3. Willow
— ? —
Willow
Michael Folger learned my mother’s shift pattern before he learned to drive.
She cleaned for the Athertons on Hulbert and for two houses on Cliff Road, and she was never home before dark in the season. He worked that out on his own and never once said how, and he started turning up at our back door on Fairgrounds Road with his hair wet from the harbor.
“Your mother’s out.”
“I know where my mother is.”
“I brought stuff.”
“What stuff?”
He held up a paper sack. “Doughnuts. They’re yesterday’s.”
“You brought me old doughnuts.”
“They’re free after six. I’m not made of money.”
That was funny then. Neither of us knew how funny.
He came back that whole winter and the winter after and the one after that.
He had a boat that was mostly rot and enthusiasm, and he was down there every day of the off-season with a scraper, and he would come to our door with his knuckles split and eat at our table like he had been invited by somebody official.
“You’re going to lose a finger,” I said.
“Probably.”
“Then what?”
“Then I’ll have nine and I’ll still beat Levi.”
“That’s your whole plan.”
“That’s my whole plan. It’s a good plan. You’re not seeing the strength of it.”
My mother came home once and found him at the table with a pot of her chowder in front of him and did not say a word about it.
She got a bowl out and sat down. Afterwards she washed up and said, without turning around, that boys from the harbor side are lovely and boys from that family are lovely too, and that they are not the same kind of lovely, and I should keep the difference in mind.
I did not keep it in mind. I have never kept anything in mind when it mattered.
The summer we were seventeen he took me out past the jetty and cut the engine, and we sat in the dark with the water under a hull, and he laughed at nothing at all, that laugh I have never heard him use in a room with other people in it.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing.”
“You’re laughing at nothing. You’re batshit crazy if it’s nothing.”
“I’m allowed.”
“You are not allowed. Say it.”
“I’m not saying it out loud on a boat. It’ll sound stupid on a boat.”
“Everything sounds stupid on a boat, Michael, that’s the whole point of a boat.”
He said it anyway. I am not going to write it down.
***
Kristina got to me at the end of that summer, in her sunroom, over iced tea.
She was pleasant the entire time. She asked about my mother’s work with real interest. She said Michael had always collected people, which was one of his best qualities.
She told me a story about a girl he had been fond of at school who was now doing very well in Providence, and she said it kindly, and she said the name Providence in a way that meant somewhere else.
Nothing in that hour could be repeated. I have tried. It comes out sounding like tea.
I went quiet after that. I stopped being at the back door when he knocked and eventually he stopped knocking.
Then his father died on a random day with no warning at all, and there were seven men and a chair and a company. Michael went to New York overnight, and nobody said goodbye because nobody thought it was that kind of leaving.
There was a boy a year after him. Cody. He was decent and he was there and it was not his fault that he was neither of the other things.
***
Years later I came back to close up my mother’s house, because she had gone quickly and without discussion.
The island in the off-season belongs to the people who live on it. The shops shut, the ferries thin out, the whole place exhales. I taped boxes in her kitchen with a marker in my teeth and wrote KITCHEN on the side of each one in handwriting that got worse as the day went on.
I ran out of tape. So I walked into town, and Michael Folger came out of the hardware store with a padlock in a paper sack.
We looked at each other on the sidewalk.
“Willow.”
“Michael.”
“You’re here.”
“I’m here.”
“Are you just here or are you here here?”
“I’m closing up the house.”
He looked at the ground and then back up. “I heard about your mother. I should have called.”
“You should have.”
“I know.”
“You had my number.”
“I had your number.”
“So.”
“So I didn’t call,” he said. “I’m not going to give you a reason, because I’ve got one and it isn’t good.”
He held the padlock in the sack and I held nothing at all, and the wind came up Main Street and neither of us moved out of it.
Then he said, “Do you remember that dog?”
That is what we did. We stood in the window of a place that sells sandwiches in the season and was open for coffee and nothing else, and we talked about a dog that had been dead for years. A gray mutt with a bad leg that lived behind the fish place and let anybody feed it and belonged to nobody.
“He had a name,” Michael said.
“He had four names. Everybody gave him one.”
“What was yours?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“That’s not fair, I told you mine.”
“You told me yours was Captain.”
“Okay, mine’s Fish.”
We did that for an hour, because a dog was the only subject on the island that could not hurt either of us.
Everything else in that window had a knife in it.
Our parents. Him disappearing to New York.
The back door. The boat, which I did not ask about, because if he had sold it I did not want to know and if he had kept it I wanted to know even less.
Eventually the woman started stacking chairs.
“I should get back,” I said. “I’m out of tape.”
“I’ve got tape.”
“You’ve got a padlock.”
“I’ve got tape in the truck. I buy tape constantly. It’s a problem.”
He drove me back to Fairgrounds Road and sat with his hands on the wheel outside my mother’s house with the engine running.
“Willow.”
“Don’t say anything.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were about to say a whole speech. I can hear it warming up.”
“I was going to say the tape’s behind your seat.”
I got the tape. I got out. I went up the path and I put my key in my mother’s door, and I opened it, and I left it standing open behind me and did not turn around.
I heard the engine stop.
***
He came in and shut the door with his back against it and neither of us said a word.
I had him by the collar before he was all the way inside, and he made a low, wrecked noise into my mouth, and then his hands were under my jaw, in my hair, holding my face like the thing he had actually come to the island for was my face.
“Willow.”
“Don’t talk.”
“I need to say one thing.”
“Say it after.”
He said it after. It took a while to get to after.
He turned us and put my back against the wall by the stairs, and the boxes went over on the counter behind him, and neither of us went to look.
He got my coat off. He got everything off and he did it looking at me the entire time.
