The Space Between Sisters

by Mary McNear

  “No,” she said, honestly.

  “Because it is taking all of my willpower not to do what I really want to do, which is to take you up to my bedroom . . .”

  Poppy gulped. “Really?”

  “Yes,” he said, staring back at her steadily.

  She ran a tongue along her lower lip. It was sticky with syrup. “So why . . . why are we sitting down here?”

  “Because I need to spend a night with you like I need a hole in my head.”

  That broke the mood. She scowled at him. “That’s not a very nice thing to say.”

  “No,” he agreed. “It’s true, though.”

  She stood up and started to clear her plate from the table.

  “Hey, come on. Don’t get mad,” he said, and when she passed him on her way to the sink he caught the sleeve of her blouse and tugged on it, playfully. She let him take the plate out of her hands. He set it on the table and pulled her into his lap. He put his arms around her waist and nuzzled her neck. “I said I didn’t need a hole in my head. I didn’t say I wasn’t willing to have one. As long as it’s small, and it’s in a very inconspicuous place.”

  Poppy laughed. It was impossible for her to stay mad at him right now. His lips left her neck and found her lips. “Mmmm, you always taste so sweet.” He reached across the table for the bottle of syrup. “You know,” he said, “we could have some fun with this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  His smiled, mischievously, and, holding up the bottle, he pantomimed pouring it down the front of her blouse.

  “Sam!” she said, but she was laughing. Then she turned serious. “Does this mean we’re going up to your room?”

  “Do you want us to?”

  She nodded, her heart pounding. “If you don’t . . . don’t think it will be a mistake.”

  “Oh, I definitely think it will be a mistake,” he said, but he was smiling.

  “Will you . . . carry me?” she asked, thinking of all the movies she’d seen this done in. It had always struck her as the height of romance.

  “I can probably do that,” he said teasingly. “Let’s go.” He picked her up and carried her through the kitchen, into the living room, and up the stairs. And Poppy savored the feel of his arms around her and of her cheek resting against his chest. He reached the top step, turned down the hallway, and then stopped in the doorway to his room.

  “You sure you want to do this?” he asked, looking down at her.

  “Yes,” she said, her desire mixing with nervousness.

  He lay her down on his bed, and lay down beside her. They held each other then, and kissed each other, and Poppy pressed herself against him, and pulled his T-shirt off, and ran her hands over his bare chest. She was waiting for him to undress her, too, but he took his time, and continued at a relaxed, unhurried pace that Poppy found maddening. She wanted him so badly. Didn’t he know that?

  “Are you going to take my clothes off?” she asked, finally.

  “I was getting around to it,” he said, smiling.

  Well, you could get around to it a little faster, she thought. But at that moment Sam began to unbutton her blouse. He took off everything except her pale blue, lace edged bra and panties. She had fantasized about this moment so many times over the last several weeks, but, as it turned out, even in her fantasies it hadn’t been this sweet.

  Sam, almost against his will, let his eyes brush over her. She was beautiful, no doubt about it, but he couldn’t help but think she didn’t belong here, in his already rumpled bed, with its brown-and-white-checked sheets and scratchy brown blanket. No, she belonged somewhere else, on a tropical island, maybe. Frolicking on a powdery white sand beach, with bottle green water licking her ankles, and palm fronds waving above her head.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked him.

  “Nothing is wrong,” he assured her. “This is just a little surreal, having you in my bed like this.”

  “Surreal in a good way?”

  “Yes,” he said, leaning down to kiss her sweet, syrupy mouth. “In a very good way.” He thought now about the box of condoms in his bedside table drawer, tucked under a financial document so boring looking that it would discourage even his most curious child from looking any further.

  He kissed her more deeply, hungry for her taste and for the feel of her body against his. Still, he knew he needed to go slowly. He remembered the night on the dock at Birch Tree Bait. His hand had brushed against her breast while they were kissing and it was as if he had delivered an electric shock to her.

