13. Margo #2
It’s dim inside, the only light coming gray through the one grimed window, my father’s world of nets and buoys and the old skiff up on its blocks, everything smelling of tar and brine and cold water.
None of it matters. Sebastian has me against the rough planks and his mouth is on mine and I’ve got two fists in his sweater and I am done, entirely done, with every good reason I had this morning for not doing exactly this.
“Tell me to stop,” he breathes against my jaw, even now, even here, giving me the out I don’t want. “One word.”
“Don’t you dare stop.”
He groans as if the words hurt him and drags the sweater over his head, and I get my hands on him.
The warm plane of his chest, the muscle gone leaner from two weeks of failing at fishing, and I rake my nails down him just to hear the sound he makes.
He makes it. Low and wrecked. I want to pull that sound out of him a hundred times.
My shirt goes next, his hands not gentle with the buttons, and when he can’t get the last two he simply pulls and they scatter across the boathouse floor and I don’t care, I’ll sew them back on later, I’ll be a different person later.
His mouth drops to my throat, my collarbone, lower, and my head falls back against the wall and cracks a little and I don’t feel it, because his hand has found my breast and his thumb is dragging over the peak of it and every thought I’ve ever had walks straight out of my head.
“God, you’re…” He leans back to look at me, and his eyes are black in the dim, and there’s a wonder in them under all the hunger that undoes me worse than the hunger does. “I forgot. I made myself forget, because remembering was unbearable. Look at you.”
“Less talking.” I get my hands into his waistband, and I feel him jump, feel how much he wants me pressed hard against my hip. “You’ve done enough talking to last me five years.”
“Then I’ll do this instead.”
He drops to his knees on the rough wood.
He drags my jeans down with him, and my underwear, his mouth following the whole way down the inside of my thigh, and I get a hand into his hair to steady myself because my legs have stopped being reliable.
He hooks my knee over his shoulder. He looks up at me once, checking, always checking, and whatever he finds in my face makes his jaw tighten, and then his mouth is on me and I have to bite down on my own hand to keep from bringing my mother down the cliff.
He isn’t careful. That’s the thing that finishes me.
The Sebastian I married was careful about everything, measured, controlled, a man who did nothing without a reason.
This one licks into me like he’s starving for it, as if he’s got five years to make up and he’s going to do it right here on his knees on a boathouse floor, one arm locked across my hips to hold me still when I try to buck away from how much it is.
His tongue works me open, slow then merciless, and he groans against me when I gasp, the vibration of it going straight up my spine, and I’m gripping his hair hard enough to hurt and he only presses in harder, greedier, like the pain is a gift.
“Sebastian.” His name comes out of me broken. “I’m going to…”
He doesn’t stop. He pins me tighter and takes me over the edge with his mouth, and I come apart against the boathouse wall with my hand clamped over my own mouth and my whole body shaking, and he works me through every last shudder of it, gentling only when I sag boneless against the planks.
He’s breathing hard when he rises, his mouth slick, his eyes wild. I drag him up by the shoulders and kiss him, taste myself on him, and it only makes the want worse, a bottomless thing that one climax hasn’t touched.
I get his trousers open. He kicks them off along with the rest, and then it’s just us, skin to skin in the cold salt air, and he lifts me like I weigh nothing, my back against the wall and my legs around his waist, and we both go still for one shaking second with him poised right there.
“Margo.” Just my name, ragged, his forehead dropped to mine. “If we do this…”
“I know what this is.” I dig my heels into the small of his back. “Now.”
He pushes into me in one long slow stroke and we both cry out, and God, the fullness of it, the ache of it, the sheer rightness of a body I’ve hated and missed and dreamed about, and he holds there buried deep with his whole frame trembling like he might come apart from the effort of not moving.
“You feel…” His voice is gone. “I’m not going to last. I’ve thought about this every night since you left, I’m not…”
“Then don’t last.” I drag his mouth to mine. “Just don’t stop.”
He moves.
He fucks me against the wall of my father’s boathouse with the old skiff watching and the water slapping the pilings under the floor, and it’s not making love and it’s not gentle and it’s every furious, grieving, desperate thing we’ve been swallowing for weeks pouring out through the place where we’re joined.
