Swim Through the Night

I'm Margot. Forty-six years old, marine biologist, and at that moment somewhere in the middle of Louisiana with my boyfriend of four years driving and me watching the swamp slide past the window.

Jamal is thirty-eight. Aquatic ecologist. Handsome in a quiet way that took me a year to fully appreciate.

We'd been at a conference in Biloxi all week. Wetlands restoration. Great sessions, honestly. Good talks, good crawfish, too much free wine at the vendor receptions.

And now we were going home.

The rental sedan had sticky seats and a radio that only caught AM gospel or zydeco, depending on the stretch of road. Jamal drove. I rode. We'd been doing this for maybe two hours.

The thing about four years with someone is the silence changes. Early on, silence is nervous. You fill it. You chatter about nothing just to prove you can.

Now the silence is comfortable. A warm bath of a silence.

And somewhere in the last few months I'd started to wonder if comfortable was the whole problem.

I looked over at him. One hand on the wheel, elbow out the window, humming along to a gospel station he wasn't really listening to. He'd rolled his sleeve up. His forearm was tanned from fieldwork.

When did the wanting get so quiet? That was the question rattling around my head.

It hadn't always been quiet. At twenty-six I'd had that affair with the visiting researcher, the one from Europe. Six weeks that felt like six years in the best way. He went home and I cried for a month and then I got on with my life.

I'm not chasing that exact feeling. I'm not stupid. But I wanted a version of it. Something with teeth.

"Hey," Jamal said, glancing at me. "You're doing the staring thing."

"I'm allowed to look at my boyfriend."

"You're allowed. You're also doing it like I owe you money."

I laughed. Okay, fair.

"Conferences put me in a weird head," I said. "All those people asking what's next. Like science is a treadmill."

"What is next for us?" He said it lightly. Mostly lightly.

"Home. Laundry. Grading."

"Mm." He let it go. He's good at letting things go. That used to feel like a virtue.

---

The bridge closure came out of nowhere. A state trooper with a flare gun and a hand-lettered sign, DETOUR, pointing us off the highway onto a road that got narrow fast.

"Bridge out?" I said.

"Must be. No warning on the app."

"Jamal, that's the only crossing for twenty miles."

"I know." And there it was. A little shine in his eyes. He was grinning at the road like it had challenged him personally.

I forgot sometimes that Jamal used to be a risk-taker. Grad school stories. Storm sampling. Kayaking into floodwater to pull instruments. Somewhere along the way he'd gotten careful, and so had I, and we'd called it growing up.

He took the detour without slowing down.

"Left here," I said, squinting at my phone.

"That road's dirt."

"It says left."

So he turned left onto a dirt road through cypress and black water, and my heart did a small stupid hop. There it was. The old thrill. Not because of danger, exactly. Because he chose it.

"You like this," he said, catching me watching him.

"Maybe a little."

"Interesting."

"Shut up and drive."

The road spat us out near a crossroads with a gas station and a diner attached to it. NEAR HOUMA, or that's what I guessed from the water tower. The light was going gold. Brackish water and diesel on the air.

"We need gas anyway," he said, pulling in.

---

I stayed in the car for the first minute. Just watched.

He got out, stretched, and started pumping fuel. Rolled his shoulders. Looked around at the bayou like it owed him a story.

And I watched his hands.

God, his hands. Long fingers, careful with everything. He handled the nozzle like it mattered. He'd held a horseshoe crab at the conference banquet, showed a table of drunk grad students how to flip it safely, and I'd watched those same hands and thought about them on me and then felt guilty for it. Guilty. For thinking about my own boyfriend.

That's the rut talking. The rut makes wanting feel like trespassing.

I unzipped my bag a little, fussed with nothing, kept looking.

His forearms flexed when he squeezed the handle. He pushed his glasses up with his knuckle. He tucked his shirt in better and I imagined those hands tucking my skirt up instead, slow, both of us still half dressed, the door of some motel room not quite latched.

Warm. I got warm all over just sitting there.

"Hey." He leaned down to my open window. "You want anything? Diner's still open. Pie, maybe."

"Is it good pie?"

"It's bayou pie. It'll be an experience."

"Then yes. Coffee too."

"Black?"

"You know it's black. You've known it's black for four years."

"Testing. You'd be amazed what I forget." He grinned and went.

I watched him cross the lot. Wide shoulders. That easy walk.

And I made a decision, sitting in a sticky rental seat at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. I was going to say something. Tonight, maybe. Not an accusation. Just the truth. That I missed wanting him loudly. That I wanted us to be new again, or at least less folded up.

The motel in Thibodaux was supposedly ahead. Faded neon, according to the one review that mentioned it. Bleach-smelling sheets, said another.

Bleach sheets and flickering neon and a night with nowhere to be.

Okay. I could work with that.

He came back with pie and two coffees and a handful of gas station peanuts because he's exactly that man.

"They had one kind of pie," he said, getting in. "I bought both slices. We'll split the difference."

"What kind?"

"Unlabeled."

"Jamal."

"It's an experience, Margot."

I laughed and took the coffee, and he pulled back onto the dark road, and I thought, tonight. Tonight I'll tell him.

The road ahead was all water and cypress shadow. The radio found some zydeco. He tapped the wheel.

"Hey," I said. "After we check in. Can we talk? Just, like, really talk."

He glanced at me. "Everything okay?"

"Yeah. Yeah, actually. Better than okay, I think."

