We’re slick now, with sweat and with his release gliding where we’re joined.
I slide off him, feeling like I’m floating as I roll onto my back next to him.
I turn toward him, checking to make sure he’s okay.
Clint’s eyes are closed, his breathing heavy. But he senses me looking.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
He nods. Then he reaches up, brushing hair from my cheek. And he kisses me. So tenderly I could cry.
So I do.
Chapter Seven
He’s worried, at first. But I tell him I’m okay. I just need to cry for the loss of the life I thought I had. The unexpected beauty of what we just did.
Once he knows this is what I need, he holds me close, not trying to stop me, only brushing the hair from my cheek and stroking my back, and after a while, pulling a sheet up over us and holding me some more.
When I finally wind down, I feel like a new person. Cleaned, from the inside out.
Using the notebook, we talk for a while. I learn he has a cat named Barbara, who came out of nowhere and lives mostly on the porch but comes in for snuggles at night.
“Barbara?” I laugh.
She was the woman who owned the hotel, he tells me, who wrote his father’s contract into the sale of the island and buildings, and let him stay on after his father passed. Her daughter owns the place but has been quietly talking about selling. Which, he admits, scares the shit out of him, because he might have to leave. If he did, he says he’d move to the mountains.
Anything to be away from people.
I feel my heart pull at how similar we are.
I tell him I was raised by a socialite mother who wanted me to do all the things with all the people, when all I wanted to do was read books. I told him how my dad would take me out on his boats—he’d gone from a poor fisherman to owning a shipping business that did relatively well.
“After he paid our bills, he gave all his money to his mother. She’d raised him as a single mom on the poverty line in England, and he wanted to pay her back. She never spent it, we learned later. She saved all the money for me, her only grandchild, with the stipulation that I get it when I find the love she lost, when her husband died at sea shortly after Dad was born.”
I shrug. “Or at forty. She didn’t want to entirely dictate my future.”
Clint runs a finger up and down my arm, his expression filled with something I can’t name.
Talking about love with this man I don’t know—it feels like something I can’t name, either. Not wrong, but unknown. Special, somehow.
Clint tells me how he goes to town once a month for supplies, early on a weekday morning to avoid seeing people. He has one friend, Mac, who runs the beach bar on the mainland. He visits once a month, bringing him beer and books and conversation.
I don’t know how long we talk for, but it feels so natural and so easy. We come together again, and this time, I show him more of myself. I teach him, and he learns. And I turn to jelly, laughing at how easy this is too.
I don’t realize we’ve fallen asleep until a loud banging wakes me up. I startle, blinking, and look at the clock on the wall.
It was probably around ten-thirty when we got here. It’s one now.
My wedding is supposed to start in half an hour. The boat with all the guests should be arriving…now.
My stomach bottoms out as I hear my name.
“Maggie!”
It’s Jeff. Of course it’s Jeff.
I get up, extricating myself from Clint, who blinks to wakefulness, then sits up when he sees the panic on my face. “Jeff’s here. I have to go.”
