Love in Maine (17 page)

That taken care of, Hank picked up the beers and returned to the bedroom. He set the
bottles down quietly and went into the bathroom, then slid back into bed behind Maddie.
She hummed her appreciation, settling her backside against him.

He didn’t want to wake her, but he couldn’t help trailing his palm along the perfect
curve of her hip, draped in the white sheet and the pale blue cotton summer blanket.

“Do you want me to leave?” she whispered, not looking at him.

He pulled her quickly around to face him. “What?!”

“You said,
just for now
. So I didn’t know if you meant,
just this one time
, or
just tonight
, or what.”

She wasn’t even baiting him or trying to push him to make a decision. Maddie looked
into his eyes with plain curiosity, like she was having to decide on a bus schedule,
and needed the facts that would let her move on with her plans.

“Do you want to leave?” Hank realized he hadn’t even considered this from her point
of view. “I mean—”

Maddie lifted her lips to his, to get him to stop saying all that nonsense. The kiss
escalated quickly and she was back to all that faraway moaning and pleading in about
five seconds. She withdrew from the kiss, letting her head flop back onto the pillow.
“I don’t want to leave until I have to be at work Monday morning, and even then I’ll
be hard pressed to leave if you’re still wanting me around.”

He stared down into her eyes. “You knock the wind out of me when you talk like that,
you know. Every time. All breezy and accommodating and eager at the same time.”

She smiled and kissed his cheek. “I thought you hated my enthusiasm.”

“You thought wrong.” Hank kept her caged in his arms and had the incongruous thought
that one day he would like to meet her family, so he could see what it took to instill
that level of confidence.

“You are so entitled,” he said, caressing her cheek with the back of his knuckles.

Maddie’s face turned stormy in an instant. “I am not—”

He kissed her quickly to get her to stop flying off the handle. “I meant,” Hank continued,
moving so he was back down on the bed lying alongside her, “that you have a wonderful
sense of what you are legitimately entitled to. You have certain ideas about what
you can accomplish in life, what you deserve. I didn’t mean it like you were spoiled.
I meant it as a compliment.”

She looked skeptical. “I don’t think there are many people in the world today who
would take ‘entitled’ as a compliment.” Maddie tried to rearrange her arms so she
could clasp her hands up near her chin, in a sort of horizontal version of crossing
her arms in front of her chest, which would have just been ridiculous.

Hank laughed anyway, and pulled her to him. He began kissing her again and Maddie
sank deeper and deeper into the abyss, not caring about the consequences. Not caring
about how miserable she was going to be one day in the not very distant future, when
Hank just didn’t show up or didn’t say hello to her when he walked past her window.
None of it mattered, because right here in the beautiful present, she was his to do
with as he pleased. As he pleased her.

They spent the rest of the weekend in bed, with the occasional foray to the refrigerator
or the couch. They watched a movie in the middle of the night, Maddie lounging all
over Hank like she had been desperately wanting to do the whole time they had been
watching
Troy
the week before.

By Sunday afternoon, Maddie suggested they go down to Freeport to watch the fireworks.
They were back in bed, dozing lightly.

Hank didn’t open his eyes when he spoke, but his hand tightened gently on Maddie’s.
“I’m not really good at fireworks.”

“Oh.” Maddie sounded surprised and a little disappointed. She was having visions of
the two of them on a blanket holding hands and looking up at the sky and feeling the
pounding, explosive claps in their bones.

“You should go with Janet and Phil. It’s supposed to be a really big deal this year.”

“I think I’d rather lie here with you,” she said simply.

His eyes were still closed, but his lips turned up with a satisfied smile. “I like
the way you think, kid.”

Maddie rolled into Hank’s arms, lining her body up with his, and fell into a blissful
nap. It was one of those fairy-tale sleeps where she felt partially aware of the birds
outside Hank’s bedroom window, and drugged by the smell of Hank’s skin on every inhale,
but her brain was quiet and she felt like a still peace had settled over her.

A few hours later, they took a shower together and then Hank made a big pot of pasta
and they sat at his kitchen counter and ate it with a couple of glasses of red wine.

