by Julia Kent
I have no idea where we’re going, but I trust Grace. I have to.
It’s not like I have a choice.
“Fifteen-minute flight, Mr. and Mrs. McCormick. A quick jump.”
Declan frowns. “That’s too short!”
“Huh?”
“There’s not time for—you know.” He looks down at his groin.
“Where we’re going, there’s plenty of time for so much more.”
“Really?” He perks up. I rest my palm on his thigh and slide up and in. Oh, yeah. He’s ready.
“Oh, yes.”
“I’m not sure I can wait,” he confesses.
“Oh,” I say sweetly. “Don’t worry.”
And then I hold up one finger as the helicopter pilot starts the lift.
For fifteen minutes, I tease him over his Bermuda shorts until Bermuda has grown from a tiny island to a continent with an awfully large peninsula jutting out.
“Tease,” he hisses in my ear.
“What do you think you were yesterday! I’m more a Smurf now than when I was covered in airplane toilet water!”
“What?”
“Women get blue...you know...too.”
“Do not.”
“Do too!” I shout over the chopper sounds. “It builds up.”
“There’s nothing to build up. Guys have semen. Women just...”
“Have orgasms.”
“And that’s not fair, either,” he says, clearing his throat as if I’ve committed some grave offense.
“What’s not fair?”
“You get more than one.”
“More than one...”
Oh.
That.
I give him a big smile.
“Beginning descent,” the pilot cuts in, his voice clearly filled with restrained laughter.
I look at Declan’s headpiece. I reach up and touch mine.
Oh, damn.
We’ve been on global microphone the entire time.
The landing involves zero eye contact as we climb off the helicopter, onto a cement helipad right off the beach. It’s morning, a crystal-clear sky where the blue deepens as you go up from the horizon.
“Mr. and Mrs. McCormick,” says a young man who can’t be more than eighteen, with closely cropped dark hair and a face covered with moles. He has warm brown eyes and wears an outfit nearly identical to Declan’s. “I am David. My instructions are to take you directly to your quarters, and to respond to requests, but otherwise provide you with privacy.”
“What is this place?” Declan looks around in marvel. There are about ten hut houses along the beach, a huge zero-entry pool, a poolside bar, and...
Nothing else.
David looks at me. “Should I answer that?”
Declan gives him a WTF? look, then shines it on me like a searchlight.
“Excuse me?” I gasp.
“Our instructions were to avoid all discussion of business.”
Declan’s mouth tightens. He’s about to argue.
I reach for his hand. “Business later. Personal first.” I rub my hip against his. He looks down at me, jaw still grinding, but he nods exactly once.
And I lead him by the hand to our quarters.
Five minutes later, we’re alone, a tenth of a mile from the next hut house, every luxury at our fingertips.
Including the luxury of privacy.
Money can’t buy happiness.
But it can buy you space. Sometimes it can buy you time.
And if you’re lucky, it buys you freedom.
Declan
Money means nothing without the power to use it to get what you want.
And all I want is Shannon.
We enter the cottage, the air between us crackling with electricity. Constant interruptions have left us frustrated. Through dinner and drinks, the sultan offered women in twos and threes to me. He took my refusals as a commentary on the attractiveness of the women, sending them away, requesting more and increasingly beautiful women (his words, not mine).
My bizarre night with the Sultan of Al-Massi was a giant mind game, a labyrinth of challenged beliefs and a raging case of need for Shannon. Yes, I just lied through my teeth to her. Yes, I’m a horrible human being for doing it. Admitting what really happened with the sultan, from flinging the earring-filled Champagne on him to his crazy brother, won’t help either of us, though.
It’s just another distraction. We don’t need any more diversions.
Nothing has gone as planned on this honeymoon.
Not one damn item.
My wife has taken charge. She got us here alone, secluded and in deep privacy.
Time for me to take control again.
She’s standing before me, breathing slowly but thoroughly, just watching me. I’m not on display. She takes me in as a person who is experiencing time in full awareness, each second passing as it happens. No rushed sense of hurrying toward a future goal. No regretful mourning for missed pasts.
My wife is here. All the way. This is no partial woman who steps to close the distance between us. Bright eyes stare back at mine, almost painfully awake, sincere and just as the here and now folds into our bodies. I touch her, connected and true, reconfirming that the best decision I’ve made in my life was loving her.
Is loving her.
Love is a process.
So is making love.
No part of touching her is devoid of meaning. Not the moment my finger pad meanders through the soft skin of her wrist, finding tributaries that drive her blood to her heart. Not the second she makes a small, hushed sound of acquiescence – not to me, but to some part of herself she’s been holding back but now relinquishes. Not in the combination of our heat, our scents, our quiet acknowledgement through motion and tacit agreement that being in each other’s arms has its own rubric.
Meaning and purpose infuse the constant criss-cross of emotion between us.
“Why,” she asks, her nails running up and down my arms like the long leaves of a willow tree summoning the wind, “don’t I cherish every second with you? When we’re together it’s so easy to be distracted.”
“You’re asking me? I’m hardly the expert on emotional insight.”
