Out at Night. Susan Smith Arnout

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      Her eyes filled. She felt his breath, soft, on her face. He searched her eyes. All the bones in her body seemed to soften; she was warm wax in his hands.

      “For the last five years to go away. Not the part with Katie. The part without you.”

      He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. In the moonlight, his eyes glowed bright. “But see,” his voice was low. “That’s just it, Grace. That was the part without Katie. For me. That was the part.”

      She couldn’t breathe. Her throat closed. The night air felt heavy against her face. She had done this, she had done this. And there was no fixing it.

      She rolled away from him with effort and slid free of the sheets. She stood. Her legs trembled. Their clothes lay in a jumbled trail across the Saltillo tile floor and she took a shambling step.

      “You bolt at the first sign of trouble.” There was no accusation in his voice; it was as if he were tracking the beats of a song, figuring out its rhythm. She realized her heart hurt.

      “I bolt.” The floor was cold. She found her T-shirt and put it on. She needed underpants. She needed distance. She needed to remember to take her birth control pills.

      “It’s as if you’re there one moment, and then you flip a switch and you’re gone. I don’t want you to go.”

      Mac flung off the covers and stood. The heat between them was old, and raw and real. She looked away, but not before she’d seen that he’d seen it, too, in her eyes, on her face.

      He pulled her to him and kissed her and she wrapped her arms around him and stood trembling, feeling the shock of his presence, the immediacy of his reaction. His arms seemed harder, somehow, than they’d been five years before, his muscles knotted.

      “Hunger does that.” His voice had an edge.

      She could feel her heart start to race. “That’s a little scary. Reading my mind.”

      “I’ve had five years’ practice. You were squeezing it,” he added.

      “I beg your pardon?”

      “My arm. The muscle. You were squeezing it as if you were testing its strength against your memory. My arm won.”

      “Yeah, memory’s a tricky thing.”

      “Been my experience.” His body shifted and tensed and she felt the familiar fit of his body, both of them wanting more.

      She dropped her hand to his back. She could still feel the sun in his skin. “Have you had a lot of that? Experience?”

      “Do my best.” He slid a hand down her back, and she could see him tracking its impact, evaluating mentally the way her back tensed, the short intake of her breath when his bare hand slid from her T-shirt to her skin, the hooded light in her eyes.

      And then it rounded a corner again, what she was feeling, and her eyes filled.

      He stopped his hands and moved his naked strong body a fraction away.

      “I did this to us, okay? I made it be not simple.”

      “So now you’re beating yourself up.” His hands found her hips. He pulled her gently toward him and she felt again the blurring sweetness of desire, the melting heat. His palm grazed her buttocks, his eyes still on hers.

      She was going to have to push him away. If not now, then soon.

      Her breath came in short gusts. “What are you offering, Mac?”

      “I think that’s pretty clear.”

      “No, I mean it.” She rocked back away from him, but all that did was position her closer. If he moved, even slightly, toward her. Into her.

      “Okay, what am I offering. The truth. Ask me anything.”

      “Risky business.”

      “Riskier not to.”

      He touched her breast, her belly, the soft part of her that melted under his touch. They stood together in the dim light, their bodies naked except for her T-shirt. He swallowed. Sighed as if it took everything he had. He pushed her gently away.

      “Truth then. I get the feeling you’re a whole lot of work. Maybe I’m not up to that. Maybe I’d give it my best shot, and still come up short.”

      Her heart was beating very fast.

      “You kept Katie away for five years. When I think about that too much, it makes me crazy.”

      She couldn’t breathe.

      “Maybe it is too late. Not for Katie. But for us.”

      His room held a king-sized bed, a mahogany sideboard, a bar, a flat-screen TV. Through the French doors she could see the ocean. She looked everywhere except his face.

      “So that whole ‘sticking around when you’re not sure’—that stuff you said after you got out of the hospital and flew here to surprise us and meet Katie—that’s bullshit?”

      “I don’t want to do this anymore. Not here. Not this way.”

      He was a big man, his movements economical. He found his shorts and pulled them on. It was abrupt, final, and changed everything. The small window he’d offered—the one through which she could have slipped without penalty or disguise—had closed.

      It would take much more now to open it.

      Yet as Grace returned to her solitary bed next to Katie’s, listening to the commingled sounds of the surf and Mac gargling into his sink, it seemed as if they’d been doing this forever, or a version of it, and maybe when things evened out, they’d add back in the sex part and get married.

      A fantasy she’d construct brick by fragile brick.

       THREE Friday

      They spent the morning in a golf cart touring the candy-colored clapboard Harbor Island village, stopping at Angela’s Starfish for fresh conch, searching for Jimmy Buffett’s Cheeseburger in Paradise. Mac had been polite and remote with her, lavishing attention on Katie and right before Grace’s eyes, their daughter bloomed.

      There had been one reoccurring speed bump, an awkward one, when she noted it: she seemed incapable of letting Katie and Mac hold a conversation without interjecting herself into it, trying to change the focus, not to her, but so that Mac was closed out.

      He’d point at a modest wooden house set back from a road and tell Katie it was a library. Grace would turn her in the other direction and point out the sea.

      As the morning wore on, the tendency became more pronounced until Katie and Mac’s defense was to close Grace out entirely, and it was then that she finally lost her footing on the emotional cliff face she was climbing—this strange new territory with no toeholds—and slid a good distance backward, scraping parts СКАЧАТЬ