Just got home. Will you come?
“Jack?” she asks.
I nod.
“Go.”
“I can’t. What if Anne comes back?”
“She won’t,” Margo says softly. “If she’s with Billy, he’ll calm her, though how anyone covered with tattoos can be calming,” she mutters, “is a mystery. Go, Mal. If she comes back tonight, I’m here. I’m in charge. Joy will sleep with me.”
Again, I think of all they haven’t asked. “But what she said—”
“—can wait,” Margo cuts in, both commanding and gentle.
Leaning forward, I hug her, then put a hand to Joy’s face. She’s always such a talker that her silence unsettles me. When I draw back with the question in my eyes, she simply says, “Go, Mom.”
I’m not sure she’s okay. But Margo is already reaching for her, and right now, there’s no one I’d trust more.
Leaving the bed, I step into flip-flops, pull on my sweatshirt, and lifting its hood, run down the stairs.
With each step on the bluff stairs, each loping stride across the sand, everything else falls away. All I can think of is running through the rain to get to where I need to be.
He is tall and solid as he holds open the back screen. His hair is a mess, though whether from shower or rain I neither know nor care. The rest of him is gray—gray eyes, gray sweats, gray tank—and the irony of that? Despite those bits of gray in my life that I hate, he is everything I want.
Those gray eyes hunger. He is pleased that I’m here. One look at my face, though, and he sobers. Drawing me inside, he lowers my hood and pushes his fingers into my hair until they cradle my scalp. “What happened.” It isn’t so much a question as a statement of dread.
Being here with him after an eternity without is such a relief that I find strength. I don’t speak, simply rise on tiptoe, wrap my arms around his neck, and hold tight. He smells of warmth and soap, distantly of beer, mostly of Jack.
I hear a whimper and feel a wet nose on my thigh.Guy.
Ignoring the dog, Jack holds our heads inches apart. “Tell me.”
My mind dredges up single words from the debacle on the dock—ugly, gun, broken, gone—but only one thought is a phrase. “Make me forget?” I beg. He said sex did that for him, and I want it now.
Guy whines.
Ignoring him, Jack lowers his head to mine. I feel his face in my hair, his breath against it. “Talk first,” he insists.
But I can’t. The restraint I’ve perfected in years of raising Joy is gone. Angling back, I frame his face and stare into those eyes.“Make. Me. Forget.” Pulling his head down, I kiss him the way he kissed me yesterday in nearly this very same place.
Reality is slow to return. I fight it for everything I’m worth, wanting to stay forever first on the kitchen counter, then against the stairwell wall, then in Jack’s boyhood bed which, true to his word, is just as it was when we were last here. What we do now, though, is very different from then. Back then, Jack was in charge. More sexually adept than me, he taught me what to do. And it’s not that I’ve become the expert since I left, just that my need for him is an adult need and greater than ever before.
I demand, initiate,take.
That is the first time, the one in the kitchen, all the fiercer after the seconds it takes for Jack to race up, shut Guy in the master bedroom, and race down. The time on the stairs is Jack’s answer to me, typically precarious with his feet, an elbow, and my bottom all on different treads. And the third? In his bed? Slow and sleepy and sexy. It is what we have never, ever done.
The hair on his chest is damp under my cheek, his heartbeat still a rapidka-thump ka-thumpwhen he turns us so that we’re face-to-face. I can see him in the dim light of the bedside lamp—his mussed hair, flushed cheeks, the way he sucks in a breath when I spread my fingers over his belly. He wants me again, quite clearly. But there’s something else in him now, another change with age. We used to communicate about everything except sex. We were too young for that. Sex was sex and, frenzied as it was, untouchable with words. No more.
“Where did you learn all that?” he asks in a thick voice.
“You.”
“You never—”
I stop the thought with my fingertips. “Just you.”
He lets that stand for a minute, our heads sharing the pillow,his eyes holding mine. Then he circles my back to cinch me in. His voice vibrating against my cheek. “Tell me what happened tonight.”