Her eyes tip up, chin still tucked into her chest, lashes blinking as she stands here, breathing with contemplation. My palms rest on her elbows and I feel a deep mourning, breathtaking and whole. Joy and connection are the yin.
Knowing that one day I won’t have this is the yang.
“Declan,” she says, as if that answers some question.
Snippets of a poem come to me, full and resonant. I take Shannon’s hand and whisper:
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Her eyes turn soft, narrow and wide at the same time, eternity in every part of her.
“That’s beautiful.”
“Rilke. We studied it in college. I never understood what it really meant until now. Until you.”
“No feeling is final. It’s the journey, then,” she says, nodding. Her hair tickles my wrist as I reach down to cup her jaw, needing to feel the movement of her mouth as she speaks.
“I wouldn’t walk this path – any path – with a different person, Shannon. You’re mine. I’m yours.”
“Let everything happen to you,” she repeats, chin up, cheeks round as she smiles. “The beauty and the terror. The fear and the love. The messiness of all of it. We’re never guaranteed happiness, are we? But you and I will always have each other through whatever life brings. The only guarantee is that life will always change. We will always have obstacles. Complications. Problems.” Her fingers slide under my shirt, creeping up bare skin, then her palm splays flat, up over my heart. “And we’ll have each other. Face it all together.”
“Yes.” My ring shines against her pale face. “That’s what our vows mean.”
“We have more than our vows.”
“We do.”
“No feeling is f
inal,” she says. “That can mean so many different -- ”
I kiss her, soft and swift, just enough to stem the growing urgency in me, the burning need to climb inside her and never leave. “Whatever it means, I want to feel all the feelings with you.”
Chapter 9
Shannon
The hut is a sex palace.
Not really, but we’re turning it into one, with each piece of clothing shed, each rasping kiss, every light and hard touch. No one’s around. No one will interrupt. No cell service. No Bluetooth. No laptops, no corded phones, nothing but us.
The island has all the conveniences of modern civilization, but they’re in the main resort building, a quarter mile away, which is just enough distance to make sure I’m Declan’s focal point.
And he is mine.
“Finally,” he says, the word rubbing against my neck like a spell he intones, his lips making their way up, tongue trailing down the curve of my ear, my shiver pushing blood from my pulsing heart through every part of me, quickening.
Sex isn’t about sex any more. It’s not about getting off, or turning into beasts who use friction to meet some biological destiny. It’s not about scratching an itch, or calibrating power balance.
It’s about creating that small, sacred space between the two of us where no one else may enter. For all time, there is this experience that only Declan and I share. No one else. Even if I tell someone—Amanda, or Amy—about the mechanics and emotions of this intimate act, it’s a poor copy of the truth. Because no one can recreate the exact dynamics of stroke and whisper between us. No one can know how it feels in my heart when our eyes meet, the trigger of impulse and relief that comes when we kiss, the cascade of pleasure that comes from a delicate timing that we invent as we go along.
“Finally,” I reply, my face buried in his shoulder as we embrace, fully nude, moving slow. As my hands slide up under his arms and find his shoulder blades, my biceps press against the hard ridge of his ribs, the soft against solid generating heat. Belly to belly, we kiss, letting all our skin say hello. I look up, his hands resting on the top of my ass, not pressing—just there—as my breasts flatten against his chest, thighs settling between each other, bodies working to find that puzzle-piece fit that gives this moment its own unique stamp.
“I’ve missed you.”
“Me, too.”
“It’s only been two days. I was between your legs on the plane. I can still taste you, Shannon, but it’s not enough.” He lifts my hair from my neck, letting a warm breeze stroke the back of my neck before moving the strands back, opening the lines of my throat for a kiss.
“I want you everywhere,” I whisper back as he licks the hollow, hands roaming, finding ways to claim me.
“Everywhere,” he echoes, until my heated pulse finds its home where he needs to be, and I’m on the bed, Declan between my legs, hands under my hips, lifting me up for the perfect angle.
And I disappear into this haven we create whenever we’re alone, together, and truly present. He is superb, his mouth finding me where I ache, and it doesn’t take long. Knowing my pleasure, my release, is his singular focus as I thread my fingers in his hair, feel his shoulders with the backs of my thighs, appreciate the fine mastery of hands that want to touch and tease and connect for the pure sake of knowing me fully—I shatter.
I shatter, and let him see me in pieces. Let him feel my body clench and release, pulse and collapse, moan and cry out with the sensitive nakedness of wearing yourself inside out.
And trusting the other person with your exposed, beating heart, offered like a sacrifice.
His breath against my inner thigh makes me hold mine, letting aftershocks run through me, his palm reaching up, up my torso, snaking across my belly and ribs, up to find and cup a breast, his fingertips knowing my body so well.
Yet always a student.
“This is why I married you,” I tell him, looking down, unashamed as his face comes into full view below the curve of my belly, a wicked grin on those exquisite lips.
“For my tongue? Not my net worth?”
“As far as I’m concerned, your tongue is your net worth.”
