And The Sea Called Her Name(5)

“I need you,” she said, drawing one pale arm out from beneath the covers. “Come lie down.”

“We need to figure this out. We can’t just go to bed. This is serious, Del.”

“I know, but right now I need you to hold me. I want you next to me.”

Slowly I came forward and stopped at the bedside, drawing off the jacket I’d used to cover myself. My jeans were still soaked and they clung to me coldly like a dead second skin. I stripped them off along with my boxers and when she lifted the blankets for me to crawl beneath I saw that she was still naked. The sight of her body in the soft light as well as the longing look on her face brought about a warmth in my center, and despite the anxiety that still gripped me, I felt myself stiffen as I laid down beside her.

She intertwined herself with me, nuzzling close beneath my chin and wrapping her arms around my back. We stayed that way for a time before my hands started to play across her skin that was now warm. She sighed and drew even closer, her hand sliding between us to grip me. We moved together for a time on our sides, a thankfulness in our caresses that I’m sure we both felt. It was as if something of great velocity had narrowly missed us and the only way to show our gratitude was to pour ourselves into one another. When she rolled onto her back and I moved above her, she whispered something that I didn’t absorb right away. The sinuous rhythm of our bodies was too much and it was only minutes before our climaxes rolled through us both, the simultaneousness of them leaving us breathless and shaking.

She fell asleep as the clock downstairs tolled eight times, and I stared up at the thick drape of shadows that coated the arched ceiling of the room. Del’s breathing became a metronome that lulled me into an uneasy drowse between sleep and waking. Images rose and fell behind my eyes. The outline of Del’s shoulders and head slipping beneath the water, her appearance in the yard seconds after I raced inside to call for help, the black pools her eyes had been for a moment. I shoved the thoughts away, sinking deeper into the mattress and closer to her. It had been one of the ‘stranges’, as our neighbor, Harold, had said to me sitting on his porch sipping cold lemonade one evening.

The stranges are those things that can’t be ‘splained away, he’d said. They’re like that house that caught fire a dozen years or so back south a Bangor in that little town called Cadence. No one knew how it started but by the time the fire department got there it was an inferno. Everyone had gotten out ‘cept a boy of nine. As you can imagine, his parents and sister were beyond with grief. They stood there watching their house burn along with the little boy inside it, nothing to be done but put out the flames. But lo and behold as the department finally started to get a handle on the blaze, they saw something moving inside. Harold had leaned forward in his Adirondack chair, its aged boards squeaking beneath his weight. And by God if it wasn’t that boy walking through the flames, right as rain. He came down to his mother an father without so much as a blister on him. Even his clothes were fine, only smellin’ a smoke. He said he’d woken up to someone holdin’ him while the fire raged around them. He couldn’t see who it was but they were strong and he couldn’t have gotten away if he’d wanted ta. He said that when the way was clear, that person let him go, but before they did they told him who had set the fire. They said it was a man who worked with his father and wanted to hurt him due to a business deal gone wrong. Well, don’t ya know they followed up on what the boy said and found a singed gas can in the fella’s garage along with clothes full a smoke. Never got an explanation for who or what could’a been in that burnin’ house with the boy, but it knew things that no person could’a known. That’s the stranges, son, and there’s lots of them in this world.

The small comfort I felt at remembering the story was overshadowed by the sense of vulnerability it brought. Were we to simply get up tomorrow and go on with our lives, shrugging at one another over coffee and saying, Oh well, must’ve been a case of the stranges yesterday. I knew I couldn’t accept that and I didn’t think Del could either, but the longer I thought about it, the more smeared the details became. I was exhausted, and perhaps there would be a logical explanation for everything in the morning. My mother always said everything seemed worse at night, it was one of the small bits of wisdom she’d given me before my father died and her gaze had grown cold whenever she looked at me like a hearth that’d lost its fire.

I settled into sleep without meaning to, trying to focus on the sensation of me flooding inside Del as she pulsed around me. But one other thought kept returning that I’d shoved aside—another strand in the braid of panic that had wound around me. Her hands had felt strange in the yard when she reached for me. For a moment they hadn’t felt like hands at all. They had been somehow different, alien in a way that brought a shiver from me from beneath the covers beside her.