Page 106 of The Wild Beneath

Walker’s sound is definitely stronger by the water. She thought it might be. It unfurls in her body like a warm liquid, displacing everything cold and dark. Her eyelids feel so heavy she cannot stay awake. A swollen moon rises overhead.

A crystalline dream delivers itself. Annie stands alone on Ruth’s porch underneath colourful buoys that still hang from the rafters. She smells rain. The skies are dark at the horizon and clouds pile up on one another. The sea is restless, the colour of wolves.

When the rain starts, it spills in waterslides off the roof. She steps into the torrential downpour. It drips from her hair, off her nose, around her neck. So much water.

She blinks. Walker is there, right in front of her, so close she can touch him.

His T-shirt and jeans are completely soaked. His skin appears thin and gossamer-like, as if she might see through it if she looks close enough.

His light grey eyes still sparkle like fireflies. She smells the sea on him. He is sweaty and breathing hard. A film of moisture covers his face.

He takes her hand. His touch is slimy and damp and holds an electric voltage that tunnels into her arm.

“Meet me on the water,” he says.

Annie is devastated to wake.

What time is it? Time seems like a faraway concept.

Everything might be fine if she lies here for eternity, in this place where Walker feelssoalive.

But she can’t feel her fingers and toes anymore, and the tip of her nose is icy. She burrows her hands in her pockets. She’s hungry. When was the last time she had something to eat? She rides home while the moon splinters light through the trees, between the low-rises, reflecting off the wet concrete. A woman in Roots sweatpants and Blundstones smokes beside the door of the convenience store under their apartment. She is wearing multiple strands of mala bracelets and a single AirPod in her left ear. “This is the last time I fucking tell you!” she yells at the phone in her hand. “Can you hear my voice?”

Annie eats leftover lasagna from the fridge. Bowed over the counter, her back aches. She grips her fork without realizing, then puts it down. A hockey game broadcasts in her neighbour’s apartment: “Those men worked hard on the ice, am I right? That’s a lot of training paying off right there. That’s hustle!” A door claps shut down the hallway. A threadbare-nothingness feeling creeps in. She loads her plate into the dishwasher and flips off all the lights.

She empties sand out of her pockets.

When her head hits the pillow, she expects a night of staring at the ceiling, imagining life trajectories with Walker versus Evan. But unexpectedly, she’s asleep right away, dreamless until morning. It’s already bright outside when she wakes.

In the kitchen, she makes coffee and loads a sticky soap pellet in the dishwasher she forgot to run. Her feet are still cold. The percolator hisses on the stove.

A key clicks in the lock and the front door opens.

She wasn’t expecting Evan so early. But the clock says 1:05 p.m.; she realizes that she slept half the day.

“Work late?” Evan asks from the doorway. A rush of cool air against her bare legs. He stomps water off his boots, zips off his jacket, crosses the room toward her.

“I just woke up.”

“Come here.” He pulls her close, picks up her hair and kisses her neck. He murmurs in her ear: “You smell salty.”

“I missed you,” she says. It is true. He smells like cedar, resiny. Like the woods. His cheeks are burnt from the wind. Annie puts her hands there and he smiles in that way he does, the dimple in his left cheek.

He kisses her.

He needs her right now. She feels it. Maybe she needs him, too? Maybe sex will put her back into the normal pattern of her life. Wasn’t she fine before the past dragged itself up?

Evan unbuttons her shirt, lifts his own over his head, and pulls off his pants. His hands cup her face, lips are on hers again, at first soft, then urgent. He slides her underwear down and off. The place she loves between his collarbone and neck is warm and smooth.

But then the faintest sound of Walker filters into her belly, her pelvis.

For a moment, she’s not in her body. She’s in the far-off deepest places that humans haven’t reached. Those underwater mountains and valleys. She is only that sound; its inescapable message she can’t seem to decipher.

Evan lifts her up on the counter. Behind her closed eyelids, she sees Walker’s grey eyes, feels the heat of his mouth.

But Evan wraps her legs around his waist and anchors her back here. Her breasts press against him, her face in his neck. She holds Evan harder with the muscles of her thighs so shecan stay here with him. Tears run down her cheeks, onto her neck. She bites down on her own forearm.

She touches herself between her legs, so she can come, too. For the shared release of it.