Woman in Charge Starts It on a Stranded Skiff

The skiff jolted and her hand closed on his forearm. Not a root. Him. The hull dropped back into the marl with a suck and she kept the grip, full weight, fingers set past the point where balance had already returned. Benjamin felt the heat of her palm through the wet cotton of his sleeve and the small, deliberate press of her thumb against the tendon. She had spent three days correcting his lines without looking at his face. Now she looked. Glasses already folded into the pocket of her shirt, the inventorying stare gone, nothing left in her eyes he could name. The insects roared. Sulfur and leaf-rot came up off the water and stuck in his throat. His pulse kicked once, hard, under her hand.

The gut had narrowed while they worked the last transect. Prop roots knuckled in from both sides, black and jointed, caging the skiff where the tide had left it. Open water was a pale slit beyond the last arch of roots; anything louder than breath would carry. The marl under the hull was slick as oil, and the inch of water that had shipped over the floorboards was slicker. When he shifted to check the painter his boot skated and her grip tightened, not a flinch, a correction. She did not step back. There was nowhere dry enough to stand apart. Humidity glued his shirt to the small of his back and turned the air in his lungs thick. A mosquito lit on the inside of his wrist, a finger’s width above the cut the oyster shell had opened across his palm at noon, and he slapped it with the other hand without thinking. The jar split the cut again. Blood welled, thin and immediate. He wiped it on his thigh. It welled again.

They bailed what little had shipped, the scoop passing between them because the footing would not let either of them work alone. Each time the skiff rocked she put a hand on him or he put one on her; the contacts stopped being accidents after the third. Her wrist brushed the cut when she took the scoop from his palm. The blood stuck. She did not pull away. He watched the place where his skin met hers and felt the stick of it, warm, already drying at the edges. The light under the canopy went from green to grey to nothing. The slit of open water held a last pallor and then gave that up too. Mosquitoes drove them onto the one thwart that stayed above the seep, shoulders and hips forced into the same narrow board, a tarp dragged over both their heads because the whine had thickened to a swarm and the swarm had found every inch of them. Boots were already off, heeled under the thwart an hour earlier when they filled, left where a foot could find them. Under the canvas the air had no give. The tarp sweated back at them. Her knee rode against his. Cloth that had been wet all day had no dryness left to offer; it clung and conducted heat straight through.

He could feel her pulse where her arm pressed his. Everything softer than that the insect-roar took. She had not spoken since she took his arm. Her face, inches from his, was nothing to him now but breath—he could not see it, could not see the tarp a hand’s width off, but the breath came against his mouth and not toward the roots or the dark where the water had been, and it stayed there. Wanting her had been a trespass he could stow with the lines and the fuel can. The hold on his forearm had cracked the stowage. His cut palm found her wrist again in the dark and stayed, the split skin opening a little against her and not minding. She turned her hand so the contact widened, skin to the inside of his wrist, and the small shift of her weight toward him was not balance.

He kissed her because the alternative was calling the kick in his chest weather. Her mouth met his without the half-second of inventory he had watched her use on every sample and every knot. She answered with her mouth and with her weight, urgent, almost careless, the professional distance gone out of her hands as they caught his shirt and held. The tarp breathed with them. The hull ticked against a root. Heat came off her skin where the wet cloth had failed, and his own pulse hammered under her knuckles where they bunched the cotton over his chest. The want was animal and already moving, and the swamp gave them nothing—no door, no script, no witness but roots and rot—to tell him whether the day she would not explain had put her here or whether she had chosen the inch of dark between them. His mouth was still on hers. Her breath broke against his lip. He had not yet moved back.

He drew back the width of a breath. The tarp caught his hair. Her mouth stayed open where his had left it; he felt the heat of it, not closing.

“Are you sure?”

The insects took the two seconds and made them larger than the gut. The hull settled a fraction in the marl. Her hands on his shirt gave him nothing he could sort—no inventory, no refusal. They did not tighten and they did not let go. A mosquito lit on his neck inside the tarp and he did not slap it. Then her chin moved against his, small, and the word came with it, low enough that the roar almost ate it.

“Yes.”

Unmistakable. The want, which had been weather and blood and the fact of her hand, turned and looked at him. He felt it in his teeth. She caught his shirt again and hauled, not a kiss yet, a decision with weight in it, and the hull rocked under them both.

