Chapter Fourteen #3
“Clay…” I whisper, so softly the word is hardly more than air.
My heart rises into my throat. “I signed the note Wells-Lockhart because I promised you I’d stay until the end.
And I meant it. I wouldn’t trade a single moment of this life.
Not even the hardest parts.” I stare into the painful blue of his eyes, pleading, needing him to touch me, remember me.
And for the first time, the weight of his hands changes.
His fingers graze down my arms to my hips, his eyes press into mine—like he’s still unsure, like he’s afraid to hurt me, curse me, condemn me to a life at sea—but with my next exhale, he kisses me. Gently. Soft and sure.
He can’t deny me. Even when he tries. We are built for each other, and the sea will always bring us back.
“I don’t want to lose ye,” he says against my lips, his voice on the edge of breaking.
“Then don’t let go.”
He stares down at me, eyes shivering in the cold, only inches between us, a hundred years between us, and nothing at all.
He slides his fingers along my bottom lip, my chin, counting the seconds, just before his mouth finds me again.
Kissing away all the guilt, the sin, the regret.
He tastes like the sea, like penance for a life I don’t deserve.
The tall grass licks at my bare feet, the tide breaks against the shore.
His mouth pulls me apart while I listen to the rhythm of his inhales that are as steady and familiar to me as my own.
And I think: This love is not tame. Or mild.
It’s redemptive and terrifying. “I will love you until the very end,” I whisper against his lips, repeating the words we spoke to each other the night he gave me the ring.
He runs his fingers through my hair, a soft, needing exhale sputtering from his lips—and I know I would do anything for him.
I would endure violent oceans and countless lifetimes, just to feel one more moment like this with him.
Because love like this doesn’t exist in the real world.
It lives only out here, at the edge of everything—where time bleeds between morning and night, and a single second contains decades.
Eons. I would give up everything for him, all over again.
Just to feel his hands on me. Because time means nothing to me anymore.
It is a riddle that has no end. A fable that wraps itself around me, until I forget who I used to be.
Rain starts to fall, fat drops sailing down from the cover of clouds, and he takes my hand, pulling me up to the house.
His hands are on my spine before we’ve even crossed the kitchen.
A single candle burns from the window above the sink.
His mouth searches the soft place below my ear, hungry, desperate in a way I haven’t felt from him in days.
He pulls the sweater over my head, drops it to the kitchen floor, lips on my throat, pressing himself against me.
And I feel like I might cry, like I can remember every time I was with James, and how it never felt like this. I never craved him, needed him. Never felt like I was breaking free of my old skin and becoming something naked and new.
Clay’s hands are against my thighs, and he lifts me up, placing me atop the kitchen table—where we have eaten in silence when we were still strangers, where we drank whiskey and I felt his eyes on me, where I have listened to his stories told by candlelight.
An ache rises in my core, and I need him to show me that he won’t ever let go. I need to know that this will always be enough, for both of us.
He levels himself over me, eyes fixed on mine, like he’s thinking of all the ways he might have lost me, all the times when I could have slipped away and never returned.
All the nights we would have missed. His lips graze my chin, his fingers at my waist, touching me so delicately that tears break against my eyelids.
“Ellie?” he asks, running his fingers across my cheek.
But I smile, pulling him down to me and crushing my mouth to his.
He pushes the long linen skirt up to my waist, holds me for another moment, breathing, before easing inside me, careful and slow. Like he wants me to remember every second, every exhale, every moment we’re together, so I won’t forget. But I only want him, over and over until the end of time.
And I hope we never see land again.
I stop tracking the days.
I no longer care.
It’s probably been five months, maybe six, since we last saw the mainland—since I saw James.
There is a rhythm and a routine, an ease to each day, that becomes as knowable and steady as Clay’s heartbeat when he sleeps.
The mornings are mild, but the nights are windy.
Clay says we’re likely somewhere in the middle Atlantic, where it rains nearly every day, but the sun always reveals itself in the afternoon—so we know it hasn’t forgotten us.
It’s spring, early summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and I’m thankful for the effortlessness of the weeks and months.
