Page 76 of Goode Vibrations
“Don’t make things up, Pop.”
She told me everything I needed to know with a single look. “I’m not.”
“I guess for me, it’s partly that I know I’m not…small. And I figure it requires a lot of trust, which I’ve always been short on.”
“I’ve always been too scared of it to even consider it. Yvonne, my former friend and roommate, she used to tell me all the time that I didn’t know what I was missing. She said the key was to ease into it. ‘You can’t go full anal the first time,’ she’d say. ‘You gotta take baby steps. But once you’re there? Hold on, honey.’” She mimicked her friend, using a mocking nasally voice.
I laughed. “Can’t go full anal, huh?”
“Apparently not.”
“I wonder how she found that out.”
She snorted. “Probably the hard way, knowing her.” Her eyes met mine, and we both laughed, somewhere between amused and aroused. “Someday?”
I growled a sigh. “Maybe we’d better get back to having regular sex first, before we discuss that.”
She rolled a shoulder. “Maybe.” Another sultry look. “Any other dark desires you want to share with me?”
“I…um. Not really. That’s it.” I glanced at her. “You?”
“I’ve always had this fantasy of a guy I totally trusted tying me to the bed and just…using me as he wished, for as long as he wanted.” A significant stare. “Obviously, I’ve never trusted anyone anywhere near enough to even think about going there.”
I let out my breath, eyes closing briefly. “You know, I’ve got some climbing rope back there somewhere. Quite a lot of it.”
She shifted in her seat. “No teasing, Errol.”
“Who’s teasing?” I growled. “How well do you trust me?”
She clutched at the seat belt where it passed through the deep valley between the mountains of her breasts. “Enough to know that after this wedding, you and me, Errol? We’re gonna need a cabin in the woods and a week alone.”
“Why a cabin in the woods?” I asked.
“Because I have a feeling you’re going to make me scream. A lot. Loudly. And I wouldn’t want to disturb anyone.”
“Oh.” I throttled the steering wheel until my knuckle joints ached. “Yeah, you’re right about that. Alotof screaming.”
The longest,most interminable part of the trip into Ketchikan was the ferry. God, so bugger-all interminable, it felt like. Nothing to do but sit and talk, watch the waves. Out of sheer boredom, I got out my fiddle and played.
Except for Poppy, I’d not played for anyone in years—I had the instrument with me all the time, but I only ever played alone, to feel some sort of connection to Dad, and usually only when I was in a certain mood.
Of course, as it tended to, playing the fiddle drew a crowd. And the gathered crowd included a towering old fella with a twelve-string guitar and a knowledge of Irish music, and so he and I jammed for a while, keeping toes tapping. He even sang a few, in a rough but tuneful voice, words and verses to tunes I’d never realized even had them.
Poppy sat near me and watched me play, and the bright gleam in her eyes did something to me. Not lascivious, either—for the first time in my life, the way a woman looked at me hit me in the heart, made me want to…to be someone I’d never considered being.
I wanted to play for her just so she’d look at me like that, like I hung the moon and stars.
Later, once the jam session was over and the crowd had dispersed, Poppy and I were sitting alone once more on the top deck away from the spray, in the stiff wind, huddled under my blanket together.
“Why’d you stop playing?” she asked, after a time of silence. “You’re so good.”
I rolled a shoulder. “A lot of reasons, really. It hurt too much, for one. The fiddle was Dad’s. The music was Dad’s. The couple of years I tried filling in for him, I was constantly reminded, mainly by O’Brien, that I wasn’t him.”
“You were a kid, and a kid going through hell.”
I let out a gruff sigh. “I know. And I think he knew, too. But O’Brien was—is—one of the old guard. An Irishman from the countryside, who grew up brawling with anyone who looked at him crossways. He played the bodhran, the hand drum thing, and his family connection to that goes back farther than mine with the fiddle. He’s just…a stone wall of a man. He didn’t know how to deal with Dad dying any more than I did, and knew even less how to show it, let alone deal with me, his mate’s kid, a hurting kid lashing out and acting a fool. I don’t blame him. Not now, leastwise. I hated his guts then, and it felt mutual. But now, with time and distance and a bit of understanding? I get it. I could never be my father. And the shit of it all was that I was too fucked up to properly try, and me failing at that meant the band that had been their livelihood and their life for the last twenty-some years died with Dad, because I couldn’t hack it as his replacement.”
“That’s too much pressure to put on yourself.”