Daniel Gregg never considered Carolyn Muir to be perfect. Spirited, perhaps, but annoyingly cavalier in her disregard for punctuality and order. She seldom made herself available when she said she would, nor worried terribly about straightening papers strewn across his former desk at the end of a long day of typing.
"Time is relative on my ship, Captain Gregg," she informed him saucily after daring to throw a slipper at the mantle clock as it chimed six bells. "Or should I say, my watch!"
Yet there were exceptions to every womanly rule. Mrs. Muir's was bath time. Even the dour Martha knew to steer a wide berth of the house's only bathroom, as they called it, after 9:45 at night. The clawed-foot, cast-iron tub belonged exclusively to the lady-of-the-house at 10 p.m. each evening. Not even Daniel Gregg dared to materialize or hover even invisibly outside the bathroom door as this beautiful creature transformed mere evening ablutions into a scented mystery of grandest proportion.
He could only imagine how she must look, without clothes, or how she wielded the mysterious-to-him loofa vigorously – or, was it languidly? - over fair skin so that she emerged, at the end of each session, wrapped in a heavy wool robe yet looking and smelling exactly like the kind of goddess he'd always imagined he would someday bed with benefit of marriage.
More than idly he would speculate over other activities in which she might indulge in the beautiful bath he'd imported from Boston over 100 years ago. Floating there in bubbles, suspended, he fervently hoped, by fantasies of how his rough skin might feel against hers, reveries of how their joining might be, could she assuage her desire enough to belay the need for, or thoughts of, more tangible suitors? Did she? Where did her hands wander in these intimate nightly voyages?
Blast! He could remember the naked figures of his most notable conquests, the shapes, contours and colors of their various breasts and how they looked and felt beneath him at the moment-of-possession, the very instant he made them his, the singular moment of passion when the glorious satisfaction of the hunt exploded into the afterglow of desire before dully transforming into the most caddish desire of all: to leave and return safely to the arms of his first and only love, the sea. Love them, yes! Marry them, no! he'd boasted her first night aboard his ship.
How perfectly ironic, how very sad, he mused, that one day it would be she who did the leaving, Carolyn Muir who tired first, and he who paid the ultimate price for love unrequited. Foolishly, and nonetheless, he felt his pulse quicken each evening, when she stirred from their companionable silence in front of the fireplace to prepare for her bath. He would formally bid her good night before pretending to retire to the Wheelhouse, the Alcove, the Widow's Walk – to wherever it was he could conjure reasonable human-like excuses for being otherwise occupied at the very moment that most stirred the blood that no longer really ran through his veins.
At 9:45 exactly she would rise modestly, nervously fingering the buttons at her throat, smile discreetly, yet gaze coquettishly over her shoulder as she sailed forth from the master cabin, leaving him eternally flummoxed in her wake.
What kind of a spirit am I, he mused after every awkward parting. I can hurl thunder and lightning and rain squalls with every twist of my very short temper, invade human dreams and consciousness to suit my own purposes, manipulate time and objects and even bear the intrusion of two small children and yet – the Captain never dared to rematerialize on the second floor of his own small cottage until well after midnight, when he knew without doubt he could watch her sleep, without fear of discovery.
Sometimes he stirred the fire then laid himself down comfortably on the bed beside her, leaving no mark on the blanket while observing with great fascination the steady rise and fall of her breast or the way her nipples would stiffen when she threw the covers back on those rare, warm evenings of their first summer together. Sometimes, she would roll onto her side, and he would marvel at the swell that silently swept the covers, lapping gently from the rise of her hips, down to her tiny waist then gently back up to her shoulders.
A lesser spirit, he often thought, would invade the dreams of one so helpless, so wonderfully vulnerable – but what would be the satisfaction in that, when the wanting was not of her own measure? Nay, far better to remain safely on what should have been his side of the bed, listening to gentle breaths with uncharacteristic patience sometimes rewarded with the involuntary sigh of his name.
