"Oh Lord," she murmured. "Add that to your pillow embroidery list, honey."
I thought about her words for a minute. She was deflecting, but that was okay. This stuff was intense, and she was the one carrying most of the weight. So then I raked my scruffy chin over her belly until she was screaming with laughter and twisting away from me.
"Get your ass back here," I called.
"You're gonna have to catch me first," she cried.
I wrapped my arm around her thighs and dragged her back to the center of the bed. I pinned her down and teased every ticklish point on her body. There were many. She went right on yelping and giggling while tears streamed down her cheeks. I didn't know whether it was the wiggling or the laughter or the simple pleasure of touching her naked body, but I was absurdly aroused and I wanted her to know that. Straddling her waist, I brought her hand to my cock.
"Caught you," I said.
Erin shook her head as she stroked me. "Oh no," she said. "I caught you."
Chapter Twenty
Erin
It wasn't effortless,this long distance marriage thing, but we were making it work in our own bubble-gum-and-duct-tape way. Every five or six weeks, Nick flew to Iceland and we spent incredible, over-too-quick weekends together that invariably included minor injuries in co-showering. Even if I did wind up with a black eye from one particularly catastrophic body wash incident—yeah, Nick lost all of his chill over that one—I couldn't get enough of our temporary little reality.
I shopped for soft new bed sheets and picked up his favorite beer whenever I saw it in the local grocery. I drew complex countdowns to our next time together in my notebook and gleaned an obscene amount of joy from marking each day off. I locked myself in the lab on the days when his surgical schedule prevented us from video chatting, and plowed through work at a pace my advisors at Oxford couldn't believe. I explained that I was motivated to report on my findings, and while that was true, I was also starved for time with my husband.
After Nick's first handful of visits, we found time to leave my apartment and see Reykjavík. We explored the restaurant scene—Iceland was much more than salted fish, by the way—and leveraged the endless sunlight of summer in the Arctic to check in with the area's population of elves. We did not find any, but Nick did get a midnight blowjob on a glacier to celebrate our first year of marriage. We were all about seizing those once-in-a-lifetime moments.
Nick always came bearing goodies from the States. First it was cookie dough, and I've been parceling it out in spoonfuls ever since. After that, he brought four UT-Austin t-shirts. They were straight from his personal stock, and smelled exactly like him. If I ever showed up to one of our video chats wearing his shirts, I could be certain that chat would end with the t-shirt off. But it was still awkward. I hadn't outgrown that yet.
Later, Nick came armed with news that Sam had returned to Boston after his months-long sabbatical in Maine, and he'd also reconciled with his girlfriend, Tiel. Crisis averted.
But then Shannon was "struggling," and when pressed for details, Nick turned that one around on me and recommended that I inquire personally. No, of course I didn't do that.
Nick would say I was inventing ways out of a conversation with Shannon. He was right about that, but not all the way. For years after leaving home, avoiding Shannon—and everyone else—had been my superpower, and I wore it like a merit badge. It served me well. It allowed me to engage to the degree that was comfortable for me. It gave me the space to work through all—um, most?—of my issues. But it also wore the ties between me and my siblings down to threads, and my muscles didn't remember how to reach out anymore.
I wanted to, even if I was known to argue otherwise. I wanted to make sure she was all right, and I wanted to stop fighting. I wanted to be able to sayyeswhen Nick pushed me to visit Boston. I wanted to confide in her about Nick, and I wanted her to promise that I was capable of giving him even a fraction of the love he gave me. I needed to know that it was possible, that the abuse we'd endured as children hadn't ruined me forever, and she was the only one who could tell me that.
The problem was that I was certain Shannon wanted nothing to do with me. In all these years, she'd never attempted to contact me. She didn't even want to make eye contact with me at Matt and Lauren's wedding. Yes, I'd said the worst things my silly teenage mind could conjure to her, and then slammed every real and metaphorical door in her face years ago. But those things had never stopped her before, and I couldn't interpret her silence as anything other than apathy.
So, I did the only thing that made sense. I sent her some rocks. I scoured my collections for a rough amethyst geode and some obsidian that I'd found here in Iceland. My business card, the one Oxford had printed up with a spiffy logo and eight different ways to contact me, might've fallen into the box, too.
Amethyst and obsidian weren't the same as a phone call, but they were the best I could offer.
The issues weren't exclusive to Shannon and Sam. Most recently, Riley was still in love with Lauren, and he was making more off-hand remarks about his affections than fully advisable in mixed company. Nick had chuckled while he recounted a Friday dinner at Patrick and Andy's apartment—she'd taken up the tradition of hosting a Shabbat supper for my lapsed Catholic siblings, and that was spectacularly amusing—where Riley asked Lauren when she'd be leaving Matt for him. No one read Riley's question with any degree of seriousness, and Lauren laughed it off as if it was another case of him busting Matt's balls.
My siblings, they were good people. Some of the best people, actually. But sometimes, even the best people didn't notice what was right in front of them.
* * *
To: Erin Walsh
From: Nick Acevedo
Date: November 4
Subject: Don't kill me
Hi, Skip,
I was at Patrick and Andy's place for dinner last night, and Shannon was there. I hadn't seen her recently, and I don't know how to explain it other than to say she seemed off. Really, really off. Even worse than she was over the summer.
Call her. Email her. Send her another rock. Anything. It's been too long.
