Chapter 18
I’ve written it down. Not on a card, because I have some pride.
On the back of a prep list, in pencil, at four o’clock on Saturday afternoon, between check walnut order and call Loretta re: ham, AGAIN.
Nine words. I looked at them for a while and then put a line through them and wrote seven different words, and then I turned the paper over and did the walnut order instead, because I am thirty-two years old and a professional and I have catered a wedding on two hours’ notice with a broken oven and a bride in the walk-in.
I have never in my life been this frightened of a sentence.
The trouble is that there is no polite way to ask a man to bite you.
I checked. I spent Friday morning in the back of the shop with a bowl of shallots and ran through every version I could think of, and they are all either a medical inquiry or a proposition.
One of them came out sounding like I was offering him a snack.
I said that one out loud to the shallots and had to sit down on an upturned crate.
So at six on Saturday I drive up the hill with nothing written down and nothing in my hands, which is twice this week, and I am beginning to think the man is doing something to my personality.
He opens the door before I knock. He’s not in a sweater. He’s wearing a heavy dark jacket with the collar turned up, and there’s a canvas bag over his shoulder.
“You need to wear something warm,” he says.
“I am wearing something warm.”
He frowns at my green wool coat. “Warmer than that.”
“Julian, this is a good coat.”
“It is a beautiful coat and it was designed for a person standing next to a building.” He is already holding out a second coat, an enormous oiled canvas thing that smells of tar and salt, and he settles it over my shoulders before I have agreed to anything at all.
The sleeves come down over my hands. “There’s a hat as well. You will hate it.”
“Where are we going?”
“Out.”
“Out where?”
“Penny, you’ve spent a week telling me I answer only the exact question.” The corner of his mouth moves. “I am attempting to make you enjoy the experience of not having one answered.”
“You developed a personality that hoards information.”
“And now I’m renovating. Come on.”
The drive continues past Blackthorn House.
I didn’t know that. I have been up this hill often enough that I was convinced it was the end.
Instead the drive keeps going around the north shoulder in three switchbacks that are so steep my van would need a talking-to and that Julian’s car simply purrs through, before reaching a boathouse built into the bluff.
The boathouse is made from the same dark stone and weathered cedar as the main house.
There’s one lamp over the door and a slipway going down into black water, with the tide making that soft slapping sound under the timbers that I have heard my entire life from outside a dozen different boathouses and never once from inside.
“You have a boathouse.”
“I have a boat. The boathouse came with the arrangement.”
The boat is thirty-six feet of black hull and polished wood with a gaff rig and not one single thing wrong with it. It is so well kept that it looks unused, which I know from working in other people’s kitchens is the opposite of what it means.
And there is nothing on the transom.
“It doesn’t have a name.”
“No.” I open my mouth, but he answers before I ask. “Because names are recorded. I stopped naming them in the nineteenth century.”
Then he goes right on coiling the line over one arm as though he has not just handed me a piece of himself I didn’t ask for.
I don’t say anything about it.
Thursday night I stood in his hidden room and told him I was tired of being handed only the corner I happened to point at.
He told me he had never had to tell anyone before and didn’t know the order it went in.
Now, two days later, he’s standing at the foot of his own bluff giving me nineteenth-century boat registries while coiling rope.
If I make it a moment, he may never do it again.
“How many boats?”
“Eleven. Twelve if you count a dory, which I do not.”
“Why don’t you count the dory?”
“Because it sank,” Julian says, “in the harbor, in flat calm, with me in it.”
I laugh so hard I have to grab the boathouse door, and he looks quietly delighted with himself.
There is no engine. He gets us out of the boathouse with a pole and then hauls the mainsail up hand over hand in one long, smooth pull that shuts down every useful thought in my head.
I have watched men do this my whole life.
A gaff main on a boat this size requires two people or one person with equipment, and Julian does it with no more apparent effort than a man drawing a blind.
I sit down on the roof of the cabin, put my hands inside the sleeves of my enormous coat, and think very clearly, I’m going to ask this man to bite me tonight, and I’m going to have to do it out loud.
We come out past the breakwater at about seven, and Black Harbor slides away behind us and turns into something I have never seen.