Eyes never leaving mine while he stripped me down to bare skin in my mother’s kitchen.
When I reached for his belt he caught my wrist and pinned it up beside my head and said no roughly, and then he went down on his knees on my mother’s kitchen floor.
“Fuck, look at you,” he muttered, voice already wrecked. His hands slid up the insides of my thighs, spreading me open for him. “Still the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen. Been thinking about this cunt for years, Willow. Dreamed about getting my mouth on it again.”
Nobody in my life had ever taken that long over me. He worked like a man who had been assigned it, patient, his hands flat on my thighs holding me open while he licked a slow, filthy stripe right up the center of me.
He groaned like he’d been starving. Tongue flat and wet, then pointed, circling my clit with the kind of focus that made my head knock back against the wall.
“Michael-”
“That’s it. Say my name while I eat this perfect pussy.” He sucked my clit between his lips, hard enough to make my hips jerk. “Christ, you taste even better than I remembered. So fucking wet already. Were you thinking about me on the drive back? Getting this slick for me?”
“Yes,” I breathed, fist already in his hair. “God, yes - don’t stop.”
“Not a chance.” He pushed two fingers into me without warning, curling them while his mouth stayed locked on my clit.
“So tight. Gonna feel so good around my cock later. Missed this. Missed how you get all shaky when I do this-” He sucked harder, fingers working deeper, and my knees went.
He took my whole weight against the wall and did not stop, tongue relentless, fucking me with his fingers until I was grinding down onto his face like I had no shame left.
“Fuck - Michael, I’m-”
“Come on my tongue. Give it to me. Been waiting years to taste you coming again.”
I came hard, thighs clamping around his head, a broken sound tearing out of me as I yanked his hair. He licked me through it, filthy wet sounds filling the kitchen, murmuring praise against my cunt the whole time. Good girl, fuck yes, just like that, so fucking beautiful when you come.
Then he stood up and lifted me and I got my legs around him, and it was not patient after that.
He got his cock out somehow, hard and thick and already leaking, and he rubbed the head through my soaked folds once, twice, before shoving into me in one deep thrust that punched the air out of both of us.
“Jesus - Willow-” His forehead dropped to mine. “So fucking tight. Taking me so well. Look at you, stretched around my cock like you were made for it.”
“Harder,” I said, nails digging into the back of his neck. “Don’t you dare be careful with me.”
He laughed, wrecked, and gave me exactly what I asked for.
He fucked me into the wall like he’d been dying for it.
Filthy strokes that made the picture frame jump off its hook and crash somewhere behind us.
The boxes I had labeled all day slid and went down.
He had one arm braced flat above my head and his other hand gripping my ass, holding me open so he could drive into me deeper.
“Missed this pussy,” he growled against my ear, hips snapping hard. “Missed how wet you get for me. How you take every inch like a greedy little thing. Tell me you missed my cock.”
“I missed it,” I gasped, clenching around him on purpose just to hear him swear. “Missed you fucking me stupid. Missed how thick you feel - god, Michael, right there-”
“Yeah? Right fucking there?” He angled his hips and slammed into that spot until I was crying out with every thrust. “That’s it. Let me hear you. Nobody on this whole road but us. Scream for me if you want. I want the whole island to know I’m back inside you.”
“You’re such an asshole,” I managed, breathless, laughing and moaning at the same time as he pounded me harder. “Keep talking. Don’t stop talking-”
“My beautiful fucking girl,” he rasped, mouth at my ear, saying my name over and over like it was the only word he had left between the filth. “Willow - fuck - look at you taking me so deep. Gonna fill this cunt up. Been saving it for you. You want it?”
“Yes - give it to me - come in me-”
He groaned like I’d broken him. One hand slid between us so he could rub tight circles over my clit while he fucked me through the wall. “Come with me. Squeeze my cock and come all over it.”
I shattered again with his name in my mouth, clenching so hard around him that he cursed and followed me over, burying himself to the hilt and pulsing deep inside me in long, hot spurts.
He kept rolling his hips through it, grinding every drop into me, mouth open against my throat while neither of us was quiet and neither of us cared, because there was nobody on that whole road to hear it.
***
We sat on the floor in the mess of my mother’s kitchen with his coat over both of us. Cum was leaking out of me onto the floorboards and I couldn’t bring myself to care. He had a box lid stuck to his back. He did not know yet.
“Say the one thing,” I said.
“I don’t want to.”
“You said you needed to.”
“I did need to. Now I’ve had you and I’ve soured on the idea, because if I say it you’ll have to answer it.”
“Michael.”
He looked at the ceiling for a while.
“I never stopped,” he said. “That’s it. That’s the whole thing. I went away and I did the job and I got very good at it and I never stopped, not for one day, and I’ve got no idea what to do with that.”
“Then don’t do anything with it tonight.”
“All right.”
“Tomorrow we’ll be sensible.”
“All right,” he said. “Tomorrow.”
We were not sensible tomorrow, or the day after that.
***
By the time the ferries picked back up weeks later, I already knew. I told him standing in that same kitchen with the boxes still where they had fallen, and I watched his face. He did not look trapped.
He said marry me before I had finished the sentence.
The courthouse took no time at all. There were two witnesses off the street and a clerk who spelled Sutton wrong on the form, and then crossed it out and spelled it wrong again, and Michael leaned over and wrote it himself, and the clerk let him.
No lunch after. He had a call.
***
I came out of it in our bed with the city going gray through the glass and my husband asleep beside me on his back with one arm flung out.
His shoulder was six inches from my mouth. He smelled of the shirt he had not changed and the flight he had taken that morning.
I put my hand flat on his chest, which is a thing I am allowed to do, which I have papers for.
He did not wake up.