He prowls up, erection dragging along my thighs, teasing at my V, then coming up my navel, brushing against my ribs as he bends on knees and kisses me, a lush connection without self-consciousness, without rules. He’s dark. I’m fairer. He’s bold. I’m contemplative. He’s self-assured. I’m still finding my way.
And yet we fit.
A small smile plays on my lips as he kisses me, the movement enough to make him break away and look at me. These green eyes are fully present, the flecks of color spectacular, like a miniature fireworks display in an iris. Declan searches my face, saying nothing.
We don’t need words right now.
Minutes pass. Perhaps hours—who knows? Where we are, together, has no clock. Marking time isn’t a ritual in this space between us.
Measuring love is, though.
Potentiating love. Making love grow.
Without asking, without needing permission, without conscious thought, I rest back and pull him to me, my thighs slick with my own response to him, with his ministrations, and in the moment he enters me, the space extends. Expands. My arms wrap around him as he fills me, a powerful urge building, a healing impulse that sets a charge between us.
“I never knew I could feel this,” he says, eyes locked on mine, moving above me. The interplay between our constant visual connection and his movements fuels so much more.
“Neither did I.”
“No, Shannon. I mean I had no idea—” He stops, closing his eyes, rolling his hips, the sound of his restrained inhale making my blood tingle. “No idea this was here, with you, waiting to be found.”
“I feel like all the years before I met you were just practice for living my real life, Declan.”
“And I feel like I find the missing pieces of myself I didn’t know were out there whenever we’re together, Shannon.”
“No one tells you,” I say, tightening my legs around him. “You have to find it for yourself. This kind of love.”
“How can we know there’s love like this if no one ever tells us?”
Tears fill my eyes, the emotion too much, too sweet, too sudden. “What if they don’t know? You’re so special, Declan.”
I swear his eyes start to shine.
“We’re special,” he says, his voice low as he moves inside me again, deeper now, my hips opening, as if there’s an inner sanctum in this space we forge, one that can only be found if he goes deep enough. “What we have, together. I don’t know what to call this. Love isn’t enough.”
I reach up and stroke his lip, my fingertip lifting up at the bow, moving down his jaw line, memorizing his face in this moment, when we’re as close as can be.
“I want to cry,” I confess. “For knowing how close I came to never meeting you. Never knowing you.” I cling to him, my kiss frantic and open-mouthed, as if he’s about to disappear. I’m breathing in his kiss, as if he’s become part of the air and I can inhale him. The feeling makes no sense, and yet he meets me with a mouth as heated and desperate as mine, his hips pulling away then easing back, arms on either side of me. I’m caged by him, body and soul.
“You do know me. And this is just the beginning.”
We stop talking, emotion too much, letting our bodies say what our mouths cannot, and in the end we cry out, gratitude filling the space, mixing with love to create an intoxicating spell, a chant I feel in my bones.
And then we sleep, curled into each other like lovers who know nothing else, all the beauty and terror in the space between our cells, waiting to be felt.
Together.
Declan
You know how you torture a man? Not by depriving him of something. Not by humiliating him, or breaking him, or making him suffer. Not with physical pain or economic deprivation. Not even with a borderline insane mother-in-law (though that can be remarkably effective).
It’s simpl
e. Cravenly simple.
Give him something to lose. Something – someone – he can’t live without.
I’m wide awake, unable to even contemplate sleep, while Shannon snuggles against me and fades out into whatever blissful world she dreams in. My job is to keep her in that world. Safe, cozy, and able to relax into whatever she needs to feel protected.
I spent nearly thirty years assuming that marriage was about a certain amount of sex and love. That choosing a woman to marry was a matter of an emotional continuum. Take feelings I had for someone I’d already dated and just dial them up one or two standard deviations, find the woman who triggered that and there you go – pick a mate. My operating principle was that choosing a woman as a life partner was about finding the one who made me feel just a little bit more than I felt with all the others.
I was so wrong.
The continuum doesn’t exist with Shannon. Comparing what I feel with her isn’t about intensity. It’s apples and oranges. Trying to express the emotional intensity I feel for her requires a different language. A completely foreign set of tools for measurement. They broke the mold when they made her. She is original. Without measure.
Incomparable.
We have terms for this in business. A black swan is one. In the 1500s Europeans believed there was no such animal as a black swan, because they had never seen such a creature. All swans were white, and therefore “swan” mean a white swan. Their entire mental structure of animals was based on the negative – without a black swan in their experience, or in the scientific record, the assumption must be made that it did not exist.
Until one day an explorer found one in Australia.
All potential life partners fell into a single pool in the past. I had a structure in mind for how love, sex, time, money, and existence worked. Not a rigid system, but one I was sure was true. Like a fish who, when asked how they like living in water, asks, “What’s water?”, I had no idea.
No idea that there was a life beyond water.
We say someone “rocks our world” when we meet them, but that doesn’t describe it, either. Shannon is a different planet, a heavenly body in more ways than one. She has her own laws of physics, an ecosphere that requires exploration and careful stewardship. Her very existence shakes me to my core and realigns me.