"Okay." He reached over without looking and put his hand on my knee. Just rested it there. Four years of that exact gesture, and this time I put my hand on top of it and held on.

He noticed. He didn't say anything. But I saw his jaw shift, and I saw him check the mirror, and I thought, good. Wake up a little, baby.

The motel sign came up out of the dark like a rumor. Half the letters glowing. VACANCY in tired red.

"Looks haunted," I said.

"Looks available."

"Both can be true."

He parked, and neither of us moved right away. The engine ticked. Somewhere out in the dark, frogs were going crazy.

"Margot," he said.

"Hm?"

"Whatever the talk is. I'm glad it's coming."

I looked at him. The neon lit half his face.

"Me too," I said.

The office was a glass box bolted onto the side of the building. A woman behind the counter was watching something on her phone with the volume all the way up. She didn't look up until Jamal put his card on the counter.

"One bed or two?" she asked.

"One," he said.

And there it was. My stupid heart, doing its little hop again. Because he didn't even glance at me. Because of course it was one. It had always been one. But tonight, with the talk I'd promised myself, one felt like a decision made fresh.

"Twelve," the woman said, sliding a key across. "Ice machine's broken. Don't use the drain in the tub, it's slow."

"Good to know," Jamal said, dead serious, like he was taking notes.

The room was exactly what the reviews promised. Faded bedspread. A TV older than both of us. One lamp with a crooked shade. The window looked out on the parking lot and then the black water beyond it. The air conditioner came on with a rattle and a smell of old dust.

"Charming," I said.

"It's perfect," Jamal said, and he meant it. That's the thing about him. He finds the good in a motel room that smells like a hundred other trips.

I sat on the edge of the bed and bounced once. The springs groaned.

"Listen to that," I said. "It's got opinions."

He laughed and dropped the bags. Then he stood there, in the middle of the room, and looked at me. Really looked. I felt it land on my skin like a hand.

"So," he said. "The talk?"

"Shower first. I've got two hours of rental car on me and a conference's worth of airport air."

"You want company?"

And I could hear it, the small careful question in it. He was asking, not assuming. Four years and he still asked.

"Obviously," I said.

The bathroom was tiny and yellow-lit and the shower had one of those showerheads that spits more than it pours. But the water was hot, which surprised me, and the little mirror fogged up fast, and when he came in after me he had to step close just to get the curtain shut.

"Cozy," he said.

"Shut the curtain."

He did. And then we were just two people in a small wet box, and the noise of the water made everything private.

He reached past me for the soap and his chest brushed my back and I felt it everywhere. That's the thing nobody tells you about long relationships. The touch is familiar but your body forgets to be casual about it, if you let it. I let it.

"Turn around," he said, quiet.

I turned. He had the little hotel soap in his hands, working up a lather, and he started at my shoulders. Slow. Both hands. Deliberate, like he was mapping me again. Like he'd been told the map had changed.

"You're tense," he said.

"I'm thinking."

"About the talk?"

"Among other things."

His hands moved down my arms. Then back up. Then across, and his thumbs brushed the sides of my breasts, and my breath went short. He noticed. Of course he noticed. He's a scientist, he notices things.

"Margot," he said, low.

"Yeah."

"You keep breathing like that and this shower is going to go long."

"Good," I said. "Long sounds good."

He turned me around to face him. The weak water ran down between us. He was already hard, and there's no graceful way to notice that in a small shower, so I didn't try to be graceful. I looked. He watched me look.

"You always did like looking," he said.

"You always liked being looked at."

"Is that what this week was? You looking?"

Part of me wanted to save all of it for the bed, the whole speech I'd built in the car. But the water was loud and the light was bad and it felt easier to start talking there, slick and half hidden.

"Some of it," I said. "Jamal. I've been restless. Not about you. About us. We got comfortable and I miss wanting you loudly. I miss when it was loud."

He went still. The water kept going. His hands stayed on my waist.

"Loud," he said.

"Loud. I want to want you where it's embarrassing. I want to be the woman at the banquet thinking about your hands and not feeling guilty about it."

"You felt guilty about that?"

"Weren't you listening at the banquet? I was a wreck."

He laughed, and the laugh broke something loose in him, and then he was pulling me in and the soap was between us and the kiss was not careful at all.

That was the yes, by the way. The asking and the yes, both directions, all night long. He asked with his hands pausing at my hips. I said "please" and meant it, and that concluded the matter.

His mouth went down my throat. The water beat weakly on the top of my head. He soaped my breasts with both hands, deliberate, and then not deliberate at all, thumbs over my nipples until they were hard and aching and I was making noise I didn't bother to be embarrassed about.

"There it is," he said against my neck. "Loud."

"Shut up, oh my god, keep going."

He pressed me back against the cool tile and went down. Just like that. Forty-six years old, in a Motel Whatever in Thibodaux, and my boyfriend of four years on his knees with the water running down his back, and I got loud. His mouth found my clit and I grabbed the bar on the wall and held on.

"Jamal. Jamal. Yes, like that."

The pressure was weak but his tongue wasn't. He knows me. Four years of knowing me. And the strange thing was that the familiarity didn't kill the thrill, it fed it. He knew exactly the rhythm, exactly when to back off, and he backed off twice on purpose because he knew it would drive me crazy and it did, it absolutely did.

"You're doing that on purpose," I gasped.

"Obviously."

"Asshole. Don't stop again."