Osprey Island

The beers were growing warmer by the can, but they’d drunk enough that they didn’t much care. It was cheap, shitty beer—piss-water, Brigid teased, saying her friends in Dublin would be horrified—and it went down just like water, pretty much. They ate their sandwiches, and Brigid went in the water again, not because she felt like a swim but because she had to pee. Lance had already gotten up a few times to piss in the woods, and it seemed that every time he got up he sought out a closer tree, so the last time Brigid could literally hear his urine streaming and hitting the ground. She paddled a bit, floated around while she emptied her bladder, then splashed about to dispel the impression that she might’ve only gone in the water to pee. The bay felt grand anyway, refreshing, though it made her feel drunker than she’d thought she was, the way you might stand up from your table in a bar not feeling scuttered at all, but when you go to use the toilet, the bathroom starts to spin. When Brigid came out of the bay—water sweeping off her body, evaporating almost instantly under the intensity of the early-afternoon sun—she was overcome with tiredness: the night before, and the beers, and the heat all catching up with her at once in that kind of postlunch, postexercise exhaustion that might have felt rather glorious if she hadn’t been drunk, except she was.

Lance was squinting, laughing at her as she came up the beach, and as she flopped down onto her towel—facedown, her limbs sprawling out from her, useless as jellyfish—he said, “Siesta time, señorita?” all the while chuckling, mocking her for such alcohol intolerance. All Brigid could get out in response, her mouth already mashed sideways into the ground, was a muffed “Mmmmnn.” She would be asleep in seconds, one side of her face dangerously exposed to the sun, the other cheek growing warm with drool bleeding slowly from her open mouth as she slept.

The sun crept across the sky toward the west, and by early mid-afternoon shade had begun to overtake Dredgers’ Cove, spreading from the tree line out as the sun moved behind the pine woods. Brigid was still asleep as their spot on the beach lost its sun, first dappled by the leaves, then shaded altogether, and in her sleep she was growing chilly. The first thing she would remember feeling—remember being conscious of at all—was warmth, and she was grateful for it, as though someone had noticed her there, shivering in that tiny striped bikini, and thought to drape something over her—a jacket, or some clothes that were lying about. But there was weight to the covering, a warm, heavy pressing-in that came up beside her, curling around, cupping, and she curled into it, letting the warmth come over her like a dream, a good dream, an erotic dream where everything is warm and wet, everything coming together as though under warm bath water. But then, wrongly, the weight was on her, not around her, heavy on top of her, and it was too heavy, like a carpet unrolled over her back flattening her into the sand with not enough room for her lungs to inflate inside.

And then she was awake, and he was moving on top of her and though she felt cold, her sunburned skin was noticeably warm under his hand, which was cool as it came under the fabric at the bottom of her suit, tracing the crack of her ass down like he was going to push his cool hand in and warm it up inside of her. She knew what was happening; her head was still swirly from beer and sun, but she knew what was happening, had enough sense about her to think it wasn’t the smartest thing in the world, but it wasn’t the worst thing anyone had ever done, and Brigid wasn’t averse, necessarily, to doing things that were a bit bad. No one was cheating on anyone, and his wife had died, and didn’t people seek human contact in times of grief to try to get through their pain and claim a life for themselves in the face of death? Isn’t that what people did?