“And your bra,” he says. “Take it off.”
The music has changed. The singer chants an impatient bridge, punctuated by a pop-slide in an eerie minor key as the bra straps stutter down my arms. The chorus rises, driving and sensual, a low hum of synthesized bass guitar buzzing underneath the melody. A breath of night-chilled air drifts over my breasts, crinkling the tips, tightening my skin.
A slow smile creeps across his lips when he sees the hoop in my left nipple. He rises and strips to his boxers. And this time he doesn’t have to speak. I shimmy out of my skirt and sit with my knees pressed together, shivering, untethered, enduring his long visual exploration. His face is half-hidden, divided down the center by shadow and light.
Now look at you...look at you....
I let him ease my thighs apart. His gaze falls, locked between my legs. A groan rumbles in his chest when he sees the tattoo low on my abdomen, just above the smooth mound of my pubis: ~ Make it hurt ~ He passes a thumb over the letters, then dips again into the slippery heat between my legs, his fingertips circling, deepening, nudging at my cunt. He kisses the tip of my breast and flicks the silver hoop with his tongue.
“What are you about, hmm?” he says, and sucks my nipple into his mouth. The metal ring clicks against his teeth.
But I can’t answer. I arch my back and turn my face aside. A coil of desire constricts at the base of my belly.
He eases me back, lays a chain of kisses around my breast, down my ribs, into the shallow dip beside my pelvic bone and finally to the liquid heat between my legs.
Our floating room begins to spin. I am strangely disembodied, as though all my senses, all my pain and pleasure and naked want, are concentrated under the warmth of his mouth. I claw at the blankets and bunch them in my fists. But when I sink my fingers into his hair, he catches my wrists and pins them at my sides, muttering under his breath, his teeth grazing my clitoris. With the anchor of his mouth to hold me in place, I wind around him like a tetherball on a rope, in dizzying spirals that lift me to his mouth.
“Come on, baby,” he says. “Right now...”
His voice vibrates against me, and in the last moment it is his breath, the lightest touch of cold and heat, that topples me. I leap under his mouth, my wrists still pinned to the bed, my cries sailing into the night. He follows me, groaning with pride and dark male glee. His tongue flattens over me, dips inside me, drinks me in so thoroughly that I soar up again, simply from the idea of being consumed this way.
As the room spins to a halt, I realize my eyelashes are wet with tears.
Jack kneels between my knees and rolls on a condom. The light skims across his body, painting long, striped shadows in the grooves of his abdomen. He slides inside me without a word, without preamble, driving his hips forward, pulling me to him with one hand splayed against the small of my back. A breath snags in my throat at the size of him.
He stops, the muscle in his jaw flexed and quivering.
“Jesus,” he says. “So fucking tight. Be still.”
After a moment, he begins to move, his hips rolling to the undercurrent of music and the elemental motion of the water beneath us. I wrap my legs around his narrow waist and pull him closer. We fall into a deep, slow rhythm. Each gliding thrust is an incantation in a language I don’t understand. My whole body strains, listening. And from the back of my mind, from some small and lonesome and untouchable place, I seem to hear my own voice chanting in time.
I want to go home, I want to go home.
* * *
It rains again that night. Jack turns off the music so we can listen to the drops on the roof and the surface of the ocean. The sound forms a soft cocoon around us, a background noise to the steady thrum of his heartbeat under my ear.
“Tell me a secret.” His voice rumbles as if from the inside of a bass drum. “Something no one else knows.”
“I like to keep my secrets,” I tell him.
He slips out from under me and raises himself up on one elbow. He pushes the covers aside and runs his hand down my body, brushes the tip of my breast with his knuckles.
“I can’t figure out if you know what you’re doing,” he says. “But you want to be careful with me. I’ll fucking eat you alive.”
He lowers his head to my breast. His mouth opens over my nipple, warm and demanding. His erection hardens like a newly forged sword against my thigh.
* * *
We stop at a café near the marina for breakfast. We are both starved, and devour plates of eggs and pancakes and large cups of coffee in silence, as though we’ve been lost at sea for days. Then we go across to the corner market, where we buy cigarettes and a pack of gum. And condoms, which Jack purchases without comment while I pretend to admire a rack of key chains.
He pulls up in front of my house and walks me to the door. I stand on the step and put my arms around him, press my lips to the stubbled underside of his jaw. He takes my face in his hands and kisses my cheeks and eyelids and the tip of my nose.
I don’t ask him inside.
I know he’ll call before the day is out. The phone rings four times. On the fifth ring, I pick it up.
“Baby,” he says. “What have we started?”
CHAPTER SIX
I have always liked cemeteries. There is a calmness about them, a purposeful tranquility. I like the names, carved in marble or set in brass, the dates still visible after a century or more. My favorite headstones are embellished with epitaphs written by the family left behind, which seem a humble and endearing attempt to sum up a life like the log line of an epic novel: The heart of man is restless until it finds its rest in Thee... Now twilight lets her curtain down and pins it with a star... Little Boy Blue has gone away.
One of the first things I bought when I received the advance on Zebra Crossing was a matched pair of gravestones for my mother and grandmother, to replace the cheap brass plaques that had been set in the ground to mark the places where their ashes had been interred. My mothers deserved proper headstones; they deserved to stand upright, not laid like pavement in the grass.
I have brought my scrub brush and thermos of soapy water. I kneel before my grandmother’s grave and scrub away the dirt and bits of moss that have accumulated in the crevices since last month. I pour water over the granite surface, watch it gather into tiny pools at the bottom of her name, then trickle away and disappear into the grass.
At the edge of my mother’s grave is a spider on a half-formed web. It’s a beautiful thing, pale gold, with long delicate legs and a slender body covered with fine hairs. I put my face down close, peer into its many glassy eyes. Its front legs pluck gently at the dew-jeweled threads. A single drop of water falls to the rung below and hangs there, clinging to the corner, where the cells of the web are joined by a tiny silken knot.
With the back of my scrub brush, I destroy the web and smash the spider into the grass. I pour water over the brush to clean away the bug’s remains, then more water over the headstone. When I am finished, I run my fingers through the carved letters, over the cold arc of granite and the carved stone rose at the center.
* * *
Later that night, Jack comes back for me. We head north, straight up the boulevard, past the tiny Vashon Theater crouching beige and humble on the left, and the much larger vine-covered brick yoga studio on the right, past the auto shop and the Episcopal church, until the town peters to an uncertain end and we leave it behind. After a few minutes, Jack turns onto a narrow dirt road fringed with pines, through which the Puget Sound shines in the twilight. He doesn’t stop until we’ve reached the empty mouth of a trailhead, where the moon sits like a pearl on a sheet of hammered pewter.
Below us is the beach my mother took me to about a month after Nana died. The weather was chaotic that day, blustering and weeping