Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
But this evening. This evening I have woken to the sensation of having shed a skin. In my sleep I have let something go. An entire life.
I go into the small living area to find Dominic taking off his shirt.
Which is the last thing I need.
“Sorry-“
He doesn’t look at me, doesn’t seem embarrassed, just continues to take off his clothes. “Dirt’s driving me crazy,” he grunts. It’s true, we are filthy from the digging, and the coarseness of it against my skin has been awful between the bed sheets. It looks good on him though.
“Going for a swim,” he adds, unbuckling his belt. I stare at him, stripping down to his long johns. His chest is covered in dark hair but I can see the lines of the muscle beneath the skin, his broad chest and shoulders and strong arms, and I want to touch him with a hot kind of want.
“A swim?” I repeat. “Where?”
He looks at me like I’m a moron. “In the ocean.”
I turn to peer through the window. I’m not sure what time it is, but the sun is setting slowly, the evening sky streaked orange to violet to
navy. Here, that could mean anywhere from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. “In that ocean, which is so rough it drowned two people and sank a building?”
Dominic shrugs. “I can’t stand it.”
He walks for the door and the metal stairs, climbing his way barefoot down the rungs and onto the rocks. Aside from the violence of the waves, there is also the cold to contend with, and I watch him flinch as the water reaches his toes, his feet, his ankles.
He glances back at me once. “You coming?”
My feet curl over the edge of a metal rung, and below me is a drop onto slippery rocks, and before me an icy, drowning ocean. A man who is not childless, or safe in any way, a man not mine. But he is wading into that freezing water and he’s shouting in pain, and he’s laughing, it is uninhibited, and some part of me can perceive a threshold laid out before me.
I take off my clothes, all of them-he has seen me naked anyway, he has picked over my prostrate body, what does it matter, a body seems a meaningless thing now-and I walk down to the water’s edge. This water I have feared for so long.
I sink into it. The cold is sharp enough to steal air and thought. I am battered and for a brief second I am filled with the terror of it, of being back underneath, and then I release it, I let the water batter me and I survive this battering, I surge to the surface with a scream, and Dom is laughing and using a towel he’s brought to wrap me up, and he’s saying, “You’re a mad woman, you are.”
Our bodies are close. I stand almost within the sphere of his. If I look up, and he looks down, I think we might fit together, the lines of us. But we are too cold, we go inside, and the tension of it will kill me, the unfulfilled want. I don’t know where to put it, it doesn’t fit within me.
We dry ourselves with trembling hands. My teeth chatter. The saltwater stings. I watch him. Neither of us has put clothes on yet, we are huddled in towels.
“I want…” I try to say it, say anything, but the words fail and I am aching, I am so needful I can’t speak.
He looks at me, takes me in. Then he crosses to push me against the wall. His hand goes to my jaw, tilting it, to my throat. “This?” he says against my mouth and I nod. The kiss burns.
He pushes my towel to the floor and he looks at me as though he’s never seen me before, and he touches me and he is reverent, and I feel strong. I feel alive. He drops to his knees and runs his tongue from my naval to my breast, tasting the salt on my skin, and mere minutes ago I thought a body was meaningless. His tongue drops lower, tasting me, and I am already so wet I could come in seconds, but he stops and rises, leaving me ready to burst, and as I am throbbing with need he lifts one of my legs around his hip and he fucks me deeply and I lose my breath and my sight and I dissolve around him until he is holding me up, holding me so I don’t slip to the floor. “Oh god,” I breathe, dizzy, and he kisses me again, lifting me and carrying me to a bed while our mouths are still pressed together and then he makes love to me more slowly, letting the orgasm build again until I can feel it everywhere, every edge and tip. When he has come too, we lie together, entangled, and I taste his neck, his collar, where I have imagined tasting a thousand times before.
We sleep, I don’t know for how long, but when we wake it’s because our tummies are rumbling with hunger. I feel a powerful surge of guilt. I long to be able to call Hank and tell him what I’ve done and how I feel, but this is not something he will forgive, and so maybe the need to tell him is really a need to end us.
Dom and I rise and dress, and we don’t speak much except to mention the food and how we’ll cook it. I brought rice and frozen curry in my pack, but only enough for one, we will share it and still be hungry, but I am always hungry on this island.
We get a couple of pots going on the camp stove. We stand on opposite sides of the small kitchen, pressed as far from each other as we can be. He stirs the curry slowly, helping it defrost.
“Should we not have done that?” he asks softly.
I shake my head. “No, I don’t think so.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too.”
He looks at me. “It’s just-I thought I could have died from wanting you so badly.”
I close my eyes. My heart will explode, it is beating so frantically out of my chest. I hear him move but I don’t open my eyes, I squeeze them more tightly shut. I feel his breath on the back of my neck. Then his lips. A sound leaves me. He takes my clothes off and his mouth moves down my spine, over my bum, his tongue finding me again. I turn and press him to the floor so I can straddle his lap. I hold his chin and look into his eyes and when he tries to kiss me I don’t let him, I fuck him slowly, watching him, his eyes and his mouth, and it isn’t until we are both coming that I kiss him, taste him, breathe him in.
The curry is bubbling over the pot and we break away to rescue it. After a moment of battling the stove we look at each other and we can’t help it, we laugh, both a little in shock.
We eat the curry beside each other on the couch. We talk. We agree we won’t let it happen again, that it’s best if it doesn’t but it does, several more times in the night. I feel lost within it, within a sea I have never swum. I thought I knew the texture of desire.
“How will you live here if no one comes to bring you supplies?” I ask softly in bed.
“Did I say I planned on staying?”
I leave the question where it is. I don’t think Dom genuinely believes they will stay, but I think he is struggling enormously with the idea of leaving, and those are two different things.
He sighs. He is tracing my lips with his finger. “I’ve had fantasies about buying a boat. So I could come and go more easily.”
“Would you be allowed to just?… stay?”
“No. But I’m not sure anyone would bother to stop me.”
“And the kids?”
“My kids stay with me,” he says, absolute.
“And when the sea gets too high?”
He doesn’t answer. Pulls his hand from me.
“Dom,” I say, “it’s dangerous here.”
“It’s dangerous everywhere. Right? I won’t let anything happen to them.”
“But you’re asking them to have that same vigilance and that’s not fair on kids.”