A Life Between the Fences

Author's Note: There isn't really any smut in this one, as I wrote it to be more sensually romantic than explicitly erotic.

Special thanks to s0rethr0at for her excellent notes and suggestions on the penultimate draft, and to a little ox for enduring and shaping the early ones.

Please enjoy.

A LIFE BETWEEN THE FENCES

~*~*~*~*~

Where James grew up, the soil was tanned dirt, the grass a parched brown that went undrunk like winter leaves. When he saw those first patches of dirt each year, he would watch his window as night after night the jellyfish-blue moon squeezed by, counting down the remaining days of spring. Then, when the summer heat arrived, they would load into the car and drive three hours north to their cottage where the soil was soft and dark and freckled with flat white stones like ancient arrowheads.

Where Astrid grew up, the soil was rich but hidden beneath acres of crabgrass and rustled river reeds. The only patches she saw were where the neighbours' sheep had chewed the world bald, or where the riverbank had collapsed in the spring floods, where dark veins of mud and minerals and splintered stone became suddenly exposed. For her, the climb into the car and the four-hour knee-to-elbow shouting match with her brothers started as a hassle, but she learned to look forward to it when she saw how pretty the lake was at dusk, the black shore flowing out to meet the sun and the last waves of the day.

He was nine and she was ten when they met on the beach between their cottages. He was talkative, obsessed with bugs and frogs and fish, and she was lanky and shy and only wanted to swim. He annoyed her, the way boys always did with his constant babbling and his need to be the center of attention, and she annoyed him just as much when she admitted she didn't know the difference between a frog and a toad—and, worse, that she didn't care.

One blue afternoon, he caught a yellow sunfish off the dock and brought it to her. The jagged bony scales in her hands made her tongue stick out, and she groaned, dropping it into the water where it darted beneath the hard black shadow of the dock. After that, James decided he'd seen enough of the weird swimming girl, and Astrid was happy to be ignored by the childish boy.

He was twelve and she was thirteen when they discovered they both liked the same music and the same movies, and that summer they spent most of their time in hissing bean bag chairs, swapping back and forth his father's headphones, or eating popcorn together in front of a blue square of television. All summer long they hiked and swam, and he taught her about frogs and toads, and she taught him how to tread water.

Each summer after that they met at the white-planked fences that uselessly marked the neutral stone path that led from the road to their shared beach. Sometimes he would bring her gifts: flowers one summer, homemade cookies another—once a CD he'd made with her in mind. One year, she gave him a sweater she'd knitted, grey and oblong around the shoulders, but he wore it that night by the bonfire and most nights that winter.

He was nineteen and she was twenty the first summer he didn't come back. She puttered from room to room through her family's cottage, swimming only when the sun heated the greying dock enough to burn her toes.

"Will he be back next year, Mrs. Gould?" Astrid had asked his mother when they were down by the shore, their ankles caked in seaweed, sand squished between their painted toes. His mother could only offer a sad look and say she wasn't sure. But she was a mother, and she was only too proud of her son, and only too happy to remind Astrid that her little James was far away visiting England this summer, and maybe Australia the next.

He was twenty and she was twenty-one the first summer he was at the cottage without her. His father's back had hunched that year, and he'd begun to walk with a dark brown cane James had brought home from England. He'd meant it as a joke about his father's impending old age, and they'd shared a laugh when he'd given it, but trying to get into the bathroom one night his father had fallen and struck his arm, breaking the bone and turning his skin a splotchy block of yellow and green bruises. The joke seemed in poor taste after that, and when his father began to use the cane sincerely—hopping around on it, calling it his fourth leg—that joke had seemed in poor taste too.

His mother had taken to gardening that summer, evoking beautiful carnations along the fence line, but their cottages still didn't seem half as lovely as he remembered, and he instead spent the summer on the trails or hiking next to the canal. He'd go as far west as the town of Spring Garden, putting the sun on his back in the morning and returning with his face red and wind-beaten before the newspaper was on the porch in the afternoon. He even took up swimming more than he ever had before, and twice that summer he swam to the lake's far shore, and he imagined Astrid would have liked that.

