But I only want one thing now.
I used to think I wasn’t any good at love. I used to think I was broken, missing some vital organ. But it wasn’t that. I was just in the wrong place. Wrong time.
My lips brush his in answer: I’m not going anywhere. I won’t leave him again. He shifts slightly, and I feel the hardness of him. I press my hands against his chest, raising myself over top of him, and letting him ease back inside me.
Last night wasn’t enough.
His eyes spear through me, his fingers count my rib bones up to my breasts, a shudder falling from his lips—like he’s thought about this countless times, touching my flesh, moving against me with each exhale.
As my core tightens around him and I feel myself unspooling, I fear that it won’t ever be enough. Whatever this is, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever known. Being with James was never like this. Not even close.
Whatever this is, it feels fated.
Primal and inevitable.
Like he said before, I’m the only other person to ever step foot on the island. Maybe I would always find my way back here. Maybe this house, this bed, his mouth against the swollen tip of my breast—rain streaming against the windows, sunlight making crosshatch patterns through the trees, streaking across the bedsheet and over his chest—is the home I have spent a lifetime searching for.
I wake in his arms each morning.
Our naked bodies wound together, the shell of my ear pressed to the hard muscle of his chest, listening to his heart beat out of time. Blood through veins, keeping him alive. This anomaly of a man.
When he sleeps, in the coldest part of night, he often reaches for me, hands that long for my flesh, planting kisses on my collarbone, my neck, with his eyes closed.
But sometimes I worry he’s thinking of his wife. I wonder if it’s her he’s reaching for. Clawing at the hard soil, trying to pull her up.
This thought could untether me, so I keep it tamped down. Just out of sight.
One afternoon, I remove James’s ring and hold it in my palm. The gold band, the diamond still shimmering bright—like a beacon, a warning, an eye watching me.
I open the bedside drawer and tuck it in the far back, among the dust.
James won’t know I have taken it off. He won’t know what it means.
He won’t know what I’ve done.
With another man.
I close the drawer, exhaling.
Piece by piece, I let my old life go. I forget who I used to be.
Four months pass, then five, the days skittering by like thin-legged insects, uncounted, unnoticed.
Clay and I work together in the garden, knees in the damp soil, sun against our necks. During the day, we let the sheep wander the island yanking up the fresh grass, and sometimes I feel Clay watching me. Sometimes his hand slides along my calf, beneath the linen skirt I wear on days when it’s warm. And I pull him to me, craving him. My hair tangles in the dirt as he makes a map with his mouth up my thigh, slides his fingers beneath my underwear, spreading me open, and whispers, “I imagined kissing ye like this fer so long. Imagined what ye might feel like.” And we make love in the garden, beneath the sun, our cries carried out on the wind where no one will hear.
It’s only us, and the loyal sea, who will never tell a soul what we’ve done.
It feels undeserved. This stolen, pilfered time. This quiet. This man’s hands.
I watch him from the kitchen. He is shirtless, using a heavy iron plow to dig a new plot of land where we’ll plant more cabbage and kale, enough to feed the two of us, and the sight of him—sunlight and muscle and grit—unsteadies something deep inside me. He’s mercilessly, unbearably handsome. In a quiet, ruinous kind of way. If I had met him in the real world, at some corner bookshop in Seattle, I never would have spoken to him. A man like that would have seemed too imposing, elusive—a man meant for wild lands and distant seas, too unpredictable, too dangerous for someone like me. But I had chosen predictable back in Seattle, with James, and it made me edgy, anxious, trapped in a life that was choking me to death.
Clay wipes the sweat from his forehead, glances out at the great swell of the ocean, and I think of walking out there, pulling him down to the newly tilled soil and making love to him under the afternoon sun, our bodies shimmering in the waves of heat. He wouldn’t stop me; he’d lay his mouth on mine with the same greed. But some part of me doesn’t want to break the slow fragileness of the moment, watching him like this, time dulled but also somehow pinwheeling out of control. Like I know these afternoons can’t last forever. The sea is too unforgiving. Time is too ruthless and underhanded.
Something will change.
It always does.
Clay wades into the water up to his shins, using a rake to sweep up the long, algae-coated tendrils, then plops them in a bucket, which I carry up the rocks to the sandy bank. We’ll fertilize the garden with seaweed and brown kelp we dredge up from the shoreline. We will dry some onmetal screens, cook it over a fire, then boil it down to extract the salt. We work in silence; the heat and labor of it makes it too hard to talk.
