4.

An abundance of brightness worked its way through the shitty motel room’s narrow window the next morning, penetrating my closed eyelids as I enjoyed the few seconds of blissful numbness remaining before the hangover consumed me. I turned over and it arrived right on cue. I stretched an arm across the bed, reaching for a warm body next to mine, but sensing only the touch of sheets and familiar mixture of relief and loneliness. Everything about the bed felt nicer than it had the day before as I worked my eyes open and shifted my weight around. The room even smelled nicer. I decided I would spend the rest of my life there.

I sat up. Through blurred vision, I saw the green of treetops against a sapphire sky, framed by a large window carved out of a white wall; a desk with a computer; a bookshelf; drawers and dressers. I gave up the search for my underpants and walked towards the quiet sound of music making its way through the closed door.

‘Mornin’,’ I croaked, stepping through into a living room.

She looked up from a book, cross-legged on her couch.

‘Good morning. Oh, wow. Could you please put some clothes on?’

‘Really?’

‘It’s a little … much for the morning.’

‘That’s fair enough, uh –’

‘Hannah.’

‘Hannah! Yes.’

I raised my fingers to my chest, opening my mouth to speak.

‘Mark. I know.’

‘Right, of course. Sorry.’

‘There’s coffee if you want. Toast too,’ she said, nodding her head towards the kitchen, scanning me then turning back to her book.

I looked down at my vulnerable manhood. It’d looked a lot better to me the night before as well.

We sat and talked in her apartment. She explained we were on Johns Island, the second of three barrier islands between Charleston’s downtown and the Atlantic. I didn’t remember getting there, but I believed her. I smoked on the balcony. She asked for a drag and coughed, sniffling and shaking her head. The balcony overlooked a service road of dirt running alongside the row of apartments, lined with ancient oaks. They reached past the third floor we stood on; spaced far enough apart that one’s branches would embrace another’s without feuding for the air in between. They came together and swayed.

The road’s end was obscured as the gaps between the trees closed off to nothing as you peered down, like posts of a fence. A few feet of grass beyond the oaks on the other side of the road met dense forest, forming a barricade and tying the whole scene neatly. My hangover was no match for the beauty of the place. I couldn’t feel bad while here. My idea of paradise had always been palm trees, white sands and turquoise water, when maybe all along it should’ve been oak trees, some dirt, and a girl I could make smile.

Hannah drove us back downtown from the island, eager to show me as much of Charleston as my body would allow in the sweating humidity. We walked Rainbow Row and Waterfront Park hand in hand. She pointed out things of cultural and historical importance and I vomited into a bush. She doubled over in hysterics, then almost did the same. Neither of us was going to rest on the pages of history, but then neither of us really cared.

We spent the night together, then another and another. Before long, we were retrieving the Miata to bring back to Johns Island. As I pulled my duffel bag from the boot, its underside dripped with what smelled like gas. I had forgotten about the bottle of differential fluid wedged in the corner of the boot. The hinge of the boot’s lid had pinched splits into its plastic, and now the contents were pooled on the floor where I had, a lifetime before, neatly placed a leather jacket I’d bought in New York City. I heaved it out, heavy with the weight of oil held in its pores, crammed it inside a garbage bag and carried it upstairs.

‘It’s ruined,’ I said, scrubbing with a sponge to no avail.

‘Only if you give up trying to fix it,’ Hannah retorted. I immersed it in the bathtub – the water turning a lighter shade of brown with each plunge. Draping the leather over the balcony’s handrail, I went inside and tried to forget about it.

Hannah was unlike anyone I’d met. She had moved from the chaos of New York City about as far as possible, if you factored in everything except distance. Staying on with a law firm in the city, she now did freelance contract editing. It meant that a few hours of work each week more than covered the time spent reading or sipping drinks, walking or sleeping.

There was an ease to her and everything she did. I would seldom return to a room to find her in the same position as when I’d left. She shifted around the apartment like a cat tiring of its position every time the clock’s hand moved.

One afternoon, I passed her lying on her back, head hanging off the edge of the couch, as her eyes drifted over a book she clasped. I leant over to read its upside-down cover but couldn’t. Her legs were apart with knees bent over the back of the couch and her dress fell around her thighs. Without hesitation, I unzipped my jeans, removed myself and took the weight of her head in my hands. She kept the book between her fingers, resting it against the carpet and took me in her mouth. Licking me off her lips, unfazed and without a word, she lifted the book from the floor and resumed glancing across its pages. She wasn’t like me. She didn’t have to make sense of everything, so everything made sense to her. The book only looked upside down to me.