He ran the shell across the top of her bikini, ran his finger inside, rolled his thumb inside her bathing suit. The shell fell to the ground and she moaned, glanced out to the sea, to the mother and baby dolphin dancing to a universal rhythm she now understood. She didn’t, yet, look in his eyes. Sometimes when she looked, she would absolutely know that there was no way she could ever fill those eyes; other times she looked and knew that she, only she, could actually fill him, and she would.

Her legs gave way underneath her, now made of sea and sinew, no bone or muscle to obey the commands to stand; she understood the release of the mother and baby dolphins’ water dance of joy as she worshiped the puffed blue sky, Nick’s eyes, the conch shell that dug below her spine.

Then he rose above her and flipped her with one movement of his arm; she saw the crushed shells void of their other half, the lonely ones left to the sea’s discretion. She rolled to her side and looked away from the shells and into his eyes.

She curled into the sand next to him and he pulled her to him until the connection at the shell’s edge fused them. Her face burned from the searing sand, rough chin. Only if he moved could she. He rose up on his elbow, rested his head in his hand, looked down at her. “The connection breaks so easily: one storm, one wave, one rock. . . .”

“Not ours. Not ours,” she said.

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Twelve

Amy utilized her jobs as teacher and OWP member as she never had before—as more than things she did because she loved them. She used them now, like the other chores of her life, to preoccupy her mind in an attempt to fill the crevices Nick crept into without permission. The island became more than a project; it was now a place that desperately needed her full attention. She scribbled across her lesson plan, sharpening her pencil every few minutes in the electric pencil sharpener on her mahogany desk.

This week, she would take her class on a field trip to the oldest house in Savannah, the Cherry Mansion, teach them about the vernacular intricacies that were best learned by touch and sight. As field trips were first thing in the morning after the previous day’s class, they required that she spend the night in the art dorm, which was really a historic house turned residence hall. She loved the deep smell of plaster a hundred years old, the mumble of college students above and below her, the whispered rumors of the marble-playing ghost boy and the wandering ghost woman, who died as she fell down the steps looking for her husband, who was in the bathroom (perpetually, apparently) with another woman.