All of These Things

by De Mattea, Anna

“That was the first time I had the dream,” I say. “Basically, I was alone in a swimming pool, and I stayed afloat with the help of a life preserver, but no one pulled me out. No one was even around. I called and called for help, but the winds and the waves were stronger than I was and I sank, and so I died. That’s it.” I feign courage and good cheer, drawing it to a close.

  Alec’s immobilised. He licks his lips, and I’m suddenly very cold and trembling, but the water is still lovely.

  “Can I come closer?” he asks.

  I don’t answer, but he begins to shift, and his movement progresses into a walk. I don’t know what he’ll say or what he’ll do, and yet I’m certain it will be something that’s so right, and just like the scenery of this place, I’ll most likely never forget it.

  He’s before me, and I swallow. He raises a hand to remove his glasses, and like a wand, he places them to the side on the paver flooring. He proceeds to remove mine, and they join his. Alec’s eyes are blue like the gulf, and they’re pained and restless. His hands touch my neck, and with a delicate fistful of my hair, he gently sweeps it to one side. My mane tumbles over my breast, and I notice the swell of my chest rise and fall under it.

  “You’re not alone anymore, Caroline. I got you,” he says softly, his voice sensational.

  “Okay,” I say, working up a whisper.

  He takes my hand, leading me to the center of our private pool, his eyes never leaving mine. I manage through a storm of sensations, reaching the shore once and for all. I think he knows I’ve given it my all for now, as I know Alec will always want more.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Checking his watch, Alec declares 4:17 pm the official time I, Caroline De Andreis, finally learned to swim.

  “I’m still doing it. I did it!” I shriek, probably looking very clumsy and graceless, but I’m flat on my tummy, with my head over water and my feet definitely not touching the ground. My legs stay extended, splattering behind.

  “I thought we agreed to no splashing, love,” Alec teases, rubbing water out of his eyes. “Keep going, Caroline. I’ll be right back.” He dives in and swims away.

  I stand with my feet firm on the ground, slowly starting to spread out forward and swim in the opposite direction. I can’t believe I’m doing this! I’m actually doing it.

  I’m finally swimming!

  I stop once more and get on my mark. I want to head in the ocean’s direction. Even with the sound of breaking waves, I go, swimming to the infinity edge. I hear a splash and turn to find Alec back again with two glasses and that bottle of champagne.

  I experiment with a flirty smile.

  “Are you expecting me to admit that you were right?” I say, being my feisty self around him again.

  “I’m not daft enough to expect that,” he says, and hands me the goblets.

  “Well what about a thank you? Would you expect a thank you from me?”

  “The pleasure was all mine, sweetheart.” Alec winks, and the cork pops.

  I raise the glasses for Alec to pour, and we walk, locating a safe spot to deposit our drink.

  “To you, Caroline. A now, all accomplished, over-achieving, magnificent woman.”

  I giggle.

  “To the best instructor a girl can ask for,” I respond, clinking my glass against his. “I can’t believe you brought champagne.”

  “I had a good feeling.” He grins, resting his torso against the edge of the pool, staring out to sea. I do the same.

  “You were incredible with me, Alec. Thank you. And thank you for contemplating this whole day, and then going ahead and making it happen.”

  “I told you, it was my pleasure. I probably enjoyed the day more than you did.”

  “There’s no way that’s possible.” I turn my head to look at him.

  “Caroline?” he says my name coyly.

  “Yeah?” I mutter. He gazes at me; his eyes warm even as they get darker.

  “I’d wait,” he says.

  I perk up, my head lifting away from my wet shoulder.

  “I’ve never felt this way. So I’d wait. Even if it’s the last thing I do, or if you’re the death of me,” he says, achingly serious. “I’d wait.”

  The candour of his open-heart is entrapping. I surprise myself because I don’t feel a desperate need to look away, and in fact, I’m lured by his unguarded revelation. For someone like me, who’s forever wary and perpetually cautious, Alec’s honesty is beguiling.

