Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
“Rowan,” he says calmly, and his tone warns of a blow. “I won’t make decisions motivated by your trauma. You’re not their mother.”
I turn away, embarrassed. But he pulls me back. “Sorry,” he is saying. “I didn’t mean for that to hurt.”
“I don’t want them to be mine,” I tell him. “They
can’t be,” and he nods, and he is kissing me, and we both pretend what I’ve said is true.
A storm comes. Shuddering claps of thunder, streaks of lightning. Crashing waves and shrieking wind and it feels like this cabin will be taken, it feels like we are within the story he told me, and I can’t believe, suddenly, that we are sleeping in such a hazardous place. The sky has fallen dark, finally, the storm has swallowed even the band of sunlight on the horizon. Dom snores lightly beside me, but it is too cramped in this bed and I can’t make my mind stop whirling. I give up on sleep and go sit in the living room so I can watch the lightning through the window. I take the blankets from another bed and huddle beneath them. Imagine the sound of the pylons creaking, the waves smashing through the windows and into this room, filling it so quickly that I don’t have time to swim for the door.
“How long you and Hank been together?”
I am startled out of my daydream. Dom doesn’t sit on the couch beside me; instead he sinks into the armchair, wrapping a quilt around his shoulders.
“Do you want to go there?” I ask him.
“Think we’d better, don’t you?”
“We can leave this in the cabin, when we go.”
“Can we?”
We can fucking try, I think.
We have to try.
“Nearly ten years,” I say.
“How come you never had kids?”
“We didn’t want any,” I reply bluntly, and why is it that I feel this need to be defiant about it, even with him? There is unfathomable pressure on women to have babies-it is our only purpose-and when we don’t, we baffle people.
I take a breath, come down off the ledge. “I didn’t want any. Hank did.”
“Ah.” Dom’s eyes are on the streaky sky. “Because of River, do you think?”
My immediate reaction is to say no, of course not, why should it need to be about that? But with him not looking at me I am able to breathe instead. My eyelids fall shut and I sit with it. Poke around in the dark for the truth. It is tender and aching, like the wound on my hip. “It’s just?… too dangerous. And I am a coward.”
“No,” he murmurs. “You’re not that.”
“I can’t have children that I may not be able to keep safe.”
I open my eyes. Dominic nods once, accepting that.
“He’s never forgiven me for it,” I say. “For not wanting them. They asked him to come to Shearwater years ago, asked him a few times, but he always said no. I think he thought he could change my mind. Then the property burned, and he gave up. He was on the next ship out.” It sounds bad, when I say it like that, and Dom’s expression agrees. I try to explain. “I think he just felt like there was no use staying anymore. He didn’t have anything left.”
“He had you.”
I smile humorlessly. “Cold comfort, I guess.” Having me didn’t turn out to be enough for Hank. “We didn’t break up,” I clarify.
“And then you came all the way here for him on a flimsy private boat.” Dom sounds perplexed, almost angry.
“He asked for my help,” I admit. “He said he was in danger.”
Dominic frowns. I can see his mind working this through. Then he says, “I think he was. Inside him, I think he was.”
“Why didn’t anyone help him?”
“We tried. We gathered around, I promise we did. But there was no way to call for help and we were in over our heads and he didn’t want our help. He was furious. He wanted to destroy things.”
“But he only ever wanted to plant things,” I say. It is so broad, the distance between the man I know and the man he became while he was here. It is so sad.
But that’s not the full truth, is it? He plants things but sometimes I glimpse that tiny seed of nastiness within. It appears only in brief flashes, the lightning outside and then gone, hidden behind the charm, the friendliness, the laughter-but it is there. His selfishness. An ego so fragile, he takes hits to it poorly. Which is why I don’t think we’ll survive what I’ve done.
“Did you and Hank have a plan for after Shearwater?” Dom asks me.
I shake my head. “He couldn’t talk about after.”
“But in your mind, there is an after, for the two of you?”
A flash of his face in lightning. I say, “I don’t need to explain to you what a marriage means.”
“No,” Dom concedes. Then he says, “But they do end. I can tell you with great certainty that they do end.”
“Do they?” I ask. “Yours hasn’t.”
He is startled, I think.
“Let’s not pretend,” I say, “that I’m the only one here being pulled in another direction.”
Dominic and I fall asleep where we are, curled in our blankets. I listen to his breathing. As I drift off, I am locking doors, building firmer barricades. But he wakes me in the early morning with a soft question, the sound of which could almost be a dream.
“Could there be an after for the five of us?”
Dominic
There is a bad day ahead. No avoiding it. When the ship comes for us, she is going to know the truth. I don’t know what it will do to her or make of us, but I understand what it means to lose someone suddenly, I know how words unspoken can be a poison within, so if I am to lose someone slowly I will make sure there is nothing unsaid.
I do not want to leave this place, but I would do it for you, I would do it with you, if that is something you might want.