Her hair was down. I wanted to plunge my hands in it, pull her to me.
“Well,” said Dornan. “I should be getting back in to help with that scaffolding. ”
Kick and I just looked at each other.
“It’s still hot in there,” he said to her. “Maybe you should stay out here for a bit.”
She nodded.
“Pass your cup, then,” he said to me. I bent and retrieved it, handed it over obediently. He sighed, shook his head, and went inside.
“It’ll be hot in there for a while,” I said.
“Okay.”
“We could go for a walk.”
“What, in traffic?”
“Not exactly.”
THE POCKET park was on the other side of a deserted side road and hidden by a row of straggling hawthorn. If I hadn’t known it was there, I would never have found it.
There was a patch of grass and two benches overlooking the Duwamish, connected by a short path to a grassy clearing. We held hands and sat on a bench, watching the river slide by below, as brown as overbrewed tea. I felt my lack of sleep the night before, and if the wind hadn’t been so strong, I might have dozed. Every now and again the water glinted, like a powdered old lady throwing a roguish smile.
The rocky shore was green-slimed and smelled of rot. Northward, in the direction of Harbor Island, four Canada geese stood splay-footed on the pebbles and honked. Beyond them arced the concrete spans of a massive bridge.
“What’s the bridge?” I asked Kick, stroking the back of her hand idly with my thumb.
“The West Seattle Bridge. And, funnily enough, what it’s connecting to is West Seattle. Typical of this city.”
“Dornan finds all the names in this city amusing.”
“Um.” She sounded relaxed, or maybe she was just sleepy.
“I hear you two were up late last night, talking on the beach.” She was staring out over the water. “So. What was so interesting that it kept you up until two in the morning?”
She turned to look at me, and searched my face the way my mother had done just a week ago. “Oh, this and that.” And she laughed, and kissed my cheek. I put my arm around her.
Gulls wheeling over the old, crumbling pilings that poked like broken teeth from the low water on the shore of Kellogg Island squabbled over something I couldn’t see. Power lines ran here and there, and steam, white as the smoke in a movie magic spell, coiled up from a plant on Harbor Island. The clouds in the west looked like yellowed Styrofoam.
“There’s nothing like this in Norway,” I said.
“Um.” She settled tighter against me. In this light, her hair was like twisted gold wire. I would have been happy never to move again.
A tug plowed by, heading south, upriver, tight and rolling and muscular, cocky as a rooster. Its engine throbbed but the stink of diesel was whipped away by the breeze. Silver flashed in its wake. Salmon.
In the other direction, downriver, near the geese, more movement made me turn.
“Look,” I said, and she lifted her head.
A green-backed heron came in to land, like an inexpertly piloted Cessna. She sat up. “If a stunter dived that badly she’d be fired.”
“Not as graceful as you,” I agreed. “I watched Tantalus.”
“That old thing?” But she sounded pleased.
“You dive like a cormorant.”
She smiled but didn’t say anything. The wind began to pick up. Another heron slipped and slid through the air and splashed tail- and feetfirst into the shallows right in front of me. It plunged its ugly, ancient-looking beak into the opaque water but missed whatever it had been after. Disgusted, it took off again, flapped heroically for a moment, and finally hauled itself into the air, legs dangling.
“I had no idea they were so clumsy. And small. It was a heron, right? I always thought they were bigger.”
“Great blue herons are big.”
“And what’s that?” She pointed.
“A grebe, I don’t know what kind.” And then I was seeing wildlife everywhere, and naming it for her: a kingfisher, some kind of coot, more fish, a bumblebee humming over the mossy grass, a ladybug snicking its wings in and out as it crawled across the back of the bench. I knew that the shallows would creep with crabs and be bobbled with oysters, that the smell of rot meant that living things grew here and then died. And I knew why people would pay a million dollars for a condo in an industrial district.
Kick slid close again, laid her palm against my cheek. Small, cool hands. I turned. Her eyes were very grey. She leaned in and kissed me. “Sometimes your face looks like something carved a thousand years ago.”
I ran my hands over her shoulders, down her arms, around her waist. The muscles in my thighs and back strained and trembled. She was shaking, too, but although her pupils were big, I realized it was with cold as much as desire. I untied the cardigan knotted around her hips, lifted her with one arm, and pulled the cardigan free with the other. I breathed fast. “Put this on,” I said.
While she pushed her arms into the sleeves and tugged I watched the sky. The clouds had grown denser, firming from Styrofoam to incised stone, subtly colored, chiseled and layered and polished. “It’s beautiful,” I said.
She buttoned with her left hand, laid her right on my thigh. “Isn’t Atlanta like this?”
I shook my head. “In Atlanta, in May, the sky is always blue. Later in summer there are storms in the afternoons, and for an hour or so there are clouds overlaying a sky the color of pink grapefruit, but this… it’s like intaglio-cut stone.” I pointed. “There. Mica. And amethyst. Rose quartz. Carnelian, and, look, see that grey? That’s what natural, uncut diamond looks like.”
“Kiss me,” she said.
I did, and I wrapped my hands around her tiny waist, then slid them around the swell of her hips, pulled her to me. Her bottom was warm and luscious. I cradled her cheeks, ran my hands back to her waist, dipped my fingers under her waistband. Our mouths were wide. Another tug hooted.
I looked at the grass, decided there were too many goose droppings, and sighed.
She pulled away, grinning, as though she knew what I was thinking. “Oh, well,” she said, “nice park anyway.”
“Glad you like it.”
“I had no idea it was here. Be nice if it was more private, though.” She laughed to herself as she straightened her clothes.
“There’s a woman called Corning who wants to pave all this over with condos.”
“Will you buy one?”
“No.” She shivered again, and I put my arms around her. “Because I’m not going to let her build them.”
She started kissing me again, then stopped. “What time is it?”
“About four o’clock, I think.”
“Shit. I have a—I have to run.” She kissed me again. “Meet you at the house? Around seven?”
AT AIKIDO, the sensei wasn’t there. Mike was leading the class. It was informal and boisterous. I made people fly, and flew in my turn.
Afterwards, as we swept and wiped the dojo, Mike and Petra separately invited me to the Asian Art Museum to see a new display of Chinese art— Mike in a whatever kind of way, and Petra shyly. I declined but suggested they go together, and managed not to smile at their consternation.
THE HOUSE cooled and darkened. We lay under her duvet. My face hurt from smiling. She butted my hand, like a cat; I stroked her head. There were no lights on in the house, and in the long, northern dusk her hair gleamed, dark and light, layered, sometimes pale and silvery like bamboo pith, sometimes heavy and dark, like freshly split pine. “Wood,” I said. “That’s what your hair reminds me of.”