10. That Peach Worth It Though #5
"I love you too." She said it against my mouth, thumbs still working under my eyes, still wiping, still holding my whole face together. "Always have. Always will."
"That night." I had to stop and get my breath.
"I didn't mean for it to go like that. I just needed you.
Pushed too hard, I know I did, my adrenaline was up, but he was gon' hurt you and all I could think was get her to me.
Couldn't watch him take another piece off you.
Couldn't do it no more, not one more time, not when I been standing here the whole time with everything you deserve just sitting in my hands. "
"It's over." She was sobbing now. "It's just me and you."
"Me and you." I let it land as I nodded in understanding. Let myself have it.
"Yeah. Forever."
"Forever."
Man in my line of work don't hear a word like that without reading what's under it.
Seven years I'd been offered a partnership in everything but name: friend, confidante, emergency contact.
Every seat at the table but the one I wanted, and I sat in whatever chair she pulled out because I'd rather have a bad seat at her table than a good one anywhere else.
That's over.
I take this, I take all of it. The migraines, the hard head, the way she curls under me during a storm.
Miss Lorna. Her whole complicated past with a man I'd rather not think about right now.
All of it comes with. You don't get to order off the menu with somebody you love. You eat what the kitchen sends.
And she takes mine. The hours. The obsession. The thing in me that goes still and cold when a man raises his voice around her. Everything I am, including the parts that scared her the first time she saw them.
Even trade. Signed in salt water.
"Don't cry, Dillion." She said it soft, after a while.
"I ain't crying." I sniffed, which did not help my case at all. "That's the ocean."
She picked her head up off my shoulder looked at me a long second, and put her thumb under my eye anyway.
"Okay, Dilly Duck." She chuckled. "That's the ocean."
"Salt water's been on my face all morning."
"Right…"
"That's my story and I'm sticking to it."
"Mm hmm." She kissed the corner of my mouth. "Salty ocean. Coming out one eye at a time."
"That's right."
I moved the shoulder she was leaning on to signal her to look at me, I searched her face for any discomfort. I didn't see an ounce of it but, I didn't want to push it.
"I gotta get you back to the house. We'll shower, lay down for a little bit." I said.
"I'm good right here." she said and kissed my neck. "Let's stay a little longer, please?"
"If you start feeling nauseous —"
She ignored me and put her head back on my shoulder, my soaked blue and white stripped shirt and started humming.
Took me a second to catch it. She was humming that same record, Cry Together, out here in all this water, with no radio and no house and no way on God's earth for her to have known.
Maybe she caught it when we went under. I didn't ask her.
Some things you don't put your hands on.
You just let them be what they are and know it's something bigger than you at play.
So we stayed just like that, joined and floating. Her face in my throat. My hand cradling the back of her head the way you hold something that you don't fully believe is yours yet. I could feel her heart going against my chest. Eventually, they synced and she exhaled.
The gulls worked the shallows. The tide pushed us a little further down the beach and neither of us corrected it.
Somewhere behind me was a house with my family's name in the deed and a kitchen I'd cooked in every summer since my Grand Daddy bought this place and a woman's things still in the guest room I'd have to move to my room before the day got old. All of it mine to steward.
She hummed the second verse. Got the low part wrong. Kept going anyway.
écoute-moi bien.Listen to me.
I didn't actually say it out loud. I said it into her wet hair with my mouth barely moving, the way you talk to something asleep.
Je t'ai attendue sept ans. Je t'attendrais encore.I waited seven years for you. I'd wait again.
She didn't hear it. Wasn't meant to.
I looked up past her shoulder at that wide gold sky and I thought about a boy in a county lockup in Roena County with a busted lip and no visitors on a Sunday, and I wished I could reach back through twenty years and put my hand on the back of his neck and tell him.
Not about the star. Not about Paris. Not about the tattoos or the restaurant or the magazine cover.
Just this. Just: these hands ain't done yet, boy.
They gon' do worse before they do better.
But hold on anyway.
Because one day a woman who knows every ugly thing these hands ever did is gon' lay her face down in them and go to sleep in the middle of the ocean, because you're the safest place she's ever been.
Same hands.
That's the part nobody's gon' believe. Same exact hands.
Looked at the sky again, squinted at the sun and then kissed the top of my girls head.
"Merci."Thank you.
To her. To God. To my granddaddy.
To whoever was listening.