Something Fierce (14 page)

“Let’s swing.” He hopped on one of them.

“Let’s not.”

“Because you know I can swing higher.”

“No. Because you look ridiculous and I don’t want to look ridiculous too.”

He started without her. “This is a good one!” He pumped higher and higher. “Unless you want to walk on the beach alone, you’ll look even more ridiculous standing there watching me.”

“You’re a dork.”

“People will think you’re babysitting your senile father.”

“You don’t look like my father.”

“You
so
want to swing!”

“I don’t,” she said, though it did look fun. She looked around. No one was paying much attention to them, but it was one of the few times they’d been in public together and it still felt weird. Like he wasn’t really hers yet, like they were only pretending to be a couple: Professor Hotness and one of the silly female students crushing on him. “What if we see someone from school?”

“It’s going to happen sooner or later,” he said, whipping past her on his way up and on his way down adding, “besides, you’re not my student anymore.” He was going very high now. “If you’re not swinging, then under-dunk me.”

She laughed. “I am definitely not pushing you.” Giving in, she dodged in front of him and grabbed the other swing. He was right. They were good swings. Well balanced on heavy chains with seats that were comfortable even to butts considerably bigger than the ones they were designed for.

They had the swings going as high as they would go and finally had to call it a tie. They slowed down, jumped off. Caught up in the spirit of things now, she followed him to the see-saw. It was fun. She challenged him to a race to the beach. Seth won that one easily and was doing a victory dance when she plowed into him at full speed and they both went to the ground, laughing. “You’re supposed to let the girl win,” she said, hitting him.

“Bullshit,” he said, rolling on top of her. “You’ll outrun me soon enough. I’m enjoying victory while I can.”

She kissed him there in the cold sand, then asked, “Remember when we were imagining if we had the power to stop time, what moments we’d choose?” He said that he did. “This is one of the moments I’d pick,” she said.

“This one right here?”

“Yes.”

He snapped his fingers. “Your wish is granted,” he said. “Time is stopped. We’re free to live right here as long as we want.”

“Then it looks like we are going to be here forever.”

“I don’t know. I’ll bet there’s a bunch more great moments up ahead.”

This scared her because that had never been the case in her life. Good times were always followed by bad ones. In fact, it seemed the more wonderful an experience was, the more she let herself enjoy it, the more she’d have to suffer later. It was as if there was a price to be paid for every bit of happiness. She didn’t want her mind to start running with this thought so she said, “Let’s go!”

“Where are we going?”

“The lighthouse,” she said, pointing it out at the end of the mile-long stretch of beach. They got to their feet. “Can we get up to it?”

“Sure. You have to walk along the jetty, which can be a little tricky, but it goes right up to it.”

“Can we go inside?”

“No. It’s all locked up.”

They slipped off their shoes, stuffed their socks inside them, rolled up their pants up to mid-shin and started walking. The sand felt good on her feet and though the water was so cold that it made her feet numb, she could not resist letting the tide splash over them. With shoes in one hand, they kept the other hand free for picking up beach glass that they searched for like treasure pieces among the tiny stones washed up by the tide.

The jetty was made up of huge, rectangular stones that looked like giant building blocks. Most of them were sideways and scurrying across them without falling was a task in itself. Once they reached the lighthouse, Seth had found an open window and started climbing through it.

“Seth, no!” she hissed, but he was already wiggling his way in.

He disappeared inside for an instant and then his face popped into view, looking down at her, quite proud of himself. “This is great,” he said. He reached down to her. “Come on in.”

She looked around. “No! We’ll get in trouble.”

“Only if we get caught.”

“There’s too many people,” she said, in a sort of stage whisper.

He poked his head out and looked around. “I don’t see anyone. Come on!”

She dropped her shoes next to his, took his hand and crawled inside. The place smelled old and musty but there was still something romantic about it and the next thing she knew, buttons were being unfastened and zippers undone. “It has to be a quickie,” she said.

