Chapter 19 — Tasting the Tide101
@solena.rising
“I held everything so tight for so long, loves. My body, my brand, my heart, all of it clenched against a world I never trusted to catch me. They’re teaching me to let go here.
To let myself be opened. I used to call that weakness.
I’m starting to think it might be the bravest thing I’ve ever done.
The tide reaches everywhere, if you let it. ”
(draft)
I got drunk that night.
It didn’t take much doing. I kept going back to the dinner wine long after the mindful little measures were meant to stop, and then took myself off somewhere I wouldn’t have to look at her and finished the job, because I could not be in our little room with her and her freshly fed glow, the woman I had watched get up in front of a hundred strangers and give them the realest thing in her and come back lit, the woman who was, I understood now with total clarity, not going to leave.
Don was gone. The plan was gone. She was going. So I got comprehensively drunk for the first time in my adult life, and on an island that had spent days sharpening every feeling I owned, the blunt of it landed like a dropped piano.
The morning came to collect on that decision with interest.
I have had hangovers. This was a reckoning.
I sat at the long breakfast table the colour of the grey grains, holding a cup of lemon water I did not dare drink, sweating last night out through my pores, every clink and murmur in the bright airy room arriving in my skull like a flung tray, while a hundred rested glowing people breathed their gratitude at the sunrise and I quietly prayed for the sweet release of death.
My mother sat down across from me with a bowl of the grains, took one look, and knew the whole story.
“You went hard on the wine last night,” she said.
“It went hard on me.”
“Mm.” She set a second cup of lemon water down by my hand, quietly, not making a thing of it. “Sip that. Slowly.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re grey, Sean.” A pause, and something careful moving under the dryness. “Why were you drinking so much anyway? You barely ever drink back home...”
“New leaf.” I could not look at her, because looking at her was the entire problem and we both knew it and neither of us was going to say so over breakfast. “Turns out there’s a lot to celebrate.”
She let that land. She didn’t take the bait and she didn’t soften it either, just nudged the water an inch closer, which was somehow worse than either, and went back to her grains like a woman who had decided, for this morning, to let me keep my misery.
Coral found us. Coral found everything.
“Oh, lovely.” She crouched at my chair, head tilted, reading me like a chart. “Your tide is so cloudy this morning. So stagnant. I can see it sitting on you. You’re holding something heavy. The body never lies. Whatever you tried to drown last night, it floated. It always floats.”
She laid a cool hand on the back of my clammy neck, and I flinched, and she took the flinch as data. She was not wrong, which was the unbearable thing about Coral, she was never quite wrong, she simply took the true thing and used it to sell the very thing that was hurting.
“There’s a rite this afternoon for exactly this,” she said, brightening. “A beautiful one. It clears all of it. You and your love are going to feel so much lighter, I promise.”
And she squeezed my poor neck and floated off to read someone else’s weather, and I put my face in my hands.
The rite was Tasting the Tide, and they staged it in the long room with the spa tables, except this time there were curtains, soft hanging dividers of the everywhere-seafoam linen strung between the tables so each pair had a kind of stall, three walls of cloth and an open front.
Privacy that wasn’t. The shape of a thing without the substance of it, like everything here.
Coral stood at the front with her hands clasped and explained it, glowing, my hungover skull’s worst imaginable scenario.
“The body holds so much, loves. Grief, fear, all the tension we carry and never set down. Today we help each other set it down. You are going to kiss your partner. Everywhere. Slowly, with intention, every part of them, until the body remembers it is allowed to feel safe. This is not about sex. Forget sex. This is spiritual release. This is two souls giving each other permission. Take turns. One of you offers, one receives, and then you swap. Let the tide do the rest.”
I do not know how to convey what it is to be handed that instruction, hungover to the marrow, about the woman who raised me, in a room full of people, by a girl with a clipboard, except to say that I gave serious thought to whether a man could get drunk again by lunchtime, and concluded, with regret, that he could not.
We drew a stall near the back, three cloth walls and an open front, and the moment the curtain fell shut my mother rounded on me in a furious whisper.
“Stop pulling that face.”
“This is my face.”