"Do you think she'll stop by?" he asked Mrs. Thompson, but her mother didn't have any news. Astrid had gone to work at a summer camp, and she wouldn't be done until September, after the last blackberry bush had been picked and the lake had cooled and the dry autumn leaves had swept across the porch.

Her brothers, Michael and Caleb, had still come that summer. Older by a few years and already done school, they proved just as friendly to James as they'd been with their sister there. They were both tall, with wavy blonde hair and sharp features, as if always on the verge of smirking. Together, the three had bright bonfires on the beach by night and lounging afternoons on the dock, and one night, when Michael admitted he'd never seen a Monty Python movie, they drove forty minutes north to a drive-in theatre to catch a double feature.

The rest of the summer, James watched the flowers that grew in the consummated shadows of cottage roofs, watching how his mother nursed them even after it was clear they wouldn't last. They'd grown in white and wild at first—and even some vines had crept along the fences, germinated from who-could-be-sure-where—but by August their stems had cankered and greyed and soon not a single carnation had survived. The soil didn't drain properly, his mother told him. Nothing so beautiful could grow here.

He was twenty-one and she was twenty-two the summer they saw each other again. There were nerves. His sandalled foot tapped on the dock as they sat side by side in wooden deckchairs and made amends for the two-years-long blank spot they'd left in one another's life.

Still the hyperactive boy at heart, he joked, telling her—with active hands drawn around her—about his trip to England and his first legal beer. His hair had grown thick and dark like untouched woods, brambles curling near his temple, and she liked the charmed quality he'd come to possess—the way his dark eyes looked imperfect and implacable and impish. And she liked his big hands; his thumbs as wide as oar shafts as he gestured around her with his stories.

"What would it take to get you to swim across the lake with me right now?" he asked. The silhouette of the trees overtook the shore, their black line bleeding like oil into the water.

"To cross it swimming? You think you could?" She found it funny that he, the boy she'd taught to tread water, would want to try. Last she'd seen him dive, he still steepled his hands at his chest.

"I did it just last year."

"You did?" She hadn't heard that story yet, but she could imagine it, his muscles breaking the green water, his chest spreading wide with every stroke, the soft wake of water foam behind him. "And where did you learn to swim like that?"

"Well, I know all kinds of things now," he said and, slowly, they looked at one another and laughed. And as she laughed, her blonde hair shook at her shoulders and the meadowed green of her eyes shone, the colours lilting like the reeds where they'd once caught frogs, and he liked the wistfulness of that memory. And her laugh was a richer sound now—not the gangly croaking of a girl of only seventeen, but the haunting song of a swan across the lake at dawn.

He dangled a flip-flop from his toes and then sucked it back onto his foot. He realized he admired her, the way she held herself with magnificent dignity, knees crossed, the light sweater on her shoulders exposing only the soft dimple of a collarbone beneath. Memories were fickle, as quick to forgive as to forget, but his memory of her was unkind compared to the ornament of splendor that she was.

She told him she could only stay for a week that summer—she had an internship as part of her biology degree—and, cocksure, he told her they would just have to make the best of it.

When the sun had downed and the memories were splayed before them like wedding gifts, he took her by the hand to the boathouse. Suspended over the water, the small rowboat creaked, moonlight reflecting on its ghostly hull. Cast in a mask of carnation-white moonlight, her arms wrapped around his neck, and they twirled, dancing to the music of the bristling reeds and the sad notes of waterthrush and the pounding rhythm of all those missed summers.

It was the moment before the moment when she pulled him close and said, "I know all kinds of things, too."

His lips caressed the jigsaw of moonlight on her neck, hands rolling down her back like cold water. Giggly gasps and bumpy touching. He brushed aside her hair and the rhythm of their breaths rose and fell in the syllables of the world's oldest sonnet.

Then came the brawl of their bodies—the genteel sighs, the curled toes, the whispers of satisfaction, and the moans that skated like winter air across the open lake.

The waves lapped and the hoisted rowboat creaked, and as she breathed in the pleasant smell of his skin, he pressed into her, then drew out. Together they were the rush of waves on the shore; the surge and the fall; the swell and the peace; the crush and the pull. His beautiful brown eyes, heavy and wet, looked at her with something richer than want, and she felt warm and safe beneath him. His hands slipped under her bare shoulders, hers around his taut back, and for a moment they loved one another honestly.

