The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [29]
Maybe it was the fact that their talk flowed so easily, that there was between them an easy and sassy friction—giving each other a hard time, trafficking from the start in smart-assedness and indirection—that made his age seem irrelevant in the beginning. She’d known so few people she could really talk to, and no men save for Woodrow, who mostly listened. She knew within minutes what would happen between them, for their conversation was as close to foreplay as she’d ever experienced, each sentence a shirt shed, a caress, until they were down to bare skin.
He put his hand on her arm. She let it remain. The sun seared through his veins, into hers. She said, “I’m forty years old.”
“That’s just math,” he said. “I’m no damn good with figures.”
“Too old to have a baby,” she said. She wasn’t talking to him anymore. If she had been talking to him, she wouldn’t have brought up a baby here before they’d even kissed.
But he wasn’t the least bit put off by the topic.
“Say what? My aunt had a baby at forty-three. Far as I could tell it only had one head.”
She nodded, uncharacteristically assuaged by his dismissal of mere arithmetic. She wasn’t that good with numbers either. Numbers meant less here than they did off island, where there were thousands of forty-year-old men, whole cities full of them no doubt, and yet how many of them could talk to her like Boyd did?
Here was Boyd and he was free and she was too. Neither of them needed to add, subtract, or study chromosomes.
But this did not mean that she could be with Boyd (who that day came at her with a salty, wine-scented kiss and she shrugged and smiled and met him halfway) without some worry. Her ex-husband, Ronnie, lived down island and often fished close to Woodrow, hoping to benefit from Woodrow’s impeccable feel for the catch. If she took this boy to bed (and she knew already who was leading this dance), it would get out sooner or later, and Ronnie in his cups would come stirring trouble as he could be a jealous and mean bastard who, even though he was the one run her off with his whoring up and down the banks, wanted her to sleep forever alone.
More salty-sweet kisses. A hand on her breast, snaking down inside the cup of her bra, a thumb and forefinger pinching her nipple. She laid him down in the sand and said, “How long you going to be living with your aunt?”
“Until I move?” He pulled her toward him, hip-wiggling to position herself over that part of him in need of coverage. After five seconds of pressure expertly applied, she lifted herself up and away, made her point.
“One thing I’ll say about being forty,” she said, “is that it’s no longer all that sexy to screw some boy up in the dunes.”
“Sand all in your slits?” he asked, grinning like a preteen.
It was hard to believe he’d been to Germany just then. She had it in her mind that such travel turned you into someone out of one of those teaching sentences: Boyd traveled to Europe where he spent the summer studying artifacts of old. She did not think it was possible that you could cross the ocean and come back talking schoolboy playground trash right on, as if you’d spent the whole time drinking beer with your buddies. She must have transmitted this thought, for he immediately apologized and looked at her with such obvious fear that she had found him out that she was back to finding him endearing and surprisingly mature for his age.
“At least bring a blanket. If you can’t get a blanket, a towel’s better than nothing.”
“When?”
“Next time,” she said. She left him adjusting himself in his shorts, twitching about in the sand.
There was a next time. Soon after the first time. They met in the dunes at dusk, spread out on a nubbly chenille bedspread he’d lifted from his aunt’s house. He was timid with her at first and maneuvered his body shyly as if he was used to performing in the pitch blackness, in cramped quarters—the backseat of a car, upside a shed in some neighbor girl’s backyard—and for an audience indifferent to nuance. She let him work away his modesty before she slowed