Great Big Beautiful Life(55)
He lifts our interlaced fingers between us, studying them with a divot between his brows. After a long pause, he lifts my hand higher, pressing his lips against the back of it. It’s such a tender gesture, so careful and light, but it makes my heart speed and my throat tighten.
When his eyes rise to mine, it feels like the world has tilted just slightly on its axis.
Like this is the first time I’ve ever felt the full weight of his gaze, and I can hardly breathe, and I want to say something or do something, but I’m not sure what I can say, can do, where the delicate invisible boundary between us lies.
So I do what he did. I bring his hand up to my lips, my eyes falling closed as I press a kiss to his skin, smell his almond soap, and taste the salt of his sweat on the tip of my tongue. I feel his forehead bow to press against my shoulder, his free hand coming up to gently cradle the back of my neck as we stand there together on the walk, in a puddle of light.
When I open my eyes and let go of his hand, he snakes it around my waist too, crushing me to his chest, my cheek to his collarbone, my arms winding tight around his hips: a hug that’s more than a hug, that stretches out indefinitely, our breathing heavy and our bodies hot everywhere they’re touching.
I think we must have both decided the same thing—that nothing else can happen between us—and I think that just makes both of us all the less willing to stop. I feel him growing hard, and an ache begins between my thighs, my nipples peaking against his chest. He lets out a soft hum against my ear, one of his hands running a trail up and down my spine as he buries his mouth softly in my neck, not a kiss, just an incidental touch of his parted lips to my skin.
Just his breath there, on that sensitive place between my throat and my shoulder, is enough to unspool something deep in me. I arch a little, and he squeezes me tighter, molds me to him.
I let my hands climb into his hair, twist my face into his neck the way he did to mine, taking every bit of him he’ll allow.
He touched my hair, so I touch his; he dragged his mouth along my throat, so I let mine trail over his.
He tries to pull me closer again, as if there’s any room at all left between us. There’s not, other than the one unbreachable divide: the job.
And I can’t help myself any longer. I take just a little more. The smallest bit. A flick of my tongue against his skin, and he groans into me, my body shivering with the sound. The ache in me deepens. I tell myself not to roll my hips against his, but it happens anyway, and his breath hisses at my neck, his hands clenching. “I have to stop,” he murmurs roughly.
“We’re not doing anything,” I whimper back. He grinds against me. Just for a second, but it’s enough to send sparks all through my body, flickers of color across my vision, a harsh gasp between my lips.
He grips my hips, pushing me slowly away from him, almost like we’re peeling apart, like there’s resistance there, trying to keep us close, the memory of that friction still hanging around me like an afterglow.
Stone-cold sober and he looks almost as drunk as I feel, his eyes abyss-dark and face fraught with unspent tension. “Can I walk you back to your car?” he says softly.
I nod, still too unsteady to speak.
Nothing happened, I’ll remind myself later while I’m lying awake, eyes turned up to the stucco ceiling. It was just a hug.
My body will tell a very different story. Yours, mine, and the truth.
* * *
? ? ?
I spend Friday morning back down on the beach, watching the sunrise and then wading into the water and floating on my back. Afterward I send pictures to the group text between Mom, Audrey, and Dad’s old number. Someday, I know, it will be reassigned to someone new and we’ll have to take him off the chat, but so far none of us has.
Audrey probably because she’s too busy to care about that kind of thing, but Mom’s a little bit more of a mystery. As much as she and Dad loved each other, I still would’ve assumed her no-nonsense attitude would preclude anything so sentimental as keeping her late husband on a text thread.
Then again, it’s just as likely that she doesn’t know how to remove it and can’t be bothered to start a new chain. She and Audrey are similar that way—not Luddites, exactly, but far from tech savvy.
I send them some shots of the sunrise earlier and the water now, the tourists teeming across the sand with babies in floppy sun hats and raucous preteens carting foam boogie boards behind them.
Not a bad office for the day, I say.
Mom chimes in quickly: lol. She’s at least savvy enough to use abbreviations that have been around for multiple decades, I’ll give her that.
She follows it up with another message: Must be nice.
I don’t think she means it as a dig. It feels like one.
Audrey replies with a selfie of her and a local farmer planting fruit trees in a community garden. Please take a nice long dip in my honor! Audrey writes.
We should come here on your next trip home, I say, and she writes that she’d love that. Then Mom asks how the garden is going, and the conversation moves on, and in a way it’s a relief, to not have to worry that Mom’s disappointment in me might bubble up any further, spill over from unsaid to said.
Audrey talks about work. Mom talks about her chickens. They both look forward to Christmas, the next time Audrey will be in Georgia for a few weeks, and I sit on my towel, the sand warming beneath it, and miss my father and the world when he was still in it.