by Gwen Masters
(09/07/05)

Ken has been drinking Corona. I can taste it on his tongue, on his lips, on the moan that slips from him when silence becomes too much.

We've been on this island for three days. I'm learning to live with sand everywhere, and with wearing a bikini. It's hunter green and pretty against my hair. I stood in front of the mirror right after I put it on and looked at skin just a little too pale, a body just a little too soft. I'm nothing like those young girls that look at Ken with lust in their eyes. I am no longer eighteen or even twenty-five, and it shows. He says it doesn't matter. I somehow believe him.

He took the phone away on the first day, so that if I wanted to call Adam I had to do it by walking to the end of the island and getting into a little boat and taking it all the way to the outer reaches of Grand Cayman. And I don't know how to use the boat. First problem solved. The phone made a splashing sound of freedom as it hit the green and blue water.

Then it was the computer, the sleek silver laptop that caught my eye in the middle of the first day. Ken quietly pulled the connection out of the wall and I gasped, seeing the modem as a lifeline to a life that was already dead and gone. I was amazed at how far a laptop could sail. They never tell you those things can double as Frisbees. It now provides company for the phone somewhere in the rocky underbelly of that giant swell of ocean.

There is no television and a radio that only works half the time. There is nothing here but my thoughts. That's the whole point, but I couldn't stand it at first. The first day I paced the marble floors of the villa until Ken's calm gaze stopped me. He sat at the chess table. I watched as he moved the knight forward. I knew how he would play the game. He would give so generously it would seem reckless, and then with only a little power left, he would devastate my royal couple. He would win. Every single time.

"Your turn," he said.

That night we walked out onto the beach; I looked as far as I could both ways and there was nothing but clear white beach surrounded by a halo of moonlight. The stars glinted off the water and made me dizzy. Never had I seen so many stars in the sky. Where had they been?

"You can still see Orion from here," he pointed out, and I relaxed into the space of familiarity. The water was cool on my toes. His hand felt sure and safe on the small of my back. I turned completely in his arms and looked at all the distance around us. No one else for miles.

"Is this all yours?" I asked softly.

He looked at me through eyes the same color as the water. "I wish it were," he said.

The second morning I awoke to crisp white sheets and fruit salad, plucked fresh from the grove. The breeze was unusually strong and just cool enough. I sat up naked and covered myself with the sheet, and he didn't pretend not to notice. I was glad. I ate chunks of pineapple and papaya, and some strange fruit even he couldn't name, but that dribbled red juice as I lifted it from the chilled bowl. I fed it to him and he licked my fingers clean. The shiver that ran through me was more than the breeze off the water.

"A storm is coming," Ken said nonchalantly, and I thought of Adam.

Adam left me and now, even all this time later, I'm not sure why. He came into my life like tropical storm turning to hurricane and devastated all in his path, only to turn again and renew it with compassion and tenderness. Then came the tsunami from the earthquake of his soul, throwing me onto the shore without a second thought. I tumbled from his affections on the wake of his demons, left gasping and broken on a cliff far above the sea; looking down into a darkness that was so frightening I could never speak of it in the light of day.

My body felt heavy and desperate in the devastation, an impossible case of Dead on Arrival. That's how I felt when that Lear jet landed and I stepped from the hushed cream interior into the tropical heat. It was a lovely view, but I had nothing inside me. No capacity for enjoying it, for reveling in the call and wheel of the birds, for admiring the man beside me. I had nothing but a broken memory.

But there was Ken.

His blue eyes followed me everywhere I went those first days, taking in more than I imagined one person could see. He saw the way I looked for a trace of Adam's cologne in my suitcase. He saw the way I stared out over the water, always facing west, where somewhere on a landlocked shore Adam was going about a life of his own without me.

He even saw the way I looked at his St. Christopher medallion with a snapping of heart, knowing it was the same kind Adam always wore, the one I had given Adam to protect him in his travels, wherever they might take him. "He wears one of these?" Ken asked softly, and I nodded.

