I’ll Become the Sea (11 page)

“Are you cold?”

“No.”

“Take this.” He unzipped his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. The fabric was warm from his body and smelled like him.

“There.” He pulled it partially closed and looked up into her face. His hand stopped for an instant at her chest, his fingers still closed around the zipper.

She held his gaze, willing her mind to go blank. She couldn’t let him read what must be plain to see there. The knuckles of his hand were warm against her breastbone. She resisted the urge to lean into them. She shut her eyes and pulled away instead.

“Thank you.”

The air by the water was clean, threaded with salt and the smell of the briny foam scattered over the shoreline. She took it in, deep breaths of it, trying to clear her mind. To simply enjoy David’s presence beside her. To make herself accept it, to not ask for more.

“Jane.”

She gave him what she hoped was a neutral smile. “Hmm?”

“I wish you didn’t feel like you had to be perfect.” His voice was quiet. She felt him watching her.

“It’s not the worst thing in the world.”

“Maybe not.”

Beside them, waves rolled in against the shore and rolled out again.

“It’s a hard way to live, though.”

“It makes me try to be a good person.”

“You are a good person. You don’t have to try.”

“Thanks, pal.”

“I’m serious, Jane. People should love you for who you are, not for the function you serve for them.”

“Maybe so. But they don’t, really, do they?”

“They should.”

“I guess.”

“You think you serve any particular kind of use for me?”

“No, actually. If anything I’m a huge pain in the ass.”

“Why do I keep you around then?”

A ripple of warning ran up her spine. “I don’t know.”

He stood very still beside her and looked out to the ocean.

“I wonder how the water feels.” He dropped the shoes from his hand and padded across the sand as if he were taking a stroll across a field.

She watched as he waded in, not slowing, not flinching, letting the ocean swallow him up to the knees. She waited, and then she followed him into the waves. “David.”

He turned to her. The night sky lit up his face and she saw him, all of him: dark hair against tanned skin, eyes so piercingly blue they seemed to arrow straight through to the center of her.

It was time. She could see that. She didn’t know what she was going to do when he reached for her, but she knew she wouldn’t stop him.

He closed the distance between them, taking her hand and pulling her in deeper.

She let herself be drawn in. Her balance gave way in the moving water, in the sand shifting out from under her feet. She put her arms around him to anchor them. She let her head fall forward to press against the space below his throat.

“I keep you around,” he said, “because of the cookies.”

She smiled against his chest. He wrapped his arms around her.

The deep, rich scent of him flooded into her. It broke something inside her. She gathered the soft fabric of his shirt in her hand and pulled him half an inch closer.

“What are we doing?” Her voice was low, almost a whisper.

He ran his hand up her spine to her shoulder. He spoke into the nape of her neck. “We’re doing what we both want to do.”

He slid his hand into her hair. An uncontrolled sound tore from her throat.

His body was tight and rigid against hers. Waiting. Ready for her. She shuddered, her hands moving to grasp the rough outside seams of his jeans. She took his hips in her hands and pressed him closer. All around them, black waves lapped against the shore.

He grazed his mouth over hers with a gentleness that bordered on violence. She tasted the exhalation of his breath. The intimacy of that made her legs tremble. He tightened his fingers around the hair at the back of her neck, pulling her closer. It had taken too long. They had waited too long. She was desperate for him, and terrified.

He ran his tongue over her lower lip, and she gasped, arching involuntarily against him. He slipped his thigh between her knees, opening them, pressing her body down against the length of muscle in his leg. The force of his hold on her, the rawness, ripped away their balance. They lost their footing in the water.

They were deeper than she’d realized. The first shock of cold barely had time to register before they were caught in the crash of a wave that drenched them both. He took her by the waist, dragging her to her knees, hauling her against him. He kissed her as the undertow wrenched the sand out from under them. He kissed her like they were already drowning.

It was too fast for her to think, to react; too intense for her to stop even if she wanted to. He rushed against her like waves breaking through a dam.

He lifted her to his hips. She wrapped her legs around him. He was hard and she moaned into his mouth, clinging to him, pressing her body into his. He thrust his hands inside the back of her shirt, raking them over her skin.

She tasted the salt and heat on his lips, drinking him in. Feeling his pulse racing under her fingertips. She tried to stop herself from shaking, but the scent of him, the flavor of his skin, devastated her. He lowered his mouth to her throat, licking her there, biting the curve of her neck. She arched her back, driving her hips against him.

“David…”

He brought his hand around to the front of her, under her shirt, pushing aside her bra to find her nipples, wet and taut under his fingers. The sound she made when he touched her was barely human.

She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. She’d had no idea it would be like this.

She pushed him away, harder than she’d meant to. She dropped down to the sand, stumbling in the water, tripping as she backed away. She almost fell, and he reached for her.

“No!” Her voice was unnaturally loud in the still night. “I can’t do this.”

She sounded like a child, and she knew it, but she couldn’t think clearly enough to fix it. She only knew she had to get away.

He walked toward her as she backed out of the water, but she held up a hand to stop him.

“No.” She clenched her fists to make her voice stop shaking. “I can’t do it.”

“Jane!”

She stopped, stunned. She didn’t think she’d ever heard him angry.

“You can’t keep running away from this.”

She shook away the tears that sprang to her eyes, the fear.

“I’m sorry.”

She slipped into the darkness.

There is no undoing what I have just done.

My jeans are still wet. The knees and shins scatter sand onto the floor. I hold my breath, hoping that the stillness will stop me from thinking.

I take off my clothes. The skin on my throat is sore from the friction of David’s beard. I swallow, pulling back the covers on the bed, and lie down.

I feel myself standing on the precipice of a great fissure. I feel its pull, like vertigo. The treacherous desire for total collapse. To fall and never get back up. To go where nothing else will ever be expected of me again.

