Safe Harbor

by Judith Arnold

  Kip’s hands.

  In her dream he kissed her. His lips danced over hers, and his tongue found hers, and she felt all those dangerous sensations again. Her breasts seemed heavy and overly sensitive, the cotton of her nightgown chafing her swollen nipples, and because this was a dream she could imagine that not her nightgown but Kip was touching her, stroking her skin. She could imagine his long, patrician fingers, light and agile, playing across her flesh, sliding from her breasts lower, to her belly and lower yet, down where she’d never let a boy touch her before.

  She shouldn’t think these things, but she couldn’t seem to stop. What had frightened her in the cupola excited her when she was alone in the sagging single bed, just her and her fantasies of Kip doing things that made her skin burn and her flesh tremble, her hips tense and her breath grow short.

  Just her and Kip, exploring each other in her sleep-drugged mind. Here in the darkness of her room beneath the eaves, Shelley was beginning to figure it out.

  ***

  IT WAS RAINING when she woke up. She’d slept past nine o’clock, but when she dragged herself out of bed she felt tired and achy, as if she’d run a marathon overnight. She got dressed, broke a tooth of her comb trying to unravel the snarls in her hair, and stumbled down the stairs, her head throbbing and her vision blurred.

  The bright kitchen light hurt her eyes. Her mother was preparing a shopping list, looking offensively energetic in her denim skirt and striped shirt. “What kind of cereal do you want me to buy?” she asked. “We’re almost out of Cheerios.”

  The thought of cereal—of any food at all—made Shelley queasy. “I don’t care,” she said, moving directly to the coffee maker and filling a mug with hot coffee.

  Her mother eyed her with mild disapproval. “You shouldn’t have stayed so late at Kip’s last night.”

  Shelley checked herself before embarking on a vehement defense of her virtue. Nothing had happened with Kip—and yet everything had happened with him in her mind, in the secret confines of her bed. It was Kip’s fault that she was so poorly rested, even if he hadn’t actually done anything to her.

  “I was home by eleven,” she said, recalling not what she’d dreamed but what had happened. “We were playing backgammon and I lost track of time. Anyway, eleven isn’t so late.”

  Her mother shrugged. “It’s vacation. I don’t care if you sleep in. I just don’t want you overstaying your welcome at the Strouds’.”

  On cue, Shelley heard a tap on the screen door, followed by Kip’s voice: “Hello?”

  Her mother rolled her eyes. “You two are inseparable,” she said with a tolerant chuckle as she left the kitchen to unlatch the door and let him in.

  Shelley was grateful to have a moment alone. Simply hearing her mother describe her and Kip as “inseparable” reawakened her memory of Kip’s kiss, his mouth inseparable from hers, and then her dreamy mental elaborations on that kiss. Hearing the approach of footsteps, she hid her face behind her mug and took a sip of coffee.

  “‘Morning,” Kip greeted her. His yellow slicker glistened with moisture. He took it off and draped it on the back of a chair.

  Shelley peered up at him over the rim of the mug. Despite the slicker’s hood his hair was damp and his eyeglasses were mottled with raindrops. He pulled them off and dried them on the hem of his T-shirt. Shelley remembered how he’d taken them off last night before kissing her. She hastily averted her gaze so she wouldn’t have to see the pinpoints of light sparkling in his dark brown irises, the enviable thickness of his lashes and the intriguing bump in his nose.

  It wasn’t fair that he could look so good so early. She knew she herself must look wretched. At her best she was barely passable; right now, when she was exhausted and in the throes of a sublime headache—to say nothing of totally embarrassed, not only by what she’d felt in Kip’s arms but by what she’d felt long afterward, in her own bed—she was hardly at her best.

  She braced herself for his inevitable ribbing about her ghastly appearance. All he said, however, was, “Can I help myself to some of that coffee? It smells great.”

  “Go right ahead,” Shelley’s mother answered for her. “I’m on my way out. If you don’t have a preference, Shelley, I’m going to buy shredded wheat.”

  “I do have a preference,” Shelley said quickly. “I hate shredded wheat.”

