The Long Winter Game

I'm Cora, twenty-eight, and I run the ferry booth out at Port Blossom. My boyfriend Pierre is thirty and he's a seasonal fisherman, which means in winter he has nothing to do and all the time in the world to be maddening about it.

Here's what I mean. We've been together two years now. I moved here when I was twenty-six for the off-season job, and Pierre was the first person who talked to me at the dock. That part was good. The problem started in December.

It's the rainy season. Everything is gray. The water is gray, the sky is gray, the cottage we rent has salt crusted on the windows so the gray comes through frosted. You'd think two people stuck in a small house with a porch over the water would tear into each other. We do not. Pierre takes his time with everything.

He makes coffee like it's a ceremony. He kisses me like he's got a whole afternoon and we both know he does. When I pull him toward the bedroom he follows at his own pace, and somewhere in the middle of things he'll slow down again, calm as Sunday, like he's got all the patience in the world and I'm the one being greedy.

So by mid-January I was annoyed. Not mad. Annoyed in a low simmering way, the kind that builds.

It came to a head on the porch one Tuesday. Rain coming down soft, both of us under the blanket, his arm around me. He leaned in and I leaned in and our mouths were maybe an inch apart, and then he stopped. Just stopped, smiled a little, and said, "Soon."

Soon. Like I'm a bus schedule.

I pulled back and looked at him and something in my brain snapped shut like a cash drawer.

"Fine," I said. "You know what? Fine. New rule."

He raised an eyebrow at me. He does that. It's infuriating.

"New rule," I said again. "I don't come until you earn it. Not with me, not with anything. And you don't either. We'll see who breaks first, mister patient."

He laughed. He actually laughed, that slow warm laugh of his, and said, "Okay, Cora. If that's what you want."

"It is what I want," I said, and I stomped inside with the blanket, which lost some of the effect because I had to untangle it first.

* * *

A week went by.

He didn't push. That's the thing about Pierre, he never pushes. Wednesday there was a smooth gray stone on my side of the sink, the kind with a white band through the middle, just sitting there. No note. Thursday there was a note, tucked under my coffee mug, that said nothing but "the rain is good for the garden." We don't have a garden. That's how he is.

Friday he made clam chowder from scratch and didn't mention the rule even once. I ate two bowls and hated how good it was.

Every night I went to bed wound tight as a ferry cable and every night he just kissed my forehead and rolled over.

I'll be honest with you, the game was supposed to punish him. It was punishing me. I knew that by Sunday and I kept going anyway, out of pure spite.

* * *

Monday was a slow day at the booth. One car in the morning, one in the afternoon, both regulars. I sat there with my tea watching the rain hit the water and thinking about things I shouldn't be thinking about at work.

Here's how bad it got. I caught myself with my fingers at the edge of my underwear under my coat, just resting there, not doing anything, just feeling the warm. And I imagined Pierre's calm smile, that exact face he makes, the one that says he's got all day. And I stopped. Pulled my hand back out and buttoned my coat and drank my tea like a professional.

Nobody noticed anything, probably.

But I thought about it the whole drive home. That's the part that got me. I could have handled it back at the booth, quick, nobody the wiser. Instead I drove home wound up tighter than I'd been all week, because some stubborn thing in me decided the whole point was not giving in, not to him and not to myself either. He wants me patient? Fine. I can be a glacier.

* * *

That night I was in bed reading one of the paperback romances from the box in the closet. Rain on the roof. Pierre came in from checking the crab pots in the dark, and I heard him peel off his wet jacket and hang it up, and then he came through the doorway and stood there looking at me.

"What," I said, not looking up.

"Nothing. You look comfortable."

"I am comfortable."

He came around to his side of the bed and sat down on the edge of it. The mattress dipped. I kept my eyes on the page and understood not one word of it.

Then he did the thing. He reached over and put one finger on my collarbone, just one finger, and traced it slow from one side to the other, over the top of my shirt, unhurried like everything he does. My skin lit up like the dock lights. I gripped the book.

And then he pulled his hand back. Pulled it all the way back, folded both hands in his lap, and said, "Not yet."

I put the book down. "Not yet? Not yet what? You can't just say not yet after doing that."

"It's not your turn to break," he said. He was smiling. I could hear the smile in it without even looking. "That's the game, right? You set the rule."

"That's not the rule I set."

"It's the rule that's happening, though." He leaned over, kissed my forehead, and turned off his lamp. "Goodnight, Cora."

"Goodnight," I said, and I said it mean, and he laughed into his pillow.

I lay there in the dark for a long while, staring at the ceiling, listening to the rain and to him breathing all