Contains: suicide (drowning), infidelity, domestic violence, LGBTQ+ themes.
I’m in Arlene’s apartment again. We love like crashing waves, coming together and ripping apart. She never sees me in the daylight. She tells me she’s not a morning person. I tell her I don’t care. I just want her in my life. She tells me she wants to marry me, she’ll love me ‘til I drop dead.
I believe her.
I love her.
She whispers something against my lips, and I choose not to hear it.
⭒-.⋆ଳ⋆.-⭒
The water is freezing against my bare thighs. I was already starting to lose my balance, knocked this way and that by the waves I walked into. It was a stupid idea. I thought it would be the easiest. People disappear into the sea all the time.
I freeze up with the ocean at my waist, my thoughts racing, tears rolling down my cheeks. The moon is bright, full above my head. There’s a breeze, warm against my cold skin. Something feels different. This isn’t right. I could still change my mind. Maybe one more tomorrow wouldn’t kill me.
The tide pulls me in.
I’m off my feet, water over my head. I splutter. Cough. Fight against it. It burns in my lungs, my eyes, my whole world set on fire. What an idiot I am. But I was always the dramatic one, and I knew I’d never be able to look her in the eye again–
My head aches. I try to thrash. Regret claws at my skull. I can’t tell up from down anymore. My hand breaks the surface and goes under again. It’s freefall. It’s Hell. I see gray, the light of the moon, darkness.
The ocean goes still around me.
⭒-.⋆ଳ⋆.-⭒
There’s something around my waist, warm and gentle and the moonlight is blinding above me. I’m alive? floats past my tongue, but I can’t seem to do anything but cough.
I’m throwing up the ocean onto wet sand, golden curls sticking flat against my cheeks, uniform shirt dripping off of me. Someone’s in front of me, sitting two feet away, watching me at my lowest. All I can make out is something gray tied around his waist.
“Nobody teach you not to walk into an angry sea?”
In a better state of mind, I would’ve paid more attention to the Gaelic twang in his voice. I just wretch, sand getting under my nails, sharp and gritty.
“I won’t save you again.”
The man sighs as he stands up. He brushes sand from bare knees and walks past me like I’m not even there.
⭒-.⋆ଳ⋆.-⭒
Five hours later, no sleep, still alive, still miserable, working. My lungs still burn with every breath, like salt crystalized in my flesh.
I try to cough it out, and Jasper says Turn around when you do that, Matt.
I wipe down the counters, switch out the scoops, tell a little kid we don’t do banana splits in the winter months. I ignore the way my gut churns when I hear the ocean.
Drumsy’s is the worst ice cream joint on the boardwalk, thirty paces each from Drumser’s and Sweetfrog like some kind of sick middle child. I’ve technically been employed the longest, but it doesn’t matter because the longest is a year and seven days.
I should be glad I have a stable job at all. Especially in a gray Ocean City October, when temperatures and tourists are starting to dip, and nobody’s willing to shell out for shitty ice cream. I can’t bring myself to care.
I cough again, and my lungs spasm again, and Jasper tells me off again.
I wash my hands, switch out the empty tub of vanilla, tell Old Man Maraschino that we’re out of cherries for the week and not just yesterday.
⭒-.⋆ଳ⋆.-⭒
I’m in Arlene’s apartment again. We love like crashing waves, her flitting over me like a dream, a nightmare, salt-kiss on cold lips. She laughs at me, wraps her arms around my head [][][]
⭒-.⋆ଳ⋆.-⭒
Three days later, three days after the worst night of my life, I see the strangest name printed onto the red vinyl of a rescue buoy. It’s slung over his shoulder, dark straps pressing against sun kissed skin. His hair is dark, braided and sparkling with lines of silver. The boardwalk crowd parts for him as he walks– something about the way he moves, or his bare chest and feet.
And his eyes– dark, glossy, full– shift towards me, and I realize I’m staring just as he walks up to the counter. I say his name– Toirdhealbhach– and the weight sits on my tongue perfectly, so many letters for two syllables, and he looks at me like I’ve broken something precious.
“Close your mouth, you’ll catch flies.”
There’s a twang to his voice, familiar and foreign all at once. I purse my lips, looking down to avoid his searing gaze. I nearly vomit when I see the gray fabric tied around his waist. I look back up, and he scowls, and I say his name again– Trey-lach?– like I’m not sure if I said it right, like I want him to correct me.