I’ve lived here my whole life. I’ve looked at this town from Founder’s Point and from the road and from my upstairs window since I was six years old.
I’ve never once looked at it from the water at night.
It turns out that from half a mile out in December, my town is about two hundred yellow lights on a black hill with a church spire in the middle and the Widow’s Lantern burning at the bottom like the last coal in a stove.
“Oh,” I say.
Julian is at the tiller with his hair going sideways in the wind.
“Yes.”
“That’s Theo’s window. That’s the actual window.”
“It is.”
“Abigail Rood’s window.”
“For four hundred and eleven nights,” he says. “I used to come around the point and it was the only light on that whole shore. Bess leaves it on now for the parking lot.”
“Bess would.”
“Bess has views about the parking lot.”
I laugh and look back at my town glowing across half a mile of black water, then at Julian.
He is entirely at ease. One hand rests on the tiller, his attention divided between the sail and me, and I have never seen him look this comfortable anywhere.
I don’t need dates or another story tonight. I know what I’m looking at.
He’s at home.
“You like this,” I say.
“I like a great many things. You’ve simply never seen me do most of them.”
The moon comes up off the water sometime later, orange at first, and lays a shimmering stream of light across the sea. From shore, that kind of moonlight is scenery. Out here, it’s a path.
Julian anchors in the lee of the Sisters around half past eight, and the boat settles into the quieter water. The silence that follows isn’t really silence. Water knocks softly along the hull, something creaks overhead, and far out on the ledge a bell tolls twice.
Then he goes below and comes back with a hamper.
I stare at it. “What’s that?”
“Supper.”
“Julian.”
“For you,” he says, with dignity. “Obviously.”
Inside is a thermos, napkins folded with military precision, and a paper bag of Bess Kelleher’s molasses cookies, which I would recognize in the dark from three feet away, which is exactly the situation.
“You called Bess.”
“I telephoned the Rusty Kettle and asked what a person eats on a boat at night.”
“You called Bess.”
“She was extremely helpful.”
“Julian, Bess Kelleher is behind the bar at the Lantern by six, and Harriet Coyne sits at the table nearest it because of the draft.” I unscrew the thermos. Chowder, hot enough to steam in the December air. “By tomorrow this entire town will know you took me out on a boat.”
“Yes.”
“You knew that when you called.”
“I did.”
There it is again. Something handed over without being asked, in a completely level voice, by a man who spent four hundred years making sure his name wasn’t on anything.
The boat rocks gently beneath us. The bell tolls again out on the ledge. I drink the chowder. It’s Bess’s, so it has too much pepper and is exactly right. Julian sits with his back against the wooden rim of the cockpit and his long legs taking up most of the available world, watching me eat.
“Does it bother you?” I ask. “Watching?”
“No.”
“Honestly?”
He considers the question. “Not the food. I remember food the way you remember a room you were in as a child. I remember the feeling but not the details. I couldn’t tell you what pepper tastes like now.
” He tips his head towards my cup. “What I like is the noise you make when something is good. You have made it four times.”
“I have not.”
“Five.”
I look at him, and the words are out before my mind catches up with my tongue.
“I want you to feed from me.”
“No,” Julian says.
It is not a considered no. It’s out of him before I have quite finished the sentence, fast and flat, and my whole face goes hot. For one awful second a wave of humiliation rushes over me, and then I actually look at him.
He has gone completely rigid. Both hands are clenched on his knees and he is staring at something over my left shoulder as though the Atlantic has suddenly produced an urgent administrative problem.
This is not a man declining.
“Oh,” I say slowly. “That was fast.”
“Penny.”
“That was very fast.”
“I am aware.”
I set the cup down on the cockpit floor so I don’t end up wearing it. “How long have you been thinking about it?”
He doesn’t answer for five seconds, which for Julian is a long argument.
“Since you asked me what it feels like. Monday night.” His jaw moves. “I have thought about almost nothing else.”
“Monday. And you didn’t say anything?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
This time he looks at me.
“Because if I asked you,” he says, “you would never again be certain that you would have offered.”
The wind goes out of me. Of course. He would rather want something for five days in silence than let me spend one evening wondering whether the price of loving him was blood.
“Julian,” I say, “I wrote it down.”
He blinks. “You what?”