‘It’s not meant to be romantic,’ he said, without turning round. ‘Chef must have thought I was dining with my wife.’
Lori wasn’t sure what to say. ‘I didn’t think it was.’
He ground out the half-smoked cigarette on the chalky wall, where it left a smoky grey smudge. ‘Sit down.’ He gestured to the table. His eyes were changed, she saw, the pupils large so they swallowed the blue, as though staring down infinite distances had at last absorbed the dark immensity of sea and space. ‘Relax.’
The food was delicious: tender pale mussels and hunks of salted bread, raspberry and chocolate fondant that dissolved on her tongue. They shared a bottle of Krug and Lori began to feel drunk. The sky was in limbo of deep purple. Water contained them like glittering ink. Candles were lit and the glow accented each contour of JB’s face: near-blackness around his mouth and eyes, through which she would occasionally capture a flash of sapphire, glinting sharply like treasure on the ocean floor.
‘Come for a walk,’ he said when they finished. He saw her hesitate and held out his hand. ‘There’s nowhere like the beach this time of night.’
Lori took it, but only to stand, and released his grip before he had the chance to do it first.
The sand was wet between her toes. Firm, compacted, solid ground, yet comprised of grains so tiny that alone they
were invisible. She loved how the sea came in on its rhythmic tide, smoothing it over again and again like a mother’s palm across a fevered forehead.
‘You see why I choose to be here,’ he said. They walked in quiet, only the sound of the lapping waves for company.
Lori turned, unable to make out any detail. He was nearest the shore, against the moon, so that its light was absorbed by the side she couldn’t see, drawing him a blank shape.
‘It’s not hard to imagine,’ she said.
‘No?’
‘Living on Cacatra. Being happy. It’s the first place I’ve felt that way about since my mother died.’
She thought he moved closer, walking so their arms would touch, could touch, if she wanted them to. In the same moment she remembered JB’s own parents, Paul and Emilie Moreau, who had both died so horrifically when he was a child.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘that was insensitive.’
‘Because I’m an orphan?’ The word conjured images of filthy abandoned children, weak and shivering and alone—not JB, with his wealth and sex and the cold fire that burned in his eyes. ‘Your pain is no less legitimate.’
They continued in silence, but it was comfortable, understood, as when confidences are shared and each tentative word valuable. Lori looked behind her. The house they’d come from was a twinkling cluster in the distance.
‘I was fourteen.’ JB stopped and turned to the ocean. ‘I never wanted to see water again. Now, I can’t imagine any other way than to be surrounded by it.’
‘Fourteen is young.’
‘Any age is difficult.’
He crouched, picked up a roughened stick and carved a wide arc in the sand, from left to right. Lori lowered herself down next to him.
‘We lost control of the boat,’ he said, his voice strange, too low, as though he was trying to get far enough beneath the words to support them. ‘One minute we were together. The next, they were gone. I lost them.’
Lori closed her eyes. She pictured the jumping, steaming waves. Grey, brown, violent.
‘There was nothing I could do. I watched them both drown.’
She put her hand on his arm. Once upon a time she might have thought better of it, but now it came naturally. Whatever misunderstandings and embarrassments had gone between them in the past, she wanted to be his friend. She owed him that.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
JB looked up. There was sadness in him, such deep loneliness, deeper than Rico’s that day in the parking lot, deeper than her father’s, deeper than her own.
‘Do you believe in God?’ he asked. His expression was determined, as though he sought not just her faith but the absolute answer. He needed to know.
‘I used to,’ she said. ‘Didn’t everyone?’
Reclaiming the stick, JB swept through the arc, completing the circle around them. He had to lean across her to do it and his proximity was hard to bear.
‘Afterwards, I lay on deck,’ he said. ‘The storm had passed. The sky was purple, like a painting. They were the worst hours. Me and God, with nothing to say.’
‘Were you alone?’
‘Our boat had been reported missing. They came for me.’
She studied his face, knew the truth before she asked for it. ‘Were you hurt?’
JB raised a finger to the scar on his mouth. ‘Only this. I slipped trying to reach them and it cut right open. The wound was deep. It took a long time to heal.’ He shook his head. ‘Sounds dramatic, doesn’t it? But it felt like they were reminding me.’
