Rini dismisses us and everyone scatters. Margot follows Rini to the front door, asking about the tropical storm gathering force in the Caribbean, which Rini assures her she’s tracking. Adam grabs his bag and heads up the stairs to his suite, while Rick and Ted head to the game parlor. Aimee, Eden and I remain.
“Did you see your welcome-day horoscopes?” Eden asks. “They were on our pillows.”
“We haven’t been up to our rooms yet,” I say.
“Was it good?” Aimee asks.
“Mine was, but it was so generic it could apply to anyone.” Eden pulls the card out of her pocket and reads, “Welcome, Aries. The first sign of the zodiac, you’re both the rebel and the leader, which means you don’t have to explain yourself to anyone, but you do have to set a good example for others to follow. It takes a special kind of power to make your own rules, so don’t forget to play by them.”
“That doesn’t sound generic,” I say, knowing I would never make my own rules for anything.
“I also found a tarot card,” Eden adds.
“You found a tarot card? Is this place full of woo-woo clichés?”
“What was the card?” Aimee asks.
“The Lovers, but it was facedown on the floor, not displayed or explained. I thought it was weird, like it had been randomly dropped there,” she says.
That doesn’t make any sense. Everything in this house has been meticulously arranged.
“We’re going swimming. Wanna come?” Aimee asks Eden to my surprise and disappointment.
“I think I’m gonna read a little before I shower,” Eden says, and heads upstairs.
“It’s just us, then,” Aimee says, rubbing her hands together.
She’s clearly excited, so I don’t bother to point out the obvious: that neither of us is wearing a bathing suit; that while the sun is warm, the air has an ocean chill in it; that we don’t have towels; that we haven’t properly settled in.
Without a care in the world, Aimee has already flung open the French doors leading to the water. Besides, Aimee never misses the obvious—she just doesn’t care about it. She’d say, Farah, nothing good has ever been obvious.
I watch her run toward the beach grass at the edge of the water. She doesn’t check to see if I’m coming. It would be my loss if I wasn’t.
The Stars Harbor dock juts out from the sprawling green lawn like a T. Down the center, solid planks run fifty feet out over the water, held up by bulkheads painted white. A ramp is affixed to the right side holding a floating jetty intended to rise and fall with the tides, a launch for a smaller speedboat or fishing cruiser. The left side of the T is another solid dock and is meant to provide access to a sailboat or small yacht. There are no boats for us, but I wonder if other guests come with their own.
As she runs, Aimee hops from one foot to the other, kicking off her slides. She glances back at me, and though I can’t hear her over the wind, I can tell she’s giggling. She wiggles out of the pants of what I thought was a one-piece jumpsuit. The top piece transforms into the shortest dress ever.
I break into a jog to catch up with her.
Aimee leaps off the end of the high dock, her legs scissored wide, her arms loose above her head. There’s a moment she’s suspended in the air when she looks like she’s flying, and there’s an expression of joy on her face that defies adulthood. Gravity takes over then, and she’s pulled under the water with a thwap.
“Come in,” Aimee calls, her head poking through the water’s surface. “It’s so refreshing.”
“That’s fish pee,” I tease.
“Okay, Moana,” she says, calling out my movie reference.
We’ve set our kids down in front of Disney’s Moana four dozen times over the years to have some time to talk.
“Are you worried about the kids?” I ask.
I leave my boys every day for work, including one weekend a month. I don’t need a break from them the way she does, but Aimee’s excitement was contagious when she convinced me to come without them. Now, looking at this water that the boys would love to be splashing in, I’m having doubts. I already spend too much time away from them.
Aimee flips from her breaststroke onto her back with her arms in an exaggerated windmill motion. “I’m literally floating. Do I look like I’m worried about the kids?”
I shake my head with a cackle. “You most certainly do not.”
Aimee grins from the water, the golden-hour glow lighting her skin. She bobs up and down with the gentle waves. I glance back at the house and clear my throat.
The front and the back of the house are completely different styles, I notice. The front has textured white clapboard siding, with small, identical windows, whereas the back of the house is wood planks, painted blueish gray. The entire center section has glass windows. Two wings spread out from the center with Juliet balconies dotting each side, like a boutique hotel. It gives the house character I didn’t expect. Original. Not cookie-cutter construction. I’m impressed with Margot’s selection.
A scream shatters the quiet.
“Something is wrapped around my leg,” Aimee shrieks, then screams again.
Heart hammering, I step off the grass onto the dock.
“Is it still there?” I ask.
Maybe it was seaweed. Aimee has the tendency to overreact.