“It can be,” he said, “but it doesn’t have to be. I haven’t turned time back on yet.”

When they were ready to head back to the parking lot, the sun was an orangish-red and seemed to be sitting right on the lake. They found a spot to watch it sink and emptied their pockets of beach glass which they spread between them. Kerri sat cross-legged on the sand and Seth leaned against a huge, gray log, scoured and polished from its time spent in the grip of Lake Erie. They fingered through the pieces of glass, mostly brown, green, and clear, worn smooth by untold years of churning in the lake, sandblasted to a frosty glaze. Garbage transformed by nature and time. There were three rare pieces: two blue and one red. Holding the red one up to the sky and appraising it like a jeweler, one eye open, the other closed, Kerri said, “I’m not ready for you to meet my father or Jimmy yet. I hardly talk to them myself. And the first meeting with my mother has to be a short one. We have to have an out in case she is in one of her moods.”

“Is she really that bad?”

“Trust me.”

“Great.”

“Are you nervous about meeting her?”

“Of course, but if we’re going to do this, then let’s do it.”

“Mr. Open and Honest.”

“You know it.”

He’d told her the other night that this was his only “nonnegotiable” in a relationship. It had made her feel sick with fear when he’d said it because she knew that they had very different ideas of what being “open and honest” meant and she knew better than to discuss this with him because the last thing she wanted in this regard was clarification as to just how different. That meant boundaries, limits, rules, and those things made her crazy. They made her feel like she couldn’t breathe.

But, thinking of it now, she wasn’t feeling sick or scared. She was feeling angry. Had he been threatening her with this word “nonnegotiable?” Had he been telling her that she’d better toe the line or else he’d throw her away? That he would take this happiness away from her…now that she knew it existed, knew how good it could feel, knew how much she needed him, knew she couldn’t live without him?

Or was he giving himself an easy out? He was open by nature. Remaining so wouldn’t be difficult. But this was all new for her. She’d never known anything but secrets and the good old “don’t ask; don’t tell” policy. Surely he knew how difficult this was going to be for her. She was bound to slip up and when she did, he could leave, feeling fully justified in doing so. Maybe he wasn’t so different after all. She looked at him and saw he was looking at her.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“It’s something. You went away for a minute and came back looking sad.”

“I saw a little girl drowned here once,” she said. “Sometimes, the memory just hits me out of nowhere.”

“Jesus. I’m sorry. That must have been awful.”

“It was,” she said, gazing toward the setting sun. “She was only four, maybe five. I remembered seeing her earlier in the day. She stuck out because she was so cute and she was trying so hard to get her dad’s attention but he was too damned obsessed with talking on the phone. It was like I wasn’t even surprised when I saw the crowd of people an hour or so later and that poor, little thing laying there in the center of it all. She’d wandered too far out into the water and by the time anyone noticed, it was too late. She had on this bright purple one-piece swimming suit and these matching sandals. One was missing. The lifeguard was working on her, but I knew she was already dead. Her skin was this awful shade of blue. Life can be so ugly sometimes.”

“It can,” he said, softly. “Ruthless and random.” He put his hand on her knee. It was warm against her cool skin, sending a prickle of goose bumps across her thighs. “And then…there are days like today.”

S
eth laid on one
end of the couch
, Kerri on the other, both in bathrobes, freshly showered their bare legs entangled. A cold rain was peppering the roof and the temperature had dropped enough after the sun had gone down to justify a fire, maybe, if today was a sign of things to come, the last fire of the season. He made a halfhearted attempt to reread the short story he had planned for tomorrow’s morning classes and tinker with the lecture a little, but mostly he watched the fire and savored the wine and the sweetness of the moment. He took a sip of the merlot; it was a nice bottle he’d gotten for his birthday last year and had been saving for a night like this.

He turned his gaze from the fireplace to Kerri. She’d finished with her chemistry homework a while ago and was now reading
The Moon and Sixpence
. She’d laid it aside after their first date and forgotten about it until recently. She looked up from the book. “Finished?”

