I love this more.
“What’re ye thinking about?”
“How I wouldn’t trade this for anything.”
His hand travels up my spine, to the base of my neck, fingers in my hair. “Aye.”
I settle onto my back, listening to the soft, easy sway of the sea against the rocks below. “Tell me again about the green flash.”
“Mmm,” he mumbles as I sink into his arms. “For centuries, sailors have claimed to see a green flash just as the last of the light is fadin’ from the sky. A spark of green at the horizon. Might only be a tall tale, or might be true.”
“But you’ve never seen it?”
“Nae, not yet.”
He’s told me all this before, but I like to see the hope in his eyes, I like to imagine the horizon shivering a soft hue of green just before the dark takes hold.
His fingers coil around my necklace, tracing the shell he gave me all those months ago.
It feels like a promise. He is mine and I am his. For as long as this lasts.
And I hope it lasts longer than time itself.
“We’re drifting south,” Clay says. “Closer to the equator.”
“Have you been this far before?”
“Hard to say.”
The days feel languid in the heat, making us slow, lazy. My skin tans from the sun, beating over the island, and most afternoons I wear only a thin cotton dress that I shortened using a pair of heavy scissors I found in the kitchen. Sometimes we retreat inside during the hottest part of the day, lounging in the shade of the porch. I make ginger ale—made from fresh ginger root and a squeeze of lemon from our only lemon tree in the greenhouse, set to steep in the sun. Clay gulps it down, asking for it every afternoon.
Sometimes I lie naked on the rocks, soaking up the warmth—feeling like I’m on a weekend vacation in Mexico or Bali, imagining a waiter coming to ask for my margarita order.
“Ye dinnae make it easy on me,” Clay says with a smirk one afternoon as I stroll up the dirt path toward the house, a shawl pulled over my shoulders. “Wearing nothing an’ expecting me to keep working.”
I give him a sidelong look, teasing—daring him to do something about it—and he follows me back to the house.
We find a comfortable pace to our daily life. Waking each morning just before sunrise, Clay gathering our blankets from the shore while I go inside the house to make tea.
I count my cycle, measuring the days alongside the patterns of the moon. I can’t be sure if time can be trusted, but I calculate the days whenI could get pregnant, doing my best to avoid them. I find a rhythm, a steadiness in my body that I never knew before. Like I can hear my own heartbeat, feel the blood through my veins. An intuition that’s hard to explain.
In the evening, I read to Clay on the front porch. Most of the books on the wood shelf in the living room are about gardening, raising sheep, repairing a thatched roof. But I retrieve the book from the bedside table:The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns.
I read him old Scottish poems with my legs propped in his lap while he rubs the soles of my feet, easing the tension from the day. He smiles when I fail to apply the correct Scottish swing to my voice, and I poke him in the ribs for laughing at me.
When our eyes sag with exhaustion, we carry our blankets back down to the bluff, spread them out in the grass—where a soft wind curls up from the sea, cooling our flesh—and we make love beneath the stars, before drifting into sleep.
And it all starts to feel too good to be true, too easy, too comfortable.
“It hasn’t rained in nearly a week,” Clay says, standing between the rows of bean shoots and cabbage.
The sky has been an endless anemic blue for days, and even the water along the shore has turned aquamarine. A warmth to it like bathwater. We must be getting closer to the Caribbean.
“If it doesn’t rain soon, we’ll lose our crops.”
We carry buckets of fresh water from the house down to the garden, pouring them one by one onto the parched soil. But the basin of rainwater in the cellar won’t last forever—either we will die of dehydration, or the garden will.
Hauling buckets down from the house is hard work, making us sweat—making us even more thirsty—our backs and shouldersthrobbing. And it hardly gives the plants enough to survive. We can’t keep on like this.