  There was more kissing now, more touching, and stroking. Sam loved the way she ran her hands over his chest and back and stomach; even with his blue jeans and her panties separating them, he was unbelievably aroused. He dipped his fingers inside her bra and caressed her nipples, then trailed a hand lightly down her stomach, which was silky smooth and perfectly suntanned. But when he reached the waistband of her panties, he felt, or imagined he felt, a little tremor pass through her. He didn’t know if it was desire, or something else. Something like fear. Because when he thought about it now, that was what he had seen in her eyes down at the dock. She’d been quick to cover it up, but it had been there nonetheless. He’d frightened her, crossing a line he hadn’t even known was there.

  He stopped what he was doing. “Poppy,” he said, understanding something about her for the first time. “Did . . . did somebody . . . hurt you?”

  She hesitated.

  “I know we never talked about this,” he said, “but that night, the night Linc got in an accident, when we were kissing, something happened. You pulled away from me. Do you remember?”

  “Yes,” she said. But now she wouldn’t meet his eyes.

  “Poppy,” he said again, turning her face gently towards him. “What happened that night? And . . . before that night?”

  She sighed, clearly troubled.

  “If you don’t want to talk about it . . .”

  “No, I do. I want to, Sam. But I’m not sure I know how to. I’ve never told anyone about it before.”

  Sam waited. He thought about turning off the bedside table lamp. Would it be easier for her to tell him this in the dark? Maybe. But he wanted to see her face, especially since he sensed how important this was. So he didn’t rush her, but when she bit her lower lip in frustration, he knew how hard she was finding it to put this into words.

  Finally, he said, “You know, sometimes how you say something matters less than just . . . saying it.”

  So she told Sam the story, slowly. Haltingly. Sometimes she looked at him. Sometimes she didn’t. It was hard to listen to, partly because he knew what was coming, and partly because he knew it was too late to protect her. He thought of Poppy at sixteen, walking home from school on a spring day, and he wished he could turn back the clock and change the course of that afternoon. He knew now, in the telling of it, how much it had altered her life. And the fact that she’d carried this with her all of these years without ever telling anyone seemed to him to have been a terrible burden. When she was done talking, he pulled the sheet up over them and folded her into his arms, trying to transmit as much warmth to her body as he could.

  “I’m so sorry that happened to you,” he said. She nestled against him. “Are you okay? Right now, I mean.”

  She met his eyes. “I’m okay,” she said. And she sounded surprised. “I didn’t know I could do that. And, by the way Sam, the reason I forgot to take the keys out of the lock when I was closing Birch Tree Bait that night was because I was so preoccupied. I’d let myself think about that, really think about it, for the first time in years.”

  He stroked her back, and kissed her, tenderly, on her temple. But the conversation wasn’t over yet. He had another question for her. “So, the men you’ve been with since then . . . you’ve never wanted to tell any of them?”

  “No,” she said, softly. And then, for the first time since coming up to his bedroom, she smiled. “Believe it or not, Sam, even though I’m in your bed in the middle of
the night in my bra and panties, I actually have a problem with intimacy.” She propped herself up on her elbow. “Once, I had a boyfriend for six months. That was a personal record for me. Usually, I tried to end things before they got to that point. But I thought he might be different. He was . . . he was a nice guy, a really nice guy. And, more importantly, he wasn’t in any hurry for us to, you know, be together, or if he was, he didn’t let it show. He said he’d wait, until marriage, if necessary. He thought that was the issue for me, and I let him think that. And then one day, I decided, we should try. Just . . . try. He didn’t know about what had happened to me, but he knew I didn’t have a lot of experience, and I thought it would be all right. When the time came, though, I panicked. I just completely . . . panicked. I broke up with him after that. I told him I wasn’t ready for a serious relationship.”

  “And that was it?”

  “No.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Last year, I went to my ten-year high school reunion. And I saw this guy I’d had a crush on my junior year. He used to play the saxophone in the school orchestra.”