When she laid tumbled on his chest after they were done, tangled in their clothes like fishing line, she felt his strong body—the line below his nipple that ran hard and firm to the muscle that bridged chest to limb and the heavy curve of his upper arm against her back. He smelled like lake water, and she had forgotten how much she missed that smell, if only because it reminded her of him.

He stroked her fine blonde hair, the goosebumps on her arm rising and falling as he drew a circle with his finger.

They sighed and thought, as young lovers do, that nothing could go on when they were so hidden; that upon seeing them, the moon, the stars—the night itself—would attenuate and slow and offer them time; that if they could have only one moonlit night together, neither of them would ever want again.

But the stars swirled, the night wheeled on, and bit-by-bit the jellyfish-blue moon squeezed by.

"Next summer," Astrid said at the end of the week, her feet already dangling off the dock and into the next. "I'll be here for the whole summer."

"I'll hold you to it. Maybe we can swim the lake then."

"We probably could have this year."

"I think we made the most of it," he said.

And an hour later she was gone.

He was twenty-three and she was twenty-four the summer she arrived in the all-black Cadillac, tires popping and squeezing the stones beneath as they pulled down the gravel road to her cottage, her fingers intertwined with those of her fiancé, Ryan. His other hand was on the steering wheel, his dark hair as straight as his collar as he smiled and talked about seeing her family again. They passed the sycamore that lurked off the road, the one she'd called the Elephant Tree when she was young, its knotted hollow hide sheltering the red and yellow wildflowers that grew around it.

There, her father had built a swing when she was little, a flat board suspended by two itchy yellow ropes that burned your hands if you moved along them too fast. Her brother Caleb had ruined it the summer he'd decided he preferred a tire swing, and he'd cut the ropes to make room for it. Even three years younger than him, James had chased her brother around the tree when he'd learned what Caleb had done, and together they'd trampled the flowers.

Ryan parked next to her family's cars, and they staggered out into the oozing warm sun. The white fence stood steadfast between hers and the Gould's cottage, but the Gould's place was shuttered and estranged, their grey dock drawn high up the beach like a mountain coldly clinching its snow.

"Where are they this year?" Astrid asked as Caleb greeted them on the deck stairs. The question had come more worryingly than she'd intended, and she blushed at the thought of what her brother might say in front of her fiancé, but he said nothing; he only shrugged and helped Ryan take the bags.

The days passed as they settled like stones into the lakebed, and together Astrid and Ryan found the groove most comfortable among her family. She showed him the trails of her youth, picking the white heads of unblossomed weeds, feeling the high grass that overhung the trail and tickled her knee, squeezing his hand in hers as they walked. She sensed his unease each time she looked down the road at the sound of gravel popping under car tires, and for his sake she did her best to bury her anticipation—to put the feeling in a sack, wrench it down and sink it deep in her gut, but there was no way to kill it outright.

One afternoon, she led Ryan to a black stone creek that cleft lightning-sharp through the woods, where tree trunks buried them in a shameful shade. The mossy bridge over the creek was three steps long, and she stopped in the middle of it, wood bending beneath their feet as she put her hands on his chest, and she kissed him. He was gentle, the same way he was when he corrected her—tender and reserved, and so careful not to blemish her that the only mark he'd ever left was the thin tan line of an engagement ring. His dark eyes looked at hers, big hands squeezing her more tightly into him, and he kissed her on the cheek.

The lake sparkled through the trees as they looped back along the trail to the cottage. James's mother, Mrs. Gould, was there, black hair bundled loosely behind her as she unloaded a sloshing cooler from one of their cars. From the shadow of the trailhead Astrid watched, heart flopping side to side as she looked for James, but he was nowhere to be seen.

"Is that his family?" Ryan asked, not unaware of the long looks she cast unsparingly at the other cottage, or the way she drifted unmoored from the shore of his chest at night. He had even learned the boy's name by accident, and although no one had told him anything pertinent, he knew what she suffered from.

"Yes, that's them," she admitted, and the blood crowded into her cheeks.

