Tim Seagirt offered Carolyn a hit.
She shook her head, but leaned through the window anyway, coughing at the hazy cloud swirling around the car's steering wheel.
"Tim," she choked on the smoke. "You really shouldn't perform that song again. The lyrics, well, let's just say they're a little too personal, mean a little too much to me. I mean…"
"I really don't know where that song came from, Mrs. Muir." Tim's face was friendly. What a difference a generation makes, Carolyn thought sadly, wishing she had the temerity to take off her pearls, brush out her hair and wear jeans to pick up the kids at school. Was it a good thing or a bad trend, that people like Tim would soon teach Jonathan and Candy a new way of looking at everything? Free love? She could use a little.
She pulled at her dress, and tried to refocus on her departing guest.
"The songs are really the same, anyway. Can't touch/not there, what's the difference? Both songs are about something you can't have." He sighed, then smiled and shrugged his shoulders.
Carolyn raised a perfectly plucked eyebrow and casually the joint from between Tim's calloused fingers. "Much better than a cigarette, isn't it?" the musician smiled. She inhaled and instinctively pulled away from the car, swishing at the curling smoke with her hands. "Got it in India! Real hash. Here, finish it!" With a wink, he reached for her arm and squeezed her wrist. "Thanks for being so cool about everything."
Off he drove, leaving Carolyn standing by Gull Cottage's gate, lungs burning, coughing furiously, tears streaming out of the corners of her eyes. Very un-cool, she thought, hoping the kids and Martha didn't have their faces plastered against the kitchen or parlor window.
Why not, she thought, suddenly relaxed, unsure as to why she'd even been angry. At least it's something I can have. Carolyn closed the gate but headed around the house, to the stone stairs leading from the verandah to the beach below. It was if she could hear every water molecule of the pounding surf. She stopped at the top of the stairs, took another drag and smiled. Why not?
Time to enjoy life instead of trying to guess what the Captain meant by shore birds and emerald surf or worse, worrying about what he didn't write.
"If only I could touch your hand," she sang at the roaring waves as she descended. "I spend the night in the bed thinking he'll be there but he never comes…and I wake up and wipe the sleep from my eyes and I rise, to face another day without…"
Carolyn laughed and took another long drag. Maybe the hippies really were on to something. "Why not smoke marijuana?" she asked herself out loud, holding tightly to the rail. "Dooodoooodooodooo, doodoodooodooo, dooodooodooodooo."
"Because none of this is funny, Madame. And you're incredibly fortunate that I'm hear to catch you should you fall whilst engaging in such silliness."
There he stood in the sand below, looking like a bad Hollywood stereotype of a domineering seaman. She descended the stairs as provocatively as possible, considering the circumstances of her early 1960s shift dress, blew a smoke ring theatrically into his face, and arched her eyebrows.
"This isn't your quarterdeck, Captain." Unperturbed, she stooped to remove her shoes. "This is my beach. My joint. If you are disappointed that I'm not really as ladylike as you thought I was – " she laughed, feeling funny and detached yet strangely aware of every crease in his spectral face. "The sea. It's so beautiful."
Why hadn't she noticed this before? "Yes, it's my first marijuana."
"My dear," his tone softened. He peered closely at her face. "The cannabis has loosened your inhibitions. Let's move somewhere we are less likely to be spotted by the children or your nosey harridan of a housekeeper."
She blinked, and suddenly they stood a mile down the beach in a cove dotted with scraggly pines and large boulders. Why hadn't he tried this before? Things were fun again, suddenly. Carolyn giggled, then hiccupped.
The Captain smiled, despite himself. "You are as lovely, disheveled, and vulnerable here on the beach as you were poised and impossibly impregnable back there on the settee but an hour ago. Wait here, my dear. Sit down – don't try to move until I get back."
He disappeared and returned, seconds later, with two large blankets and a thermos of coffee. "Madame," he suggested as she seated herself upon the larger of the two spreads. "We should allow some time before returning to Gull Cottage. I've instructed Jonathan to tell Martha that you've taken a notebook down to the beach to work on several ideas for stories."
Carolyn smiled at him, listening but not hearing. "Thanks for the coffee, Captain." She shaded her eyes with her free hand. His shoulders were unbearably broad, she noticed, not for the first time. Was that a pulse on his neck? Why hadn't he ever sat this close before?
Carolyn lay back upon the blanket and closed her eyes, humming. "The tropic sun, the emerald surf, I'd happily forget each one if I could link your arm in mine…"
"My lips cannot touch yours."
"But they can smoke the same marijuana cigarette you just stole from mine!"
