22. Tilly
TWENTY-TWO
Tilly
The Blue Roof: After Katrina, federal tarps rated for ninety days stayed on New Orleans roofs for years, blue and taut and holding. Temporary is a word about what people intend, not about how long a thing actually lasts.
Someone finally checks the time at two-fourteen. Birdie nearly drops her wine.
“Holy shit. How is it two in the morning?”
“Because Grandbank made us listen to the entire story about meeting Sophia Loren, which must have gone on for over an hour. We all lost half the night,” I say.
There are only six of us left on the terrace now.
The remains of the night are scattered across the table between us.
There are empty glasses, two bottles of wine, a plate with three lonely olives on it, and a bowl of something nobody has touched in at least an hour.
Everyone else disappeared gradually. Daddy went first. Reeves and Charli followed.
Banksie lasted longer than I expected after the hike, but even he gave up sometime around midnight.
Rhodes is still here.
He has been sitting across from me for the better part of two hours, which should not be notable considering I have spent thousands of hours in rooms with Rhodes Stone.
Tonight, though, I know exactly where his foot is. His ankle rests against mine beneath the table. Luckily, nobody can see it. He moved it there twenty minutes ago and hasn't moved it since.
I take another sip of water and keep listening while Birdie argues with Kate about whether we're getting breakfast together tomorrow.
Rhodes's foot slides higher. I almost choke. His eyes meet mine across the table, and the bastard doesn't even smile. I press the inside of my sandal against his shin. His eyebrow moves.
Last night, we were apparently capable of pretending one time would get whatever this is out of our systems. We were idiots, clearly.
“I'm going to bed,” Kate announces. “If anyone speaks to me before ten, I'll become violent.”
Birdie checks her phone again. “Make it eleven.”
They both stand. I pull my foot away from Rhodes before the table shifts, and somebody catches us playing footsie like teenagers.
Libba is nowhere around to notice anything. She slipped away about twenty minutes ago, claiming she was going to the restroom, and never returned. Normally I'd be annoyed. Tonight, it's a gift.
Birdie hugs me from behind my chair. “Come on. Walk with us.”
“I'm not quite ready. I'll be fine. Y’all go ahead.”
She releases me. “You sure?”
I nod, glancing at the mess on the table. “I'm going to pick some of this up so the Italians don't think all Americans are sloths.”
Rhodes looks at me, but I refuse to look back.
Wade snorts. “You're a better person than me.”
Birdie kisses the top of my head. “Goodnight, Mother Teresa.”
Rhodes laughs into his glass. I kick him under the table. He catches my foot between both of his before I can pull it away, and heat shoots straight up my leg.
Wade and Birdie are already halfway down the stone path, still arguing over breakfast. I can't see them any longer as their voices fade between the villas.
That leaves Rhodes, me, and two Stone cousins I hardly knew before this trip, Cam and Heartly, at the far end of the terrace. They've moved on to debating SEC football with enough passion that we could probably set the table on fire without distracting them.
Rhodes lets my foot go.
“You're cleaning?” he asks.
“Apparently.”
“I'll help.”
Cam looks over. “You two are suspiciously domestic.”
My heart gives one hard kick. Rhodes doesn't miss a beat.
“You should see her with a garbage disposal.”
I laugh because I can't help it. Cam loses interest immediately, which I appreciate, because I have no interest in talking small talk with him about our domesticity.
Rhodes gathers the empty glasses. I stack plates. Neither of us touches the other. That suddenly requires an unreasonable amount of concentration.
I carry a tray into the little outdoor kitchen and set it beside the sink. Rhodes comes in behind me with the bottles.
"There's a whole beach down there," he says, reading it off my face. "Nobody on it."
He pulls a blanket off a lounger, the big striped one somebody left out, and I follow him down the stone steps cut into the cliff without another word. I kick off my sandals at the top of the stairs, and hook them on two fingers.
The path smells like salt and lemon trees and thousand-year-old stone. Below us the water's black and loud, the surf rolling in long and dragging back over the rocks.
The sand's still warm on top from the day, cool underneath where my feet sink.
He shakes the blanket out in the lee of the rocks where the path can't see us, and the wind grabs a corner.
He pins it with one of his shoes and mutters at it, which makes me laugh for a reason I'm not quite sure why.
