Ghost Sea: A Novel (Dugger/Nello Series) by Ferenc Máté Read Free Book Online Page A

dark. The sail shook; the wind was on the bow—we were in irons.
    She slowly eased the muscles of her thighs and let me lean back. I felt her breath on the side of my face; then her lips touched my cheek—hesitant, like a child stealing a kiss. Then she drew back. I took her hand from the tiller and kissed the delicate skin of her wrist. I pushed up her skirt and kissed the long hollow on the inside of her knee. She ran her hand across my neck, wrapped her fingers around my throat, and pressed. “I could kill you.”
    I bit her thigh. She cried out softly. Her mouth ran across my neck, kissing and biting hard into the muscle of my shoulder, higher in the back, into the nape, where the Kwakiutl say the soul resides.
    I turned. She leaned away but kept her arms around me. I could only see her teeth, the whites of her eyes, and her white blouse. I unbuttoned it. She lowered her forehead onto mine.
    I kissed the sweat from the bone between her breasts, kissed her breasts, her stomach, then pulled her skirt up to her hips. She was naked under it.
    “You…” I said.
    “Me,” she whispered.
    I pushed her back against the transom, raised her knee, and kissed and bit the topmost part of her thigh.
    “Damn you,” she murmured.
    “Damn you .”
    “Oh, shut up.”
     
     
    T HE MOON HAD already set when I sailed us back toward the ketch. She was down on the floorboards, with her head in my lap, her legs curled up like a cat, her skirt hiked high, and her white breast and naked shoulders pale in the darkness. She slept with long, even breaths. I pulled down her skirt and covered her with her blouse to keep her warm.
    I could have stayed in that dinghy all my life.
     
     
    I SATON the caprail of the ketch and held the dinghy’s shroud. She stood in the dinghy, did up her buttons, then tried to press the creases in her skirt with her hands. “Look at me,” she said. “I look like I’ve been run over by a train.” Then she slowly and patiently combed her hair with her fingers. “May I have a glass of water?” she said.
    I reached down to help her aboard but she shook her head; her eyes seemed to be looking far away.
    “I better not,” she said.
    She drank, holding on to the shroud for balance, then handed me back the glass. She took my hand from the shroud, kissed it, and then put it against her face just as it had been when the night began. Then she lowered it and, as I turned to put the glass on the deck, she let it go. By the time I turned back, she had pushed the dinghy off. She sat and filled the sail, eased the sheets to get up some speed, then hauled in and accelerated as she sailed around my stern.
    “What time for the lesson tomorrow?” I said in a loud whisper.
    A block squeaked as she let out her sheet and began a dead run toward the yacht before her reply came out of the darkness. “He doesn’t want me to see you again.”
    The eastern sky had a thin blush of dawn. The yacht, dark except for the anchor light, stood black and immobile against it. On its aft deck, a small flame flashed then ebbed and flashed again, as a match does when someone is trying to light a pipe.

    KATE
    The Wilderness
     
    I feel myself less than a beast, without dreams or aspirations. I don’t need sleep and I don’t care if I never eat again, all I want is to be warm once more in life. I sit in the canoe and shudder. I feel colder inside than out. I can’t help but wonder if it is really only the cold. I should be afraid of what they might do to me, especially the young one with the icy eyes, but I’m too cold to care. I believe in fate, or God, or whatever it is that does these things to you. I longed for you but I got him instead. I wonder if it’s too late to make amends; if I promise to be good forever, would the world let me go home and just stay by the fire? The sun is coming up; at least it will warm my face. What wilderness and silence all around me. It is as quiet as a graveyard.

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C HINATOWN
     

     
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