Alice Close Your Eyes

by Averil Dean

  My home feels very far away now, across the water and another divide I have not yet measured. Jack’s heartbeat is more than idea or even a sound—it’s a vibration under my cheek, a relentless drumbeat driven by something I don’t understand. More than sex, darker than seduction. This is pure male impulse.

  On the last thread of music, he begins to undress me, his fingers cool and rough as stone against my skin. He unbuttons my sweater, slips it over my shoulders and drops it to the deck. He pushes me before him, a step at a time, down the narrow staircase to the tiny bedroom. I feel the mattress behind my knees, and he puts a hand behind my head to keep me from bumping it as he lowers me to the bed. This small kindness blooms at the base of my throat and burns my eyelids and the bridge of my nose.

  Silence closes around us, broken only by the hollow sound of the waves lapping against the side of the boat, and the eerie flow of the music around us.

  He reaches under the hem of my skirt and runs his hand up my thigh until it comes to rest on my hip. With his other hand, he takes off his glasses and sets them on the bedside table.

  You wish you had that knife now. Don’t you...

  What would happen if I asked him to stop? Would he take me home? Apologize? Get angry and call me names? Would he stop at all? I’ve told no one about him, or where I would be tonight, and he knows it. He could hurt me, kill me, carry my body out to sea and no one would ever know what happened to me. I would be the face on the milk carton.

  My train of thought stops there.

  No. I could never be the face on the milk carton. Those missing people have families to search for them. No one would look for me.

  I would be gone. Gone.

  He strokes me, down my thigh and up, sliding his palm along my waist. He tugs at the strap of my underwear and winds it twice around his thumb, pulls it tight until the fabric nips and pinches between my legs.

  I close my fist around the front of his sweater. He leans over this obstruction to kiss me again, one hand cupped around the back of my head, one between my legs, slipping along the edge of my underwear. His kiss is firm and insistent, slanting to stroke the inside of my mouth with his tongue. He tastes like burned marshmallow on a young stick, toasty and green.

  His teeth close over my lower lip as he traces me through my underwear. I twist and clutch at his shoulder, trying to catch my breath. But his mouth is demanding, and he has found, with his thumb, the bump of my clitoris. I choke back a moan of anxious greed, and raise my hips to meet him, sinking my fingers into the damp fringe of hair at the nape of his neck. I trace his stubbled jaw and the edge of his lip, feel the muscles below his ear bunch and release as he kisses me, the steady strength of his pulse against my thumb.

  He tugs my underwear aside. My thighs tighten reflexively, but he’s already kneeling between them; he’s got his foot in the door. His back stiffens, two fingers slipping through my folds. His tongue moves past my teeth, deeper, seeking, and I know he’s worried, the way all men worry when they get this close to the prize.

  Don’t stop me. Don’t pull back, don’t take what I need. Don’t get in my way.

  He eases my panties down to my ankles and slips them off. Sits back on his heels and looks at me, with my skirt around my waist and my underwear crumpled in his fist, pressed to his nose. His gaze never leaves me.

  “Take off your shirt.” His voice is quiet and direct.

  I peel off my T-shirt, trembling from the blast of adrenaline and the force of him. The room swims around me. The bobbing floor beneath us feels insubstantial and unsafe, as though we might suddenly sink beneath the water and never realize it had happened. I want him to hold me and give me something solid to keep me in place.

  But he wants to look at me.

  “And your bra,” he says. “Take it off.”

  The music has changed. The singer chants an impatient bridge, punctuated by a pop-slide in an eerie minor key as the bra straps stutter down my arms. The chorus rises, driving and sensual, a low hum of synthesized bass guitar buzzing underneath the melody. A breath of night-chilled air drifts over my breasts, crinkling the tips, tightening my skin.

  A slow smile creeps across his lips when he sees the hoop in my left nipple. He rises and strips to his boxers. And this time he doesn’t have to speak. I shimmy out of my skirt and sit with my knees pressed together, shivering, untethered, enduring his long visual exploration. His face is half-hidden, divided down the center by shadow and light.

  Now look at you...look at you....

  I let him ease my thighs apart. His gaze falls, locked between my legs. A groan rumbles in his chest when he sees the tattoo low on my abdomen, just above the smooth mound of my pubis: ~ Make it hurt ~ He passes a thumb over the letters, then dips again into the slippery heat between my legs, his fingertips circling, deepening, nudging at my cunt. He kisses the tip of my breast and flicks the silver hoop with his tongue.

  “What are you about, hmm?” he says, and sucks my nipple into his mouth. The metal ring clicks against his teeth.

  But I can’t answer. I arch my back and turn my face aside. A coil of desire constricts at the base of my belly.

  He eases me back, lays a chain of kisses around my breast, down my ribs, into the shallow dip beside my pelvic bone and finally to the liquid heat between my legs.