  “So, he’s a musician?”

  “Now?” She smiled. “No, he’s an insurance adjuster. I trusted him, though. I thought, ‘This guy’s a good guy.’ I could just tell. I mean, I didn’t want to have a relationship with him. I just wanted to see if it could happen. So I asked him back to my apartment, and I told him this was a one-time thing, and he seemed okay with it. Later I was glad I asked him. Because it . . . it worked.”

  “It worked?”

  “It happened,” Poppy amended. “It was all right. It wasn’t great. But I didn’t freak out, either. I didn’t want to see him again afterwards—not that way, anyway—but I was okay with what happened. I was kind of testing the waters with him, I guess.”

  There was a pause. “And me? Are you testing the waters with me?”

  “God, no. This isn’t some kind of experiment. Can’t you tell that, Sam?”

  He could tell. He could tell by the way she was looking at him right now. But that didn’t mean that this should go any further tonight. “We don’t need to do this, Poppy,” he said. “You know that, don’t you? We can talk. Or sleep.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “No more talking.” And, as if to drive this point home, she placed her palms on his chest. She ran them, lightly, up and down. “We’ve talked enough for one night.”

  Still, Sam hesitated, thinking about what she’d told him. He couldn’t put it away now. It was too . . . too big. Too complicated. And it made him want to fix it, he realized. It made him want to make it right. But he couldn’t. Not tonight, maybe not ever.

  “Kiss me,” she said, softly, and the bedside table light seemed to be glowing all around her blond hair. He leaned in to kiss her. Maybe, he thought, maybe the best thing to do was to concentrate on the present. It was possible, he knew, in love as in life, to overthink things, to overanalyze them. What if all they needed to know right now was that they wanted each other, they cared about each other, and they trusted each other?

  “I’ll tell you what, Poppy,” he said now, savoring the silkiness of her skin against his. “We’ll take it slowly. Very slowly. And if you want us to stop, at any time, you just say so. And we’ll stop. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she whispered.

  CHAPTER 23

  Later, much later, as the morning sunlight began to slide, almost imperceptibly, over the bed they were lying in, Poppy tried to rouse herself. She’d been drowsing in and out of sleep, her cheek resting in the crook of Sam’s neck, her arm thrown over his chest, and she had a vague sense of time passing, of seconds ticking by and minutes accumulating. She stirred in his arms, and tried to sit up, but her limbs felt so heavy, so deliciously heavy, that she gave up almost immediately and nestled against him instead.

  “I can’t move,” she murmured into his neck. She felt, rather than saw, him smile.

  “So don’t,” he said, tightening his arms around her.

  “I’ll have to, eventually,” she pointed out. She shifted her cheek, fractionally, so that it was now resting against the warm solidity of his chest. “I mean, I’ll need to eat, won’t I?”

  “Hmmm,” he said, moving one of his hands to the small of her back. “I’ll bring you breakfast in bed.”

  “But then you’d have to leave me,” she objected, running a hand over his chest.

  “You’re right. I don’t want to do that,” he said. He left one hand on the small of her back and raised the other hand up and ran it, languorously, through her hair. “Maybe we can get someone to bring us food.”

  She smiled, stretched, and wondered, idly, how much longer they could reasonably stay here, hungry or not. “What time is it?” she asked, turning her head so that her lips could nuzzle his chest.

  He took his hand out of her hair and lifted his watch up. “It’s eleven thirty,” he said.

  “Eleven thirty?” She lifted her head up and stared at him in disbelief. “Don’t you . . . don’t you have to go to work?”

  “Nope. I texted Byron early this morning and asked him to cover for me.”

  “I don’t remember you doing that.”

  “You were sleeping, as I recall.”

  “And you didn’t wake me up?”

  “No. Why would I have?”

  “So we could have been doing something other than sleeping,” she said, raising herself on one elbow.

  “We had been doing something other than sleeping.”