  “But you don’t know me,” I whisper.

  “And I imagine I never totally will because you amaze me every day.”

  His voice comes to me like an extension from the wind, chilling my wits, my body, and streaming through my reason. I’m enraptured in this funnel cloud of possibilities and seduction, travelling from a former self and into a brand new start. The black and white confines of my life, a life I steered on a one-way road toward my idea of a model world, pull to the side and revel in the unexpected.

  “Alec,” I whisper.

  “Don’t.” He draws back, but his eyes don’t leave mine. “I told you. Don’t leave me with nothing.” He readies himself to swim away, leaving the glass and champagne—deserting our private paradise.

  It’s just as well because it’s not like I know what I want to say, anyway, even when every cell in my body screams for the chance. I don’t want this day to turn heavy or discontent, and so I poke around in my brainpower to find a truce.

  “Hey!” I say, grabbing his attention back my way. Completely inept, I swim towards him until I jolt him out from a brooding state.

  “Does this mean, as a newbie swimmer, I’m all out of luck with piggy-back rides?” I say, jumping onto his back, wrapping my arms around Alec’s neck. My legs cross at his waist, and I watch his smile grow.

  “You get free access, love.”

  “Free access?”

  “Indeed,” he says, lowering us into the sparkling water.

  “Good. So bring us back to our glasses and drink champagne with me, okay?” My cheek presses at his ear, and my breasts up against his back. He smells divine, a blend of sunscreen, chlorine and musk.

  He concedes, and we’re adrift.

  “Alec?”

  He gives me a curious, lopsided look.

  “What is it, sweetheart?”

  We reach the edge once again, and he refills our glasses, handing me mine. I stay wrapped around his torso.

  “You told me last night at the bar that the rose represents your grandmother.” I trace his tattoo. “But why do you have a shield back here?”

  “I’m afraid that story isn’t as romantic.”

  “So? I still want to hear the story of Alec.” I tilt my head away from his scruff and give him expectant eyes. He returns it with a quiet laugh.

  “Have I told you how much I care for those two tiny dimples that surface at the corner of your mouth when you smile?”

  I roll my eyes. “Don’t change the subject. Go on about that tattoo...”

  He pulls in a deep breath from the misty air, and I watch him assemble the courage to speak.

  “The shield is exactly what it’s meant for, to screen from harm, but most importantly, it provides you with a chance to fend for yourself,” he says, sounding valiant and fearless. “My father was an alcoholic, a well-to-do business man with a temper. His occasional outbursts were entirely unexpected. He hid it from society very well, but from time to time my mother had to escape with my sisters to Grandmother Rose’s.”

  My brows furrow. “But what about you?”

  “I was the only other male in the house, so I’d distract my father until they could get away.”

  He’s still unbelievably prim and poised, and I tuck my head in the curve of his neck and shoulder.

  “But you’d make it out, right?”

  “We learnt the hard w
ay that father would find us at my grandmother’s, and then it was worse for Mum. He’d reprimand her for taking his children, but Grandmother Rose was tougher than her daughter and very inclined to intervene. One day, she was hurt in his indignation, and I decided never to join them again. Better I stay behind distracting him while they found a few days of peace.”

  I wince, muscles tightening.

  “Is that why you knew how to fight… the night of the break-in?”

  “Partly, yes. I did practice fencing and martial arts, though.”

  “How old were you?” I ask, and my head has not moved from its resting spot.

  “You mean, when I was letting them go off on their own? Maybe eleven or twelve,” he says. “My father also had another secret family. Quite the underground man he was, and although he really wasn’t around for them, he did treat them lavishly. He rather preferred to control Mum, instead.”

  Concurrently, we put off adding anything else and just look out to sea.

  “Alec?”

  “Yes?”

  I turn my mouth to the crook of his neck. “What are you doing to me?”

  His eyes close fleetingly and reopen at once. Alec looks down at me. “I could ask you the same thing, sweetheart.”

