18. Willow
— ? —
Willow
It was still down in the morning, which almost never happens, and the whole island had gone quiet and sulky about it.
Dee Coffin rang at eight to say she had been up since six and had never in her life seen it sit like this, and to ask whether Michael’s car was still in my lane, and I hung up on her.
He had the stove going.
“There’s no bread.”
“There’s flour.”
“You can’t do johnnycakes on-”
“Willow, I’ve made johnnycakes on a gas burner at sea in a swell. Sit down.”
“I’m not sitting down in my own kitchen.”
“Then stand over there and be difficult, because you’re in my light.”
That, I thought, was not an instruction I should have enjoyed.
He had slept in his shirt and it showed. It had dried on him crooked and he had not shaved and there was the thing at the back of his hair that he has had since he was a boy and has never once been able to do anything about, and I looked at it for slightly too long and then looked at the pan.
Archie was at the window with Duck, both of them held up to the glass, conducting an inquiry.
“Gone.”
“What’s gone, baby?”
“All gone.”
“It’ll come back.”
“BOAT gone.”
“The boat’s in the shed. The boat’s fine.”
“Boat can’t SEE.”
“Nobody can see, mate,” Michael called over his shoulder. “That’s the whole situation.”
It went wrong slowly, over four boxes, which is not where I would have chosen.
The back room takes water and my things were in it. Not packed by me. I walked off that dock with a child and a handbag, and days after they found me, Sal came down the lane with the trunk full and carried it all inside the door and would not take anything for it.
“They want moving,” I said. “Before it gets into the bottoms.”
“Where do you want them?”
“The shed.”
“Right.”
So we carried boxes out into a garden that was not there.
You cannot see the house from the shed in fog like that. That is not a figure of speech. I turned around with a box in my arms and the house had gone, and there was one square of yellow where the kitchen window should have been, and the horn out at the point, and nothing else in the world.
He went back for the last two. I stayed in the shed stacking.
When he came in he had to duck, which he always has to, and he put the box down and straightened up and there was not enough room in there for the pair of us and both of us knew it and neither of us went outside.
There was a bag of somebody else’s cement against the wall behind him. I watched him clock it, watched him decide not to look at it, which took him a visible amount of effort, and I did not help him.
“That’s the lot.”
“Thank you.”
“Willow.”
“Wrong voice.”
“There’s a wrong voice?”
“You know there’s a wrong voice,” I said. “You’ve had it since you were seventeen and you have never once used it about anything sensible.”
“I’ve used it about the tide.”
“You have not.”
“I’ve used it about the tide to you, on a jetty, and you went red to the collarbone, and you know exactly which night I mean.”
Oh, I thought. That’s how we’re playing it.
He laughed, which he should not have done, because it did something to the air in a small building with no windows.
I got a hand out to steady a box and he got a hand out at the same time and mine went over the back of his and stayed there.
Neither of us moved.
He turned his hand over underneath mine. That was all he did. He did not take hold of anything and he did not step in, he simply turned his hand over so it was palm up under my palm and let me decide what that was.
You absolute coward, I thought. You’ve done that on purpose so it’s mine.
“He’s at the window,” I said.
“He’s at the window with a rabbit and a fog. He’ll be there for two weeks.”
“That is not a plan.”
“It’s the best plan available in this shed.”
“That’s not what I-”
“I know what you meant.” His voice had gone somewhere low. “The door’s open. You’d hear him from here. And I’m not going to say another word, because whatever happens next has got to be yours or it’s no good to me.”
So I took hold of his collar with both hands and pulled.
He came off that doorframe like it had been holding him back for months.
He kissed me with both hands on my face, the way he does, the way he has done since a boat when we were seventeen, and he made a sound into my mouth that I felt somewhere under my ribs. I got him back against the wall of that shed with an oar rack digging into my forearm and neither of us cared.
“Christ, Willow-” He broke off to breathe, forehead against mine. His thumbs were stroking along my jaw, gentle, at odds with how wrecked his voice sounded.
“I want your mouth on me.”
Something flickered behind his eyes, something that looked almost like relief.
“Where?” he asked roughly.
“You know where.”
“Say it anyway,” Michael said, mouth brushing my throat. “I’ve got everything else about you wrong this year. I’m not adding this.”
“I want you on your knees,” I said, plainly, with nothing on it at all, straight into his ear. “I want your mouth between my legs until I can’t remember why I’m angry with you.”
He made a noise like I’d hit him, and dropped.
“Up,” he said, hands already at my hips. “Bench. Now.”
He lifted me onto Ruth’s potting bench like I weighed nothing, and something solid went over and rolled off the edge, and neither of us looked to see what it was. He got between my thighs and shoved my skirt up around my waist, and then he stopped, breathing hard, and looked at me.
“These need to come off,” he said, fingers hooked into the waistband of my underwear, “or I’m going through them. Your choice.”
“Off.”
He pulled them down and I kicked them somewhere and then his hands were spreading my thighs wider, pushing my knees up and apart, and he looked at me, properly, like he was memorizing something. “Fuck. Look at you. You’re already soaked.”
“I’ve been like this since you said my name in the wrong voice,” I said. “So if you’re planning to be smug about it, save it for after.”
He laughed against my inner thigh, breath warm on skin that had not been touched in months. “I’m not being smug.”
