Oceans  

You’re used to her waking you before the alarm goes off, when it’s barely light out. You don’t mind.

Often she’s sleeping draped half across you, so when she shifts even slightly, her breath tickling your cheek or her thigh sliding smoothly against yours, you begin to rouse. Some mornings, you’ve drifted apart during the night and she rolls sleepily up behind you, snaking her arm around your waist. Her hand barely skims the surface of your skin as it moves slowly but deliberately lower. She knows by now that your brain isn’t the first part of your body to fully awaken.  She touches you so perfectly, that for the first time in your life you love the morning.

It’s not like that today.

Today you’re jostled from sleep at six o’clock when she bounds out of bed towards the bathroom. You follow, your legs moving on automatic pilot, to find her bent over the toilet. This is the drill lately. You catch a glimpse of yourselves in the mirror - you in only boxer shorts, hair in a state of anarchy, she in one of her little cotton nighties, whose innocent appearance is inversely proportional to their effect on you; neither of you looks like you’re sure what hit you. You almost look comical. But even half-conscious, you’re smart enough to save that thought for later, when she can appreciate it. Right now, you simply hold her hair back and firmly grasp her shoulder, hoping it makes her feel anchored.

When she’s done, you hand her a glass of water to rinse her mouth. As she sets it down by the sink, she glances up at your reflection, standing close behind her. Your eyes meet and she attempts a weak smile, but you can see how miserable she feels. Instinctively, without saying a word, you bend down to lift her and carry her back to bed.

You’ve carried her like this before, for very different reasons. Now, your only thought is to soothe her and make her feel safe. You lower her carefully and climb in behind her, molding your body tightly to hers, as if proximity might allow you to absorb and take away some of her discomfort. You slip your hand under her nightgown and settle it over her belly, which she insists is already growing. It still seems pretty flat to you, with just the same ever-so-slightly rounded - devastatingly feminine - swell it’s always had. However, you can’t help noticing that her breasts, which were already damn near perfect, actually have gotten slightly bigger. She’s less than enthused by this development (seriously, Jim, I look like: hey boobs, where you going with that girl?) and complains that they’re sore, so you keep your admiration mostly silent and try to touch her extra gently.

Kissing her shoulder, you whisper into her hair: get some sleep, we still have almost an hour. She melts back into you, lacing her fingers with yours against her soft skin.

  ******* 

It’s warm in the bedroom, even with all the windows open. That heavy summer feeling is beginning to creep insidiously into the air. You make a mental note to try to get the house’s ancient central air conditioning system up and running before it’s really hot and she gets seriously uncomfortable.

Your mind drifts back to last summer – to the endless days apart that lasted weeks, the weeks that lasted months. It’s hard to believe the Fourth of July is already in sight again. Last year around this time, you’d been on the phone discussing plans for your family’s annual barbecue when she’d mentioned once spending the holiday in a little town on the Jersey Shore when she was little. How she’d always wanted to go back, but Roy would never consider going anywhere but the lake.

‘Let’s do it then,’ you’d said, without giving it another thought. ‘Let’s go.’

‘Wouldn’t your mom be disappointed?’

‘Yeah, but she’ll blame it all on you, so that’s cool.’ When she made no response, you’d hastily added, ‘Just kidding. Don’t worry  - she’ll understand.’

‘Well, it’s probably too late anyway,’ she’d replied wistfully. ‘Hotels get booked for that weekend months ahead.’

You’d spent the rest of the day at work searching websites and making calls and she’d been correct – the nicer places had all long since been filled. But somehow, you’d lucked into the last available room in the vicinity, even though you knew you were probably being ripped off for what appeared to be a seedy beach motel whose touted ‘ocean view terrace’ was undoubtedly a gross exaggeration. You didn’t care. It would have been worth cashing in your 401K just to hear the delight in her voice when you told her you’d scored.

She’d taken the train to the shore from Penn Station and you’d driven there in time to meet her at the nearest station. She’d been so excited to get to the beach, that you’d checked into the motel, dropped your bags in the room and put on your bathing suits in record time.

‘Seriously?’ you’d asked in disbelief as she grabbed her bikini and headed toward the bathroom to change.

‘Come on, Jim…we haven’t seen each other all week. Getting undressed in the same room pretty much guarantees not getting to the beach before sundown.’

‘No fun at all,’ you’d muttered as she closed the bathroom door, laughing at your tragic expression.

