5. Held At Her Temperature
Held At Her Temperature
Lightning cracked the sky open, close, and she jumped into my arms without thinking. I caught her, because that's what I did. My arms had the job before anybody asked me. And for about two seconds, I let myself have it. Her, soaking wet and shaking. Her heartbeat going hard against me.
Then I remembered the bedroom door that closed upstairs. And I remembered a door in February that never opened at all, and whose choice that was. She didn't need me like she used to. She'd shown me that with four months of whatever was dying between us. So I did what she taught me.
I let her go.
She stumbled back half a step and looked up at me, rain and confusion running down her face together. All these years, and I had never once put her down first.
"What you doing here, Ru? In this weather? Your mama know you out here like this?"
"My mama? I'm a grown woman." Teeth chattering between the words, whole body shaking, pink dress soaked through and clinging to every curve of her body.
"I got on the ferry. They said they were canceling but I prayed hard and they ran it anyway, it was delayed two hours, and the shuttles were shut down so a man gave me a ride on a golf cart in the rain and—"
I sucked my teeth. Grabbed her bag off the porch where she'd dropped it, took her arm, pulled her inside, and kicked the door shut on the storm.
"You know better than this." I was moving her down the dark hallway, hand around her arm.
"You get sick on boats, Aurelia. You've thrown up on every ferry you ever rode without me.
That's why I come back for you. I finish my week, I ride back over, I get you, and I hold you at the rail and talk your ear off the whole crossing so your body's too busy being annoyed with me to be sick.
That's the system, all these years you've been coming here. That's how it works."
My voice was climbing and I didn’t stop it.
"And you're scared of thunderstorms. You sleep with the light on when it rains bad, and I stay on the phone with you till you fall asleep. Me. That's my job. So you tell me why you got on a boat, alone, at night, in the worst storm this island's seen all summer."
"Because I needed—"
"Every year." I ran right over her like I hadn't asked the question, voice getting harder.
Underneath the anger was fear, and I could feel it pushing everything else out of the way.
I stopped us at the hall closet, let go of her arm, yanked it open, and started pulling towels off the shelf like they owed me money.
"You never get on that ferry without me.
Not once. And you're telling me you got on it in hurricane season, at night, by yourself? "
"I needed—"
"I don't care what you needed!" I said too loud.
The lie came out so fast it beat my conscience to the door.
Course, I cared what she needed. I'd built a whole life around what she needed, the ferry holds, the phone calls, the two a.m. pickups, the table I put up in full restaurant on Valentine's Day.
Caring what Aurelia needed was my second longest-running position and I took pride in that.
I had her by both arms now, I don't even know when that happened, my jaw clenched so tight my teeth ached. "Do you know what could've happened to you out on that water tonight? Do you know what it does to me to even—"
I made myself stop. Closed my mouth on the rest of it, because the rest of it wasn't scolding anymore, the rest of it was everything I’d been swallowing like word vomit for months, and everything was not available at this address with Madeline upstairs.
I let go of her arms, stepped back and put the towels between us, pushed them at her chest until her hands had to choose the warmth.
"Dry off," I said, calm as I could.
She took the towels and pressed it to her face. Dragged it back over her hair. And then she looked at me over the top of it, water still running off her chin, eyes red, from rain or from crying, I couldn't tell, and it killed me that after seven years I couldn't tell.
"Are you going to let me answer you?" she asked. "Or did you ask just to hear yourself?"
I sucked my teeth and pushed open the guest room door.
The one she always stayed in. I dropped her bag on the floor and went into the bathroom and turned the shower on.
Ran my hand under the water, adjusted then tested it again.
Not too hot, not too cold, the temperature I could find in my sleep because I'd found it a hundred times, in this house, in my penthouse, in hotel rooms when we traveled.
I knew the exact degree of warm this woman liked her water, and it was pissing me off that even in that moment, my default was to get it right.
I came back out and she was standing there dripping on the floor, towel around her shoulders.
"You're dripping all over the damn floors. Get in the shower." My eyes bounced all around the room, finding something else to do. "Wash up. Put something dry on and go to bed, Ru."
"Why are you talking to me like I'm a child?"
"Why would you do something so childish?"
"Get on the ferry? People do it every day."
