Read Online Undertow by Elizabeth O'Roark - Free Book Online Page B

and he’d have no way to get home anyway. But it only made the emptiness, the lack of reality, more intense. Even after I saw my grandfather lying there at the wake it remained unreal. He didn’t look like himself, with his face waxen and his hair flat to his head. I was still unconvinced that I wouldn’t find him the next summer swinging golf clubs into the trunk of his car or sitting on the porch. I felt, from the time we arrived until the time we left, that I was merely caught up in the gray fog of a dream that I couldn’t seem to scratch away. That I would wake. But of course, I did not.
    I didn’t realize, until he was gone, how safe I’d felt with my grandfather. How, at times, he and Nate felt like the only normal things in my life, the only people whose love wasn’t offered as a bargaining chip for good grades or good behavior. Without either of them there, the world felt like a precarious place for the first time in my life.
    Things that once seemed certain were now more tenuous. And especially now that Nate had been away at college, I needed to see him with my own eyes to know this one thing would stay the same.
    The beach was crowded on my first day back that next summer, but I saw nothing but him as he approached. He pulled me to him tightly and neither of us cared who saw. I knew, suddenly, that my home wasn’t Charlotte or the beach house. It was him, here, and as I sank into him I couldn’t imagine how I would ever leave it again. I wasn’t able to wait for it to get dark until I had him to myself. “Let’s get the canoe,” I whispered. He knew what I meant.
    We paddled quickly toward our old fort. He jumped out the minute it ran aground and tugged the canoe onto the sand. And the moment it was there, he was pulling me out of it, our movements made frenzied and desperate by the long separation, by the way the earth had shifted during it. I stripped his shirt off of him and then my own. He loosened the strings of my bikini and it fell to the ground.
    “Maura,” he breathed. It was the first time we’d been together in daylight. “God you’re beautiful,” he said quietly, regarding me. I stood before him in nothing but my bikini bottoms, and then I removed them as well. He stepped back into me, his kisses almost reverent, and I sank to the ground, pulling him with me.
    “Nate,” I said, as he hovered over me. “I’m ready. I want to.”
    “Are you sure?” he asked, his voice strained with need. I nodded.
    He grabbed his wallet and pulled out a condom. I was both surprised and relieved he’d thought to bring one — it hadn’t even occurred to me. I watched him put it on, feeling torn between need and outright fear.
    “Are you ready?” he asked. I nodded, and he began to slide into me.
    “Stop!” I cried.
    His face looked strained. “I’m barely in, Maura. Does it hurt?”
    I tried not to wince. “Just give me a minute. Let me get used to it.”
    He pressed in farther, and I gasped at the burning pain of it.
    “Are you okay?” he asked.
    “I’ll get used to it,” I said in a small voice. I began to think that maybe I didn’t need this after all. He pushed in a little more, and again the pain was bad enough that I seriously considered making him stop. I gripped his arms.
    “How bad is it?” he asked, but I could tell by his face that he knew.
    “Just do it,” I gasped, bracing myself. He did, and it hurt like a bitch.
    “Shit!” I cried, when he was finally all the way in, in too much pain to worry about how absolutely-not-hot I was making this.
    “I’m sorry, baby,” he groaned.
    “It’s okay,” I whispered. “It’s over.”
    “Um, not exactly, Maura,” he replied.
    Just as it stopped hurting, just as it began to feel unbelievably good, he came. And it was worth every ounce of lingering frustration I felt afterward to be able to watch it happen, and to know I’d made him happy.
    **
    We went to the pier with everyone that night. He held my hand carefully, as