Float Plan - Trish Doller Page 0,71
my favorite.
“Exactly.”
He laughs, rolling off me, and raises his arm for me to fit up against him. “I reckon you’ve ruined me now.”
“I’m not even sorry.”
As we lie together, the sun casts a square on the floor, and outside, the birds squawk. A tiny green gecko scurries up the wall beside the bed, lingering to stare at us. I focus on these things. On Queenie’s short, sharp bark that demands freedom. On the steady beat of Keane’s heart beneath my ear. Anything to hold at bay the guilt that my feelings for this man might be bigger than anything I’ve ever known.
* * *
There are a lot of things we could be doing in Martinique, but the first three days we spend nearly all our time in bed, venturing out only to take Queenie for a walk or eat in the open-air kitchen. I cut Keane’s hair using a pair of scissors I found in a drawer, and he shows me his self-care routine, explaining the layers and how he maintains his prostheses. We memorize each other’s bodies like maps, learning the places to avoid and the places to linger. We sleep. Make love. Talk. Fuck. Laugh. The time is a crash course in being together—although we’ve been learning since the beginning—and we go back to the Alberg with everything we’ve discovered.
The cabin of the boat smells like the oranges hanging in the mesh bag above the galley, and I smile at the sight of my Cangrejeros hat hanging on its hook beside the companionway. The blue is already beginning to fade in the sun, and it has molded to the shape of my head. The Pig Beach starfish stand in a row on the ledge in the V-berth. The photo of Keane and me at the patchwork house hangs beside the photo of Ben and me. A new house rising up beside the old.
“I’ve hung the hammock,” Keane says, coming into the cabin as I’m making up the bed. He slips his arms around my waist from behind. “But sleeping naked beneath this fluffy duvet with you is going to be the best part.”
Warmth rises in my cheeks, even though we’ve been more naked than clothed over the past two days, and he laughs softly.
“I have a gift for you.” He rummages through his duffel. “I bought this in San Juan and then you gave me Ben’s mug, and I feared it was too much and not enough, but now … here.”
He thrusts a palm-size package at me, done up in Christmas wrapping. While I tear open the paper, Keane rubs a hand across the top of his head. He’s nervous. So I’m nervous too.
Inside is a pair of earrings with raw, unpolished stones set in sterling silver.
“They’re rough diamonds,” he says. “Conflict free. I saw them in a shop window in Old Town and they were just … you.”
“They’re beautiful.”
“Like I said.”
I laugh as I kiss him. “Could you be less smooth once in a while?”
“I love you,” he blurts out. “And I know I should have kept that to myself a bit longer, but it’s the truth and I am feeling particularly un-smooth at the moment.”
“I … don’t know how to respond to that.”
“Not exactly what I’d hoped you’d say, but—”
“No, I mean … I’m scared. Ready to love you, but also not. I still think about Ben sometimes and I don’t know how to stop doing that. And maybe this will blow up in our faces but … I want to try.” My shoulders sag. “That was the least romantic declaration ever.”
Keane nods a little. “I wouldn’t put it on a greeting card.”
“I love you too.” The words come out on the back of a breath and the beginning of a smile. I didn’t mean to say them out loud, but here they are. “I don’t want you to be a rebound thing, Keane Sullivan. I want you to be the real thing.”
He holds my face lightly, tenderly, and kisses me. “Count on it.”
* * *
The next morning we take a series of buses to Fort-de-France, where we rent a car. As we head back south, Keane won’t tell me where we’re going, only that there is something he wants me to see. At the top of a bluff overlooking the ocean, near the town of Le Diamant, he brings me to a cluster of twenty concrete statues arranged in the shape of a triangle.
“In 1830, after slavery had been abolished in the islands,” Keane says,