Page 57 of Slanting Towards the Sea

He looks like he wants something. To say something, to set things straight between us.

What? What? What? I want to ask. Tell me now, waiting is agony.

Everything about him is heavy, like he’s saddled with more than he can carry.

I think, unflatteringly, of the donkeys that passed near Lovorun when I was a child, the way they bore the heft of full bags of pumpkins or watermelons from the fields beyond the estate.

How their eyes, when I offered them an apple or a carrot, looked sad and also gone.

We hold our bodies unnaturally still as we wait for the sounds of swimming to fade. A thought pierces me, This could be the moment Vlaho tells me we’re done, forever.

As soon as I think that, I’m reaching for him, running my hands up his arms, through his hair, pulling him closer, willing him to come back to his body.

He looks surprised, but soon the surprise morphs into a different kind of need as I straddle him, cupping his face in my hands, kissing him like I can find him in his mouth.

My heart pulses in my ears and toes as our tongues touch.

He smells like the sea, like heaven, like the sun itself.

He slips his hand between the edges of my towel, pushing it aside, pulling me closer.

Reaching for the bikini tie on my left hip. Undoing it.

“What if they see us?” I ask, but I’m untying the drawstring on his board shorts beneath me, my fingers clumsy with fear, with desire. It feels like he is slipping from me, and I need to center him back to myself.

“They’re far away,” he says, catching my lips with his. The taste of tangerines and watermelons, and all things verdant and blooming. The taste of all these years of being apart, of silent misery without him.

“God” is all I can say as he enters me. I clutch his head to my breasts as we move, curled around him like a cat, a creature of instinct.

Around us, the sea, the rocky, bare island, the endless skies, sounds of nothing.

We are alone in the universe. I close my eyes to keep the world out.

There’s only us, this feeling of coming back home.

“I love you,” he says. “I love you so much.”

I hook my palms behind his ears, make him look at me.

If I had reservations about us getting back together, about him leaving his family, his children, for me, those reservations are gone.

This is what I want, this is what I’ve always wanted.

To find my way back to him. I love you too , I want to say but the release comes from my lower abdomen in waves and pulses, rendering me mute.

Afterward, I tie my bikini at my hip, and Vlaho pulls his shorts on, and we sit side by side.

A seagull screeches, careening into the sea.

I’m emptied when I should feel full, as if having sex has robbed us of something.

He’s back to how he’s been the whole day, something about him cumbrous, but he works through whatever makes him that way to open his arm to me. “Come here.”

I crawl into his embrace, overcome with the sudden urge to cry.

To push my sadness out of my chest like garlic through a press.

I know it makes me a horrible person, but at this point, I don’t even care if Marina and Asier find us this way.

All I want is for Vlaho to acknowledge what this means.

That he’s done his thinking. That he chooses me.

But I can sense this is the one thing he can’t or won’t give me, at least not today.

“Vlaho, talk to me,” I tell him. “What is going on with you?” I touch his face and he winces, like my father recoils when I brush against his right side. This act of dismissal no less painful because it’s involuntary.

“I made such a mess of things, haven’t I?” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“I opened a can of worms that night. With you, with my mother, Marina. And now everything is up in the air. For everyone.” He turns to face me.

“I love you, you know I do.” His tone is that of someone delivering a consolation prize.

“But I need time to figure things out. How to move forward. Tena and Maro—”

My body stiffens at the mention of his children. I don’t want to know how hard it is for him to do what comes so easily to me.

He deflates a little, feeling this shift in me. “But I can’t do this either,” he continues, nodding to where Asier and Marina have swum. “Watching you with him, it’s too much.”

I get up. “What the hell, Vlaho? I spent six years watching you with someone else.”

“That’s different. Marina and I, we weren’t—”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t know that back then, did I?”

He gets up too. My breaths come in rapid bursts.

“Yeah, but I never had feelings for her. Not that way. You’re sleeping with that guy, Ivona. He’s been all over you all day long.”

“Are you telling me you never slept with Marina?” I give an ironic laugh.

He wipes his face. The patch on his cheekbone turns bright red. “I never betrayed you, is what I’m saying. I didn’t sleep with her for the same reasons you are sleeping with him. I never wanted anyone but you.”

“You fucking got her pregnant,” I burst out. The mother of all betrayals. I catch myself, look out to the entrance of the cove, but there isn’t anyone there. “You did betray me. You let me go.”

“That’s not exactly how it happened, and you know it.”

We stare at each other, two bulls refusing to budge.

There’s a wildness in his eyes, a fire consuming him from within. “It’s not just… You really broke me when you left, you know that?” His voice is heavy, dark.

I sit down. I’m stripped of all my weapons, defenseless.

The days and months before I left him open themselves before me in mesmerizing detail.

How cruel I had been to him. How much I had made him suffer.

My breath goes shallow, it coils at the top of my throat.

Vlaho is staring past me. I pull him nearer, draw the hem of his board shorts up, exposing the skin on his thigh that was once punctured with blue dots.

I drive my fingers over it. Kiss it. The scars can’t be seen anymore. But they are still there.

“What are you saying? That you’re afraid?

” I ask. I want to tell him that I’m not that person anymore.

I was green. Insecure. Broken in seven hundred different ways.

The world had put too much on me and I didn’t know how to carry it.

I didn’t know how to occupy space, to ask for what I needed any more than he did.

But that was a long time ago. I’ve changed.

I’ve grown. I’m asking now, I want to tell him. I’m asking now.

He shakes his head. “It’s just that… I gave it my all. I loved you through all those dark moments. The unemployment, the infertility, the grief. And still you left me. Still it wasn’t enough.”

I let his words ripple through me. But as I search myself for compassion, I find annoyance instead. “I didn’t choose to be barren or jobless. I didn’t inflict those things on you .”

“That’s not what I implied, Ivona.”

“That’s exactly what you implied. And I know those things affected you, Vlaho, but they happened to me . They were inflicted on me .” Old pain rises within me, and I rise to my feet with it. “You gave it a lot, yes, but you didn’t give it your all.”

Not just because he had given in to his mother, if subconsciously.

It was all those silent days, when he failed to find the words to reach me.

How he waited for a way out of our agony, but never offered one.

Not really. If there even was a solution other than breaking us apart.

It was that I could sense his relief when he’d go to work.

The strain in his step when he returned home.

How wary he was of asking the painful questions, starting the difficult conversations.

How thankful he was when I played along, and told him my day was “fine” and I was “doing okay.” Because he didn’t know how to handle it, because it was too overwhelming. Because I’d become too much for him.

I think of Asier and his son; of my mother after the boot incident. Maybe he didn’t want to, but Vlaho washed his hands of me too.

“So what do you suggest we do now?” I challenge him. Meaning, show me. Cup your hands.

He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. He lowers his gaze.

And for the first time, I recognize a truth I’ve been trying to ignore.

Back in the era of hunkering down we were the same kind of broken.

But we’ve taken different roads since. Mine, fraught with challenges, swimming upstream and against the current to carve a place for myself in the world.

The change the only constant, like Heraclitus said, like Asier said.

Vlaho’s—a chrysalis.

He is still that man, I realize. The one who was too afraid to admit his needs even to himself, let alone to rise in defense of them, to stand up for the one he loved.

Still a boy allowing others to pull his strings.

It spikes in me, this frustration for having come all this way only to hit the same old wall.

“You know what, Vlaho? Grow the fuck up.” I snatch my towel from the seat and wrap myself in it as I turn my back to him.

There behind the transom, Marina is standing on the platform watching us, her wet body glistening in the sun, mask hanging in her hand.