They ate on the deck that night, her parents having invited the Goulds to join them. Mr. Gould came over, hopping alongside his cane, Mrs. Gould with a brilliant white casserole dish in her hands, and they spoke their gladness at seeing them all again after missing them last year. When they'd sat down, James hopped over their fences and clambered up the stairs, sandals flapping against the wood. Astrid would always remember the look that spread out across his face, drawing back his charmed smile as he saw her, and the juddering of his jaw and the passing into a fever of embarrassment as he noticed her fiancé.

"This is Ryan," Astrid said as Ryan rose, and the two men shook hands. "He cooked for us tonight."

"He owes us," Michael said to James. "For Astrid killing our sailboat."

The barbeque sizzled grey smoke behind them, and the wind shifted. Then, like nothing had happened, James looked at Michael and pointed knowingly to her brothers. "There was money in that boat."

"That's what I told her," Caleb said.

"Not only did not one of you know how to sail a boat," Astrid said, "but you also didn't know how to build one."

Michael sucked the barbeque sauce off the tip of his thumb. "She snatched the money right out of our hands."

Ryan smiled, sweeping back his dark hair. "What boat?"

"Well." Michael leaned forward. "The three of us were going to build a sailboat. We could have taken it all around the lake, given sailboat rides, you know, stuff like that. We could have been rich."

James put a helping of salad on his plate. "I've never seen anything as beautiful as that pile of wood." He took a hamburger. "It was going to be sixteen feet of pure freedom."

"Freedom?" Astrid asked, half-smiling. "When you've nowhere to go but the lake?"

Ryan put his arm around Astrid and also smiled. "What were you going to use for sails?"

"Cattails," Caleb said excitedly. "We were going to put them in the lake, let them soak, and then weave sails out of the plant stalks."

Ryan laughed at that. "All in one summer?"

"Bigger things have happened in a summer," James said.

Ryan had many questions about their sailboat, and the three boys were happy to indulge him. It'd been a long time since they'd talked about it in front of her, and it surprised Astrid to see it come to them so easily. It amused her in a way she hadn't felt in years, the way they alternated between accusations that she'd ruined their lives and admissions that they knew very little about sailboats.

As they talked, she absently laid her hand on Ryan's shoulder. James's expression changed. The weight of her engagement ring became noticeable on her finger, and she withdrew it into her lap, her other hand taking a small piece of the cold white- and black-flecked potato salad onto her fork. She could feel James staring at her, but she couldn't raise her eyes to meet his.

It wasn't long after that when James thanked the Thompson's for their hospitality. He had a headache, he told them, and a need to sit down.

"You're already sitting down, son," her father said as he rubbed the grey whiskers of his fine goatee.

James looked at her brothers. "It's good to see you again."

Astrid watched him go and the clattering of silverware wore on like a pounding rain.

The Goulds were pleasant and glad to meet Ryan, and they congratulated the couple when Ryan announced that he and Astrid were to be married on that very beach later that summer—and that, of course, they were both invited. She stared at her fiancé, his arm wrapped around her, and she wished so desperately that she could have been as mesmerized by him as she had by the talk of sailboats.

When dinner was done, she and Ryan collected the plates for washing, a tartan dish towel on his shoulder as he stood beside her in the kitchen. Before them, the dark beach stretched down to the water, where waves cut across the lake like glinting rows of snowcapped mountains.

She handed him a plate. "It's not fair for you to have to wash after you've made dinner."

"I don't mind." A plate squeaked clean under his hand, and he quietly put it in the cupboard.

"And I'm sorry about my brothers. Blaming you for their sailboat, I mean."

"I don't mind." A smile and another soft squeak.

"And, I'm sorry if that... I'm sorry."

He put his big hand on the small of her back and kissed the top of her head. "I don't mind."

When they finished, she decided on an evening swim. Ryan was content to stay inside and talk more with her brothers, so she set out with a towel that flashed in bright oranges and yellows, which she left crumpled on the beach. The sun prowled above the horizon as she tiptoed to the water, where a wave ambushed her toes and spilled warmly over her feet. The sun still had some warmth to give for the day, and the water was rejuvenating as she dipped beneath it, wet hair twirling behind her head as she broke the surface. Deeper into the water she moved, until her feet couldn't reach the sand, and then she floated, letting the black waves lap against her chin.