He Had Me Drowned, Then Wept at My Grave novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: Pilot House
Daphne kisses Anders in his apartment above the pilot station and comes under his hand, stopping before sex at her word, until the sitter calls: a man with a Greek newspaper was at her door.
I didn't go home after closing, because I couldn't stand my own kitchen.
The sitter had Irini for the night, as she did every Thursday, and I had a whole evening and nothing to do with it.
I drove down to the river instead, to the old pilot station on the pier, where Anders lived in two rooms above the dispatch office.
The deckhand's voice kept going through my head.
Tarpon Springs, in Greek, in a shop in Oregon.
Five years of being Dara, and it took him one sentence.
I climbed the outside stairs in the rain and knocked.
Anders opened the door in a gray T-shirt and old jeans, with his oilskins steaming on a hook behind him.
He had a night run at two.
He looked at my face and stepped back from the door.
"Come in."
The room was one long space with a bed at the far end, a wall of nautical charts, and a window full of ship lights.
It smelled like coffee and wet wool.
I stood on his mat and dripped.
"Something happened," he said.
"Don't ask me," I said.
"I won't."
"Don't ask me tonight."
"I'm not asking," he said.
He hadn't moved from the doorway, hands loose at his sides.
He was waiting, the way he'd been waiting since June.
I crossed the room and took hold of his shirt in both fists.
"I want to kiss you," I said.
"Then I'd say go ahead."
I went up on my toes and pulled his mouth down to mine.
He tasted like coffee and rain.
For one second he held absolutely still, and I felt how much it cost him, how much he wanted to take over, and didn't.
Then I opened my mouth against his and he made a low sound in his chest.
His hands came up and framed my face, and he kissed me back so slowly that my knees went.
I'd been kissed hard for three years.
I had never been kissed as if I were worth taking the time over.
"Dara," he said against my lip.
"Say it again."
"Dara."
It wasn't my name.
It was a name I'd taken off a bus-station shelter wall, and hearing him say it, I wanted to give him the real one.
I kissed him instead.
I got my hands under his T-shirt.
His stomach was hard and warm, his skin rough with scars from the sea, and when I dragged my nails up his ribs he shivered all the way through.
"Take it off," I said.
He pulled the shirt over his head.
He was lean and broad, pale as a Norwegian, with a thatch of sandy hair across his chest going gray in the middle.
I put my palm flat over his heart and felt it pounding.
"You're nervous," I said.
"I'm forty-three," he said.
"I've guided four-hundred-meter ships across the bar in a gale.
"And you've got my heart going harder than any of them."
I laughed, and kissed his collarbone, and then his sternum, and the scar on his forearm when he lifted it to touch my hair.
He walked me backward until my legs hit the edge of the bed.
His hands went to the hem of my sweater.
"Can I?"
"Yes."
He drew it up and off, slowly, and I stood there in my black bra with the lamp on.
He took in a breath through his nose.
"Christ," he said.
"You're beautiful."
I felt the old flinch start, the one that came when a man looked at me too long.
Leo had looked at me like that, in the first year.
For a second I was in the dining room again with the gravy and the rain and twelve faces, and my wrist throbbed.
Anders saw it.
He didn't say anything.
He took his hands off me and held them open in the air, and waited.
"It's not you," I said.
My voice cracked.
"I know," he said.
"I need you to keep going."
He nodded.
"Tell me how."
I took his right hand and laid it flat against my stomach, over my bra's lower edge, where the stretch marks silvered my skin.
"Like that," I said.
"Slow.
"And when I say stop, you stop.
"Right then."
"Right then," he said.
"And I'm in charge."
"I wouldn't take it from you," he said, and meant it.
I lay back on the quilt.
He knelt over me with one knee between mine, and kissed my neck, just under my ear, where my pulse beat.
His mouth was hot and slow, and his stubble scraped.
