Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [102]
“Don’t talk,” he says, closing his eyes. “I have my eyes closed, so I can’t see what you’re saying.”
He opens his eyes to see if she is looking, and she laughs.
He kisses her again quickly. He reaches down to the hem of her skirt. He slides his hand up the back of her leg. He has wanted to do this all night. He has wanted to do this for weeks.
She shifts, but does not entirely pull away.
“Iwish . . . ,” she begins.
Above them, the tree is making a sound like water. Their faces hover inches from each other. He can feel her breath.
“You wish?” he asks.
Honora
It would be so easy, she thinks. All she would have to do is turn a fraction of an inch toward him, and that would be that. They are hidden from the light. No one would ever know.
He smooths her hair with his fingers. He says her name and turns her face to his. “I have to see your mouth, remember?”
She knows that he is going to kiss her, and she wants it to happen. She wants to stretch her body the length of his and to arch her back. Her mouth is partly open, and she makes a sound at the back of her throat.
“Ijust . . . ,” she says.
No one but she and McDermott would ever know, she thinks.
“Don’t talk,” he says.
And hasn’t Sexton dishonored the marriage already?
McDermott kisses her again, and overhead the tree is again making a sound oddly like water running. A brook, maybe.
“Iwish . . . ,” she begins.
What does she wish? She wishes that she had again the pristine jewel that was once her marriage. She wishes she could let McDermott love her. She wishes that she did not care about honor or trust or the future. About how she would have to think about herself — day after day after day, week after week after week.
His face is so close to hers that she can feel his breath near her eyes.
“You wish?” he asks.
She presses her palms lightly against his chest.
McDermott
The moon, fuzzy around the edges tonight, creates a cone of light on the water. The surf is barely breaking at the bottom of the low-tide beach. Alphonse was snoring when McDermott left him in his bedroll — a barely audible sound, like that from a woman. The boy sleeps with his mouth open and his eyes rolled far back into his head. His eyelids flutter with his dreams. Dreaming of peach ice cream, McDermott hopes. Dreaming of flying airplanes.
He takes another pull from the bottle of whiskey he found on the kitchen table. He woke in his bedroll, mildly surprised that he felt hungry. In the kitchen, he stood eating leftover lamb stew and saw the bottle on the oilcloth. It hurts his stomach but will help with the sleeping. He can’t remember when he last slept the night through. He wakes restless, and it isn’t because of the bedroll on one of the thin mattresses that Mahon trucked in — it happens at the boardinghouse too. Only there he can’t go downstairs looking for a bite to eat. Madame Derocher keeps a lock on the icebox.
He puts his feet up on the porch railing and tilts the wooden chair backward. In the morning, he will leave.
Sometimes he sees her in the hallway as he is on his way to the bathroom for a wash, and once in a while she is in her dressing gown, carrying a pile of clean laundry or a stack of towels for the men. She keeps the door to her bedroom closed, and he has not wanted to see the bedroom or to imagine what goes on behind that door. And, in a way, that is the hardest part of leaving her in this house: knowing that he is leaving her with Sexton Beecher. Ross told McDermott about Beecher going on at lunch about guns, and privately they agreed that the guy is as crazy as a bed-bug. If it weren’t his house, Ross said. If it weren’t for the typewriter and the Copiograph. You couldn’t use a man’s home and then boot him out, McDermott surprised himself by saying, and, reluctantly, Ross agreed. Keep an eye on him, though, Ross said. And McDermott thought then that he ought to tell Ross about leaving in the morning, that Sexton Beecher would no longer be his problem. But he hadn’t conferred with