“It’s your I’m-better-than-all-of-this face. They can read it from miles away. You’ll get us flagged.”
“We are about to kiss each other everywhere in a tent full of strangers, Mom. My face is the least of our exposure.”
Saying it out loud was a tactical error.
It had all been theoretical until then, the face and the tent and the strangers, and hearing the actual sentence land in the actual air made it real in a way that turned my stomach over.
And at the exact same moment, in a back room of myself I would not be giving tours of, it did the precise opposite.
It stirred me up. Both at once. That was the whole problem with her, and always had been.
“You’re the one who said we climb,” said my mother. “This is the climb. So climb, and stop doing it like a man reading a hostage statement.”
“I am climbing. Look at me. This is my climbing face.”
She opened her mouth to take that apart, and Coral’s head came around the curtain.
“Skin to skin for this one, loves,” she said, beaming, like she was recommending a fabric. “Cloth holds the tension in. Everything off, both of you. The tide can’t reach what’s still hidden.” And she was gone.
So we undressed. In a cloth box, in the daylight, a foot apart, both of us suddenly fascinated by the careful folding of our own clothes, not looking, definitely not looking, and looking.
We’d been dressing and undressing around each other in the dark of that cramped room for a week and a half, eyes politely elsewhere, and not once like this, slow and sober and lit, each of us catching the other in flicks and stealing it back.
And God, she was something. I’d seen pieces of her in the dark before this, stolen impressions, but never the whole of her at once, in daylight, a foot away, and I took it in three guilty seconds at a time and pretended I hadn’t.
The heavy fall of her breasts and the way the cool air drew her nipples tight.
The dip of her waist and the flare of her hips.
The dark hair between her legs that I had, until very recently, only ever known with my hands.
I was hard and there was nowhere on earth to put it and I gave up trying to hide it, and she was stealing the same kind of looks at me, her eyes dropping and snagging and flicking back up to my face, a flush climbing her chest, the two of us standing bare in a cloth box getting plainly and ridiculously turned on by the sight of each other, and neither of us saying one word about it.
She lay down on the table.
“You ready?” I said, which was a stupid thing to say and I knew it leaving my mouth.
“Just start, Sean.” Breathless and annoyed at once. “Before I think about it.”
So I bent and kissed her, and she said nothing after that, nothing at all, just breathing, and the breathing was the entire conversation.
Her body coming awake under my mouth was the oldest signal there is, older than shame, and the hangover and the dread and the hundred strangers six feet off through the cloth all thinned to nothing, and there was only her skin and the small sounds she was working not to make.
I kissed down her. Slowly, with intention, exactly as instructed, which was the joke of the whole thing, I was finally a model student.
The hollow of her throat. The slope of each breast, and then, because the curtain held and because I had stopped being able not to, her nipples, one and then the other, drawn into my mouth until she arched up off the table and got a fist in my hair to keep herself quiet.
“Sean.” Barely a sound. Half a warning and half the exact opposite of one.
I did not stop. I kissed lower, her ribs, her stomach, the crease of one hip, in no hurry at all, listening to her breathing climb and catch and her fighting to flatten it back down for the room.
The inside of one thigh, slow, and then the other, working inward, her legs falling open for me like the rite was a permission she’d been waiting for an excuse to use, and by then she had lost the ability to keep words behind her teeth, just little bitten-off scraps of them.
“Oh God, Sean, you can’t, we can’t, we’re...”
And then I moved my mouth to her pussy, soft, barely a kiss, and the rest of the sentence dissolved into a single strangled sound she caught a half second too late against the back of her own hand.
For a moment I kept it like that, soft, almost chaste, just my mouth moving against her, because some careful part of me was still braced to be stopped, still waiting for the fist in my hair to pull me off her. It did not pull me off. It pulled me in.
That was when I understood how much I was going to get away with.
So I stopped being careful. I worked her clit with the flat of my tongue, slow and filthy and patient, finding the rhythm that made her breath stutter and then doing it until she shook, and she went to pieces by slow degrees with her hips pinned flat under my hands.
“Don’t stop.” Barely a sound. “Sean. Please. Don’t you dare stop.”
“Not planning on it,” I said, the words muffled against her, and she shivered at even that.