The Winters(14)
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I was tired and emboldened by the wine.
“I hope I do, Max. But you have to tell me when I will see you, and under what circumstances. I don’t want to be demanding, but I have to take greater precautions now. You have privileges here. I only have risks.”
“Fair enough.” He took a deep breath, looking out beyond the windshield for a moment. “Tomorrow I have work to do in town, two morning meetings and lunch with an old friend I had the misfortune of running into. When I get back to the club I’ll want to take a boat out in the late afternoon, sometime after four. I’ll order food. Then later I’d like to see . . . what’s it called? The bioluminescence field. I heard it’s very pretty at night. Do you think that can all be arranged at Laureen’s Charters?”
“I think so.”
“Good. Now go and get some rest.” He picked up my hand and kissed the back of it once, twice. “And please be sure to pack a bag. I might want to spend the night out on the water.”
* * *
? ? ?
Even now, thinking about our past two weeks on the island can cause my face to redden, partly because I’m recalling the delicious vertigo of love taking hold, but also because my behavior became that of a woman deranged. The next morning I charged into the office and rather than asking, I told John-John that I was taking Max Winter out on an overnight cruise.
“But if anyone wants a boat and crew, even if it was Mr. Winter, Laureen said that I was to pilot, not you.”
“Too bad.”
He gaped at me. “I don’t want to have to call her.”
“Then don’t. I beg you, John-John. It’s not necessary. I’ll cover you for the rest of your goddamn days in exchange for this one tiny favor.”
I wince at the image of this wild-eyed young woman desperately clearing the path leading to her own destruction. Yet there was no reasoning with me. He threw up his hands and walked out of the office to unlock the rental kiosk, while I calmly prepped a forty-five-foot Formula, a small, attractive yacht I could handle on my own—its anchor not too heavy, its quarters roomy and comfortable—even if the weather changed overnight.
At four thirty, Max arrived at the end of the dock dressed in jeans and a gray T-shirt, mouth stern beneath dark glasses, the thick strap of a leather overnight bag slung across his chest. He was trailed by two kitchen workers, each carrying a cooler filled with food and drinks. No one, least of all John-John, was fooled into thinking this was anything but preparations for a romantic overnight trip for two. As I said, I had lost all reason. Moving from half to full throttle once we hit open water, I had a premonition that I would be returning to a different reality, a more difficult one, likely, but in that moment nothing mattered. I let the salt air slap hard at my bare arms, my hair whip painfully at my cheeks. I removed my uniform and was wearing a silky white tank top, no bra, the only mildly alluring thing I owned. While I steered us out to the sea, Max came up behind me to take advantage of my inability to do anything about his hands on my breasts or his mouth on my neck. Within minutes of losing sight of land, we were in the sleeping quarters impatiently consummating our relationship, blotting out any notion that this was some chaste friendship, that his intentions towards me were benignly paternal or mine at all innocent. I was no virgin (though I am, by nature, modest), but by the expert way Max moved beneath and above me, how he murmured to me with confident knowledge things about my own dark appetites that even I had never articulated, I knew he had completely ruined me for any man after him, were there to be one.
“Jesus,” I whispered, collapsing next to him, coated in a layer of sweat and shamelessness, an arm flung over my eyes to obscure how conquered I felt. “I almost hate you for that.”
He burst out laughing into the low cabin ceiling before curling next to me wearing a self-satisfied grin.
Every night that final week (after fleeing John-John’s scolding glare), the boat became our private oasis. I dropped anchor near the glowing water, where we’d eat, swim, have sex, and then do it all over again. I was, by all measures, deliriously happy, mentally carving every moment into small chapters, the time he said that, the time we did this, the time we went there, so that when he was finally gone from my life, our brief time together would feel to me as though it had been much, much longer than it was.
What did we talk about? Everything and nothing. Local lore, the particulars of the boats we’d take out. He was fascinated by my upbringing and wanted to know how my father parented me alone after my mother died, now that he found himself in a similar position.
“How did he discipline you?” he asked.
“I think I was born obedient,” I said, not too proudly. “Can’t really rebel when your livelihoods depend on each other.”
“Lucky father,” he said. “I think Dani’s bent in a way you aren’t. Has been since birth. She’s seen all kinds of specialists, dabbled in all manner of therapy. She’d be diagnosed with something, but the drugs would do nothing. Then we were told she had some kind of personality disorder, but she’d display few of the characteristics. Things were just getting right with her world, then Rebekah died.”
We had talked almost nothing about Rebekah since the night at the fish shack. But there it was again, the name that charged the air and changed the mood.