“THIS IS ABSOLUTE HEAVEN,” Isabel says as she stretches like a cat on the sundeck of the sailboat. It’s now early afternoon, and we’re lying side by side in much the same positions we’ve been in all day—stretched out on sun chairs on the deck of a Beneteau 50 as it floats on the glimmering waters of the Sterling Basin. We’re only a few dozen feet from the shoreline now, at an isolated anchorage. There’s a captain at the helm of the boat, but she’s inside in the cabin, and she’s pretty much remained invisible for most of the day.
Now, it feels a lot like Isabel and I are the only people left in the universe. Other than the sound of the waves lapping on the hull and the gentle breeze as it slips past the boat, the world feels silent and its bliss. Isabel and I have been reading for hours, shifting only to help ourselves from the picnic Marie packed for us.
I’m engrossed in a twisty psychological thriller, and Isabel is still reading that biography. Every now and again, we break from our reading to chat. The book I’m reading is too dark for Isabel’s tastes, but I’ve explained the premise, and she’s developed a theory about the ending. She thinks it was the ex-girlfriend, but I suspect that’s too obvious—I think the murderer was the mother-in-law. I actually read the book Isabel is devouring over there earlier this year, so we’ve had a few chats about that, too.
We did a lot of things during the years we were together, but never before have we shared a day like this. We just weren’t the kind of couple to laze about, but now I’m starting to suspect that was yet another thing I’ve been missing out on.
“Going for a swim soon?” I ask her, and Isabel lowers her book and wrinkles her nose at me.
“It’s too cold,” she points out.
“That never stopped you before,” I laugh softly, thinking of all the times she’d dive into the water from the beach in front of our house and I’d stand back on the deck and shake my head at her. “How many freezing cold spring days did you jump into the water back at the house and try to convince me I should join you because it was invigorating?”
“I’m old and scared now.” She grimaces.
I roll my eyes and set my book aside. “Age is an attitude.”
“Easy for you to say,” she laughs. “You’re two years younger than me.”
“So thirty-four is the age where all of the fun stops? Good to know, I’d best pack a lot of it into the next two years.”
Isabel grins and sets her book aside, then walks gingerly to climb down the ladder that leads to the swim platform. I follow her, kicking off my flip-flops and pulling my T-shirt over my head, because I expect she’s going to leap right in and I figure, since I goaded her into this, I should at least join her.
Instead, she keeps her clothing over the top of her bikini and sits on the edge of the platform to dangle her feet in the water. I stand beside her, taking in the view and breathing in the salt air on the breeze. The cool breeze. She has a point. It probably is far too cold to swim today.
“Maybe we’re both old and boring. Is the water as cold as it looks?” I ask her, but when I glance down at Isabel, she’s giving me an odd look.
She stands, and I think she’s about to turn and go back up to our sun chairs, but instead, she says with a grin, “Sorry.”
“What for—”
I don’t even manage to finish the question before she gives me a surprisingly fierce push toward the edge of the swim platform. I shriek, and at the last second, manage to reach out and catch her hand. We both tumble into the clear blue depths, but I keep her hand in mine the whole time—mostly so I can make sure she emerges safely. Unfortunately, that means that when we breach the surface of the water, breathless, we’re nose to nose.
There are tiny droplets of water on her skin and on her eyelashes, and she’s laughing even as she splutters, and she’s just so fucking beautiful. I don’t even think as I steady myself with one hand against the swim platform. I just give in to the impulse to pull her close.
Our bodies align naturally, our hips and chests drawn together. I can feel the tight buds of her nipples through two layers of her clothing, just as I’m sure she can feel my body responding, even though the heat from her body is surely the only thing keeping my dick from shriveling up in this freezing fucking water.
We’re moving closer together when she pauses, and lifts her hand to gently, tenderly touch my cheek near my eye. And then she pauses like that, staring at me for so long that I’m starting to get confused.
“Is there a jellyfish stuck to my face?” I whisper.
Isabel seems to snap out of her reverie. She smiles back now, and she lifts her legs to wrap around my hips. I steady her by resting my free hand on her hip, but that just means I’m now holding her against my rapidly hardening dick. It’s all I can do to stop myself rutting against her like an animal.
“I’m pretty sure you’d know if there was a jellyfish on your face.” She traces the stubble on my cheek, then slowly drags her finger back up to my eyes.
“What is it, then?” I prompt her.
“You’re smiling all the way to your eyes, Paul,” she whispers.
