I say, “We are alone on this sea.”
“Yes,” he says. “It feels that way.”
I was right about what was in him. I smile. “There is no one staying at this place tonight but us. The tourists who come along here go on to Nha Trang, I think.”
He turns to me abruptly. “Come on then. There’s still some light.”
He drops his bag on the ground and holds out his hand. I lift my own hand and I move it toward his and even before we touch, it feels as if I have a shadow body inside this one that he can see, and my hand nears his and the body inside, which normally fits snug inside me, has loosened for him and then the tips of our fingers touch and I begin to quake inside my skin. His hand grasps mine firmly and we are moving across a grassy plot and onto the beach, the sand gray and packed hard, and he lets go of my hand and he pulls off his shoes and drops them. I pull off my shoes too, knowing I will destroy my stockings, thinking to ask him to go back to the villa and into our room beneath the gallery facing the sea, for only a brief time, so I can change from these tour guide clothes. But he is groping for my hand again with an eagerness that makes me feel like we are two children and I am angry with myself, thinking of my stockings.
He moves quickly now, almost running, and I run with him and all I am thinking is my stockings should go to hell, my life has changed, and now all that I regret about my clothes is that I have not stripped them from me.
We are at the waterline, the waves bubbling and swiping at us, and we turn to the north, where there is not even a hint of a distant figure, and we move together by the South China Sea and the water splashes up our ankles and I say, “Wait.”
We stop, and again I look ahead, and behind, and even the speck that might have been a person to the south is gone, and to the west there are only dunes and rocks and the creep of the mountains toward the sea. We are alone. So I lift my skirt, and I find the rim of my panty hose with my thumbs, and I grasp only the hose and not my panties underneath, and I strip them down and roll them soggy and ragged off one foot and then the other and my thighs and my legs and my ankles and my feet are naked, and I throw the panty hose into the sea — let some crab inhabit them — and I let my skirt back down to where it was. I look and Ben has squared around to watch this. He lifts his eyes to mine and he smiles and then I gasp as he falls forward and he is on his knees before me and he lifts my skirt again and he bends and I feel his lips on one knee and then on the other and I lift my face to the hunch of the distant mountains and my skirt climbs and he kisses one thigh and then the other. My hands fall to the top of his head, but lightly, so as not to discourage him. I wish now I had stripped off the panties as well. I do feel a pressure there, on that most tender of spots on my body, his mouth is there, but I do not feel the flesh of his lips on me. I lift my hands from his head, ready to take this barrier from between us, but he rises and his arms are around me and I am in his arms and his mouth is on my mouth, briefly, and then he has turned again, taken my hand again, and a great surge of the sea bumps us, rises quick up my leg, floats my hem, jealous, I think, of Ben’s kiss, wishing to kiss me there, too, and we try to stay on our feet, from the nudging of the sea, and Ben laughs and lets go of my hand and moves on ahead.
I know I am to follow, but this sudden vision of him, his whole body at once, moving, is a rare thing for me. I have seen him very close up far more often. The sea runs away from me, too, and I move after Ben, but slowly, angling up the beach a bit, letting him go. He loves the water. I can feel this in him. He is twenty or thirty meters ahead of me now, slowing, watching out to sea. The fishing boats are tiny, about to disappear, the sound of their motors has dwindled into silence.
And now his shirt is off, flying back behind him up the beach. And he is stripping his pants down and my breath catches, I think to do this too, throw off my clothes and run to him, but I am still loving to watch, and he strips off his underpants and my Ben is naked and his shoulders are broad like the hills at the turn of the beach and his back is straight and his bottom is small and my hands stir, this is a part of him I have not seen yet, really, and I want to lay my palms on this sweet part of him, and he is striding forward now into the water.
He has not looked back to me. He is thigh deep in the water and now his bottom has disappeared and he is pushing hard and he still has not looked over his shoulder — it is like he has forgotten me — and something dark comes into me, an old thing, and he falls forward and I see the flash of his arms and his legs and he is lifted by a wave that does not break and he falls and he is still swimming and I know what the dark thing is, it is the dragon, how he missed his kingdom in the sea and one day simply was gone. The princess — who was his wife and the mother of his children — woke and he had gone back to the sea.
I want to cry out to Ben. I take a step forward. He is far out now — how quickly he seems to have gone — he rises on a distant swell and the swell falls and I do not see him. He has vanished. I cry out at last, a pitiful sound, a tight pathetic sound that no one can hear, and I am rooted where I am, I cannot move and I am clothed tight and I am suddenly alone. I keep my eyes fixed there, where he was a moment ago. I wait. I wait. The sea swells again and falls and there is foam and breakers and there is a vast sky, going dark, going very dark, and still Ben does not reappear. He is gone. I touch my belly. I press there. I do not want our child to follow him.
Then his head — far away — appears in the sea. He shakes his head sharply, clearing water from his face and now I can see him looking to the shore, he is looking for me. I lift my arm, I wave, and his arm comes up from beneath the water and he waves, and then he disappears again. But before the darkness can clutch at me once more, his body comes up and he is swimming, fast, lifting with a swell and speeding in and then dropping, but I can see him instantly again, and he swims and rises and falls, over and over, and now he angles upright and he is wading toward me, the water to his chest and then to his waist.
I am quaking again, for it is time. I have not looked at this part of him yet and now it is time. He moves, the water falls, a dark splash of hair appears, but the water swells, up to his chest, pushing him to me, and then suddenly the sea dips and I can see him there. Not nearly so large as it felt inside me, this part is withdrawn into the circle of the rest of him there, like a cameo, but he is coming from the sea and I know he will grow with my touch. He is striding now from the foam of the breakers and I keep my eyes on this part of him and he quakes there like this quaking inside me and he is drawing nearer and even as I am watching him, this part is changing, growing, from the touch of my eyes, no longer a cameo but a clasp now, a great clasp to connect to me and to hold me tight and to carry me along. And he stops. And I look up to his face and he is drenched and he moves his hands on his chest, as if to wash himself with the sea, and he smiles at me, a soft smile that tells me we have all the time in the world, all the rest of our lives, and he tells me this so I won’t worry as he turns slowly around to look out to the sea once more, before coming nearer.
And I find that I am moving toward him, faster, and I am yanking my skirt up to my waist, and I leap up onto his back. I throw my arms around his neck and I hook my legs around his waist and he laughs a loud, sharp laugh of surprise and his wrists come under my knees and lift at me, hold me up, and I think that one day he will carry our child on his back but for now I am glad it is me and he carries me forward and I know what he is planning to do.