“I should probably go,” Maddie said, after she’d helped him put the dishes into the
dishwasher and they’d finished putting away the pots and pans.

“Really?” He looked a little crushed.

“Oh, you better not look at me like that, Gilbertson—what were you, by the way?” He
looked confused. “What was your rank in the Army?”

“Oh, that. Major.”

“Wow. That’s pretty high for someone your age, isn’t it?”

He folded the kitchen towel neatly and hung it over the handle of the stove. “Not
really.”

“Why do I get the feeling you wouldn’t tell me it was some huge honor, anyway?”

He smiled and pulled her into his chest. “It’s over. It doesn’t matter.”

“Just because something is over doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.” She said it into
his T-shirt and tried not to think of everything as having two or three ulterior meanings.
She pulled herself out of his hold. “But I really do need to go. I mean,” she gestured
down at her appearance, bare feet and legs leading up to one of Hank’s gray T-shirts,
nothing more, “I’d really love to show up at work like this tomorrow, but I think
a little sleep in my own bed and some clean clothes might boost my tips. What do you
think?”

“I think your tips would be off the charts if you went into work exactly like this.”
He wrapped his arms around her waist again. She kind of loved how he always wanted
to touch her, to have his hand in contact with her, while they were eating dinner,
while they were watching a movie. And in bed, after the obvious times, he always rested
his palm on her or draped his leg over one of hers. It felt amazing.

She started laughing a little, then kissed his neck.

“What’s funny?” he asked.

“I was just thinking my body is going to miss your body. All this touching. I’m going
to get greedy.”

Hank nuzzled into her neck, and Maddie thought it was probably because he didn’t want
her to see he felt the same way.

“Okay,” she tried again a few minutes later, feeling herself getting ramped up all
over again, just from those kisses. “Stop!” She laughed again, and he smiled with
a hint of guilt, but he certainly wasn’t sorry. “Let me go!”

He did as she asked, then leaned back into the refrigerator, sizing her up, his hands
pushed into his pockets, making his shorts tug lower.

Maddie shook her head and rolled her eyes. “You don’t have to try to look hot.” She
gestured toward his broad shoulders and narrow waist. His bare chest was tanned and
muscled, his hard stomach going pale where he’d pulled his shorts low.

“I wasn’t trying.”

“Yeah, right!” Then she squealed as he tried to lift up her T-shirt for a quick grab
before she left the kitchen. She pulled the fabric out of his hold and ran into the
bedroom.

The next few weeks it seemed to Maddie that everything slowed down and settled into
a wonderful groove. She woke up at 4:30 a.m. and made it to work by five every day.
Her waitressing had become second nature. Her familiarity with the regulars. Her banter
with Phil. Her friendship with Sharon. And then: the afternoons. Hank was always there.
He was usually back around four or five, which gave Maddie time to go for a run or
workout down at the boxing gym she’d joined.

The two of them would fall into each other’s arms, usually sweaty and dirty from the
day at work or exercise, and none of it mattered because they were desperate for each
other. And they’d fall onto the sofa or the bed and replenish themselves with every
inch of their bodies after the seemingly endless drought of an entire workday spent
apart.

On a particularly sultry afternoon in early August, Maddie turned to him in bed and
asked, “Will you take me down to the ocean floor sometime?”

He looked up at the ceiling.

She knew the look. He might want to be touching her all the time, but he didn’t like
the slightest effort on her part to get into his head. He didn’t want anybody in there,
not even (maybe especially not) himself.

“Why? It’s just dark and cold.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just where you are so much of the time. I just want
to see what it’s like. You know what it’s like at the diner.”

He grunted noncommittally.

“Don’t you ever picture me at the diner, just look at the clock at ten in the morning
and think,
Hmm
, I can just picture Maddie at Phil’s spilling an iced tea on Dr. Vinton—”

“You didn’t?” he asked, his eyes wide.

“No!” She laughed. “But I almost did. I’m too good for that now.” She flexed her muscle
in her upper arm to show what a pro she had become. “Look at that. I had to start
carrying the tray with my left hand because my right bicep was getting bigger than
the left.”

“Quite the Lou Ferrigno, aren’t you?” He squeezed the muscle to test how hard she
had become.