“Don’t wear it out, Matti.”
The name drips from his tongue like venom. My hand flies up, over my heart, covering the nametag pinned to my blue shirt. I chose Matti over Matthew or Matt for the first time in months. The pink shirt is still stained with salt and sand, and melted chocolate ice cream I spilled on myself twelve hours before I tried to fill my lungs with the ocean.
I start trying to stammer out some kind of explanation, some sort of apology. He waves his hand, and suddenly he’s walking away. I try to call his name, but my voice freezes in my throat.
⭒-.⋆ଳ⋆.-⭒
Yesterday, one of the old wooden chairs broke. Someone took a nasty fall. Toirdhealbhach ran his thumb over the fresh plastic. They must’ve been switched out last night.
He blew his whistle at a kid who waved at him for too long.
There was nobody on the beach, not this time of year. Made for good late nights and early mornings. Long walks. Collecting shells. Checking for sea stars dying in low tide.
He turned his head. A father is dragging his son into the ocean. Yelling. Some struggle. Just a kid learning how to swim. His stomach turned anyway.
He fumbled with the fabric knotted at his waist. Untied it. Pulled it tighter against him. Looked away.
⭒-.⋆ଳ⋆.-⭒
I’m in Arlene’s apartment again. We love like crashing waves, and something twists in my gut like I’ve done this all before. She never sees me in the daylight. She wears out a hoodie that isn’t mine, but fits me perfectly. I tell her I don’t care. I just want her in my life. She tells me she wants to marry me, she’ll love me if I drop dead.
I believe her.
I walk into the ocean.
Her blue eyes sear my skin like salt and ice.
⭒-.⋆ଳ⋆.-⭒
I learn his schedule after a month. I work every day except Friday, and he spends every other day pacing the boardwalk. So on my day off, I find myself sitting under the canopy of a tourist trap shop– all pop culture hoodies and I ♡ Ocean City booty shorts– and watch him. I assume he has a section to walk, because he comes back into view every half hour, and stays in my vision for three minutes. I feel like a creep for thirty seconds every time.
He’s on his third return trip when he glances my way, and I try not to look at him, try not to be suspicious. What happens is my eyes snapping to his waist, realizing that his jacket is tied lower today than usual. He keeps walking like nothing happened, but picks up his pace.
Then gray gives way to black, and his jacket hits the boardwalk panels.
I’m on my feet before I realize it, and the thing I pluck from the ground is fur, not polyester. I don’t know how I didn’t notice before. Then it’s out of my hands, and Toirdhealbhach is in front of me, bare chest and broad shoulders and red in the face like he’s about to shout. Instead, his voice is low, and the words that come out are Don’t ever touch that again.
I try to apologize, but he’s already storming off, tying the fur around his waist as he walks.
⭒-.⋆ଳ⋆.-⭒
I’m in Arlene’s apartment again. We love like crashing waves–
I push her away from me. Her face looks wrong in the moonlight. She smells like someone else. The ring on her finger brushes across my face, freezing cold like the October ocean. I demand answers. She tries to shush me, pull my shirt off, kiss at my neck.
She never sees me in the daylight. She has a ring on her finger and a picture of her husband in her phone case. She tells me she doesn’t care. She couldn’t leave him. She had to lie to me. I just wanted her in my life.
I ask her why. She calls me love. I almost vomit.
I believed her. All this time, I believed her.
⭒-.⋆ଳ⋆.-⭒
I wake up soaked in sweat and moonlight.
It’s been a week since I last saw Toirdhealbhach. Arlene haunts my nightmares. She has since we broke up.
It’s three in the morning on a Monday, and I’m staring at her Instagram profile. I haven’t had the heart to block her anywhere. Part of me still loves her. I can’t help it. Her and her husband are travellers, and he’s in every photo, and she tags him in every post. I almost want to reach out to him. Don, your wife cheated on you with me. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.
I stare at the send button for a few minutes before backspacing the message.
⭒-.⋆ଳ⋆.-⭒
I find him where I always find him. Under the moon, at the beach, with the sand under his feet and his fur tied around his waist. He lets me hug him from behind, trace my fingers across his bare stomach, press kisses into his tense muscles.
He pulls away just enough to turn around, looking down at me. There’s a kindness in his eye, a sadness, a spark. His hands cup my cheeks, and then his mouth is on mine. He’s so warm, even when the world is freezing.