But, you had to admit she had a point. Just imagining her taking her clothes off in the next room had already begun to elicit an embarrassingly quick…reaction. You thought about icy cold seawater and tried to stop being fourteen.

At the beach, you’d spent hours in the water with her – not really swimming, just floating and bobbing in the surf. Her lips tasted like saltwater and she was weightless in your arms as you held her up so you were face to face. The undertow literally pulled the sand from beneath your feet in a sudden rush, as she wrapped her arms around your neck and whispered how glad she was you’d brought her there. The beach was as crowded as you’d expect, but you’d felt like it was just the two of you, buoyant in the vast gray blue ocean. You were only aware of the sound of the breaking waves and her slick skin slipping against yours, squinting at her in the glare of the beating sun. A radio vaguely droning top forty hits in the distance was the only reminder you weren’t totally alone. It was as close to pure uncomplicated happiness as you could ever remember feeling.

When you were pink with too much sun and rubbing lotion on each other’s backs had made your hands need more, much more, you’d collected your towels, empty water bottles and unopened books and headed back to the hotel. It had turned out to be just as honky-tonk as suspected, but relatively clean and somehow exactly right. The vinyl wallpaper had a pink seahorse pattern, the ‘original’ oil painting hanging over the dresser depicted an idyllic shore scene decidedly more Tahitian than Jersey, and the bed creaked in an oddly satisfying way when you just sat on it.

You’d crowded together into the bathroom’s prefab metal shower to rinse away the salt and sand, removing your bathing suits under the sputtering spray of tepid water. You’d impatiently untied her top as she’d bent to slide your trunks down over your hips, and soaped each other up as best you could. Coaxing lather from the tiny bar of hotel soap with the hard shore water proved futile, as did drying off with the stingy towels, but it really didn’t matter. By that point, you had only one thought and it was obvious she did too. You stumbled back to the thin mattress and discovered just how loud that bed could be.

‘This could be embarrassing,’ she’d laughed against your mouth, as the bed frame groaned impolitely beneath you.

‘Good thing we’ll never see the people in the next room again,’ you’d smiled back, trailing wet kisses down her stomach.

‘Or maybe ever…oh,’ her sentence disappeared into both your moans as you hit your target.

You’d cranked up the air conditioning to create white noise and cool your feverish skin. That and a plastic ice bucket, filled at the ice machine conveniently located right outside your door, quickly lead to round two. It had been a whole - very long - week, after all. When the loose headboard thumped noisily against the flimsy wall, you hadn’t given the people next door a single thought. Round three, after a short sated nap, was best of all. Familiarity replaced your earlier pent-up urgency as she moved gorgeously over you in the waning afternoon light, her small palms braced flat against your chest. Her sea-tangled hair brushed your face as she leaned down to kiss you lingeringly, like she had all the time in the world. Like this ordinary motel bed - with you beneath her, in her - was the world. 

The sun had long since set by the time you ventured out, famished, for dinner that night. You’d barely caught the tail end of the local fireworks exploding over the thin sliver of beach that was visible only if you hung precariously over the railing of your ‘terrace’ (which turned out to be nothing more than an upper walkway connecting the motel rooms.) Still, it felt more like a real holiday than any Fourth of July you could recall since you were a kid waving sparklers.

You didn’t clean the sand from the seat cushions of your car for the rest of the summer.

‘I’m getting sand in the weirdest places,’ she’d chuckled a few weeks later, when you’d made love to her in the backseat like an overjoyed teenager, after she’d accepted your ring in the pouring rain.

  ******* 

You can tell from her breathing that she’s dozed back off, but you’re wide-awake now. It’s so strange to think the – your - baby is mere inches from where your hand lays pressed against her belly. You imagine it floating in there, in her ocean, how blissful it must be; after all, inside her is by far the most blissful place you’ve ever been too. (And yes, you realize how inappropriate that thought is, but you’re pretty sure she’d laugh if you told her.)

Later on your way to work, you suggest returning to the Jersey Shore this summer.

‘That would be great,’ she lights up. ‘Only, I can’t wear my bikini this time. I’d look like a beached whale.’

‘No way. It’s going to be a while before you’re that big, right?’ you reassure her. ‘And anyway, if you get beached, I’ll drag you back out to sea.’

She just smiles and says maybe she’ll paint a mural of sea horses in the baby’s room.

You think of being suspended in the water with her again, the sun hot on your skin. Traffic backs up, a horn honks, it’s just another morning in Scranton. And still…you have worlds within worlds with her, right here. You have oceans.

   *****