‘Who?’
‘My mother and father. Even after the stitches were out, every time I went to smile, it hurt. It felt like they were reminding me of what I’d let happen.’
‘But you didn’t let anything happen,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’
‘Maybe.’
A wave rinsed up to Lori’s feet. ‘Do you feel close to them on Cacatra?’ she asked.
‘Close?’ The word was acutely, painfully intimate.
‘Here more than anywhere. Because you used to—’
He took her chin in his hands and kissed her.
It happened just like that. She must have turned at the exact same moment because they were sitting side by side and then they were kissing, and there wasn’t anything else in between.
JB’s lips were soft and inquisitive, sure and firm, and when he broke away Lori felt like a parched desert-wanderer given a thimble to drink. She needed more. She had to have more.
This time they went for each other, his hands running down her body, mouth on mouth, body against body, aching with burn. Switched like a light, flooding her with glow. She was thrown back on to the sand, JB’s fingertips trailing a line down her neck as he kissed her earlobe and her chin
and then her mouth again and his hand moved lower. Lori felt him cross her breast and her body shook. She shivered with heat.
‘Do you want this?’
‘Yes.’
Such a small word for the emotion it betrayed: months of devotion, of hatred, of confusion, of dreaming of this. She yearned for all of JB Moreau, his entirety, his body and soul.
His hand was on the inside of her thigh. Damp in her knickers. The sand was still warm and Lori imagined her body was fire, scorching the earth beneath. When his touch disappeared inside her she moaned, spilling on to him, reaching down to grip his forearm and clasp him to her. She could not see his face, a black outline against the sky blacker still. Only the wide eye of the moon gazed down at her, full and brimming with light.
He kissed her again, his tongue in her mouth. Water washed between them, the tide coming up, thick with salt and cold and raw. She unbuttoned his shirt, running her palms across his chest, the smell of him accompanying the parting of the material, as if he were a window she had opened on a summer’s day.
‘Are you a virgin?’ he breathed.
She could barely speak for the blood in her voice. ‘Yes.’
His hardness pressed between her parted legs. Never had a sensation been so consuming, the promise of euphoria that was too much to bear.
The instant he entered her, Lori came alive. Lightheaded, she swam in infinite depth, JB’s strong arms pulling her to him, saving her, holding their bodies together. The pain was searing and momentary, followed at once by immeasurable pleasure. Feeling him inside, joined with
him, as one, riding his rhythm, she would be content to die right here, now, on this island, and float out to sea, her body spent, this union spelling all it had ever been and ever would be.
Pleasure and pain …
He drove into her on the cusp, obliterating the line between the two. Lori was going to orgasm, faster than she knew she could. Sea water rushed up to shore, more of it, swelling around the point where they locked, getting her wetter and wetter, stinging with saline, and now his pace was increasing, his breath in her ear, the heat between them soaring till she thought they were ablaze, and he was going in deeper, more painful and more pleasurable both at the same time and it flared her like a striking match and suddenly she was ignited, climaxing with the scream she had been holding on to for years, out and absorbed into the boundless sky.
Another thrust and he joined her. She felt the release and the liquid and his face buried in her shoulder, his back rising and falling, sticky with sweat and salt water.
He rolled off, one hand across his chest, eyes closed. She could see the pulse flutter in his neck. For seconds, she watched it, waiting for her own to slow.
Lori matched her breathing with his. She touched the leather band on his wrist, because now she could. ‘Thank you.’
JB kept his face turned away. ‘What for?’
‘You know what for. What you did that day. You saved me. You never gave me a chance to say it, so I’m saying it now.’
‘You don’t need to.’
‘Yes, I do.’
He faced her. His eyes, in the moonlight, appeared softer to her now. At last, human.
‘It was wrong,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have been there.’
‘But you were.’
‘It was wrong.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘It’s the truth.’
‘Why did you pretend it never happened?’ She put a finger on the hollow of his elbow, where the skin was so soft it was like silk. ‘When Desideria brought me back. You killed a part of me that day.’