  “But you’re not scared.”

  “You’re so wrong. You terrify the hell out of me, Caroline.”

  Now, I’m the one beseeching more.

  “You can tell me,” I say. “You said you wanted to tell me everything.”

  Stupefied, he stares at me. When Alec’s lost for words like this, my body mewls from excitement. But a mask—fused of sadness and fear—is suddenly on his face.

  My defiant stare leads him on.

  Alec shifts, detaching me from him, and his hands claw at my waist, hoisting me out of the water, and I’m plonked on the ledge. His trepidation distorts the temperature, swapping the mild, tepid air and water to harsher conditions.

  I choke back, fighting the chill as his eyes look searchingly at mine.

  “Tell me your everything,” I bid him.

  My accelerating heart has me wondering on the state of his. Alec regards me fretfully—his desperate eyes leaping up from where he stands somewhere under my chin. He’s wet and gleaming, brilliantly intense.

  “Like this, you’re more than ready to quit me. You can up and leave, Caroline.”

  My eyes skim his face for clues.

  “One time,” he begins, “I wolfed down all the anger and all the fear my mother had—what my sisters carried, and my grandmother stomached. That fear and anger was so real—I could see it in front of me until it became my own on top of what was already mine. I was almost fifteen, tall like my father, and learning tricks of defense, imparting them on my family because my sister, Olivia, seemed to conduct herself a lot like my mother, and that scared me to no end. I wasn’t going to let that pattern infect another generation in my family. I wanted them stronger. Only now is my sister, Naomi, a force to be reckoned with, but she was touch and go while we were growing up,” he says, entirely implicated in his story.

  “During the last, brutal confrontation with my father, he had come round to collect my family, or at least my mother. He would not be defied. He had to have the last word, and I fought him. I fought him off knowing how much I could hurt him—how able I was to make this permanently stop.”

  I shudder, my upper body drawing back somewhat, and my eyes frantic.

  “I knew how and where I could strike him, to finally immobilize him, and that it could have deadly ramifications. Perhaps, it’s exactly what I wanted. I killed my father, Caroline. I killed him,” he confesses, keeping his voice calm.

  I don’t prompt him by asking questions; in fact, I don’t even say a word. There’s probably some judgement on my face, definite lines of panic and alarm.

  “Murder?” I whisper.

  “Mainly self-defence,” he inserts.

  “But it sounds like you were more than able to just protect yourself by then, or your entire family. You could have defeated him without killing him,” I explore.

  “The last time I ever used that kind of force, and felt that kind of fury, was when those men attacked you, but I didn’t kill them. I hurt them a lot less than I wanted to and painfully let the officials do their job. I can do that. I’m not a murderer, but I’ve killed,” he maintains, relatively calm as I border on hysteria.

  “My mother dragged us in a rut, and then she couldn’t pull us out of it. Sometimes, it felt like she wasn’t trying to change things at all for us—like my sisters and I weren’t enough, and in the end her husband meant more. My grandmother was sick over her daughter’s weaknesses. My family was crumbling, and I was completely reactive, taking things in my own hands, succumbing to a fever of adolescent, testosterone-seething behaviour. I know what I did. My grandmother knows, and my family knows, and an investigation lasted all but two minutes because I was young and ultimately guarding myself and my family.”

  Darkness shrouds him tenderly, but it’s darkness just the same. Alec steps back, jaw clenching, and eyes erratic.

  “Have I finally done it?” he asks. “Are you finally quitting me?”

  PASSAGE

  Alec: According to my sister, nothing holds more gravitas for a man than an act of true divulgence, especially when it’s at his own expense. I’ve wittingly jeopardized my future and happiness due to my admiration for another human being, and this, Naomi says, means everything. My admission was not just a declaration of responsibility or conscience, but an affirmation to Caroline that I’m totally and completely in love with her flawlessness. It wasn’t difficult for me to work out it had to be done, no matter the courage I had to uproot, because the urge automatically came with the infinite respect I harbour for this woman. Naomi tells me not to imagine or expect the worst, but she has never met Caroline, has she?