Daniel, she murmured. Never Captain. Always Daniel, just like that, an exhalation as natural as ordinary breath, yet one that never failed to stop his invisible heart. Once, most deliciously, she smiled as she softly mewled his name. Such an utterance, such a look of joy, should have melted his stern resolve to stay out of her nightly reveries, to join with her in the only way he could. Instead, there were tears, then sobs so profound he involuntarily dematerialized and retreated to the Alcove, where he wept inconsolably over sea charts until at last even the Captain of the ship slept on his own eternal watch.
So this intolerable arrangement might have continued until the day Mrs. Muir's inevitable leaving found him eternally haunted by his own misery, were it not for his own growing desire to assuage his impotence, to give her some measure of his truer feelings without exposing her to his baser desires. An excuse, any excuse, he prayed to the powers above with a fervent desire more befitting Jonathan begging Santa Clause to overlook his baser tendencies.
Any excuse, any reason to return honorably to the Master Cabin after her nightly bath, yet before sleep afforded her the only embrace she could experience in his long-cold bed. Any excuse, he thought, one night, as he lay beside her, wondering how he might reclaim some ascendancy in a relationship in danger of foundering on its intolerable status quo.
Briefly, he closed his eyes, imagining the night she would call to him from the Master Cabin, opening the door quietly while whispering his name with increasing urgency until he heard her from below, in his private hell in the Alcove. "Captain! Daniel!" He smiled at the thought. Yes, that was exactly how her voice would sound. Poignant, heavy with desire. "Captain Gregg!"
His eyes opened, and widened. She was nought beside him, rather she stood in front of the binnacle, bearing the full brunt of the unseasonably warm spring air gusting furiously ahead of the squall threatening the Maine coast. I always leave a window open, he remembered with a start, lest she die as I did, a victim to the vagaries of inefficient gas heaters. The lone open window must have given way in the storm's advancing fury, allowing the pressure of the encroaching storm to blow through the others whose fastenings he'd hardly remembered to latch.
The Captain could hear the white curtains flapping furiously in the open air. In an instant he was at her side, bidding her stand down, desperately hoping she had not caught him in his folly, lying at her side, when he realized she did not need his help – it was his presence she commanded as she stood hard into the wind, eyes closed, arms extended gloriously behind.
Without so much as a robe to shelter her, the white nightgown she favored sculpted closely to her chest, soaked with sea spray, leaving nothing to the Captain's fevered imagination. He watched, fascinated by both her behavior and her heaving, bared breast, her white neck, her delectably white shoulders and, finally, as he allowed his eyes to seek that which she'd so clearly left in evidence, the maidenhead at the center of all of their storms.
Maidenhead. Figurehead. What was she? What was this? Who was he? Lightning streaked gloriously across the sky, bidden by the fury of the storm, not by spectral anger or frustration, and she opened her eyes and smiled as he wrapped his arms around her waist.
Suddenly the Master Cabin rose, then fell with the waves and he knew he was Captain of a ship of her making, He buried his face in her neck as his hands rose to capture her small, firm breasts, crushing her nipples between his finger and his thumb as she arched away from him, moaning with desire then turning to pull his head to hers, demanding his lips upon hers as she willed his ghostly Captain's uniform away and enveloped his growing desire with her human flesh. He pounded himself furiously into her, but the joining was unlike anything else he'd experienced in his life, certainly anything in his celibate afterlife, as he rose and fell through waves of pleasure in her wake until he collapsed into her arms with little thought of anything other than sailing at her side, straight for eternity.
For the first time in 100 years, he slept soundly 'til dawn when he awakened, her green eyes staring luminously into his. "Coffee, Captain?" With a start, he rose from the couch, fully clothed. "Madame!" "Captain!" She blinked, innocently, and handed him his morning-after drink. "How!" he sputtered. "How what?" she murmured innocuously, as she seated herself at the desk and began to type.
"The curious thing about using a woman's image as a figurehead is that women were considered bad luck onboard," he read over her shoulder. "However, if a woman bore her breasts to the sea, it would ease a storm and calm the waters so that the ship could make her way."