Chapter Nine #5
I make our morning tea, a small teaspoon of honey in each cup—honey we collected together, months ago—leaving his mug on the counter. We are ghosts, only catching sight of each other briefly. And I hate it.
But on the third day, I am standing on the front porch, listening to the rain soak the ground, when the door opens behind me.
Clay’s faded green shirt is rolled up to his forearms, his eyebrows sloped in that way that makes him look both sad and beautiful.
He doesn’t realize what he does to me. The scruff along his chin has grown out.
It became our nightly ritual: the closeness of my hands against his face, moving the blade along his skin, letting the hairs fall to the porch, that usually led to his hands sliding up my legs.
But for three nights, the blade and the porcelain bowl have sat unused.
Now, he breathes in front of me, quiet, but there is a storm gathering inside him.
I want to cry, to tell him I’m sorry, but he crosses the divide before I can speak and presses his lips to mine.
“I’m sorry,” he says against my mouth. “I should’na said all that, made ye choose.
” He kisses me again, and I feel my body instantly give way, craving him all at once.
Three days was too many. “I dinnae want to know what ye’d choose,” he says, lifting his mouth an inch, his voice soft, caramelized, every syllable thick with a Scottish lilt.
“Whatever happens tomorrow, or the day after, the sea will decide. An’ I dinnae want to think about losing ye. ”
I rise onto my toes, touching his shirt and pulling him closer.
“I love you,” I dare to say, whispering these three treacherous words against his mouth.
I can’t believe my own voice. But no part of me wants to take them back.
It might not be a promise—it doesn’t guarantee that I won’t leave someday—but it’s the truth.
I love him, and the thought of being without him is more terrifying than anything I’ve ever felt.
He kisses my throat, his hand dragging up the inside of my thigh, just above the hem of my skirt, like he’s missed me more than air.
“I dinnae know how much time we’ll have together, so I intend to make it count.
” There is a rough, aching edge to his voice.
And he does make it count. He makes love to me against the cold wall of the farmhouse, my fingertips digging into his back, tracing each broad muscle.
The heavy, warm night air sails through the porch, doing nothing to cool our flesh as he mutters my name, over and over, asking for forgiveness with every press of his body against mine.
Looking for redemption in my flesh—while I look for a way to stall time.
To make this moment last, here on the front porch of his farmhouse, to keep time from slipping away.
“It’s not too cold!” I shout, the water lapping at my knees as I wade back deeper into the sea. “Please!”
We’ve had a glass or two of whiskey—the bottle nearly gone now—and the night air is strangely warm, mid-seventies at least, so warm that even when I strip out of my clothes, the heat still sticks to me.
“Don’t you ever go swimming?” I call up to him.
“Nae,” he shouts back. “Only a mad woman would swim in that water at night.”
“Then you’re in luck, because I’m the maddest kind. Now take off your clothes and come swim with me!”
He makes one of his exasperated sounds, then begins untying his boots, pulling his shirt over his head with one hand, and stepping out of his pants.
There was a time when I would have looked away, but now I watch him descend the rocks and wade in after me, a look in his eyes that tells me, when he reaches me, I’ll pay a price for convincing him to come in.
I grin, backstepping through the shallows, but he’s too fast and he lifts me from the water, swinging me over his shoulder and trudging out deeper into the sea.
“Clay, no!” I say, laughing, and once he’s waist-deep, instead of tossing me out into the cold sea, he lets my body slide down his, until my arms are around his neck, his hands at my waist. I brush my lips across his, softly, teasingly, yet he doesn’t kiss me back.
His eyes are warm, and he braces his hands around my torso, under my armpits, and then he picks me up, launching me out into the deep.
I sink below the waterline, the cold surging around me, but the chill is a relief against my sun-scorched flesh, and I rise to the surface feeling like I’ve shed my old, ragged skin.
“Ye look like a selkie,” Clay shouts, swimming in after me. “A woman come to seduce me and steal my soul.”
I wrap my legs around him. “I thought I already stole that?”
“Ye did.” He kisses me, holding me up in the water, and I feel deliriously, stupidly in love.
This is surely what the Greeks spoke of, the old poets, and teenagers who kiss under bleachers, and I can’t imagine a feeling better than this.
I want more of it. A billion times over, feverish and feral and breathless, without end.
But it also scares me. Because nothing this good comes without a price.
I feel him harden, even in the cold sea. And he takes in a breath against my lips.
How could there ever be anything more exquisite, divine, primordial than this precise moment—floating in the vast sea, the air tasting like summer on my tongue, Clay with his eyes begging me to never let go, hoping for a promise that I never will.
But a shiver of light appears in the dark.
Out on the horizon.
Lights.
We are not alone. Something is shimmering in the distance, at the surface of the ocean, and my hands release Clay.