Chapter 9 — The Flow43 #2
“You’re being shy with it,” she said, stopping at the end of our table, gray to the elbows herself now, glowing through a film of it.
She said it to my mother, fond and faintly disappointed, a teacher finding the work neat and gutless.
“Look at how you’re going around him. You’re cleaning him, tides. We’re not here to clean.”
She had me lie back on the table.
“You go where the water pools,” she said, and put her hands flat on my sternum and pushed the clay down me in two long lines, throat to navel, slow, the whole weight of her arms behind it. “It pools where you flinch.”
Her thumbs ran the dip beside each hip and then the crease at the top of each thigh, pressing, dragging, and my body, which had not consented to any of this and would be hearing about it later, answered the pressure and the heat and the sheer clinical certainty of her the way a plant turns toward a window.
“Here especially,” she said, not looking at my face, looking at her work, and her hand went down under the clay, found the waist of my shorts, and went straight past it.
No ceremony. Her fingers closed around my cock, which had made its own decisions some minutes ago without consulting me, and she drew one long unhurried stroke up the length of it, the clay slick as oil between her hand and the skin, gauging me the way you’d weigh fruit in a market.
I made a sound into the steam that I have chosen not to remember.
“There it is.” She said it pleased, the way you’re pleased when a stuck drawer finally gives, and gave me a second slow pull to be sure, root to crown, until I was full and aching in her fist and there was no more deniability left in my body even if there was plenty left in the rest of me.
She took her hand back and wiped it gray on gray down the edge of the table and looked at my mother. “You feel how much of that he’s been holding? That’s a year in there. More. Don’t leave him like that. It’s cruel to open a person and walk away. Finish what the clay started.”
She rose, unhurried, and stepped back. Not away. Back. One step, hands folded, serene and immovable, the night-shift face from the path, and she waited.
My mother looked at me, and I looked at my mother, and in about a second and a half an entire conversation passed between us that the steam swallowed before it could reach anyone else. Her eyes said this is insane. Mine said I know. Hers said she’s not leaving. Mine said I know that too.
And under all of it, in the basement where I kept the things I was billing to Tidewell, some part of me I am not proud of said the thing it had been wanting to say since the grove, which was please.
She put her hand under the clay.
I felt her find the waistband and stop there, at the border, asking the question with one knuckle, and I answered it by not stopping her, by lying back on the table with my heart going like a fist on a door, and she crossed it.
Her fingers wrapped around my cock, skin to skin now, slow, the way you take hold of something you’ve decided about, and the whole clearing went very far away.
I stared up at her in a kind of conflicted, brilliant disbelief.
She tightened her grip and stroked me, slow, all the way up, her thumb dragging over the head where the clay pooled warm and slick, and my hips lifted into her hand before my brain could file an objection.
She did it again, and again, the same unhurried rhythm she brought to everything, and I lay back under a foot of warm clay and let my mother do unspeakable things with one gray hand.
This is the thing about the mud. It hid everything and it hid nothing. Anyone glancing over saw a gray woman leaning over a gray man on a table, one arm working the clay packed across his hips, thorough at last, a good student.
What they could not see was her fist working me under it, long and certain, the clay turned to oil between us, her hand setting a pace and then keeping it while I lay there and pulsed in her grip and tried to keep my face from doing anything a stranger could read.
She kept hers composed. That was the part that got me, that she held the brand up over it, chin level, expression set to serene-for-the-room, jaw the only tell, while below the gray her hand told the truth her face would not, gripping and gliding and rolling her wrist at the top of every stroke until my whole body was strung to the place where she held me.
I lay there and took it the way I’d taken everything on this island, by doing nothing, mid-stride, one foot in the air, except this time the nothing was a lie and we both knew it and her hand knew it best of all.
Coral watched a moment, satisfied a lesson had landed, and drifted off to correct someone else.
And here is the fact I have turned over more than any other from that whole afternoon. She didn’t stop. Coral left and the reason left with her, the instruction was over, discharged, gone, and my mother’s hand kept moving.
There was no one making her now. There was just the two of us in all that heat, her breath gone ragged at the top the way it went in the dark of our room, and she leaned her gray forehead down close against my gray shoulder and did the thing she was no longer being told to do.
“Sean,” she said, almost nothing, just breath with my name riding it, and I turned my head and her eyes were right there, inches off, no brand left in them at all, none, just Mom, just the woman who used to fall asleep on the couch holding my homework, looking at me while she did this with something open and frightened and completely real.
For one second the whole engineered island fell away and there was only the two of us, found out, seen, in terrible and perfect sync, and it was so much worse than the lust. The lust I could bill to Tidewell. This I could not bill to anyone.
We both flinched off it at the same time. She shut her eyes. I looked at the sky.
And her hand never stopped. It sped, if anything, her grip going tight and slick and merciless while the clay held the rest of me down hot and total and the steam came down over us like a lid, and the pressure climbed in me past anywhere I could have called it back from.
She felt it go. Her fist knew a half second before I did, the way it bore down and worked me through it, and I groaned, low and helpless, and came in the warm dark of the clay with my mother’s forehead pressed to my shoulder and forty strangers being born again three feet away, my whole body clenching around the place where she held me while she stroked the last of it out of me, slow now, gentling, every pulse going straight down into the gray.
The clay finds every place you’ve sealed and it draws.
It drew.
And then, in the wrung-out quiet after, with my guard down on the floor where I’d dropped it, the word got out.
“Mom.”
Barely sound at all, just the shape of it on a breath. But I heard it leave me, and so did she.
Her hand came up out of the clay and pressed two gray fingers to my lips.
“Shh.” Not unkind. Firm, though, and final, the way you’d hush a child in church.
I got my eyes open. She didn’t look rattled at all. She looked like she was managing a shoot.
“Not here,” she breathed.
And there it was, the thing that scrambled me worse than anything her hand had just done to me.
She wasn’t stopping it. She was protecting it.
The story of us was still load-bearing, even now, even with her fingers gray on my mouth and the proof of the last two minutes leaching into the table between us, and she wanted to keep it standing.
Which meant there would be a next time, a next exercise, a next thing the island would hand us with a straight face, and I lay there with her fingers sealing my lips and not the faintest idea what any of it would be, or what I would let her do in it, or what I’d let slip the next time she did.
We rinsed at the sea. Coral sent us down in twos when the clay began to dry and pull, and we walked to the water cracking like old statues and waded in, and the Atlantic took the Flow off us in gray sheets, and we came out pink and new and ourselves again, which was the problem.
The clay had been somewhere to put things.
Now the clay was gone, sluiced off into the Atlantic along with everything we’d used it to avoid saying, and what was left on the beach was my mother wringing out her hair and me developing a sudden, profound interest in a nearby rock.
We did not look at each other. There turned out to be a staggering amount of not looking at each other available, and we used all of it.
She found her phone where she’d left it on the towel. Of course she did. I watched her thumb wake the screen, watched her face do the small practiced thing it did when the brand came back online behind her eyes, and I understood that this was how we were going to survive it.
She was going to post about the clay within the hour. Something about armor, about being held. It would be the truest lie she’d ever written and I’d be the one reader who could see all the way down through it.
“Good flow?” Coral said, materializing, radiant, bone dry already.
“Yeah,” I said.
“It draws everything out,” she said, happily, “if you let it.”
She had no idea. Or she had every idea. By then I genuinely could not tell which was worse, and I stood there on the sand with the word from the lawn going off again, faint and certain, the alarm in the building only I could hear, while beside me my mother typed one steady-thumbed word into her phone and pressed post.
Tides.