He Divorced Me at His Ship's Christening, So I Held the Ship novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Shed

That night in the tug yard Ruel brings her purse; she asks for hands that aren't sorry for her, and he talks her through her first climax in a year before she leads him to the Santa Rita.

By dark the Clarissa B. had not moved.

I sat on my father's workbench with my shoes off and my sash balled in my fist.

The yard was a plank dock, a gravel lot and a tin shed on the Point Loma side of the bay.

For the first time that day, nobody was shouting in it.

Anselmo had sent the crews home with a case of beer.

Harborline's tugs had come at three and sat in the channel for an hour.

Then they had gone away.

Wendell's name had come up on my phone forty-one times.

I turned the phone face down on the bench and let it buzz itself in a slow circle.

Someone knocked on the open shed door.

The pilot stood there, still in his navy jacket, with my purse hanging from two fingers.

"A longshoreman handed me this," he said. "He told me to find you and not to come back without it."

"Thank you." I took it. "That was a long way to walk for a purse."

"It's a short walk by water." He glanced at the dark bay behind him. "Anselmo told me where you'd be."

He was tall, close to six feet two, with black hair cut short and a face that had spent years squinting at weather.

I guessed he was thirty-seven or so.

His left hand had a pale band on the ring finger, faded almost to nothing.

"You didn't have to wait on my lines this morning," I said. "You could have called it a contract problem and gone home."

"It was a contract problem." He came one step into the shed. "I just didn't feel like solving it for him."

"What's your name, Pilot?"

"Ruel Salonga."

"Filipa Medeiros," I said, and then I laughed, because I was still holding a sash that said otherwise.

I held it up to him.

"Is this what I'm supposed to burn?"

"If you like." He did not smile, but something in his face eased.

"I'd keep it for the look on Mrs. Braddock when the bottle bounced."

That broke something loose in my chest.

I was laughing, and then I was not, and I pressed the heel of my hand against my eye.

"Fourteen months," I said.

"Sorry?"

"My husband hasn't touched me in fourteen months. I told myself he was busy being a CEO."

I did not know why I said it to a stranger.

I knew only that the man in front of me was not going to say anything careful.

"Then he's a fool," Ruel said.

"That's kind of you."

"It's not kind. It's a fact."

He looked at the pale band on his own finger, then back at me.

"I was married five years," he said. "My wife moved to Houston three years ago, to a bank that lends money to shipping lines."

"What happened?"

"She got tired of waiting up for a man who gets called to the radio at three in the morning."

He said it plainly, with no complaint in it.

"Did you love her?"

"I did." He nodded slowly. "It wasn't enough to keep the phone quiet."

I stood up off the bench, barefoot on the cold concrete.

The top of my head came to his chin.

"Don't be kind to me," I said. "I've had a whole day of kind, and I'm going to scream."

"Then what do you want, Captain?"

"I want someone to put his hands on me who isn't sorry for me."

He did not move.

"Say it again," Ruel said, very low. "All of it."

My mouth went dry.

"I want your hands on me," I said. "I want it to be only tonight."

"And?"

"And I want nobody on that dock to ever hear about it."

"What's said on the water stays on it," he said. "That's the oldest rule I have."

Then he crossed the last of the distance, put one hand flat against my back, and kissed me.

It was not a polite kiss.

His mouth was warm and certain, and his hand pulled me hard against the front of his jacket.

I made a sound I had not made in over a year.

I got both hands under the jacket and shoved it off his shoulders.

It hit the floor.

He lifted me by the hips and set me on the edge of the bench.

The sash fell off, and he stepped between my knees.

"Slow," he said against my jaw. "Easy. You're running hot."

"I know what I'm running."

"I know you do." He kissed down my throat. "Let me bring you in."

His voice was low and level, the voice of a man who talked nine-hundred-foot ships through a narrow channel every week.

Every word of it went straight through me.

He pushed the pale blue skirt up my thighs.

I leaned back on my palms on my father's scarred wood and let him.

His hand slid up the inside of my leg, slow and flat, and stopped.

"Look at me, Captain."

I looked.

"You're wet through this," he said, and his thumb drew a line along the silk of my underwear.

I shuddered.

"Yes," I said. "I'm wet. Do something about it."

He smiled for the first time, a short, crooked thing.

"Hold there."

He peeled the underwear down my legs and dropped it on the floor.

Then he put two fingers inside me, slowly, all the way to the knuckle.

I said his name out loud in the empty shed.

"Good," he said. "That's good. Stay with me."

I was breathing through my teeth.

He curled his fingers forward, found the place, and pressed.

The light in the shed seemed to swing.

"Ruel."

"I know. Easy."

His thumb found my clit and moved on it in small, steady circles.

He never once hurried.

"Slow ahead," he said into my ear. "That's it. A little more. Don't pull back, I've got you."

I had both fists in his shirt.

My hips were moving against his hand on their own, and I did not care who heard it.

"Tell me what you need," he said.

"Harder."

"No." The corner of his mouth lifted. "Not yet. Ask me properly."

"Please," I said, and I was almost crying. "Please, Ruel, harder, I'm close."

He gave it to me, hard and exact.

The heel of his hand ground on my clit while his fingers worked deep.

The whole room went white and silent.

I came with my head thrown back and my mouth open against his shoulder.

My legs shook around his hips.

He held me through it with one steady hand at the small of my back.

"There," he murmured. "That's it. All the way in."

It went on a long time.

When it stopped, I was gasping, and my knees would not close.

He eased his fingers out of me and wiped them on a rag from the bench.

He did it without any embarrassment at all.

"Better?"

"No," I said.

He raised one eyebrow.

"Not even close," I said.

I put my hand on his belt and felt how hard he was behind it.

He took a sharp breath through his nose.

"Not on the bench," Ruel said, and his voice had gone rough for the first time. "Your father's name is on this wall."

"Then I know where to take you."

I picked my shoes up off the floor with one hand and took his hand with the other.

I led him out into the dark and down the dock toward the Santa Rita.

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