“I’m happy today,” I whisper back, and she leans forward as if she means to brush her lips against mine. I just cannot wait to taste her—
Friends do not make out.
We’ve already ascertained that there’s just too much water under the bridge for us to go back, which means we need to move forward in this new direction, and the new Isabel and new Paul do not and cannot kiss.
Even though now she’s all but humping me through our clothes.
Oh, hell. It would be so easy to give into this pull between us. I could kiss her—she wants me to kiss her. But where would that lead us? Where could it possibly lead us, other than to another round of disaster?
I break the moment because someone has to, and it’s clear from Isabel’s ever-darkening eyes that she’s not going to be the one to see sense this time. I gently disentangle our limbs and turn to duck my head under the water again, trying to cool my raging libido down. I know it won’t take long, because all of my exposed skin is covered in goose bumps—the unpleasant kind.
I immediately decide that the best way to get over that little moment of insanity is to brush right past it, so I put a little distance between us and I turn around to say with fake outrage, “Pushing me in was a dirty trick.”
Isabel is treading water, a thoughtful look on her face. “We’re not going to talk about that near-kiss?” she says, after a pause.
“Do you think we need to?” I ask uncertainly.
For just a fleeting moment, I think I see hurt in her gaze, but it disappears quickly and she gives me a smile.
“I guess not. I just wanted to show you how direct I can be,” she says, and then she splashes me. “You realize I have no dry outfit to change into. That means I’m going to have to lie up there in this teeny tiny bikini while my clothes dry off, and we’re just friends so you can’t look, and it’s all your fault I’m drenched.”
Isabel shifts so that she’s floating on her back, staring up at the sky above her, a thoughtful expression on her face. Her hair floats all around her, and she looks like an irresistible water nymph, or maybe a mermaid sent to lure me to my destruction. In any case, it is completely unfair that I have to see her like this when I’m trying to shove her back into the box in my mind marked Just Friends, and I’m cursing myself for pulling her into the water with me.
“You pushed me in!” I say, splashing her.
She squeals and sits up to splash me again. “You called me old and boring!”
“I called us both old and boring!”
Soon, we’re splashing water back and forth, laughing like children, but it’s not long before my teeth are chattering, and Isabel’s lips are blue.
“The least you can do is get out and get me a towel,” I remark, then I waggle my eyebrows at her. “I promise I won’t look at your bikini.”
She splashes me again, and I laugh and pull myself up onto the swim platform. That cool breeze is much closer to an arctic blast now that I’m soaking wet, and I’m shaking like a leaf by the time I find two fluffy oversize towels in a blanket box on the sundeck. I wrap one around myself as I walk back down toward the swim platform, but when I reach the ladder, I find Isabel has already pulled herself up onto it. She’s standing, staring out toward the shoreline, and she has indeed stripped down to that fucking bikini.
It takes a feat of miraculous strength for me to hand her the towel without looking down at her, and I’m both a little disappointed and proud of my own self-control when I manage to do so successfully, because a split second later her magnificent body is hidden by the towel.
“This was a great idea, you know,” she says. “This whole day. This whole weekend, overall.”
“You can probably thank Jess for the weekend,” I say, and Isabel raises her eyebrows at me.
“Jess?”
“At what point did you decide to take this trip?”
“Wednesday night.”
“At your Wednesday night girls dinner?”
“Yeah, Jess said...” Her eyebrows knit, then her eyes widen. “Wait, Jess tricked us into coming out here?”
“She gave me this weird lecture on Thursday about how I shouldn’t miss the retreat to come out here ‘one last time,’” I laugh. “I hadn’t even considered the possibility until she annoyed me by telling me not to do it. She’s kind of brilliant, even if she is completely evil. When I called her yesterday, she admitted she was hoping we’d find a way to be friends.”
“Did you tell her that her nefarious plan had worked?”
“Nah.” I shrug. “I’ll let her sweat until I get back to the office tomorrow. Manipulative wench she is.”
We both laugh at that, and Isabel turns to face me, leaning against the railing behind her.
“Can I ask you something, Paul?”
“Anything.”
“You probably should hear the question before you agree to answer it,” she laughs.
“After everything we’ve discussed this weekend, do you think there’s anything I wouldn’t tell you?”
“Why did you buy the vacation house?”
I flinch as if she hit me. “Oh.”
We stand in silence for a long time, each shivering inside our fluffy towel, staring out at the water of the bay. At first, I’m just trying to figure out how to explain this without making Isabel herself feel shitty, but as the minutes pass, I struggle to resist the urge to avoid the conversation altogether.
