Chapter 11 #2
I shrugged, trying to maintain my composure as I voiced the one possibility I had trouble processing even in the privacy of my thoughts.
“Maybe. Or maybe something happened to me. Something I wanted to forget but was too terrible to extract selectively. Maybe it all connects, and to erase it, they had to erase all of me.”
With lowered brows, wary, Kai asked, “What do you mean?”
Prickles of discomfort spread under my skin, and I had the sudden urge to hide myself, even from him. Quickly, I turned away. “Nothing. Let’s just forget about it.”
I could sense him watching me still, could feel him moving closer, the palpable heat of his nearness gathering against my back.
“Anya,” he pressed, and as if carried by the momentum of our proximity, he reached for my arm as well, his fingertips brushing over the fine fabric of my sweater. “Look at me.”
Shivering, I obeyed.
His fingers moved lower, tracing a whispering line from my elbow to my wrist. “You can tell me anything. You know that, right?”
“No, I know,” I croaked. “You can tell me anything too.”
“I will,” he whispered, his eyes wandering to my mouth. Then, correcting himself, “I am.”
Too distracted by his closeness to continue this conversation, I leaned into him, into his hand holding my wrist. “What do we do now?”
“Laundry?” he suggested. “Get the fire going in the meantime?”
“And then?”
“We nap. We change. We go to the convenience store because I have absolutely nothing here.”
“There’s a convenience store?”
“Of course there’s a store,” he laughed, his thumb under my sleeve still moving in circles over that tenderest spot. Almost unconsciously. Almost as if he couldn’t help but keep on touching me. “It’s only a twenty-minute walk from here.”
I wasn’t sure why this surprised me so. I almost felt like we’d crossed the borders to some previously undiscovered realm.
It was strange, absurd even, to think that we were still Inside.
There was nothing inward about this place.
Everywhere you looked it was open. The sky, the land, the sea.
A purely outside-land where Kai and I were two nameless souls at the very dawn of time.
History had not written itself yet. There was no one and nothing to experience but each other.
◆◆◆
The sun moved high, then higher. The clothesline swayed in the wind, linen sheets and fluffy cotton towels smelling crisp and faintly floral.
It was cold out here, reminiscent of winter, the air so clean it was almost painful to breathe, but once I found a satisfying enough rhythm, I stuck to it: moving mindfully, pausing to listen to the shushing of the reeds and the exhalations of the ocean, watching the sheets billow out and brush up against each other, the cold, wet fabrics in the equally cold, wet air making the skin of my hands tingle.
The change of pace and scenery had somehow released me from the confinements of everyday life so that the task did not feel mundane at all but an ode to the beauty of ordinary things.
“Fire’s ready,” announced Kai, sprinting toward me from the porch in his huge blue sweater. He bent and fished a pillowcase from the woven basket at my feet, heedlessly entering my space, the side of his arm touching mine. “Let me help.”
By the time we finished hanging the rest of the laundry, both of our fingers and faces were shining bright pink.
Kai caught my hands in his, brought them up to his mouth, and blew his hot breath into them while shifting his weight from one leg to another to keep himself warm.
I loved the ease with which he did such things.
Never invasive, never expectant of something more, just giving in to his spontaneous need to experience my tactility.
“Let’s go get warmed up,” he said, releasing only one of my hands as we headed back into the house.
Inside, the cottage was deliciously balmy, waves of heat emanating from the fireplace, the orange glow streaming in fragments through the hive-like screen.
We left our shoes by the door and curled up on the sofa, he on the left side, I on the right, a woolen blanket between us, covering our feet.
The midday sun was full and heavy, the crackling of the logs collapsing into each other slow and sweet.
And although we were both starving, we were also terribly tired from the trip, and the couch was too comfortable, the spell too lovely to break.
Reclining further back, Kai dropped his head on the armrest and closed his eyes.
Dreamily, I watched him. The bare strength of his throat, the underside of his jaw, the semicircle of shadow fitting the side of his cheek.
It was moments like this that I found him the most beautiful, when he was wallowing in all his unwitting sensuality.
“How do you spend your days here?” I asked him, disturbing at last our companionable silence.
“I read a lot,” he replied. “Take long walks. Cook the most ludicrously elaborate meals you can imagine. I swim too, but I have to warn you, it’s very cold this time of year.” Dark eyelashes fluttering, he looked at me from the other side of the sofa. “It’s kind of an art, you know.”
“What is?”
“Doing ordinary things to escape an ordinary life.”
“I thought you loved your life,” I murmured, drowsily playing with a strand of my hair.
“I do love my life,” he agreed. “But that doesn’t diminish my need to be somewhere else, someone else, sometimes.”
I shifted a little, and my toes touched his under the blanket. He sat up to make more space for me and continued, “I’m not sure how to explain it. In the city I feel more connected to the world, but here I feel more connected to myself. And to something else. Something I can’t put into words.”
“The sky is closer here,” I whispered, repeating his words to let him know that this, at least, I remembered.
Every moment of us, I remembered perfectly.