He averted his gaze, looking unblinking up at the sky. ‘There are things you don’t know, Lori. Things I can’t tell you.’
‘You can tell me anything.’
He laughed, but there was no mirth in it.
‘You can,’ she insisted. ‘Nothing you say could change a thing.’
She saw his throat rise and fall. ‘When you came to this island,’ he said, ‘I told you that ignorance was precious. I meant it.’
‘I’ve spent my whole life in ignorance,’ she countered. ‘Don’t love me like a woman then treat me like a girl.’
Sitting up, he ran a palm across the back of his neck. He brought his knees up and rested his arms across them, head dipped.
‘I’m leaving my wife,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s over between us. It has been for a long time. We never loved each other, not in the way it’s meant to be.’
She waited. The guilt she’d felt previously over Rebecca was a useless instrument now. Lori knew she’d passed the
point of no return and the last thing on her mind was an apology.
‘The way I feel about you …’ He struggled for the words. ‘I’m not used to feeling …’ He shook his bowed head. ‘I’m not used to feeling at all.’
She reached out to touch him. ‘It’s OK.’
‘I want it to be.’ He gave her his profile. ‘I swear it, Lori. I want it to be.’
The words she wanted to say, she held tight to. She wanted to save them. And when she finally let them go, she wanted to be sure he’d say them back.
They had sex again in his bed. And again, and again—Lori lost count of the number of times. JB explored her, taught her how to explore herself, with a touch that brought her to the brink of paradise and had her drowning in pools of ecstasy.
It was a shock when he told her that protection wasn’t necessary—at least not for fear of pregnancy. Lori was shattered that he would never be a father. He’d accepted it a long time ago, he said, but for Lori, knowing the breadth and scope of his heart undiscovered, and how he was with Ralph, and how much love was missing from his world, it was an especially cruel misfortune. She realised what she felt for JB was real because she thought not once for herself or what his admission might mean, only for his loss and how brutal a lottery was life.
At three a.m., he showered. Lori slipped on her dress and padded to the room’s shutters, opening them and letting in sea air. She admired the unbroken view of the lighthouse: a pale beam thrown back and forth, searching, searching, leaning out and resting her arms on the sill. Her wake-up
call was in four hours but she wouldn’t sleep. The moment she was alone she knew she’d play out every second of tonight and it would keep her from sleep for a hundred years.
On the other side of the window frame was a tiny carved-out nook. It was invisible to the eye and Lori only noticed it because she was running her hand across the wood and her fingers disappeared inside. Curious, she felt about and came into contact with a small key, which she extracted and looked at, puzzled. The shower continued to pound.
There was a desk by JB’s bed. It was made of thick, worn wood and had two panels of drawers running down either side. On a whim, she crossed to it and knelt. She didn’t know what she was looking for, or why—but something compelled her.
The key jammed against the first panel of locks. She began to think it wouldn’t fit any of them before at last it slid into one of the holes and released a neat
click
.
Inside the drawer was a large black file. On the front in capital type it read: ABORTED.
Lori fingered its edges and met a sheaf of escaping paper, which she tugged at gently. She wasn’t expecting it to come free and must have torn it from some fastening.
LORIANA GARCIA TORRES (17)—ref. LA864 (cont’d) … surviving father, Antony Garcia (40) m. Angélica Ruiz (43), 1996. Stepsisters: Rosa Garcia Ruiz (24); Anita Garcia Ruiz (22). Mother: Maria Valeria Torres (deceased age 31). Household income per annum c. $38,000: see p11 of this doc + employment detail. Boyfriend Enrique Arrio Marquez (20); connections to San Pedro El Peligro street gang—
The shower stopped. She heard the panel slide across.
Confused, fumbling, Lori grabbed her purse from the floor and stuffed the paper inside, in the same movement returning the file, closing the drawer and locking it. She replaced the key seconds before JB emerged from the bathroom.
She saw his eyes absorb the scene, look over the desk as if he’d known where she’d been though that was impossible. ‘What are you doing?’
Lori swallowed. She linked her hands behind her back.
‘Nothing,’ she lied. ‘Only waiting for you.’
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