He kissed down my throat to the hollow at the base of it, to the cross on its gold chain, and he lifted the cross aside with one finger and put his lips on the skin beneath it.
I arched up into him.
"Take it off," I said.
"The bra."
He reached behind me and unhooked it with a steady hand, and slid the straps down my arms, and looked.
"Beautiful," he said again, and bent his head.
His mouth closed over my nipple and I cried out.
He sucked gently, flicked with his tongue, and moved to the other one, and every pull went straight down to the place between my legs.
My hands went into his hair.
"More," I said.
"Please.
"More."
He gave it to me.
He kissed his way down my stomach, across the faded silver lines, and he kissed every one of them.
Then he stopped at my jeans.
"Dara?"
"Take them off.
"Everything."
He undid the button and pulled the zipper, and I lifted my hips.
He drew the jeans down my legs, and my underwear with them, and laid them at the foot of the bed.
Then he looked at me, naked on his quilt in the lamplight, with my knees pressed together.
"Open for me," he said.
It wasn't an order.
It was the nicest thing a man had ever asked me.
I opened.
He knelt between my thighs and ran one rough palm up the inside of my leg, and my whole body trembled.
He stopped just short of where I wanted him.
"Anders," I said.
"Tell me what you like."
"I don't know.
"I don't remember."
"Then we'll find out."
He put two fingers against me, slick already, and made one slow circle around my clit.
I gasped and shut my eyes.
"Here?"
"Yes.
"Softer."
He softened.
"Like that?"
"Yes, God, just like that."
He kept it up, a steady circle, patient, watching my face the whole time.
When I moved my hips he followed, and when I tightened he went lighter, and when I sighed he stayed right there.
I had never had a man listen to my body at all.
"You're so wet," he said, low.
"You've been wanting this."
"Since June."
"Since June," he said, and slid one finger inside me.
I moaned out loud.
He curled it and found the place that made my back bow off the bed, and held it, and thumbed my clit at the same time.
"Anders.
"Oh, God.
"Don't stop."
"I won't.
"Look at me."
I opened my eyes.
His pale blue ones were fixed on mine, dark with wanting.
He added a second finger, and the stretch and the pressure and the slow slide of his thumb pulled something tight inside me.
I grabbed his forearm, the scarred one, and held on.
"Come for me," he said.
"I want to see it."
It broke over me all at once, hot and long.
I cried out his name and clenched around his fingers, and my hips jerked and my eyes stayed on his.
He worked me through it, slower and gentler, until I was limp and gasping, and then he drew his hand out and laid it flat on my hip.
I lay there with my chest heaving.
I'd forgotten that it could be this way.
I had forgotten that my own body belonged to me.
"Dara," he said.
I could see how hard he was through his jeans, straining against the denim, and I put my hand on him.
He shut his eyes and hissed.
"You don't have to," he said.
"I know I don't."
"Dara."
I kept my hand where it was, feeling him, thick and hot through the cloth.
I wanted to.
I wanted it so badly it frightened me.
And under the wanting, a small cold voice said, you are in a room above a pier with a man you've known three months, and your husband is in Florida, and the deckhand knows your name.
I took my hand away.
"Not tonight," I said.
He opened his eyes.
"But soon," I said.
"I mean it.
"Soon."
He nodded once.
He didn't argue, or sulk, or sigh.
He leaned down and kissed me on the forehead, once, and pulled the quilt up over my bare shoulders.
"Soon," he said.
"I'll make coffee."
I lay there under his quilt, shaking a little, listening to him bang the kettle in the kitchen.
He drank his coffee standing at the chart wall, and at half past one he kissed my hair and went down the stairs to the pilot boat.
I stayed.
He had told me to, and I had nowhere I could bear to be.
My phone buzzed on his nightstand at ten past two.
It was the sitter.
I read it through a thick fog of sleep, and then I was sitting up.
*A man came to the door asking for Dara. He wouldn't leave a name. He left a wet footprint on the mat and a Greek newspaper on the step.*
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