“Let’s go back upstairs where there’s some shelter?” I suggest.
I see the disappointment flash across Isabel’s face, and I turn away and climb first up the ladder to the sun deck. But I’m agonizingly conscious of my own hypocrisy—and confused at how fast I’ve fallen back into the old habit of withholding the vulnerable parts of myself, so when we’re once again stretched out on the sun deck, I try to explain.
“This isn’t about us. About you and me,” I start to say, intending to finish with, it’s just too hard to talk about and I don’t want to ruin this great day we’re having.
But then I glance at her, and her gaze is so warm and kind, I’m suddenly struck by the realization that I could have told her why Greenport was so special to me, even years ago. Isabel would have understood. It seems that there’s a cost and a benefit to sharing the deepest parts of ourselves. The cost is exposure, the benefit is intimacy, and although our marriage is over, I want to be close to Isabel. I want her to understand, and I know I can trust her.
After a weekend of sharing more and more of ourselves, we’ve now crashed headlong into a part of my life I haven’t really been able to talk to anyone about for years...and I actually want to share it with her.
“You know I don’t really like to talk about my childhood,” I say.
Isabel’s eyebrows knit, but she nods. I can’t remember what I have and haven’t told her over the years, but I know it’s not a lot. “I was a peculiar kid, I guess. I didn’t make friends easily...and then once I started skipping grades at school, sometimes I didn’t make friends at all. I didn’t really care, because I was always more interested in learning than I was in playing. And for the most part, that was completely fine because my family was my refuge. Jake and I were always close for brothers with a six-year age gap, and Dad is just like me so he’s always just gotten me, and Mom...” I close my eyes for a minute, and my mother’s face comes to mind.
I remember her, as I always do, just as she was that last weekend before her diagnosis: standing on the pier at Greenport, the wind blowing her hair, her face alight with happiness.
Isabel shifts on her chair, and when I glance at her, I find she’s sitting cross-legged. She’s turned to face me, and there’s no judgment in her expression, only a quiet curiosity. “What was she like?” she asks gently.
“Mom would have loved you, and you would have loved Mom. She was a people person,” I laugh softly. “She was nothing like Dad. You know Dad is so smart but...”
“...just brilliant enough to be awkward as hell sometimes.”
“Exactly,” I say, but then I wince. “Like me, right?”
“No, Martin is even more awkward than you are,” Isabel assures me with a soft laugh. “At least you know how to flirt. Your poor dad was like a sledgehammer when he had a crush on Elspeth. It was painful to watch.”
“It’s reassuring to know I have more game than my seventy-two-year-old father,” I say sardonically.
“So...your mom?” Isabel prompts, and I roll onto my side to face her.
“Well, I guess by the time I was in middle school, life was really busy for us. Mom and Dad were both teaching full time at Columbia, and Jake was in high school studying to take SATs, so between their schedules and me taking on every extra-credit assignment I could, things were uncomfortably chaotic.
“One night, maybe when I was ten, I came home from school and Mom was upset. She said we were all too busy, and we weren’t spending enough time together. Honestly, I don’t think me, Dad or Jake had any idea what she was going on about—but after that day, she announced we were going to have a weekend away together every month. No work, no study, just us—she decided we would all rearrange our schedules so we could have a weekend completely free. Dad and Jake groaned at first, but we all loved Mom and this really seemed to mean a lot to her, so for a year or so, that’s what we did.”
“Did you come here? To our place at Greenport for those weekends?” Isabel asks, her voice very small.
I hastily shake my head. “No, we went all over the country. Mom’s parents died when I was young, but they’d been wealthy, so she and Dad had never been short on money. Even so, Mom was kind of a minimalist, before that was really a thing. We didn’t have an extravagant lifestyle or possessions, but when it came to experiences, Mom was always happy to go all-out. I think we visited ten states that year on those trips,” I explain, but then I can feel my throat growing tight because I know what’s coming next.
“They were all good weekends, but one summer, we were supposed to fly down to Florida to visit an eco resort she’d read about. There was a hurricane out over the Atlantic, but at the last minute, it changed direction toward Orlando and our flight was canceled. Jake wanted to go home to study, but I was just so disappointed. I remember Mom giving me a hug and then announcing she needed to make some calls, and she left us with Dad while she marched to a pay phone. Ten minutes later we were on our way to Penn Station and we wound up here at Greenport. We stayed at this B&B that used to be on Main Road—it’s long gone now, but it was a simple little place. I don’t know if that weekend really was as perfect as I remember it, but in my mind, it was just fucking golden.”
