Susan Wiggs - That Summer Place - Island Time / Old Things / Private Paradise

He felt a stab of something earthy and carnal go clear through the center of him. The ax slipped from his hand and hit the ground with a dull thud. He swore under his breath and shifted slightly.

He couldn’t take his eyes off her. And he didn’t want to.

Her hair was lighter, longer and straighter; it brushed her shoulders as she walked down to the end of the dock where a red and blue nautical beach towel lay spread out and a transistor radio with a tall silver antenna played the Lovin’ Spoonful.

He leaned against the tree and crossed his arms, then blew out a breath slowly, kind of a half whistle of amazement that a girl could be put together that way.

She bent over and tossed something on the towel.

He groaned and closed his eyes. He heard the music throbbing through the air with the same beat that his heart pounded. He opened his eyes because he couldn’t hide any longer. He had to see her.

She was standing with her toes curled over the edge of the dock, her stance stiff and straight, her arms raised high, ready to dive.

He shoved off from the tree and moved down toward her. This year things had changed; he was following her.

She dove in.

When she hit the water, his breath caught and held as if he had to hold his own breath along with her. He walked faster, down the dock toward the water. But when he reached the towel, he stopped. He stood there staring at the rings of water she left behind, while the music from the radio blared out over the cove.

Her head broke through the surface, sleek and golden and wet. He bent and flicked down the volume on the radio, then he straightened and waited until she turned in the water.

She froze the instant she saw him. “Michael?”

Her voice was older and throaty. It made him think of things like smooth soft skin. Hot deep kisses. And Trojans.

He took two steps to the edge of the dock and squatted down, resting a hand on his thigh. He just looked at her and enjoyed the view. The air grew hotter and tighter and felt heavy.

She swam toward him.

He reached out a hand to her. “Hi, Squirt.”

She put her hand in his and he straightened, pulling her up with him while he watched the water run down her body.

She stood close to him, so close that all he had to do was lean forward and their bodies would touch. Chest to chest. Hip to hip. Mouth to mouth. He had a strange and laughable vision of them touching and steam suddenly fogging up the air around them.

She was five foot ten or so. No longer a little squirt. But it didn’t matter because she still had to look up at him. He was six foot two.

She slid her hand from his grip, turned away and grabbed the towel. She used it to cover herself while she awkwardly pretended to dry off.

He hadn’t moved, only watched her. He said nothing until she finally glanced up at him. He gave her a long look she’d have to be blind not to understand.

She got it. Her face flushed and she looked down quickly, rubbing the hell out of her legs so she missed the grin he had to bite to hide. She straightened then, still holding the towel. She raised her chin a little, defiant and challenging, the Catherine he remembered.

A moment passed. A minute maybe two. Neither said anything. They just stood on the dock and looked at each other under the warm and unpredictable sunshine. He felt like a thirsty man staring at an icy cold beer.

She dropped the act and returned his look, then whispered his name in that raspy grown-up voice he felt go all the way through him. “Michael.”

Just Michael.

And he was lost.

Time seemed to pass quickly after that. On days when it rained that misty rain that sometimes clouded the islands, they walked on the beach together, not minding the moodiness of the weather. The sunsets grew later and later as summer crept into the Northwest, and they fell in love.

They swam in the cove where the water was shallow and warm enough to enjoy. He taught her to sail. The first time a heavy summer rain hit, they moored and took shelter inside the sailboat’s small cabin, laughing at the foolish weather and eating a lunch of egg-salad sandwiches and barbecued potato chips she’d brought along.

The flavor of salt and barbecue spices lingered on her lips. Years later he could still not eat barbecued potato chips without thinking of that day, where a six-foot by six-foot sailboat cabin was too small and things quickly grew intense, so much so that they ended up moored to an old buoy and necking for most of the afternoon.

After that day, whenever they took the boat out he silently prayed for rain. Finally, rain or not, they spent afternoons in the cabin of his boat, where things got hot and heavy, where they would steam up the small mirror above the hard bunk and leave the sloop with their lips swollen and their bodies tense with need.

Michael learned the true meaning of wanting a woman that month. He learned the dark side of sex: the forbidden guilt and hunger that was teenage love. He would lie awake at night so hard from the mere thought of her that he couldn’t sleep. And when she would look at him in that way she had, as if he knew the answers to all the questions in the world, he felt real and alive, as if he could take on the world just for her. He learned that when you were young, nothing else mattered but the girl you loved.

One day he oiled the hinges on the old screen door because it gave him an excuse to be near her. She slipped out of the old house for the first time that night and met him walking in the woods where he pinned her against a tree and kissed the hell out of her, unhooked her bra and felt her up.

All he had to do was touch Catherine and both of them burned up. But they didn’t just touch and kiss and steam up the glass. Sometimes they would sit, hidden by those big old gray rocks near the cove, and watch the night drift by them.

And they would talk. About her hometown. About the war. About the poetry she loved. About the music he loved. About how Bob Dylan and Paul Simon were both poets and musicians. They talked about life and death and dreams.

She taught him the names of the stars because she said when he touched her and kissed her she always felt as if he took her clear up to those stars.

He didn’t care that she was seventeen and he was almost twenty. He didn’t care that the world thought he was a man who was ready to go to war, while she had one more year of high school and was jailbait.

He didn’t care because when he kissed Catherine Wardwell, nothing else in the whole goddamned screwed-up world mattered. Until the night they couldn’t stop and went all the way, the same night he’d carved their initials in the wood.

The same night her father caught them in the boathouse.

San Francisco, 1997

Catherine slipped off her glasses and sagged back in her chair, staring out at the pink Victorian across the street from her office. It was four o’clock and almost every ten minutes there had been an urgent call.

She pinched the bridge of her nose and saw stars. When her vision cleared, she was looking at her desktop, where a cluster of silver-framed images of her daughters Alyson and Dana were grinning back at her.

In a frame with delicate ballet shoes decorating the corners was a photograph of Dana, her oldest daughter, dressed in a pink tutu, her blonde hair scraped back off her small heart-shaped face. She had been six then and had no front teeth. Her gummy smile looked almost too big for her face. There was another shot next to it of her sitting on Santa’s knee, her eyes turned up to him in complete awe. And the last photo was taken only a few months ago when Dana went to the Sadie Hawkins dance.

She turned to Alyson’s pictures. There was her second-grade photo taken the day after she’d tried to cut her own bangs; she looked like she’d had a fight with a lawnmower. Every time Catherine saw that photo she smiled.