“Quit trying to change the subject. I want to go to fifty fathoms with you.”

“Why fifty fathoms? Do you even know what a fathom is?”

“No idea. I think my dad has a watch that’s called a Fifty Fathoms, and I like the
sound of it.”

He shook his head and smiled, shutting his eyes at her ignorance.

“Don’t scoff like that. How should I know how deep a fathom is? It’s probably like
a hundred feet or something. Like a league or a score. Or knots.”

“You’re not even talking about distances anymore. You’re talking about speed. And
Abraham Lincoln.”

She punched him lightly on the arm. “Come on. Please let me! I’ll be very obedient.
I promise.”

He raised an eyebrow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, you know. Like when you get on a sailboat, I know how to be all ‘Aye-aye, Captain’
and ‘Full steam ahead,’ and all that.”

He stared at her. “How can you be so smart and such an idiot all at the same time?”

She smiled. “I know I should defend my honor and call you out for suggesting my idiocy,
but I just can’t bring myself to care when it makes you smile like that and it brings
out those little wrinkles around your eyes . . .” She reached up to lightly trace
his eyebrow and he softened immediately.

“Three hundred feet,” he said a few minutes later, seemingly out of nowhere.

“What?”

“Fifty fathoms is three hundred feet.”

Maddie put her head up on her bent elbow. “Wow. So fifty fathoms isn’t that serious.”

He laughed. “Yeah. Fifty fathoms is serious.”

“How deep is the ocean . . . roughly?”

“About . . .” He did a quick mental calculation. “About twenty-five hundred fathoms.
Roughly. Fourteen thousand feet, pretty much. But there are trenches and canyons that
are much deeper.”

“How deep have you gone?”

“Sorry to disappoint, but I’ve only hit fifty fathoms once, and that was with Trimix,
a special type of oxygen that you need to go that far.”

“Oh. Is that all?” She turned away from his body as if his accomplishments were rather
paltry.

He pulled her back and they laughed into each other, then settled back into the folds
and bends of each other’s bodies. Their curves were starting to mesh together with
natural ease.

A few weeks later, Maddie had just finished a ten-mile run and was feeling pretty
much invincible. She was drinking an iced tea with Janet in the late afternoon on
Friday, and they were laughing about Phil trying to tell his ninety-six-year-old mother
about the fact that he was dating Janet.

Maddie was still laughing, talking between gasps. “Why does he need to tell her at
all?”

Janet smiled. “Because we’re getting married.”

Maddie nearly choked on her iced tea. “You’re what?!”

Janet kept smiling.

“Oh my god,” Maddie said, but she was smiling too. Then, “Have you told Henry yet?”

Janet’s face fell slightly, and she looked at the back of her hands where they rested
on the farm table. “I’m sure he’s figured it out.”

“Right,” Maddie said, “because he’s so good at seeing things like that.”

Janet looked at Maddie closely. “You’ve really gotten to know him, haven’t you?”

Maddie wasn’t embarrassed, exactly. After the Fourth of July, it was pretty much an
open secret that Maddie was spending all of her free time with Hank. They were always
together on weekends, and Maddie was only at Janet’s to sleep on the nights she had
to get up at 4:30 for work. Otherwise, Maddie had become pretty scarce.

“Oh, I don’t know if anyone can know Hank. Really. He doesn’t really want to be known.”

“Those are often the people who need to be known the most.”

Maddie shrugged. “We don’t need to go down that prickly path, Jan. We’re all grown-ups,
and we’re all going our separate ways in September.” Maddie took a deep breath, then
fortified herself. “Except you! You’re getting married! To Phil.”

Janet started giggling. “You are so transparent, Madison. He’s such a sweet, caring
person. He really is.”

“I know. Look, I work with him, remember? He’s a really good guy.”

“But?”

“But nothing. It’s just that you seem so sweet and . . . dainty.”

“Oh! You are adorable. Dainty?” Janet shook her head, and then her expression turned
dour. “I was the town drunk. Do you know what that means in a town this size?”

Maddie felt her heart cramp under the weight of what that must have meant for Hank.
And what it meant for Janet, too, of course, but for what it meant for a child to
be living with an adult who was—