Then he put his mouth on me and I stopped being able to form sentences.
He didn’t tease. He didn’t work up to it. He licked into me, flat tongue dragging through my folds, and the sound he made, like I was the best thing he’d ever tasted, went straight through me.
“Michael-”
“I know.” He got a forearm flat across my hips to pin me to the bench, because I had stopped being any use to myself, and looked up at me with his mouth still wet. “I’ve got you. Just let me-”
He ducked back down and found my clit with his tongue, circling it slow and deliberate, and my hips tried to buck up into him and couldn’t because of the arm holding me down, and I had to get the back of my hand into my mouth to keep quiet.
He heard me do it. I felt him smile against me. And then he slowed down, deliberately, the absolute bastard, and made it last longer.
“You taste exactly how I remembered,” he said, conversational, like he wasn’t taking me apart with his tongue.
“I used to think about this in the apartment. Middle of the night. You’d be asleep three feet away and I’d be lying there thinking about getting my mouth on you and being too fucking tired to do anything about it. ”
“Michael-”
“That’s on me. I know that’s on me.” He pushed two fingers into me without warning and I made a sound that was not quiet.
“But I’m here now. And I’m going to make you come on my tongue, and then I’m going to do it again, and you’re going to let me, because you’ve earned it and I owe you about a hundred of these. ”
He crooked his fingers and found the spot that made my vision go white and sucked my clit into his mouth at the same time, and I came so hard, hand clamped over my own mouth, thighs shaking on either side of his head.
He didn’t stop.
He worked me through it, gentler now, and then not gentle at all, fingers still moving, mouth soft and then insistent, and when I tried to push his head away he caught my wrist and pinned it to the bench beside my hip.
“One more,” he said against me. “Give me one more.”
“I can’t-”
“You can.” He twisted his fingers and licked over my clit in exactly the right rhythm. “Come on, Willow. I want to feel you do it again. Want you to soak my face with it.”
I came the second time with his name in my mouth and tears leaking from the corners of my eyes, and this time he let me push him away when it was over.
He sat back on his heels on that dusty floor, mouth wet, shirt ruined, hands still resting on my knees, and looked up at me, and asked for nothing.
He got up. He straightened my skirt and did it without a word. He did not put my hand anywhere and he did not press against me, and I could see he was hard, straining against his pants, impossible to miss, and he did not say one thing about reciprocation or later or any of it.
“Right,” he said, and picked up whatever had rolled off the shelf and put it back.
“Michael.”
“You’ve got sawdust all down your back. Turn around.”
“Leave the sawdust.”
“You’ll take it into the house and then he’ll be in it and then you’ll be finding it until the winter.” He brushed my back down with the flat of his hand, twice, businesslike, and stopped. “There.”
Ask me for something. Please, God, ask me for one thing so I can be angry with you.
“You should go. Slowly, there’s still fog but I think it’s better now… a little bit.”
“Okay.”
“Now.”
“Okay.”
“You’re not going to say anything about it.”
“No.”
“Not one word? Not later, not tomorrow, not in the car?”
“Willow,” he said, and got the door open with his shoulder because his hands were still not clean, “if I say one word about it you’ll spend the next two weeks deciding what it meant, and I’d rather you spent it on absolutely anything else.”
He said goodbye to his son properly, because he was not going to punish a two-year-old for the state I was in. Then he went out to the car and stopped and came back and put his head around the door.
“I’ll shift that cement bag out of your shed,” he said. “It’ll go off in there if it sits.”
And he drove down that lane at walking pace with his head out of the window, and the fog took the car about four yards past the gate.
I got Archie down for his nap and then I ended up on that kitchen floor with my back against the cupboard, which is becoming a habit I do not care for.
Pia rang and I did not tell her and she knew anyway.
“You’ve got a voice on.”
“I’ve got a cold.”
“Right,” said Pia, and let me have it, which is the most generous thing that woman has ever done for me.
I have been doing this since I was fifteen. Somebody I love does one good thing and I hand over the whole account. A table that does not rock. A bag in a trunk with the right shoes in it. A boat with a hatch in it. A man on his knees on a shed floor who asks for nothing.
And what happens the first time a phone goes at nine o’clock at night, when you’ve already handed the whole bloody account back over the counter?
He has been magnificent for a season. I was married to him for years.
That is not a fair thing to hold against a man and I am going to hold it against him anyway, because the last time I gave him the benefit of the doubt I did it for years at a stretch and nobody ever came to tell me when to stop.
He came at four the next day. I went down the lane before he was out of the car and said it standing in the road.
“That changes nothing.”
He shut the door. He took it, and nodded.
“No. I know.”
“Do you? Because I’d understand if you thought-”
“Willow, I’ve thought about very little else since yesterday morning and none of it was thinking it changed anything.” He got the bag out of the trunk, the one with the shoes in it. “It changed something for me. That’s mine and I’m not putting it on you.”
“You’re not going to argue.”
“No.”
“You’re not even going to-”
“I’m going to take my son to a pond,” Michael said, “and have him back by six. That’s the plan. That’s all of it.”
And he did.
And he was there again the day after, and the one after that, with nothing in his hands, and did not mention the shed once, and I stood in that kitchen every afternoon at four getting angrier and angrier and could not have told you, if you had asked me outright, at what.