  I received quite an ear-bashing from my sister; currently I’m regretting ever responding to her call. Hearing about Caroline has fuelled her interest, and I surrendered, forwarding a picture of her to Naomi. Therefore, I’m quite positive Grandmother Rose will have a chance to study Caroline, if not my mother and Olivia, too. It’s easy to picture them all giddy kipper around Naomi’s mobile. If there is one thing my father’s callousness helped our family achieve over the years, it’s the impulse to act as one. Grams, Mum, Olivia, Naomi, and me—we coexist imperfectly perfect, and periodically, when there is a vast distance between us, it remains painless and uncomplicated to manoeuvre through it. I suppose the one good thing to come from this is Naomi’s promise to finally bring her hankering to a standstill about me getting it on with her best friend Chloe.

  The truth is, I’m absolutely gutted. If I never hear from Caroline again, I don’t know what I can possibly do with myself. How do I go from living around the most fabulous person I’ll ever know, to her becoming someone I used to know?

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Hey,” I say softly, joining Sofie by the unlit fire pit. I can’t believe how possibly broken such a small word can sound, coming out like a bombardment of implications.

  I drag what’s become my favourite chair in the world to face the sea, slumping into the pacifying, cavernous depth of the wooden Adirondack. My chest releases another small sigh of grief.

  As I slip to the far back of the seat, I encircle my arms around my knees. Sofie’s choosing not to intrude on the silence. Instead, I feel her breaking down my affected air—calling me out on the artificiality of it. I can’t decide if I’d rather she come straight out with an inquisition, or ignore me completely. She goes on this way, looking right through me.

  My mind still hums with confusion. The questions I hashed up during my long walk back to the cottage from the O’Malley’s are abuzz. I’m wrestling the instinct to tell Sofie about Alec’s past, mildly miffed with myself for trying to respect his name and privacy. I
don’t know if he deserves that consideration. Every atom in me is exerting itself—straining to speak up or react even when they have no inkling on what exactly there is to say or do with the matter. As it was by the pool, I still have nothing to offer Alec. I was disoriented earlier—completely outside myself and couldn’t work through the little clarity in my brain. I felt muddled, utterly dizzy by a host of feelings, my loss of nerve instant.

  Face-to-face with him, in that moment, I was awkward and self-conscious. I don’t know why. There’s no sane reason for my discomfiture. Sitting there, on the lip of the pool, looking in Alec’s scared eyes, I felt irrationally mortified and embarrassed to be privy to his disclosure. I was grappled by an unrealistic, desperate yearning to turn back time. I wish he never told me. Maybe the confession is one I’d prefer to live without—something I don’t want the weight of knowing. It makes me feel like an accomplice, and perhaps, if I could, I’d scroll back further in time, never connecting with this man at all.

  The most overwhelming part is the absence of fear I’m contending with. That truth rings perpetually in my head, causing a commotion as it wracks my nerves. The lack of panic and fright isn’t calming or reassuring as it should be. It alarms me—maybe even demoralizes me to know I’m not instinctively afraid of Alec, of his capacity and his capabilities. Something like this should immediately scare me and turn me off, and it hasn’t.

  “Bad day?” Sofie asks, clearly starting her investigation.

  “Bad ending,” I say.

  Across from me, her torso crumples. The frustration in Sofie’s face is unmistakable, and I clutch myself harder before my gaze flicks back at her.

  “Wow. That’s a shit load of information—however restrained you’re trying to be. How long do you expect me not to put my nose into that?” Sofie’s brows furrow, and she pauses, examining me. “How did you fuck things up for yourself this time?”

  I pull my hands free from their grip around my knees, falling deeper into my funk.

  “What did you do?” Sofie asks savagely, lobbying my mood to further disbelief.

  “What do you mean?”