The Ferry Wait

I checked my watch for the third time in an hour. Four forty-something, give or take, because I'd been checking it so often I'd stopped really reading it.

"Still four forty-something?" Juliette asked from the window seat. She didn't look up from her tablet.

"How'd you know?"

"Because you sigh every time you check it. You've been sighing all afternoon."

She had her feet tucked up under her on the cushion, one of her soil reports open on the screen, though I'd noticed she'd been on the same page for a while. The lake outside the window was the flat gray of a worn coin, and the wind had been pushing rain sideways against the cottage all day. Off-season on Lake Superior is not a postcard. It's a lot of sound and not a lot to do.

"You could at least pretend the reports are interesting," I said.

"They are interesting. This one is about clay drainage in cold climates. Riveting stuff, Evan."

"Sure. Sure it is."

She put the tablet down on her knees anyway and looked at me. Twenty-seven years old, hair pulled back in a knot, one of my flannels on over her leggings because the cottage heat was uneven and she'd claimed the flannel the second day like it was territory she'd conquered.

"The ferry's not coming," she said. "You know that, right? We checked this morning. It's not coming tomorrow either."

"I know it. I'm just, I don't know. Watch-ticking. It's a habit. I paid good money for this watch and it likes to be looked at."

"You bought that watch because it was on sale."

"Because it was on sale and it deserves to be looked at."

She laughed, and it was the first real laugh out of either of us all day. The strike had been going on since last Thursday, and today was Tuesday, and we had been told, in the flat voice of the ferry company's recorded line, that the boats would not run again until sometime next week. A whole extra week in a rented cottage a hundred yards from a dock that went nowhere. Our car was on the mainland side with half our stuff in it. The grocery situation was fine, actually, which was somehow the most boring miracle of the whole thing.

"Okay," Juliette said, and swung her feet down so she was sitting up facing me. "We need to talk about this week. Because I've watched you pace the length of this living room about four hundred times, and I don't think either of us is going to survive seven more days of you sighing at a watch."

"So what do we do? Cards? I saw a deck in the kitchen drawer."

"We don't do cards. We've done cards. I know everything about you that cards can teach me, which is that you cheat at gin."

"I absolutely do not cheat at gin."

"You absolutely do. No, I mean the real thing. We're stuck here with nowhere to be and nobody to see. Like, actually stuck. Not pretend busy-stuck. What would you do with a week of nowhere to be?"

I thought about it honestly, which took longer than I expected. Work was gone. Phones worked, mostly, but there was nobody to call. The town had one bar that closed at eight.

"Honestly? I don't know. I've never had a week that didn't belong to something. School, then work, then us. There's always somewhere to be."

"That's kind of sad, Evan."

"That's kind of true."

"No, it's kind of an opportunity is what it is." She got up off the window seat and came over and sat on the arm of my chair, which she never does, because the chair is mine and she has the good window seat and they have some unspoken treaty between them. "We've been married almost two years. We've never once had a week where we couldn't be interrupted."

"We had the honeymoon."

"The honeymoon had a schedule. Tours. You made a spreadsheet."

"That spreadsheet was good and I won't hear otherwise."

"It was a good spreadsheet," she admitted, grinning. "But this isn't a honeymoon. This is just, us, and weather, and nothing else." She was quiet a second, and I watched something happen on her face, the way her eyes went to the window and then came back to me with more purpose behind them. "So I have a confession."

"Uh oh!"

"Maybe not a confession. More of a, a proposal."

"Now you sound like work!"

"Evan. Stop. I'm being serious and it's hard for me, so let me get through it."

I shut up. She pulled at the cuff of the flannel, that thing she does when she's nervous, and then she didn't act nervous anymore, which is very her. She flips a switch and commits.

"So you know how I read everything? Reports, papers, forums, whatever. Soil stuff mostly, but I fall down rabbit holes. Well. A while back I fell down a different rabbit hole."

"What kind of rabbit hole?"

"Come on, you know what kind. You saw me close the browser fast enough to break the sound barrier that one night and you let it go. Thank you for letting it go, by the way, but also, you definitely didn't let it go."

"I did not let it go," I agreed. "I have thought about it approximately nine hundred times."

"Well. It's not just reading anymore. I've been reading about anal play. For months, actually. Like actual months. Articles, guides, people's actual experiences. I've been, I guess, working up to saying something."

I will be honest that my brain did a small fireworks show and then went very, very quiet, waiting to make sure it heard correctly.

"You want to try," I said, carefully, "anal. With me. Here. This week."

"With you. Here. This week." She reached over to the bookshelf where she'd put her bag when we arrived, six days ago now, and dug around in the front pocket and came out with a small bottle. She held it up between two fingers like she was presenting evidence in court. "Lube. Water-based. I packed it on a whim back home and told myself it was just being prepared, and then I laughed at myself on the ferry over here because who was I kidding."

"You packed lube for our lake vacation."

"I packed lube for our lake vacation, yes. And I have been sitting on that fact, pun fully intended, for six days, waiting to see if I'd actually say it out loud or chicken out and drink all the wine instead."

"And here you are. Saying it out loud."

"And here I am." Her cheeks were flushed, I could see that even in the gray window light, but her voice was steady and her eyes stayed on mine. "I don't want to do it tonight, necessarily, or I don't know, maybe tonight, I haven't decided. But I want to do it. I've wanted to for a while and I kept thinking there'd be a right moment and there's never a right moment, there's just moments, and we've got a whole week of them with absolutely nothing else to do."

"That is," I said, "the best sales pitch I've ever heard, and I say that as a professional."

"Don't make it a joke."

"It's not a joke. Juliette. I'm in. I have been in. I just never knew how to bring it up without it sounding like I was pressuring you, so I filed it away."

"Well, unfile it." She turned the bottle over in her hand. "So. Do you want to hear what I've been reading, or do you want to just kiss me and we'll figure it out as we go?"

I looked at my watch. "It's four fifty-something," I said. "We've got nowhere to be."

"Okay," she said, standing up and pulling me by the hand into the kitchen where we could actually sit facing each other. "If we're doing this, we're doing it right. Talk first. Boundaries, signals, all of it."

"Very you."

"Thank you, I know. Sit."

So we sat at the little table with our knees touching and the rain going sideways outside and the watch ticking on my wrist like it had nowhere to be either. I checked it twice more just to be annoying. It was now a little after five.

"Rules," she said. "One, we stop the second anyone says stop. Not teasing stop, actual stop. Two, if words get hard, I pinch you. Hard."

"That seems unfair to my arm."

"Three," she said, ignoring me, "you check in with me. Out