  “It’s good for you,” her mother pointed out. “It doesn’t have any sugar.”

  “It doesn’t have any taste,” Shelley countered.

  “All right, I’ll get Cheerios,” said her mother, lifting her purse from the counter and starting toward the door. “If you go out, leave me a note.”

  Shelley nodded. She and Kip said good-bye, then listened to her mother’s retreating footsteps. The screen door closed with a whoosh and a thump.

  Kip turned a chair around and straddled it backwards, setting his mug on the table. He leaned his folded arms on the back of the chair and stared across the table at Shelley. She focused on the swirls of steam rising from her mug.

  “It isn’t much of a beach day,” he remarked.

  She sighed. Sooner or later he was likely to say something about last night. She certainly wasn’t going to raise the subject, but if he intended to, she’d rather he did it now, so they could get the conversation over with as quickly as possible.

  “I was thinking,” he went on, “we could go to the library and you could find me some girl coming-of-age books to read.”

  Shelley glanced up. Her eyes met his, and she saw in their beautiful brown depths only friendship. Nothing more complicated than that. “Okay,” she said with a relieved smile.

  Ten minutes later, the coffee mugs rinsed and her rain jacket donned, she left the house with Kip. Biking in the rain was sloppy, but they had no alternative. They rode slowly, trying to avoid the puddles and, when that was impossible, lifting their feet off the pedals so the muddy water wouldn’t splash up against their legs.

  The library was located in Old Harbor. Shelley wasn’t surprised to see the shop-lined sidewalks packed with browsers and strollers. On rainy days, there wasn’t much for the tourists to do besides shop.

  She and Kip parked their bikes in the rack outside the library and entered. Shelley adored libraries, and although the Island Free Library was much smaller than the library at home in Westport, Shelley liked it for the simple reason that she was allowed to use it. Tourists didn’t have borrowing privileges on the island, but because they paid property taxes the owners of summer homes did. Whenever she used the Island Free Library she felt like a native, a genuine citizen of Block Island.

  Not bothering with the card catalogue, she headed straight for the fiction shelves, Kip at her heels. “Don’t forget, it’s vacation,” he whispered. “I don’t want to read anything boring.”

  “These are good books,” Shelley assured him, scanning the racks in search of the L’s. “Here—Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird. I can’t believe you’ve never read this before. You’re going to love it.” She handed him the novel, then continued to scour the shelves, moving into the M’s. “Oh, this is a great book—The Member of the Wedding. Carson McCullough.”

  “What’s it about?” Kip asked as he took the book from her.

  “A girl coming of age,” Shelley told him.

  “Great,” he grunted, though he was smiling.

  “And here—” she handed him a third book “—The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath. It’s about—”

  “A girl coming of age,” he completed.

  “A girl having a nervous breakdown,” Shelley corrected him, then grinned. “Which is probably the same thing.”

  Kip shared her smile. Then he touched his hand to her elbow and directed her down the aisle. “Come on--I want to choose a book for you.”

  He had never taken her arm like that before. It was a curiously chivalrous gesture, not exactly romantic but not quite friendly, either. It was... protective. Possessive. She liked it.

  He stopped in the H’s. �
��Here,” he said, pulling The Sun Also Rises from a shelf. “There’s a good, manly book for you.”

  “I’ve read it already,” she told him.

  “Okay. How about...” He scanned the shelves and pulled out Hesse’s Steppenwolf.

  “I’ve read it.”

  “Robert Heinlein—Stranger in a Strange Land.”

  “I’ve read it,” she said.

  He scowled. “Is there anything you haven’t read?”

  “Not in the H’s.”

  He glared at her, then dissolved in quiet laughter. “I bet you’re going to be an English teacher when you grow up.”

  “I’d love to be an English teacher,” she admitted. “Or better yet, a professor of literature at some college. I’d love to get paid to read novels and talk about them.”

  “I can just imagine the reading lists you’d come up with,” Kip muttered, although his smile didn’t flag. “All books by women, right? All books about girls coming of age.”

  “Why not?” She skimmed the shelves in search of another book for Kip.