I watched my mother give in to this, staying in bed, not showering, turning the TV to talk shows and then soap operas and then infomercials, into the night and into the next day, and the next. I watched her let herself unravel. Meanwhile I continued to go to school, to clean, to cook the food that she would pick at, leaving her plates on the floor.

I would climb into bed with her some nights, holding her hand, trying to pull her back into the world. But the smell—I remember the smell of that bedroom. The stale must of the air around her. It made me sick. It made me want to open every window in the house. It made me want to run.

I hated her then. I hated every doily and trinket in our house. I hated the sickness, the inertia, the stupidity. I hated all of it.

Waiting for the school bus in the morning, I plotted ways to leave. I had a little money saved. I could pay for a bus ticket somewhere. I could hitch a ride. I could sue for emancipation. I could go live with Sarah.

But every day I would return home. I’d walk into the house and the guilt would hobble me. She would never be safe if I left. She would never survive.

Lying at night in my bed beneath the window, I would stare up at the swaying trees, at the wind sifting through the dry leaves. I would feel the hollow heat begin to open inside my chest. And I would hold my breath until it passed. I would will myself to sleep. I couldn’t leave, but I couldn’t stay. So I did neither. And I did both. I thought I could go on that way forever, but I can’t.

I get out of bed.

*  *  *

“Ben, I need to talk to you.”

“I’m in the middle of editing. Can it wait?”

“No. I’m sorry, it can’t wait.”

He sighs. “All right. Give me a minute.”

I listen to the shuffle of papers, the sound of footsteps walking across the floor. I picture him before my call has interrupted him, surrounded by monitors and machines, lost in the hum and flow of his work. I know he is rarely happier than at this point in a project. Watching all his footage, envisioning the final piece.

He let me see him like this, once. He was finishing a film he’d been working on for a year. I didn’t know why he invited me to the studio. I hoped it meant he was letting me in, including me in this part of his life which he usually kept separate. He was buried deep in the last moments of the film and burning alive with it. I saw for the first time his intensity, his passion. He was at the height of who he was then.

I understood something that day. Something I think he meant me to understand. He would never look at me that intently; in my presence he would never be engaged to that degree. I loved him desperately in that moment and my love felt desperately impotent, batting itself against a door I would never be invited into.

I tell myself this gives me just cause for doing what I did. But I know that Ben would never have kissed another woman like I kissed David. No matter how unhappy he was with me.

No. Instead, he would let our relationship cool and fade, little by little over the course of years, and do nothing. He would throw himself deeper into his work. He would put me aside like a troublesome child, ignoring my bad behavior in the full confidence of extinguishing it. He would make me gradually cease to exist.

He comes back to the phone. “Everything okay?”

“No.”

I hear him pause. “What’s wrong?”

“When are you coming home?”

He blows out a breath. “Do we have to do this now? Another two months, probably. At least that.”

I stare at the pale yellow wall across from my chair. Once, moving a heavy table on my own in a fit of rearranging, I hit a corner against that wall. A small circle of plaster chipped off, leaving an indentation like an old vaccine scar. My eyes trace its uneven circumference as I hold the phone in my hand. I want to speak, but I cannot. I’m afraid of what I might say. He doesn’t care when he is coming home, or if.

“Is there something wrong?” he says. “Did something happen again?”

Again.

“Fuck you.” I stand up from the chair.

“What?”

I grab my keys from the kitchen counter and a jacket from the closet and head for the door. “I can’t do this.
This
is what I can’t do.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about you moving to Los Angeles. I’m talking about the fact that that is where you live now. That you have no intention of coming back. I’m talking about you putting a ring on my finger just to shut me up.”

I am moving down the street now. I don’t know where. A dam has broken, a door has been knocked down. I can’t contain the words.

“You don’t want me, Ben. You want a fraction of me. You want to build a fence around the rest. And I can’t even blame you for that because it’s exactly what I asked you to do. It’s what I wanted you to do. To keep me from feeling too much or wanting too much or being too much.”

“Did something happen? What happened?”

“You want to know what happened? I loved you. For six years I’ve loved you.”

“I love you too.”

“No, you don’t.”

“What are you talking about? Of course I do. You sound like a lunatic.”

“No, actually I feel quite sane for once in my life.”

“Calm down. Take a breath and tell me what is going on.”

“I’m breaking up with you. That’s what is going on. I’m putting a stop to this.”

I have reached the boardwalk and climbed the stairs, stalking over the boards and down the path to the sand on the other side. When the ground shifts beneath my feet, I push forward to the edge of the water, to where the tide is coming in.

“Ben.”

He doesn’t answer.

“Why aren’t you here?”

A trio of seagulls separates and rises into the evening sky, crying. I watch them go. The sound of the water brings the feeling back to my body. I understand that soon the pain will come, that the numbness part of this is now over.

“Look, Jane, I’m not going to do this with you. If you’re stupid enough to end this relationship, let’s just end it, okay? Let’s not drag each other through the mud first.”

“What are you doing? Taking the high road?” I lie down in the sand, closing my eyes against the bright blue sky.

“It’s not that hard finding a road higher than the one you’re on right now.”

“How can you be so fucking…sensible?”

“What is wrong with that?”

“You’re about to lose your fiancée. The person who was supposed to be your wife. You could put up a fight.”

“What for? For the drama?”

Beside me, so close to my face that I can feel the spray, waves break and recede against the sand. I listen to them. I try to imagine my body aloft on them, away from the place where I lie, far from the sound of my own voice.

“What for?” I say.

“Don’t expect me to beg you and don’t expect me to make it easier on you by talking about it. You’re the one doing this. You live with it.”

I hear the line go dead and let the phone fall.