There was no room on the board for what they wanted. He went off the thwart onto his knees in the seep, the warm inch of shipped water soaking through at once, the tarp dragging after him and settling over both their heads like a second, smaller night. Facing her now. Her knees either side of him. Wet cotton did not slip. It peeled. He found the hem of her shirt and worked the buttons from the bottom up, blind, the small discs biting his knuckles; two came open and the third would not, and he left it fastened and crooked at her collarbone and shoved the cloth up past her ribs, where it stuck to the salt along her sternum and stayed. She got his open the same way, impatient, the fabric coming off his chest with a wet peel, a small tear of suction. She pulled the glasses from her pocket by feel and pushed them into the toe of her boot under the thwart, and that was the only careful thing either of them did. No one stripped. He dragged her trousers down past both hips, got one bare leg free of them entirely, and left the rest hung and bunched at her other knee, just clear of the water, because further was a gift to whatever lived in the seep. His own he opened and worked down off his hips, cloth heavy, clinging at the thigh. Skin met where it had to. Chest to the wet front of her. Stomach. The inside of her freed thigh, hot and slick with swamp and sweat, against his hip. Her other heel found the floorboards and set, bare, in the warm inch of water. His cut palm went to the small of her back and stayed there, tacky, holding her to the board.

A root scraped the hull when he shifted. “Root,” he said, against her hair. She adjusted. That was all the speech the place would spend. He did not want his voice out there, and nothing in her breathing asked for it.

The footing ruined whatever might have been smooth. His knee skated on the wet floorboards, the sodden cloth over it giving no purchase, and he had to stop, resettle her weight, start again with his hand flat on her back so she did not go into the seep. The tarp slid and he had to catch it one-handed, drag it back over them while the mosquitoes found the gap and his shoulder. Stop. Resettle. The bunched cloth at her knee caught between them and she kicked at it, once, and it swung heavy and wet against his calf and stayed. Then her bracing leg cramped—he felt it go hard and wrong under his hand, felt her breath hitch for the wrong reason—and she set her teeth in his shoulder and rode it out, and the leg let go, and she pulled him back in with it. Gravity kept interrupting. Her breath broke against his throat, short, then shorter. A sound started in her and she bit it off against his skin; he felt the teeth, not a performance, a clamp. His own exhale went rough and stayed in his chest. Heat. The suck of mud on the hull each time they moved. Wet cloth. Her, under his hand, exact and refusing to be read.

She came first. Sudden, almost angry at it, the grip on his shoulder gone hard enough that he knew the bruise would be there in the morning. Her face turned away into the tarp and he felt the cord of her neck go against his mouth, the way her body took the shock and would not share the look of it. He kept still and let it go through her. He did not speak her name until it was already leaving her, and then once, against her hair: “Susan.” She did not answer with a word. Her fingers stayed locked.

He lost his own after, messy and shorter, not with her. Forehead to the tarp. The peak was heat and the jolt of it and the plain stupidity of bodies in a stranded skiff, nothing shared, nothing arranged to arrive together. His breath hit the canvas and came back warm and foul with his own air. A muscle in his thigh shook and quit. Something left his mouth that was shaped like a word and was only breath. She heard whatever it was. Her hand loosened on the shoulder by a fraction and did not leave.

They came apart because the board would not hold two people gone slack, and because a breeze found the gap under the tarp and turned the wet on his skin to chill inside a minute. Something moved at his ankle, in the seep. He found it by touch, swore once under his breath, and got a thumbnail under the mouth of the leech and worked it off, the small humiliating patience of it, while her hands stayed on her own knees and did not help. Then the clothes. His trousers came up wet and resisting, cloth twisted on the thigh, the waistband gritty with marl. He heard her fighting hers: the leg found by feel, the hem dragged over her heel, the sodden weight hauled up her hips in two pulls. She dragged her shirt down off her ribs, where it had set like a bandage. He reached for the jerry can and poured a little fresh water over the ankle that had braced in the seep, the grit of marl and whatever else the floorboards had held running off her skin, then over his own palm. The cut stung. She let him. She buttoned her shirt wrong in the dark—he heard the last button find no hole—and did not fix it. The leech had used up the space where a speech might have started. Neither of them filled it.

She turned toward the water and listened for the tide against the roots. He checked the painter by feel, the knot still sound, the line slack in the marl. They sat on opposite gunwales with the tarp hauled over both of them, a tent of two poles, and still the mosquitoes came in at the hem and took what they could from his bare ankles above the seep. Not touching. Breath settling back into the size of two separate people who would have to work the same boat when the water came. The professional distance tried to climb back into her mouth and failed there; he heard it fail, a breath started and let out. His own mouth was the same. Open from the question. Still open.

“Should float before first light,” she said.

“Yeah.”

Neither of them promised the morning. The insects roared. Sulfur came up off the seep. Her shirt stayed buttoned wrong, and he did not reach across the dark to fix it.