  “No more books for me,” he halted her. “These things have to be returned in two weeks—I’ll be lucky if I can finish three by then. Here.” He pulled a slender volume from a shelf and presented it to her. “Kafka. If you want to become a literature professor, you’ve got to get into his stuff.”

  She tilted her head to read the spine. “Metamorphosis.”

  “It’s about a man who turns into a cockroach.”

  “Yuck!”

  “Real macho stuff,” he joked.

  “All right,” she said, “I’ll read it.” She didn’t know whether he was pulling her leg about the book’s subject matter. She wasn’t going to let Kip think he could gross her out, though.

  They carried their books to the check-out desk, where they both presented their cards to the librarian. She smiled and took Kip’s pile first. “Samuel,” she said, reading the name on Kip’s card before she inserted it into the dating machine.

  Kip wrinkled his nose. His legal name was Samuel Brockett Stroud III, but nobody ever called him Samuel—or even Sam—except for when he was in trouble and his mother would intone, “Sam-you-well, I’d like to talk to you,” in a foreboding voice. His grandfather had been called Samuel and his father--Samuel Brockett Stroud II--was called Brock. According to Kip, credit for his nickname went to Diana. When he was born people had referred to him as a “chip off the old block,” but three-year-old Diana had misunderstood half of it and mispronounced the rest and called him a “Kip off the old Brock.”

  Once their books had been checked out, Shelley and Kip left the library. The rain had lightened to a drizzle, but they both rode their bikes one-handed so they could use their left hands to hold their books under the flaps of their raincoats. They steered straight for Kip’s house.

  As soon as they’d shed their wet outerwear and shoes, they ascended to the cupola. Kip adjusted the windows so no rain would come in, and there, in the cramped, gloomily lit room, they read. They occupied diagonal corners, their legs stretched out between them. Whenever one of them shifted, their knees touched.

  The first time Kip’s knee bumped Shelley’s she flinched and glanced up. Kip was immersed in the opening chapter of To Kill a Mockingbird, intently perusing the page, his brow furrowed in concentration. He appeared unaware that their legs had brushed.

  It took Shelley only a second to recover from the contact. This wasn’t last night; they weren’t kissing, or practicing kissing, or grading each other’s performance, or any of it. They were merely friends, reading away a rainy morning.

  With a contented sigh that was almost a laugh, Shelley lowered her eyes back to the first page of Metamorphosis, which, she had discovered with some horror, truly was about a man who turned into a cockroach. Nothing—neither squeamishness nor skittishness—could persuade her to leave the cupola right now. Nothing—not even the possibility that her legs and Kip’s were going to bang each other black-and-blue in the crowded space—could convince her that there was anything she’d rather be doing right now.

  Kissing Kip had been a revelation. Reading with him as the rain drummed soothingly on the roof above them and his legs stretched alongside hers, warm and strong, was just as gratifying.

  With another sigh, she relaxed into the corner and read about how Gregor Samsa, a normal human being, woke up one morning and found himself trapped inside the body of a bug.

  ***

  SHE WAS HAVING THEM every night, now—sensual dreams, erotic dreams. Dreams of Kip.

  One night she dreamed they were dancing. They were at a school dance, one of those dorky Friday night events in the gymnasium, with tacky crepe paper streamers dangling from the basketball hoops and a half-dozen teachers standing around the perimeter of the gym, looking bored as they chaperoned the students. In the dream, Kip materialized out of a crowd of boys. He was dressed in his Harvard T-shirt, jeans and mocs—she’d never seen him in anything other than summer apparel, and she couldn’t picture him in a jacket and tie. She was wearing the forest-green wraparound dress she’d bought at Ann Taylor last Christmas, and the high-heel black sandals that always killed her ankles—except, of course, in the dream her ankles felt wonderful—and the gold choker her father had given her for her birthday. Kip walked directly to her and suddenly they were drifting across the dance floor, not really dancing so much as hugging, holding each other. The flared skirt of her dress swirled around her knees, and Kip’s arms tightened around her waist, and his eyeglasses vanished as he bowed to kiss her....