  She smiled at his reference to their lovemaking. They had taken it slowly, at first, until Poppy hadn’t wanted to take it slowly anymore. Her ardor had surprised her. Where had it come from? Had it been there all along, waiting for Sam? Maybe, she thought, remembering the skill and tenderness with which he had touched, and stroked, and kissed her. And suddenly she was impatient for more. She didn’t want them to waste any time, and she told him that now.

  He was amused. “Poppy,” he said, turning on his side so that they were facing each other, with only a sheet covering them. “We still have four hours before I have to pick up my kids.”

  “Four hours? That’s it?”

  “Yes, Poppy. Four hours. That’s a long time.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not. Not when . . .” Not when I’ve never made love like that before. She tried to think of how to say this, but she didn’t know how to. She’d never talked about sex with anyone before, not even Win.

  But he was caressing her breasts now and she could feel her nipples hardening and the rest of her body tingling. He leaned down and ran a tongue over one nipple, and Poppy moaned and arched her back reflexively. She felt a rush of warmth spread through her whole body.

  “Now, what were we talking about?” he said teasingly.

  She smiled, but she didn’t want to talk anymore. Still, he seemed to be waiting for some kind of an answer. “What I was going to say was that what happened last night was so . . . so good,” she said, moving her hands up into his hair and rumpling it. “I knew, of course, that it was supposed to be good, fantastic even, but hearing about it, and actually experiencing it? Those are two completely different things.”

  Sam had been stroking the inside of her thighs, but now his hands stilled and his blue eyes were serious.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing’s wrong. I’m just . . . so sorry that happened to you,” he said, gently brushing hair off her face. “I wish I could make it . . . go away. Undo it.”

  “I tried that, for a long time. I tried to make it go away. I tried to pretend it never happened. But it didn’t work,” she said, reaching out to touch his face. “The talking about it, though, the way we did last night, I think that might help.” She kissed him, tenderly, and then he ran his fingers through her hair, something she already knew he loved to do. And for a little while, as they held each other, it was as if everything else had dropped away from them. It was just the two of them, and this bed, and they had all the time in the world. E
xcept that they didn’t, of course. And as the tempo of their kissing changed, their hunger for each other returned.

  “You’re right, Poppy, four hours isn’t a lot of time,” Sam said as he pulled away, and reached to open the bedside table drawer. But as he was doing this, Poppy, wanting him to hurry, made a small, impatient sound. He turned to look at her and smiled. He touched her hair, fanned out on the pillow around her. The noontime sunlight was pouring into the room now, filling it with a bright golden light.

  “You are so beautiful. You know that, don’t you?” he asked.

  “People have told me that. But I’ve never felt that way before. Until right now.”

  Later, Sam drove Poppy back to the Mosquito Inn to pick up Win’s car. It was a lovely drive. The road was dappled with sunshine, and the warm breeze blowing onto Poppy’s face through the open window was fragrant and sweet with the smell of wildflowers growing in the roadside ditches. The best part of the drive, though, was that for its entire duration, Sam kept a hand resting on her knee. It was a gesture that seemed to her to be both intimate and protective, and it had the added advantage, too, of carrying with it a faintly erotic charge. She could have quite happily spent the rest of her life driving down this road with Sam, she decided. The only caveat, of course, would be that they would need to make frequent stops, pulling onto the abandoned logging roads that dotted the forest around them, and making love in the backseat.

  Too soon, though, Sam was pulling into the Mosquito Inn’s lot. “Well, Win’s car is still here,” he said, stopping next to it. “That’s a good sign.” And, with a final squeeze of her knee, he got out to inspect it. “It looks fine,” he said, turning to Poppy, who’d joined him. “A friend of mine got his tires slashed when he was parked here once, but it looks like you got lucky last night.”

  “I certainty did,” Poppy said, with a mischievous smile. She faced him and slipped her hands into the back pockets of his blue jeans.

  “Are you flirting with me?” Sam asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Definitely,” Poppy said.