He looks up at me from a crouch in the dark, and the laugh goes out of me.
He comes up out of the crouch, and I don't wait for him to get all the way there. I get a fistful of his shirt and put him against the rock wall instead, warm from a whole day of sun, and I kiss him the way the hallway never got to finish.
"Careful," he says into my mouth.
"I am so tired of careful."
He gets the dress up and over. Then his thumbs are in the waistband of the last thing I've got on, and that goes too.
The wind off the water hits every inch of me. I shiver, and he takes that, open-mouthed at the top of my shoulder. He kisses down to the inside of my elbow, continuing down until he ends up on his knees in the sand.
I get a hand in his hair. The waves eat the sound I make, and I'm glad for the shield, but I don't care at the same time.
When I can't stand it, I pull him up by the shirt.
We go down onto the blanket, sand shifting under us.
I get the shirt off him. I know his defined abs now by touch, the hitch in his breath when I rake my nails down his sculpted arms. I get his shorts open and take him in my hand, and he drops his forehead to mine and just breathes.
"Tallulah."
Out here with the water going and his mouth right at my ear, my full name in his voice does something to me that is dirtier than I care to admit.
He finds his shorts somewhere in the sand and comes back with a condom. He does it himself this time, fast, like he's worried I'll change my mind if he gives me the four seconds.
He pushes in slowly, and I lift off the sand to meet him. Neither one of us moves once he's all the way there. His mouth stays open against my temple and the ocean keeps roaring an arm's length away.
I start to gyrate my hips back and forth, hungry for his friction. It isn't careful nor quiet, because out here it doesn't have to be. No one can hear us but the water.
I hook a leg over the back of his and take everything and give it back. The world shrinks to his hands and his mouth and the tide climbing the sand toward us.
The tide finds us before I do, cold all the way up my back. It washes over his forearms where he's braced over me. I come on the shock of it, the dual sensation almost too much to bear.
The sand goes out from under my hip, and he swears into my hair, but keeps going straight through it. When he finally lets go, he does it silently, his whole body tensed. He cradles my head in his hand as he empties into me.
We lie there in the wet with the blanket ruined and the water pulling at my ankles. His heart is going so hard under my hand that I could count it.
We lie there afterward, half on the blanket and half off it, the sweat cooling. His hand runs up and down my arm. I could sleep right here and let the tide sort it out.
He's still catching his breath as his hand moves up and down my arm. It’s the thing he does after sex without knowing he does it. I let myself have about nine seconds of thinking this is a normal way for two people to end an evening.
"We can't do the whole-night thing," I say to the sky.
"I can hold you right here all night."
"If Libba finds my bed empty in the night, she'll do the math in about four seconds."
"I know," he concedes.
We lie there for another twenty or thirty minutes, until I start to get a chill. He picks a fleck of shell out of my hair after we get dressed, and he shakes out the blanket. We climb the cliff steps in the dark, hold hands as we walk down the dark path, and then split at the top without a word.
The seventh stair is the one that groans, so I skip it, my foot going straight from the sixth to the eighth. I turn the lock to the front door behind me and pad down the hall to my room barefoot.
Libba's door is shut. She won't stir for another few hours. If she comes down to find me, I'll be here, no need for made-up stories about falling asleep on the bench or whatever else I might need to come up with.
I drop onto my own bed and lie back and let myself feel it. My mouth's a little raw. There's a good ache low in me, all of it Rhodes.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand. Rhodes.
You make it back safely?
I grin at the ceiling and thumb back, my heart still fluttering.
Lonely in my bed... But I'm here.
Same. Libba asleep?
Dead to the world. You're safe. Your reputation as a gentleman is intact.
That ship sailed.
Heat runs down the back of my neck. I press the phone to my chest and laugh into the quiet, then bring it back up.
Whose fault was that?
Yours. You started it.
I finished it too, if I remember right.
Three dots come and go and come back, and I picture him lying in his bed with one hand behind his head while he holds the phone with the other.
Sleep tight, Tallulah.
There's nothing tight about me right now, except maybe the buzz going through my body. I'm nearly vibrating off my bed, wondering how I will find sleep.
I heart his text and put my phone on the nightstand. It's been a good night.