuss, memories he’d prefer to keep in the past, but I want to know something about the woman who once slept in this bed. Who haunts this house with her memory… haunts his heart. “You’ve never really talked about her.”
“This was her family’s land,” he says.
I tilt my head to look at him.
He nods to the window. “Ten acres, been in her family for three generations.”
“I thought it was yours,” I say.
“Nae. We had land nearby, not on the shore. When her father died, her mother was struggling to keep things going. I knew Alice since we were kids, went to school together. Was the right thing to do…”