That second night, he didn't know I was watching as he threw that medallion into the ocean. He threw it as far and as hard as it would fly, his own protection against all things real and imagined disappearing under the waves.

That's when I knew Ken still loved me.

Now it's the third night, and I am kissing him with a passion I thought long dead. I had forgotten how he whimpers when I pull away. I had forgotten how his hands feel in my hair and how they shake just a little when he gets excited. He grows hard against my belly and I feel twinges of misplaced guilt. But I don't stop kissing him.

"I want you," he whispers in my ear.

"No," I say, knowing I don't really mean it. He reaches for the buckle of my skirt. It is all I am wearing over the bikini. I rest my hand on his to stop him, but I don't protest as much as I should. It falls away and into the water.

"Please," he says with that little whimper of breath at the end, and I have to smile against his shoulder.

"No," I say, and his hand slips all the way down my back. He tickles the cleft of mystery he finds there. His other hand slides down my belly. He holds me between his palms and breathes of my skin.

"Do you have any idea, what you do to me?"

"No." It is a lie and we both know it. His teeth find the thin strap of my bikini top. He pulls it down over my sunburned shoulder. My hands slowly find life of their own. His shoulders are firm and tanned from years under his Caribbean sun. His body moves differently now. But his lips don't. He finds one of my hard nipples and I gasp.

"No," I whimper on a dying breath. He pays no attention. I know I can stop him; I know I can say the word with just a little more force and he will step away so quickly I won't be able to keep my balance. I know I can stop him and so I don't.

"You are beautiful," he whispers, and I try hard to believe. I am no longer a kid. My breasts are a little too heavy. My hips are a little too wide. There are silvery marks across my thighs. There is a thin scar like a smiley face on the underside of my belly. He touches them all and tells me I'm beautiful. How long has it been since those words graced my ears?

"No," I say one last time, and then I feel the wind blowing over me everywhere and there are no more secrets. The water is cooler than it was that first night. The stars shine in the same dizzying kaleidoscope. He lays me down under them. The silhouette of his body cuts a dark shadow across the Dippers, but I can still see Orion, a little over his left shoulder.

The water licks at my legs and he moves with it. Then suddenly he's inside me, where no one but Adam has belonged for years and years, and I gasp with the impossibility of it. The utterly amazing delight of it. I bite my lip to keep it all inside.

"No," he says.

So I cry out under him and my voice echoes across the waves. His body within mine is harder than I remember and his motion is sweeter. It feels like coming home, like knowing my place, a comfort that I have longed for all those long months when nothing and no one could touch me.

I think of Adam then. I wonder if he knows what I'm doing. I wonder if he would care. Then I find that even if he does, I don't. The peace makes me want to cry.

Ken looks down at me and I can see the water reflected in his eyes. The moonlight is pale now, waning with the change of season. My soul is not quite awake yet but the rest of me...ah, the rest of me is alive and well and present as I roll with him and rise above him. The water clings to his chest. He is beautiful in the dim light, covered in fine sand, like a sculpture almost completed but still filled with little imperfections.

I kiss him and taste the liquor. I move with the rhythm of the ocean. Ken's hands tremble on my hips and I'm suddenly glad I'm different now, not the same woman he loved years ago, not the same woman Adam claimed as his. I'm glad for the years. I'm glad for the simple joys of understanding now what I could not understand then.

I had lamented Adam's freedom. I hadn't even considered my own.

And then I'm holding onto Ken and nothing else. The release is a sweet groan and spill within us both, a call to the stars, but it's not the climax, not at all. That came the moment he threw the medallion into the sea and gave up all that Adam never would have. Ken knows how to play the game of life. Ken knows that generosity is more than enough.

The most important rule is simple: The man with the most compassion wins.

In the aftermath, Ken holds me without regret.

"Are you sorry?" he asks.

"No," I answer.

After a while the raindrops begin to fall. The storm has arrived.

"I’m not sorry," I say, and laugh out loud.

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