He gave me a small, intimate smile. “The sky is closer here.”
We slept for a bit, huddled together on that sofa, the fire crackling away, and woke up in the middle of the afternoon flushed, refreshed, and ravenous.
We took turns showering—I went first so I had plenty of hot water—then we dressed warmly and ventured outside, toward the laneway, which stretched past the field behind the cottage.
For a while we walked in silence, keeping close to each other. Kai had left my sneakers by the hearth to dry while I’d been in the shower, and now the inside fabric was soft and toasty. The air smelled of salt and pine, and in the sky the albatrosses were rallying into arrow-like formations.
“It’s so beautiful here,” I heard myself murmur, not feeling fully awake yet, but like walking through a long, tender dream.
“I’m glad you like it,” said Kai. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“These fields are so neat,” I added, watching the rows and rows of golden stems sway against the faintly blue horizon.
“They’re grains,” explained Kai. “My mom says they grow by the sound of people’s footsteps.”
Fascinated, I asked, “Is that true?”
He laughed quietly. “I have no idea.”
The trip was shorter than I’d expected, a mere stroll down the provincial road and the sturdy balustraded bridge before the first few landmarks of the town started to show: pretty stone houses, a gas station, a pharmacy, a post office, and then the convenience store with its racks of fresh fruits and vegetables cluttering the narrow sidewalk.
Kai chatted with the elderly owner for a bit, who asked about his lady friend and regaled us with stories of a rowdy young Kai breaking hearts and wreaking havoc all over their sleepy town.
I nodded and chuckled, feeling both awkward and delighted, until Kai picked up one of the plastic baskets stacked on the floor by the register, and the two of us sailed past the row of refrigerators toward the back of the store.
“I have a system,” Kai announced very seriously. “Packaged goods first, then fruits and vegetables, and then refrigerated items.”
“Ah,” I teased him. “The system.”
I let him do his shopping the way he liked while I browsed the soda aisle. After a few minutes, I sensed him rather than saw him come up behind me. “Find anything you like?” he asked.
Without turning, I let out a humorous sigh. “So many choices.”
“Take whatever. I can carry it.”
“Are you sure? It’s not that small of a distance.”
“Yeah, I’m sure. I’ve never had a guest here before. So let me play the good host for once,” he said, and just as I started to reach for a six-pack of lemon-flavored sodas, he grabbed it from the shelf and dropped it in his basket.
Incredulous, I turned to him. “Never?”
He shook his head, wetting his bottom lip with the tip of his tongue. So dull and small the aisle was and he so grand and striking that for a moment he was all I could see. That sensual line of his jaw drawing upward.
“Mm,” I hummed coyly. “Consider me flattered.”
“Don’t do the thing,” he groaned.
My eyes darted back to his. “What thing?”
“Talking to me while staring at my mouth. Very inappropriate behavior for the convenience store, Ms. Anya.”
Bold like a midsummer sun, I stepped on the spot right in front of him, tilting back my head so we could keep looking at each other. “Well, forgive me,” I crooned. “From now on I promise to only stare at your mouth in private.”
He made a little frustrated sound deep in his throat, his eyes drifting toward the ceiling. I laughed, he called me wicked, and I told him this was the most fun I’d ever had in a convenience store.
We got as much food as we could possibly carry, and while Kai paid—he refused to let me contribute a sum, being his guest and all that—I noticed the rotating rack of postcards by the register, with the words Blue Beach in different fonts scrawled across quaint seaside landscapes.
“Pick one,” said Kai, his expression mischievous and knowing. An inside joke.
“But I came on the trip.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
I laughed, shaking my head. “This is silly.”
“Ah,” he sighed, “but of all the terrible things we are, silly is not the worst, is it?”
“No, but it’s up there,” I argued halfheartedly.
But deep in my bones I knew that no matter what happened to us in the end, I would never, ever forget this about him.
His boyish optimism. His refusal to be cynical.
His determination to always find the silver lining and stare at it, even if it hurt, even if the line was not a line at all but a bright yellow sun, burning him with hope.
“Come on,” he prodded me again. “Pick one. I’ll write something mawkish, and you’ll receive it once you get home. Your first postcard.”
Girlishly delighted, I chose one of the more romantic ones, a sunset at the beach, the letters sprawling over the picture in raised calligraphy.
On our way back we stopped by the post office. Kai let me choose the stamp, a white scalloped square with a blue floral pattern, but refused to let me see what he wrote on the empty space under it.
“It’s more exciting this way,” he claimed, and when I tried to steal a peek over his shoulder, he grumbled about my impatience and pretended to scowl at me.
The woman behind the desk said that we made a cute couple. I didn’t correct her, and Kai answered impulsively, “I know, right?”
And I couldn’t help but grin, imagining the day I would find that pretty white envelope tucked inside my letterbox, take it upstairs, and tear the seal open with hands shaking from excitement. What did he write?
I promised myself that I would always cherish it.
That postcard. That tiny love letter. The future it promised. The beauty of tomorrow.