The Other Mrs. by Mary Kubica

Author:Mary Kubica
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Park Row Books
Published: 2019-12-18T15:31:40+00:00

* * *

I was there at the pier when he came. The day was dingy, gray. The clouds sank from the sky, they fell to street level, like smog. Everyone and everything was blurred because of it. Everyone was gray.

There were people outside just for the hell of it. As if they liked this, the dreary cold. They stood, staring at the ocean, watching a dot at sea that may or may not have been the ferry. It moved in, getting closer, leaving small boats behind. They rolled back and forth in the ship’s wake.

The wind cut through me like a knife. I stood with my ticket in hand, holed up behind the ticket booth, waiting for Will to come. I spotted him as he made his way down the street for the dock.

His smile was electric. My heart beat hard.

But he wasn’t smiling at me.

He was smiling at the hoi polloi, making small talk with the commoners.

I waited behind the ticket booth, watched him take his place at the end of the line. I waited, then fell in line behind him, a handful of people between us.

I draped a hood over my head. With sunglasses, I hid my eyes.

The ferry was the last of us to arrive. We paraded across the bridge, prisoners on a death march. There were holes in the bridge, one of those you see straight through to the churning water below. I saw seaweed. I smelled fish.

Will went up the steps to the upper deck. I sat where I could watch him without being seen. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I watched as he stood at the stern of the ship; as he gripped the guardrail; as he stared at the shoreline as it slipped from view.

The water beneath us was briny and brown. Ducks circled the boat.

I watched the whole time. Will stood like a ship’s figurehead, Poseidon, god of the sea, keeping watch over the ocean. My eyes orbited his body, traced the shape of his silhouette. They circled his windblown hair, rounded his broad shoulder, slipped down an arm, counted each fingertip. They followed the seam of his jeans from his thighs to his feet. Dropped beneath the soles of his shoes, went up the other side, the same way they came down. Feet to thighs to fingers. I ran my hands through his hair. Remembered what it felt like when his hair got tangled up in the webs of my hands.

Twenty minutes or so, it went on this way.

The shore came closer. Buildings got larger. All the while, they were there, blocks on the horizon. But all of a sudden, they were big and gray like everything else that day.

When the ferry docked, I followed Will from the boat and across a pier. Somewhere on the other side of it, we hopped a bus. I dug in my bag, happy to see I had a Metra card.

I climbed aboard. I found a seat behind him.

The bus clomped along, shuttling us across town.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.