They stared at each other then laughed, deeply. He lay back, abandoning his nautical posturing and acting like any other man on the beach during a warm summer's day, she thought. Was this what the hippies meant by cosmic?
Carolyn suddenly noticed how white his teeth really were. Taking great care not to touch him, she reached up and plucked the joint from between his teeth, inhaled deeply and exhaled languorously into his face. Not for the first time, she wondered how he would touch her, and where, if they were both mortal.
"Why did you wait almost a year to tell me you can't touch me – in front of everyone – " and like that, just like that, she felt fully alive for the first time since leaving Philadelphia, and carefree. "It doesn't matter, there are other ways."
"Mrs. Muir –" the Captain began, unsteadily, realizing for the first time he was no more immune to the weed's effect than she.
"Stop hiding behind the Missus part and state your full intentions, blast it!" Her face was smiling but her heart was breaking.
The frozen look on his face precluded further laughter. Captain Gregg turned away and his turtleneck and jacket vanished. Carolyn stared in awe at the muscles she'd only dared to imagine rippling beneath all those layers of wool.
There they were, as elemental to her as the sea and the air she breathed. His marvelous back, his arms, the hair on the back of his bent neck. His presence no less tangible to her for all its purported etherealness. An offering, she thought. At last.
"My lips cannot touch yours, my dear."
Carolyn closed her eyes and waited for tears to form. Nothing happened. Instead, the roar of the waves, the heat of the sun, the scraggly pines and the gentle curve of the shore pulled her gently into their embrace, unbuttoning first her dress, unclasping pearls from her neck, unhooking underclothes and tossing them all into a convenient heap behind her.
"If this is all we can give each other, then screw the emerald surf and the shorebirds, I'll happily settle for this," she said finally, laying fully naked upon the blanket.
He said something, but she could no longer understand. Time swirled languorously all around, cocooning them within the sound of the sea and the tendrils of a warm, gentle summer breeze. Carolyn saw him look, finally, and understood the surprised expression on his face, the awe and shock he felt not at her nakedness, but at the magnitude of her gift to him.
"My heart can touch yours," she whispered simply. "This alone means most to me. My heart touches yours."
At first, she did not comprehend the gentle kiss of his eyelashes as he pulled her into his embrace, gently nuzzling her face with his before answering all questions about how and where he would touch her when he finally did.
"Daniel," she cried beneath him. "Daniel."
That night, he lay with her in their bed until she fell asleep, exhausted from too much happiness.
For the first time in 100 years, he thought as rematerialized on the widow's walk, I am a lover, not a ghost shipwrecked on his own unhappiness. The stars are just the stars, no longer a cosmic conspiracy winking ominously from above, the only sentinels to my unending solitude.
His tears awakened her sometime in the early hours. He sat beside her and smoothed the hair from her face before burying his head in her neck. She reached for him with her arms, drawing him to her breast.
"I'm here now, forever – one way or another."
Just before dawn, he gathered her in his arms and carried her to their balcony where he sat, in a chair, kissing her deeply and slowly until she turned to reposition herself in his lap, clasping his head to her breast as she wrapped her legs around him and lowered herself upon him.
This time, it was he who fell asleep afterwards. Carolyn rose first, tiptoeing to the door to lock it. Saturday morning, she yawned. With any luck, it would be over three hours before the kids stirred.
She got back in bed and lay against his back, wrapping her arm under his, caressing his chest. Did he have a pulse? A heartbeat? She kissed his shoulder, and was surprised when he responded by pulling her arm even tighter against him, gathering her hand in his, resting it over his heart.
"Captain. Captain?"
He rolled to face her. "I want you to know it wouldn't have made any difference if you couldn't touch me – " she began.
"I wouldn't have kissed you if it did." He stared intently into her eyes. "I would never do anything that would hurt you in any way, my dear."
"Shhhhh."
"Shhh?"
She covered his lips with her fingers. "If you are getting ready to offer some ridiculous reason as to why you waited so long…"
"I didn't know, blast it!"
"Even when I was asleep, you never tried to touch me?"
"You are not honored that I valued your honor so highly that I never –"
"Actually, I'm rather insulted you failed to succumb to my charms much earlier. I need a joint," she suggested. "Drugs will probably take the edge off the year of sexual frustration I was forced to endure before I got you stoned and you finally figured out how to make love to a mortal."
"Madame, marijuana is a gateway drug," Captain Gregg opined as he drew her back into his arms so she could feel the physical manifestation of the love growing between them.
"However, if you promise never to smoke in front of the children, I might be able to oblige you. You won't believe what I found in Seagirt's manager's suitcase…"
Chapter 2 – the Alternative ATC coming soon-