I don’t know where you are in time. I can’t find you. I can’t find myself. I watched you sleep then and I watch you sleep now and I think about how I could kill you but they are hollow words. No, you don’t understand. I know better, I do, but that’s the way it is: I look at you now while I look at you then, you right now, in this moment, you in my mind’s eye, and I don’t know the difference.
Emily turns onto her back. It’s dark. There’s so much darkness.
It could be then. It can’t be then. It could be, but you and I were never on a boat. We are on a boat now. We are in your yacht. Inside it. This is now. We’re adrift.
George moves the hair out of her face. He does it a strand at a time, pinching them, smoothing them past the contour of her cheek.
You were on a bed. The bed was like this one. My bed, my bedroom. Here. This is my bedroom. You’re in it. Here you are. Here you are.
He enters her. Slow. Slow. The rocking she can’t feel settles into the bed. She wants it, so it’s okay. Her body says yes. She thinks his cock in her, stretching her ass, will hold the moments down, but it doesn’t. The sensation, such sensation, such overwhelming sensation”ah! The aching of it. The sharp pleasure scatters things. Dark down here, below the deck, down in the rocking hold, beneath the waterline. He comes into her. He sinks. He moves into her like he’s a lost part of her body trying to find its way back, slow strong push, ah, shoved in on a blast of breath. This friction is slow. Her spine twists like a snake. She grabs the sheets.
I was here. You were here. We were here, in the past, in the future. We’re here now. We’re there now. Now. Oh Emily. Emily. Emily.
He talks like this, fucking her, hands shaking tight into her skin, his breath hot and trapped in the net of her hair.
Where are we going?
Mild wind, Gulf Stream wind, and the hot sun slipping beneath her skin like a blade, sizzling in her sweat. It’s easy to get sleepy, somnolent sun creeping in. The salt smells strong. Today the ocean is calm. Today, just a day, like all the days that came before it.
“Where are we going?”
George looks at her. “Where do you want to go?”
She sits down beside him. Hot sky overhead, howling bright. Needles of light quiver into her eyes. She squints. Her hair is dirty. She moves it out of her mouth. “Where were you all those years?”
His mouth quirks, one corner slanting up. He turns toward the western horizon. Tall clouds billow there, fluffy columns reaching for the sky. Rigging creaks.
“Wherever you were,” she says, putting a hand on his tanned knee. “That’s where I want to go.”
“I was a lot of places.”
“Were you on the boat?”
He looks at her. At the expression on his face, her insides turn over and stretch, dipping their toes into the somnolent heat. It makes her smile. His expression mirrors hers, outruns it, his smile stretching wide and his voice laid back. “Sometimes.”
Emily stands up. She takes her clothes off. The cloth peels away from her salty skin and her body sighs in relief. She gets up, walks with care across the moving deck, and dives over the side. She cuts into the blue water. The concussion jolts her awake. Down here, deep below the waves, it is cool. She ducks beneath the surface and thinks about the bedroom: afloat on the other side of the hull, tangled-up and small and dark. The darkness of the water is vast. When she starts to shiver, she break the surface and shakes her hair over her shoulders. She ascends the silver ladder back up into the sun.
She doesn’t get dressed for a week.
I love the night. I love it. I look up and there are things written in them, up there, in the stars. The stars make me think of you. I know it’s just my mind looking for patterns, for words, but I can’t help it. It’s what I see.
His mouth, so lazy on her skin. Inside she quivers, goosebumps floating up to meet him. The in and out of her breath rises over the sounds of the water. He lays one kiss with care, a foundation for the next one.
Does that make it real? I see it. The stars, they say things. It comes to me through my senses.
Emily closes her eyes. She thinks about the house in Siasconset, rain hemming them in, a wind blowing in off the water and slapping the panes; rose petals torn off the gutters and flung against the glass, clinging there like blood, the red blood of the world plastered there, hanging the moist air with scent. A window is cracked open. The bed smells like him, the rumpled sheets steeped in the scent of dreaming skin. She’s on her back. He’s leaning over her, shirtless, straddling her thighs. She looks up into his eyes and they’re so dark that they’re empty, lovely dark and deep. Looking into them is like falling up, burning through a surrender to gravity. Her chest, rising and falling, her breath building up, harsh. She smells rain and roses and skin. Outside, there is thunder. Inside, she aches with desire. She longs to tell him about the dead girls. The words tremble on her lips. The wind comes and rattles the glass, flickers inside the bedside lamp. There’s room for that kind of knowledge inside his eyes. Inside him there’s room for all of her.
Kiss me, she murmurs inside this memory. She says it out loud, and his mouth drifts up from her wet nipples, breathes layers of warmth over her lips. The bridge of his nose grazes hers. She says it again from behind closed lids, half-asleep, lost inside herself: kiss me.
He does. His weight covers her. She tastes herself on his tongue.
Back then, in Siasconset, his words wrapped in northeastern thunder: I like looking into you. I see you in there. He whispered it again and her body fell open on the awe in his voice.
In the now he is inside her and in the then he is too, both Georges sliding home the same way, with the same tremor in the breath, the same tightening of the muscles. He gathers up to thrust and Emily falls open, hearing the young voice buried beneath the gravel of the old, the memory struggling up through his throat: Siasconset, a summer night. The rain drove harder against the flanks of the house. She heard a door open downstairs, his mother returning, and he put a hand over Emily’s mouth. In the now there is no rain. Wind whistles over the deck and rattles the sails, and he moves over her, heavy and hot, his deep scooping thrusts written in the memory of her skin. George-as-John made the springs creak, her whimpers smothered beneath the press of his palm; she digs her heels into the mattress and thrusts up to meet him. She came without a sound, stars exploding behind her trembling eyelids.
I wanted to tell you about the dead girls. I wanted to. I wanted to.
I’ll get you one. She looks up. Same eyes, different face: the intervening years a map traced onto his skin. She grinds harder. I’ll kill her for you, he murmurs into her mouth.
Emily cries out.
Where are we going?
The scent of seared tuna drifts over the calm water. The dark sky is flooded with stars. Emily sits at the head of the stairs, looking down into the warm galley light. George fills the doorway, a plate in each hand.
He’s naked, too.
“Morocco,” he says. “We’re going to Morocco.”