“Oh, Paul,” Isabel whispers. She closes her eyes and swallows, then brings the towel to dab at the corner of her eye. “Jesus.”
“On Monday we went back to the city, and on Tuesday she found the lump.”
“I’m just so sorry.”
“In hindsight, maybe she knew something was wrong. I have to wonder if that’s what those trips were about that last year. I mean, Mom was a med science professor, you know? There’s a good chance she was well in tune with how the human body works. Maybe she felt something in her body, or she’d seen some sign even before the lump emerged. But anyway...once she was diagnosed, she was straight into high-dose chemo and she was so sick, so fast. It took two years for cancer to take her, but we never traveled again.”
Isabel has fallen silent. She’s periodically dabbing at her eyes with the towel, and I move to sit beside her, then give her a slightly awkward side hug.
“I promise you, Isabel. I didn’t tell you that to make you feel shitty.”
“I know. But I can’t possibly take your house now,” she chokes.
“It wasn’t like Mom ever saw that particular house. My trust fund matured when I was twenty-one and I was going to funnel the money into Brainway, but Dad talked me out of it. I’d already put everything I had into the business and he was concerned if things went south, I’d regret not using Mom’s money for something more sentimental.”
“So the house is sentimental.”
“Of course it is,” I say, and when her face falls again, I nudge her with my elbow. “But it wasn’t back then. It became sentimental when I met you there, and when we had so many important moments there. But honestly, when I bought that house, I was just a dumb, impulsive, twenty-one-year-old with a social life for the first time in his entire life. I wasn’t intending on making it a memorial to my mom, I was picturing long weekends out here with pretty girls and Jess and Marcus and all of the dozens of people who became my friends just through them. I found the house online one night and the next day made an offer sight unseen.
“But that was naive and somewhat optimistic given we were trying to grow a business at the same time, and I didn’t use it nearly enough before you came along.”
Isabel still looks miserable. She’s sitting beside me, shoulders slumped, eyes downcast.
“Bel...just in case it’s still not clear—yes, I feel close to Mom’s memory at Greenport sometimes, but I didn’t give you the village itself. I’ll still come out here every now and again. Maybe you’ll list the house on Airbnb and I’ll rent it from you.”
“Don’t even joke about that,” she whispers. “I just keep thinking if I’d understood there was a connection to your mom, I’d never have been such a bitch about the house when we were in mediation.”
“You didn’t understand because I didn’t tell you. I’m not even sure I consciously made the connection myself until this year. And Christ, if I really needed to keep that particular house, I’d never have given in. I’d have let you take me to court so a judge could laugh your ass out of the hearing.”
I’m trying to make a joke, but Isabel doesn’t laugh. Instead, she rests her head on my shoulder. “Why did you change your mind and give me the house, Paul?”
“You looked so miserable that day. You’d looked miserable the entire time, but when you realized you’d lost, you just looked...devastated. I couldn’t bear the thought of dragging things out any longer.”
“I honestly thought we’d gotten all of the emotional stuff out of the way yesterday. This is almost worse. Why didn’t you just tell me this all along? If I knew about any of that, I would never have even asked for the house.”
“One of the positives that’s come out of all of our upheaval is the work I had to do on myself. The payoff is I understand myself better, and that means I can explain myself to you. Before this year, I couldn’t—I was just existing...kind of cut off from my own emotions. That’s a lonely way to live, even for a guy who was never really alone.”
“I still feel utterly sick at the thought of taking the house from you now.”
“If you’re really so determined to feel guilty, why don’t you focus on making me watch The Notebook last night? I’m still kind of traumatized by that, to be honest.”
Isabel laughs weakly, then shifts on the chair so that she’s facing me.
“Do you think we’d still be together if we could talk like this back then?” she asks. Her gaze is very serious, and I give her a sad smile.
“If we were still together, I would never have learned to talk like this. You said yesterday you left because you were hoping to shock me into taking stock of my life, and I guess that worked, even if it didn’t work the way you intended. If you had just stayed and let me continue in my bubble, nothing would have changed.”
“I just can’t help but wonder what might have been, Paul.”
“In programming, we might call this conversation a circular reference, because it just leads us to keep circling back around in a loop forever,” I say teasingly.
“How do I fix the circular reference?” she says with a reluctant smile.
“You review the code. You figure out why it keeps looping back over itself, and you change it.”
“Like us two rehashing all of this history this weekend, then moving forward as friends?”
“Exactly.”