“Yes, it’s still there. I can feel it.” Aimee swims over and grips the floating dock for balance. I can’t see anything from this angle as she inspects her leg.
“Oh my God, it’s an eel,” she says.
Aimee scrambles to climb onto the floating dock, to no avail. She can’t get a solid grip. She pushes up as hard as she can, but her palms slip and she plunges back into the water.
“You have to swim to the shore,” I shout. I can no longer see the top of her head. She’s disappeared under the water. I cup my hands around my mouth. “Aimee, can you hear me? There’s no ladder; you can’t get up here.”
I wait but I see nothing. The water is too green and murky. Visibility can’t be more than a few inches past the surface. As the seconds pass, the pressure mounts. It’s vital to get someone drowning out of the water immediately. I kick off my shoes.
I’m about to dive in when Aimee breaks through the surface, gasping. “Help me!”
Aimee reaches out and I wrap both my hands around her thin wrist.
“Push your feet against the side of the dock,” I say.
“Farah, hurry. There’s more. They’re all over me.” Her voice is laced with panic. A calm washes over me, as it does every time I deliver a baby.
“Listen.” My doctor voice echoes off the water. “Brace yourself and use your legs to help me pull you up.”
Aimee leans back and wedges her toes in between the planks on the side of the floating dock. I crouch down and grab her second hand. Together we leverage our leg muscles to launch her up to safety.
She lays her cheek on the warm wood, her breath ragged. I drop down to sit in front of her.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
Aimee nods and stands, inspecting her thigh. Green slimy reeds cling to her shapely legs.
“Looks like you got caught in some vegetation,” I say.
A splash ripples through the water next to the dock.
“Do you see that?” Aimee points.
Sure enough, a black eel serpentines away under the surface.
“Gross,” I exclaim.
“That’s not the type of snake in the pants I was hoping for on this trip, if you know what I mean.” She laughs.
I shake my head. Aimee loves a crass joke.
After her first two girls, Aimee specifically, greedily, asked me to confirm that she had to wait the six weeks her doctor recommended to have sex again. But after the third, she didn’t ask at all. All she talked about was how the baby was having a hard time latching and she’d never had any nursing issues with the other two.
Weeks later over a second bottle of wine while Aimee had her shirt open, a mechanical pump attached to both breasts so she could “pump and dump,” I learned she and Adam hadn’t had sex since the baby was born. But that was six or seven months ago, and the baby was no longer feeding at night so I’d assumed Aimee would’ve rectified that situation.
“Still?” I ask.
“Yup,” she says.
Normally I’d ask questions. Doctor questions. Do you have any pain? Are you struggling with desire? Or friend questions, like Is that his choice or yours? But what comes to my mind are inappropriate questions. What’s changed, Aimee? Is it the same thing I feel?
Aimee leans back to shake the water out of her hair and I lose the nerve to ask anything at all. I can’t stop looking at her. Her flushed cheeks. Her long neck. Her shirt is wet and it sticks to her body. Her nipples stand erect, and instead of ignoring this normal female response to cold, I imagine leaning down and putting my mouth over one of them and closing it, tasting her in my mouth.
The vision comes in a flash that feels real but not at all, the way one pictures jumping off a balcony when looking down from a great height. This, I realize, is an apt visual metaphor for seducing my married best friend while being very married myself, to an elected official no less. I’d probably come out in better shape after launching myself from a balcony.
“Well, that ends on this trip,” Aimee says. She picks up her pants and shakes them out in the wind.
“I’ll alert the presses,” I say.
“Oh, don’t worry, I’ll do that,” she says with a smile.
I strain to match her grin and swallow the surge of jealousy that’s jumped from my stomach to my throat. We make our way up the lawn back to the house.
The first time I had a thought like the one I had on the dock was three months ago. It was of me and Aimee touching. Not a friendly intimate gesture like an affirming pat on the leg or our shoulders brushing from standing too close. I pictured her sucking my fingers while we made margaritas. A flash that came and went while I squeezed lime into our salt-rimmed glasses. I was surprised, but pleasantly so. Who doesn’t want to be touched? And the truth was Joe had been doing a lot less of that lately. A split-second thought was hardly cheating. Besides, I’d never had any conscious interest in women, nothing I’d ever felt compelled to act on, so I didn’t view the thought as something that threatened to upend my whole life. But they haven’t stopped coming.
If I had friends to confide in other than Aimee, they’d tell me this was an early midlife crisis. And this wasn’t about my professional integrity, or my firm belief in monogamy. But I know it isn’t about any of those things. This nascent obsession is about Aimee. The way she’s wormed herself into my life, my heart, my fantasies until I start to believe I’d rather die than hold myself back from her for another day.