Some evenings, my mind strays, and I catch myself wondering how many years have passed on the mainland since I last saw James.
Eight years, maybe nine. He will be in his sixties now.
The night he saw me on the beach, only a distant memory to him.
I wonder if he told anyone about that night, or if it wasn’t worth stirring up old mysteries.
I try not to think of it. I try not to think of how different the world might be now, how unrecognizable.
In the evenings, Clay and I sit on the porch together, a quilt folded over my shoulders to keep out the chill.
The horizon shivers in hues of honey and orange soda, then turns a strange phosphorescent purple, like a field of lavender touching the surface of the sea.
The sunsets have been more vivid, more electric in recent months, peculiar shades I never saw back in Seattle.
I remember reading once that as the climate deteriorates, our sunsets will become more breathtaking.
Spectacular and unnatural. Toxins in the atmosphere will reflect the setting sun, giving us a vibrant show as the world slowly dies.
How poetic and violent. Beauty up until the end.
“Where would you go, if you could go anywhere in the world?” I ask, tilting my head back against the wooden chair, watching the world silently crumble in front of me.
He raises an eyebrow, then settles his features, pondering the question. “Greece.”
“Really?”
“My father took a trip there when he was young, said the food was the best he’d ever had.”
“Well, if we had a sail, we could chart a course. Although if my geography is correct, we’d have to travel through the Strait of Gibraltar, and I’m not sure what they’d think of an island drifting through the channel.”
Clay laughs, then nods.
Our days and nights pass simply this way, easy—too easy.
Because the sea always washes things in.
And one afternoon, it shows us how terrible it can be.
I think it’s a strip of land at first. Flat, featureless.
It’s not until the third day, as it moves closer, that we know it’s not land. It looks like oil slicked across the surface of the sea. It rises and falls with the waves, pulsing. And it’s wide—whatever it is—several miles across, a great sweeping darkness that mars the horizon.
“I dinnae like the looks of it,” Clay says, squinting through the morning mist.
Within an hour, it reaches our shores. Not oil.
But fish.
Thousands of them. All dead.
Bloated, eyes swollen, smelling of rot. I cover my nose, stepping back from the shoreline. “What the hell?”
Clay shakes his head, scrambles down the rocks to get a better look, then heads back up to my side. “Canna say what it was. Toxin maybe, algae.”
“Water temperature,” I add, thinking of the rising sea temperature reports I would often read, the bleached coral reefs, the dying sea life. Back in Seattle, there was constant talk of the threat to our oceans, of changing coastlines and unpredictable weather patterns. Of things getting worse.
It’s been over twenty years on the mainland, since I left. Perhaps worse has finally arrived.
“What do we do?” I ask.
“Nothing to be done but wait for it to pass.”
We stay indoors, windows closed. And when we do venture out, we tie handkerchiefs across our faces to dull the stench—but it’s hardly enough.
Even inside, the rot of fish seems to follow us in.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to eat fish again. My stomach won’t tolerate it.
It takes four days for the endless swath of floating fish to be carried past our island on its way to other shores. I imagine it washing up against the coast of Florida or Newfoundland.
Clay walks the shoreline of the island, finding the fish that cling to our shores, and tossing them back out into the sea.
Inside the house, I throw open every window, I drag out every blanket and bedsheet and linen, scrubbing them in the wash basin just off the front porch, using the last bar of sheep’s milk soap. I hang them to dry, hoping the sea air will carry away the last of the smell.
We get a week of clean water and clean air. It rains, filling our water supply, washing our shores of the last of the fish guts.
I remember a quote I read once:
The good news: Nothing lasts forever.
The bad news: Nothing lasts forever.
And too soon, I wish I could go back to when the fish clotted our shores. I wish I could live forever in that awful smell.
Because at least we were safe.
At least I wasn’t afraid.
We waited too long to harvest the potatoes; they’ve begun to rot in the ground, and worms burrow through their fleshy centers.
“Dammit,” I mutter, digging my spade into the soil, heaving up another foul batch.
We should have been more careful, but as the garden has increased in size, there’s more to manage and keep track of.