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'The end won't be like this,' he says, his mouth close enough to taste her breath, and for her to taste his. 'When that comes we won't even know it. We'll be here, and then a millionth of a second later, we won't be. Not even the dust of us.'
'Are you drunk?' she asks.
He shakes his head, and smiles. 'I'm too happy to be drunk.'
'Happy?'
'Of course. Hard to believe, I know, but that's how I feel. Because look where we are. Look who I'm with.'
She sets a hand on his chest, bats him playfully. He closes the gap between them and kisses her. They take turns leading the way, since there is no one around to see. She finds his tongue and rolls it gently with the tip of her own, forces its pulp against the rim of her upper front teeth. He goes willingly. Her mouth has the heat of tea. She breathes into him and he breathes back. It is the perfect give and take, like waves, a kind of essence of sex. After a time, they ease apart, she instigating the break with a subtle bringing together of her lips. But the split is merely temporary, and designed simply to let her settle more comfortably against him. He leans back against a boarded-over stall, a long narrow shed painted in faded laurel-green emulsion, heavy-duty stuff that, even so, has weathered badly, and she folds herself again into his embrace. When one hand slips downwards and cups the demure swell of her ass he feels her mouth bend into a grin, forcing his own to follow towards laughter, and when they close their eyes, they are children, playing at being in love. By making a nest just beneath the skin, certain memories put themselves beyond the reach of change.
* * *
Below and on their left, the white strand stretches emptily northwards, acting like a framing edge to the main event, the bigger picture, the enormous sprawl of ocean that, in close, bucks and moils. Frothing, needlepoint flecks mottle a surface dull as lead, great furred bilges of surf break hard against the shoreline. Further out, a peculiar sense of calm prevails, at least to the eye, some fast shuffling deception of distance coupled with the perpetual twilight's condensed striations.
Pressed together, they listen, with delicious and undisclosed terror, to the crashing sounds of the water careening against the pier's stanchion posts and to the wild, mournful bleating of the wind.
'Barb's got cancer,' Michael says, speaking the words in a soft, almost absent fashion.
For an instant, she is sure that she must have misheard, yet there is a sense of the news in his demeanour. She searches his face, but he is staring out over her shoulder towards the horizon.
'What?'
'In the kidneys. It's been there for a while, but you know what she's like. She's the kind who has to piss black before a bell goes off.'
He winces and purses his lips, as if the words themselves hurt to speak.
'Jesus.'
The weakness of his expression strikes Caitlin all at once. His flesh has the bruised shade and texture of putty, and hangs from his strongest features, thickening his nose and lending a maudlin heft to his cheeks. His mouth seems to be receding too, sinking finally from the strain of holding back years' worth of the things that so badly need saying. He has recently turned forty-eight years old. January sixth. Forty-eight is no age any more, not the way it once was, but lack of sleep, added to the many other extenuating factors, has caused rust to set in. Also, he is probably forty pounds overweight, and that, even on a thickset five-ten frame, is the sort of burden that takes a toll. There is a hint of lameness in his walk now, his joints answering to the first seasonal tweak of sciatica; his head hangs, and his big shoulders have lately taken on a certain constricting roundness. She knows what age can do, and how suddenly its effects can grab the light, but what makes it all so difficult to accept is that, in her mind, he remains so young, so vibrant, still the strong, loving man who first approached her in that bar all those years ago and who made her fall so hard. Decades ago, now. The arrangement they keep encourages delusion, of course, meeting as they do just once a month but every month, the first Tuesday without fail. With such a bulk of their lives spent in wait, reality has been allowed, even encouraged, to turn fragile. When he can no longer comfortably evade her studied gaze he meets it and sighs, a heaving gust that sings of its weariness. And all at once, she recognises him. The way his eyes narrow and elongate, the paper-cut sharpness of his lips, the smile always apparently so little-meant once it breaks the surface but which feels precious as it wells. This is him. This is who he is: her big, lumbering Irishman. She leans in against his neck. The sigh is for her, she knows. Everything is for her. Shuddering loose from the grip of the world in order to free himself fully and completely, even if only for these few hours.
Excerpted from My Coney Island Baby by Billy O'Callaghan. Copyright © 2019 by Billy O'Callaghan. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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