  Our floating room begins to spin. I am strangely disembodied, as though all my senses, all my pain and pleasure and naked want, are concentrated under the warmth of his mouth. I claw at the blankets and bunch them in my fists. But when I sink my fingers into his hair, he catches my wrists and pins them at my sides, muttering under his breath, his teeth grazing my clitoris. With the anchor of his mouth to hold me in place, I wind around him like a tetherball on a rope, in dizzying spirals that lift me to his mouth.

  “Come on, baby,” he says. “Right now...”

  His voice vibrates against me, and in the last moment it is his breath, the lightest touch of cold and heat, that topples me. I leap under his mouth, my wrists still pinned to the bed, my cries sailing into the night. He follows me, groaning with pride and dark male glee. His tongue flattens over me, dips inside me, drinks me in so thoroughly that I soar up again, simply from the idea of being consumed this way.

  As the room spins to a halt, I realize my eyelashes are wet with tears.

  Jack kneels between my knees and rolls on a condom. The light skims across his body, painting long, striped shadows in the grooves of his abdomen. He slides inside me without a word, without preamble, driving his hips forward, pulling me to him with one hand splayed against the small of my back. A breath snags in my throat at the size of him.

  He stops, the muscle in his jaw flexed and quivering.

  “Jesus,” he says. “So fucking tight. Be still.”

  After a moment, he begins to move, his hips rolling to the undercurrent of music and the elemental motion of the water beneath us. I wrap my legs around his narrow waist and pull him closer. We fall into a deep, slow rhythm. Each gliding thrust is an incantation in a language I don’t understand. My whole body strains, listening. And from the back of my mind, from some small and lonesome and untouchable place, I seem to hear my own voice chanting in time.

  I want to go home, I want to go home.

  * * *

  It rains again that night. Jack turns off the music so we can listen to the drops on the roof and the surface of the ocean. The sound forms a soft cocoon around us, a background noise to the steady thrum
of his heartbeat under my ear.

  “Tell me a secret.” His voice rumbles as if from the inside of a bass drum. “Something no one else knows.”

  “I like to keep my secrets,” I tell him.

  He slips out from under me and raises himself up on one elbow. He pushes the covers aside and runs his hand down my body, brushes the tip of my breast with his knuckles.

  “I can’t figure out if you know what you’re doing,” he says. “But you want to be careful with me. I’ll fucking eat you alive.”

  He lowers his head to my breast. His mouth opens over my nipple, warm and demanding. His erection hardens like a newly forged sword against my thigh.

  * * *

  We stop at a café near the marina for breakfast. We are both starved, and devour plates of eggs and pancakes and large cups of coffee in silence, as though we’ve been lost at sea for days. Then we go across to the corner market, where we buy cigarettes and a pack of gum. And condoms, which Jack purchases without comment while I pretend to admire a rack of key chains.

  He pulls up in front of my house and walks me to the door. I stand on the step and put my arms around him, press my lips to the stubbled underside of his jaw. He takes my face in his hands and kisses my cheeks and eyelids and the tip of my nose.

  I don’t ask him inside.

  I know he’ll call before the day is out. The phone rings four times. On the fifth ring, I pick it up.

  “Baby,” he says. “What have we started?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  I have always liked cemeteries. There is a calmness about them, a purposeful tranquility. I like the names, carved in marble or set in brass, the dates still visible after a century or more. My favorite headstones are embellished with epitaphs written by the family left behind, which seem a humble and endearing attempt to sum up a life like the log line of an epic novel: The heart of man is restless until it finds its rest in Thee... Now twilight lets her curtain down and pins it with a star... Little Boy Blue has gone away.

  One of the first things I bought when I received the advance on Zebra Crossing was a matched pair of gravestones for my mother and grandmother, to replace the cheap brass plaques that had been set in the ground to mark the places where their ashes had been interred. My mothers deserved proper headstones; they deserved to stand upright, not laid like pavement in the grass.

  I have brought my scrub brush and thermos of soapy water. I kneel before my grandmother’s grave and scrub away the dirt and bits of moss that have accumulated in the crevices since last month. I pour water over the granite surface, watch it gather into tiny pools at the bottom of her name, then trickle away and disappear into the grass.

  At the edge of my mother’s grave is a spider on a half-formed web. It’s a beautiful thing, pale gold, with long delicate legs and a slender body covered with fine hairs. I put my face down close, peer into its many glassy eyes. Its front legs pluck gently at the dew-jeweled threads. A single drop of water falls to the rung below and hangs there, clinging to the corner, where the cells of the web are joined by a tiny silken knot.

  With the back of my scrub brush, I destroy the web and smash the spider into the grass. I pour water over the brush to clean away the bug’s remains, then more water over the headstone. When I am finished, I run my fingers through the carved letters, over the cold arc of granite and the carved stone rose at the center.

  * * *

  Later that night, Jack comes back for me. We head north, straight up the boulevard, past the tiny Vashon Theater crouching beige and humble on the left, and the much larger vine-covered brick yoga studio on the right, past the auto shop and the Episcopal church, until the town peters to an uncertain end and we leave it behind. After a few minutes, Jack turns onto a narrow dirt road fringed with pines, through which the Puget Sound shines in the twilight. He doesn’t stop until we’ve reached the empty mouth of a trailhead, where the moon sits like a pearl on a sheet of hammered pewter.