My back drags against the rough planks with every thrust and I’ll have the marks tomorrow and I want them, I want to feel this tomorrow, I want proof it happened.
He’s got one hand fisted in my hair and one under my thigh, hitching me higher, hitting somewhere that makes the boathouse go white at the edges, and he’s saying things into my throat, broken things, I missed you, I missed you, I never stopped, not for one day, not for one hour, and I’m past telling him to stop talking because the talking is part of it now, the talking is the grief and the wanting all tangled up in one.
“Look at me,” he pants. “Margo. Look at me.”
I do. I meet his eyes and I let him see all of it, the fury and the wanting and the terrible tenderness I can’t strangle, and something breaks open in his face, and he drives into me harder, deeper, chasing it with me.
“Come with me,” he says. “Please. I can’t… come with me.”
And I do. It takes me apart a second time, harder than the first, my whole body clenching around him, and I feel him let go a heartbeat later with my name torn out of him like it’s been ripped from somewhere he keeps locked, his forehead pressed to mine, both of us shaking, the two of us holding each other up against a wall because neither of us can stand alone.
For one long moment there is nothing but our breathing and the water and the small tilted world of the boathouse.
Then the moment ends, the way they always do.
Reality comes back in pieces, the way the tide comes in. The cold of the air. The rough plank at my back. The scatter of my buttons on the floor. The fact that I’m naked in my father’s boathouse in the middle of a working morning with a man I filed papers against.
Sebastian eases me down, careful now, his hands gentle on my hips like I’ve gone breakable, and I let my feet find the floor and I step back out of his arms and I reach for my ruined shirt, and I feel the whole thing crash down on me at once.
What I just did. What it doesn’t fix. What it can’t.
“Margo.” His voice is soft, still wrecked, full of a hope I can’t bear to look at. “That was…”
“A mistake.” I say it fast, buttoning what buttons are left with hands that won’t cooperate. “That was a mistake, Sebastian.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do.” And the awful part is that I both do and don’t, and I can’t afford the part of me that doesn’t. “God, I hate myself. I actually hate myself right now. Two weeks. You’ve been back two weeks and I’m already flat on my back in a boathouse forgetting every single reason I left.”
“It wasn’t nothing.” He’s pulling his trousers on, watching me, and there’s no arrogance in it, only that unbearable hope. “You can call it a mistake all you want. I felt you. That wasn’t a woman who’s done with me.”
“That was a woman who’s tired and lonely and stupid about you, which is not the same as a woman who trusts you.”
I get the shirt closed, more or less, and I make myself look at him, because a coward looks away and I am done being a coward about anything except my own heart.
“Listen to me. This does not change the papers. This does not change five years. My body wanting you was never the problem, Sebastian, it was never the thing that broke. I could always want you. I wanted you through every lonely dinner and every night you didn’t come home.
Wanting you is the easiest thing I do. It’s trusting you I can’t manage, and one hour in a boathouse doesn’t buy that back. ”
He’s quiet. He doesn’t argue. He’s learned that much.
“So no,” I go on, and my voice is steadier now, the wall going back up brick by brick even as my knees are still weak from him.
“You don’t get to look at me like that. Like this means we’re fixed.
We’re not fixed. I am not some prize you unlocked by being patient for a fortnight.
I’m a woman who just did a foolish thing, and who is going to have to live with having done it, and who is telling you plainly that it will not be happening again. ”
“Okay,” he says quietly. And then, because he can’t quite help himself: “Margo. It’s not dead. Whatever you tell yourself. You felt that too.”
“I know I did.” I pick my last button up off the floor and close my fist around it. “That’s exactly what scares me.”
I leave him there in the half-light of my father’s boathouse, pulling his ruined sweater back over his head, and I walk out into the offensive brightness of the morning with my spine straight and my shirt held closed and my whole body still humming with the memory of him.
And I hate myself the entire way up the cliff.
Not because it happened.
Because some traitor, hopeful, unkillable part of me is already wondering when it happens again.