“Close enough.” He emptied the bottle between their two glasses. “How’s the book?”

“I love it. All that ‘untamed passion.’ Though he doesn’t view it in a very positive light. It’s like he sees it as a sickness or something.”

“I think he sort of does. In life, in art, especially in love. In some of his other books, he just comes right out and says it. I think it’s in
The Razor’s Edge
that he says ‘passion is destructive,’ that it ‘seizes the heart’ and ‘invents reasons’ for doing things that are just plain crazy. It ‘never counts the cost.’ Passion destroys ‘or it dies.’”

“Sounds like the anti-you.”

“When I was younger, his books would really piss me off. I mean, I couldn’t stop reading them because they were good. I liked his style of writing and he wrote about these exotic places that I imagined visiting someday. I liked the characters, the artists and the lovers he wrote about, the way he captured the time period he lived and wrote in, but his take on their passions drove me nuts. I would actually be arguing with him as I read.”

“Please tell me he didn’t argue back.”

“Only when I was drinking whiskey. Seriously though, I think my goal in life was to prove him wrong. Passion was what got me out of Cherry Run. It was all I had: no education, no money, no contacts, no social skills, not even a destination. It’s what drove me.” He gazed into the fire and felt the first wave of a wine buzz. “All those towns and cities. Barely surviving. Backbreaking day jobs and then evening classes and all-nighters. Weekends spent trying to be a writer on a massive, old computer I salvaged from a dumpster.”

“Sounds romantic.”

“It was hard. Lonely. That’s why I was rereading Maugham when I first moved here. Seeing if maybe he was right after all and it was me who had the wrong take on things.”

“And your conclusion?”

“Still working on it.” He looked at her—robe gaping open, hair damp and wild around her face, the fire reflecting in her dark, blue eyes—and said, “Though passion seems to be back in the lead.”

“I’m glad to hear that.” She cupped his face in her hands and kissed him.

The wine on her lips improved on kisses that were already perfect. He slid off the couch and onto his knees before her, opening her robe and gently running his hands over her body. He kissed her belly, her inner thighs. She closed her eyes and started breathing deeper, faster.

He imagined he was opening a flower, petal by petal, lightly, slowly, taking his time. Her breathing grew faster, her legs inched further and further apart. She was enjoying this so much that he was sure, this time, she wouldn’t stop him. This time she would let him tease and taste and explore, let him lead her to a place he was pretty sure she’d never been.

Then she jerked her hips back into the couch while pulling his head away from her.

“It’s okay,” he said, still on his knees, looking up at her. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“You look afraid.”

He ran his hands over her smooth, firm thighs, rubbing out the goose bumps. “Tell me what you want?”

“I want you to fuck me.”

“We’ll get there. What’s the rush? Aren’t you having fun?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. I don’t like that.”

“You seemed to like it.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“A woman who doesn’t like
that
,” he smiled, “is a woman who has never really had
that
.”

“I’ve had guys do it. Plenty of times.”

“Then they were doing something plenty wrong.”

“They were great. It isn’t my thing.”

“They were great, huh? I’ll bet they went at it like they were trying to remove a layer of paint.”

She laughed.

“I’m right!”

“You’re not right. You’re crazy!”

“Then they did it like they were afraid it was going to bite them.”

“And you’re the big expert? You have your very own special technique that will change my life?”

“No, no. First of all, I have no technique. Nor should I. Women can afford to have a technique because men are, let’s face it, easy. We both know that you have a technique. A very effective one. But women are a little more…”

“Difficult?”

“Complex. A technique may or may not work. Women aren’t one-size-fits-all. It changes with her mood, the kind of day she had. So…a wise man,” he grinned, “listens to the pussy and does what it tells him to do.”

“You don’t listen very well because my pussy is saying I don’t like it.”

“
You
are saying you don’t like it. Your pussy is saying, ‘Ooh là là! Give me more, baby!”

She laughed. “My pussy is talking to you and it is telling you something different than I am?”