  In another dream they were lying on a blanket at their favorite secluded beach near Dorie’s Cove. Shelley had on her string bikini, and as Kip kissed her he plucked open the bows that held the swim suit together. She dreamed of him touching her breasts—not groping and mauling her, the way the guys who had tried to touch her back in “America” would do it, but gently, sweetly, so that it didn’t seem like an assault or an act of conquest, but rather like something he was doing only to please her.

  She woke up from that dream gasping and overheated, so embarrassed she almost refused to see Kip the next day. But it was a gloriously sunny Friday morning, and she knew her father wasn’t coming that weekend. If she vetoed Kip’s suggestion that they go to the beach she would wind up hanging out at the cottage with her mother, being depressed.

  So she biked down to the beach near Dorie’s Cove with Kip. She wore one of her one-piece suits, however, and when she went into the water with him she gave him a stern look and said, “Please don’t dunk me today.”

  He didn’t ask any questions. He didn’t grill her on her prickly disposition, or inquire as to whether she had her period. All he said was, “Okay.”

  They swam together, not racing, not splashing, just swimming, floating, enjoying the water until she stepped on a broken shell. Its sharp edge sliced open her toe, and she let out a scream.

  Kip gathered her into his arms, carried her out of the water, laid her down on the towel and swabbed her bleeding toe with a towel. “I haven’t got any Band-aids,” he said, pressing the towel tightly against the cut. “I’ll ride up to the house and get a first aid kit.”

  Pushing herself up into a sitting position, she eased the towel away and examined her wound. It was a small cut, very clean. “Don’t bother,” she said. “It’ll clot soon.”

  Instead of returning to the water, Kip remained on the blanket beside her. He donned his sunglasses, rolled onto his back, and talked about how good he considered To Kill a Mockingbird. “I’d like to see the movie, now that I’ve read the book.”

  “It’s a great flick. Gregory Peck starred in it. And you know who had played Boo Radley? Robert Duvall.”

  “No kidding?” Kip digested that fact, then leaned across the blanket and pulled the towel away from her toe. “Still bleeding,” he reported.

  “Just slightly. I’ll live.”

  Lying back down, he chuckled. “You know what I like about you, Shell? You’re not a prima donna
.”

  “As compared to...?”

  “Oh, Diana, for instance.” He rolled onto his side and propped his head up with his hand. “You wouldn’t believe the fight she had with Mark last night. We’re talking radioactive. She used words I didn’t think she knew.”

  “What did they fight about?” Shelley asked.

  “Mark told her he couldn’t afford to take her out for dinner at Harborside Inn. Diana said if he really loved her he’d take her out to fancy restaurants sometimes, instead of always to Aldo’s for pizza. He works there, so I think he gets a discount.”

  “Well...after a while a person could get sick of pizza,” Shelley pointed out, trying to be fair.

  “The issue isn’t cuisine. It’s how much money Mark’s spending on her. She thinks he’s not spending enough. She can be a real bitch sometimes.”

  Shelley lifted the towel away from her toe. The gash had stopped oozing and was beginning to scab. Tossing the towel aside, she stretched out next to Kip. She was glad they never fought about stuff like that.

  If they were dating, maybe they would. Once you started dating, you had to obey all sorts of unwritten rules and contracts: if the guy spent X amount of money on you, you had to let him go a certain distance sexually. And vice versa—if you let a guy go a certain distance, he was obligated to spend X amount of money on you.

  She wondered why it had to be that way. Feminists were always saying it was all right for girls to ask guys out and pay for the date—and sure, that sounded great in theory. But if the girl spent all that money, was she supposed to paw the guy afterwards? What if she didn’t want to paw the guy?

  It was so much simpler being friends. Sometimes Kip paid for things and sometimes Shelley did, and they were equals. When Kip touched her, he touched her as a friend. As far as Shelley’s desires... She kept them to herself and saved them for her dreams, where they wouldn’t get her into trouble.

  “Your father’s not coming this weekend, is he,” Kip remarked.

  Shelley sighed. Her toe had stopped stinging and started throbbing. She rolled onto her stomach and rested her chin on her folded arms. “Nope.”