"Not you, not without me. You could’ve… shit, Ru. Did you throw up on the boat?"
"No." She wrapped the towel tighter around herself, wouldn't meet my eyes.
"I found an old video on my phone. From two summers back, both of us at the rail, you talking my ear off about some restaurant supplier thing I didn't even care about.
I played it on a loop the whole crossing.
Had my eyes closed half the time so it'd feel like you were actually there instead of just your voice coming out a speaker.
It's not the same as your hand on my back but I made it work. "
I closed my eyes, trying to swallow the fear and frustration pumping through me at the same time.
Yes, Aurelia was a grown woman. She was also a grown woman with vestibular migraines that turned rough water into something her whole nervous system couldn't out-argue on its own.
On a bad day, it gave her vertigo, nausea and a headache bad enough to put her on the floor if it hit hard enough, and open water in bad weather had always been her worst trigger.
I'd been the one who figured out, years back, that if I kept her looking at me instead of the horizon, kept talking so her brain had something firm to hold onto besides the motion, her body calmed down faster than the Meclizine ever worked on its own.
We had a system. It worked because I was always the one standing there running it.
And because of whatever strange, undefined place we were sitting in that night, I hadn't been and I didn’t like that one bit.
"Did you at least take your meclizine before you got on?" I asked, low. "Usually I'm the one reminding you."
"Yes," she said, frustrated with me for even asking.
I ran my hand over my face. "I'm not trying to treat you like a child, Ru.
It's just –" I stopped, because my head had already gone somewhere I didn't want to say out loud.
Her on that deck alone, vertigo hitting so hard she couldn't tell which way was up, nobody there to grab her before she went down, the boat rocking and her body rocking with it and no hand to hold onto, no voice to anchor her back into herself.
Worse than that. Her on the ground somewhere, alone, the crew too busy with the storm to notice one woman gone quiet in a corner, and by the time anybody found her…
I shook my head hard, physically trying to shake the images loose before they finished building themselves.
"This ain't the way we do things," was the sentence I could actually say out loud. "If something had happened to you out there, if you got real sick and you were by yourself… "
I couldn't finish that one either.
"I'm okay." She reminded me more than answering me, because she knew exactly where my head had gone, without me having to say a word of it out loud.
I shook my head again and started to turn away from her. "You need to shower. Then get some rest."
She called after me. "Dillion. I know it's your solo week, but –"
"I got somebody here, Ru."
It came out like a door slamming shut on both of us at once. I sighed and turned back around to find the confusion sitting plain in her eyes.
"Who?"
"Don't matter."
"Dillion." I watched her run the same math I'd watched Dale run earlier that evening. "You don't even let me come with you on solo week."
"Get in the shower," I said again. All the bark had drained out of it and what was left sounded hollow even to me.
"Please, Ru. Just get in the shower. And I need you to get some sleep after, because I know what you just put yourself through riding that ferry in this storm. Can't believe they even ran it."
"Prayers work." She laughed, uncomfortable, like she wasn't sure if she was allowed to make a joke yet.
"Shower," I said, and turned to leave again.
"And then we can talk?"
Four months of silence and she wanted to talk, now, tonight, in this house, and I'd just told a woman upstairs that Aurelia wasn't in the picture.
And now the picture was standing in one of the guest rooms, looking at me like I was the only thing between her and drowning.
She'd gotten on a ferry in a storm, because she needed me.
Four months I told myself she didn't. Four months of building on that. And the foundation just walked through my front door telling me she needed to talk.
I choose not to answer her. I left the room and closed the door behind me. I stood in the hallway with my palm flat against the wood like I was holding it shut. Or holding myself out. Same thing.
That woman was my kryptonite. Always had been.
You can train your whole life, build your walls, run your systems, and there's still the one thing that gets in under all of it, and mine was five foot six, scared of thunder, and standing on the other side of this door asking me to talk.
And I couldn't. Not with Madeline upstairs waiting on a man who'd kissed her forehead goodbye without telling her it was goodbye.
Behind me, through the door, the shower ran. Above me, a floorboard creaked, and I stood in my grandfather's hallway between the two of them, equidistant, in the dark, and felt the thing I'd been maintaining since February finally fracture clean in half.