He takes me to a rocky corner of the beach, stones huge and flat and cold against my skin. He strips me first, then himself. His fur goes under his back, and the rest of our clothes will be full of sand when we find them again. I don’t care. He pulls me on top of him and nothing else matters. I see the sparkle of his eyes in the waxing moonlight.
I cry into his chest, and his hands wind into my hair. He’s perfect. He’s everything. He’s mine. I love him. I tell him as much.
He kisses me. Over and over, he kisses me. Like he’s trying to shut me up, but I don’t care. I whisper his name onto his lips like a prayer. He hisses mine like it’s salt water. We crash into each other a thousand times, and it’s warm and perfect. It feels familiar, like I could die happy this way, and I don’t care. Maybe I do die, wrapped up in him.
⭒-.⋆ଳ⋆.-⭒
I wake up to sunlight streaming in through the window. My bedsheets are sticky with sweat, his name still on my tongue. I don’t give myself a chance to put on shoes before I’m out the door.
He’s there. Silhouetted against the sky, staring into the horizon line. I greet him. He says nothing. I try small talk. He glances my way.
“What keeps you here, Groves?”
I stammer.
“What do you get out of this? You could do anything. Go anywhere. Be anybody. Why work this dead-end tourist trap bullshit?”
“What about you, Trey?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“You can be a lifeguard anywhere.”
He laughs, almost a scoff, crossing his arms.
“Are you happy like this?”
He looks at me like I’d said something awful. “Are you?”
My words catch in my throat.
“Do you have any idea what you do to me?”
“I’m sorry–”
“Save it.”
He shakes his head, and walks past me, and the morning is freezing cold again.
⭒-.⋆ଳ⋆.-⭒
He sat on the rocks, staring into the waves even as the sun set.
⭒-.⋆ଳ⋆.-⭒
A woman, angry and tired and trapped and miserable, had a son. A single son in a sea of daughters. She tried to make another girl out of him, like it was the only thing she knew how to do. Keep quiet, speak when spoken to, turn your eye away from the man.
The son was raised by that misery. The man was just as miserable as the son. He had trapped the woman long ago, stole her heart and her freedom, and a weeping woman was a horrible mother. The house was cold, cut by spilled tears.
The man raised his hand and the woman flinched. The man said Love me and the woman cried. The man raised his voice and the son covered his ears. The man said Run away and the son wandered the beach.
The man kept a key around his neck. The woman spent her days weeping over a locked box. The son asked, when he was old enough to, why his mother cried so much.
He stole everything, she told him. He took all I am.
She told the son stories of her home. The ocean, the tossing waves, the family she lost. She hated her human skin. He would watch her pinch and pull at it, when she thought no one was looking. She wanted to go home. All she wanted was home.
The son became a boy became a man, with a name only his mother would call him. He kept his heart tied around his waist. No one could touch it without coming close. He wouldn’t let anyone near him. No one called his name. No one turned to face him.
He was alone, and he wanted it to be that way–
⭒-.⋆ଳ⋆.-⭒
“–so what makes you so goddamn special?!”
And then he stops, and he turns, and Toirdhealbhach is staring at me like he’s about to start sobbing. “Why the fuck are you different, Groves?”
“Why’d you stick around, Trey?”
“God, Matti, don’t call me that–”
“Why’d you pull me out of the ocean?”
“Why can’t you just leave me alone?”
“Why stay if you didn’t want to save me again?!”
It goes silent, except for the waves, and something in me shatters like ice.
⭒-.⋆ଳ⋆.-⭒
And then his eyes soften, and Toirdhealbhach smiles, quiet and intense and gorgeous. He mumbles out my words, and stares down at his feet.
He fumbles with the fur around his waist, and then he’s holding it out to me. I hesitate, but he smiles and I take it. Without thinking, I fold it and press it against my chest. The laugh he lets out is a bark, loud and unashamed. He tells me Give it back, and I try in a heartbeat. He rolls his eyes, too dramatic to be honest, and pushes my hand away. I cradle the fur in my arms.
Toirdhealbhach takes one step back. Then another. Another. I don’t move. He walks until he’s shin-deep in the water, and then sits down, letting the waves lap over him.
“Don’t run away on me, Matti,” he says.
I look down at the fur in my hands.
I tie it around my waist.
No comments:
Post a Comment