  Below us is the beach my mother took me to about a month after Nana died. The weather was chaotic that day, blustering and weeping from a swollen sky. Holding hands, my mother and I wobbled through the high loose sand, then turned our shoulders to the sea.

  For a while, we walked in silence, bundled into our hoods, hands buried deep inside our pockets.

  “Things are going to be a lot different now,” my mother said.

  I nodded. Things were already different. We came up against the bewildering absence of Nana every day. Breakfast was cold now, and late. My braid had unraveled to a ponytail, and the week before the batteries for my favorite doll had died, leaving her with an open, frozen mouth where she used to chew from a little plastic spoon. Now the doll’s mouth seemed to be screaming mutely, endlessly. I had put the doll under my bed, then in my toy box, before finally wrapping her in a rag and burying her in the garbage can on the curb outside.

  “Nana was good at this,” my mother was saying. “For me it’s harder. We’re—I’m going to have to figure out what to do about money. Maybe get a second job. I don’t know.”

  “I can get a job,” I piped, aware this was childish. But Nana would have expected me to find a way to help.

  My mom took her hand from her pocket and laid it on top of my head. “You’re a little young for that, squirt.”

  She took my hand. Hers was cold and thin as a bird’s wing. She smiled down at me, her face dewed with raindrops, melted somehow, as if all the bones under her skin had dissolved. It was the expression of the smallest on the playground, the soft, malleable face of directionless fear.

  Jack and I get out of the truck and stand together, blinking at the moon’s smug roundness, listening to the clicks of the cooling engine.

  “Makes you feel small, doesn’t it?” he says.

  “And alone.”

  “You’re not alone, you’re with me.”

  I look up at him. His face is all planes and lines, and skin like a tarp stretched over the bones. He lights a cigarette, holds it between two fingers while he plucks a strand of hair from my cheek with his thumb and ring finger.

  “First star,” I say. “Let’s make a wish.”

  He smiles from inside the cage of his glasses.

  “Careful what you wish for, little box thief. You might get it.”

  “What do you imagine I’m wishing for?”

  “Comfort. Same as the rest of us.” He peers at me through the smoke. “Or maybe not. Maybe it’s something else for you.”

  He produces a stack of blankets from the backseat, lets down the tailgate and makes a nest in the truck bed, between the wheels of his pickup. I wait, smoking his cigarette, tracking a satellite across the sky. Nana used to worry that satellites and meteors could come down and crash on our heads. You’d never see it coming, she would say with a shudder and a sidelong glance at the sky.

  Nana was pretty superstitious all around. Not only didn’t she step on the lines and cracks in the sidewalk herself, she kept me from doing so. No black cats, no number thirteen. As if she always knew the end would come at her fast.

  When he’s finished, Jack helps me up and we settle together against the wall of the cab, our legs tangled on the blankets, my head resting in the hollow of his shoulder. The moon rises and retreats as though pulled by an invisible string into the starry sky.

  “I like your house,” he says unexpectedly.

  “Yeah? You’re the first person to see it inside.”

  “It looks like you.”

  “A hot mess.”

  “Emphasis on hot.”

  “I’m surprised you’d like it. Being an architect and all. It’s not exactly an original.”

  “Not outside, no.”

  “Have you ever lived in a house you designed?”

 
“No. I’ll build one for myself one day. I’m making payments on a plot of land south of Portland, near the coast. Waiting for zoning to approve the plans.”

  “I’d like to see them.”

  “Yeah? They’re in the truck.”

  “Well, break them out.”

  Prompted by my interest, he lays out the blueprints and describes the design—a modern Craftsman, with a wall of windows overlooking the sea, which will extend all the way through the bedroom, to open that side of the house to the ocean breeze and the patio. Lots of golden wood, he says, lots of glass. But for all the house’s delights, it’s the kitchen that enchants me most. A long soapstone counter faces the open window without obstruction, inset with a deep, wide sink and built-in cutting board.

  I run my fingers over the delicate lines of the blueprint.

  “You did all this?”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “Shocked. I can’t imagine where you’d even begin.”

  “With an idea. Like writing a book, I’d imagine.”

  “That’s not at all the same thing.”

  “No? Why’s that?”

  I shake my head, spread my fingers wide. “Well, because a book is only ever an idea, and then a refinement of the idea. What you do requires mathematics, physics, logistics. Books are just an arrangement of words, anyone can do that.”

  “Bullshit. I couldn’t.”

  He rolls up the blueprints.

  “I’ve been reading Zebra Crossing. It’s more than an arrangement of words.”

  I’m surprised, and touched. I’ve never known a guy who’s read my work after meeting me. It’s usually the opposite: the minute a man hears I’m a writer, he’ll bolt in the other direction to avoid having to read a book in which he has no interest.

  “I think that’s the first time I’ve seen you smile,” he says, watching me.

  I resume my poker face and clear my throat.

  “This house looks expensive.”