I've Never Been To Tulum
Rain. The living room windows were blurred with it. The cedars in the back lane were black and wet with it. The sky was low and grey over all of it.
Trevor was at the kitchen table with his practice pad, his laptop, and a pair of sticks. A drummer was on the screen working a fill slow. Trevor was following, half a breath behind. He missed a ghost note. Started the phrase over. Missed it again. Set the sticks down across the pad. The drummer kept playing without him.
Jules idled at the kitchen island with his laptop open and a legal pad beside it. He’d been on the same page of notes for twenty minutes. His pen tapped once, twice, stopped.
I sat on the rug in the living room staring out the blurry windows with my back against the sofa and a mug of tea going cold in my hands.
Yesterday I had been married.
I turned the ring on my finger. Kept turning it. Mrs. Dorey had put white hydrangeas in the library. My sister Jane had driven over on the ferry from Victoria to stand up for me. She’d gone home again the same night, a look of confused indignation on her face. Trevor had stood up for Jules and kept his face perfectly neutral the whole time. A woman in a suit had said words and Jules said them back and I said them back too. Jules signed his name, I signed mine, and Jean had transferred the money before lunch.
Jules closed his laptop. A minute later, he opened it again.
At the kitchen table, Trevor started the fill again. The rubber pad took the hits without sound, only the soft knock of the stick tips and the breath he let out when he missed the ghost note for a third time.
I had never seen three people do less in a room.
“Did you eat?” Jules asked.
“Toast,” I said.
He nodded.
The rain kept on.
Trevor sighed and shut his laptop with more finality than Jules had managed. He fiddled with his drumsticks. He shook his head at both of us. Finally, he spoke.
“I’ve never been to Tulum,” Trevor said. “But I’ve heard it’s nice.”
Jules looked up.
“It is nice.” Jules’s hand stayed on the laptop lid. “The water is the colour you think the ocean is supposed to be. Nobody there knows you. You walk around as the person you actually are.” He gave a small shrug. “I’ve been a couple of times.”
Trevor tapped a stick against his palm. “Yeah. Not quite what I meant, Jules.”
Jules tilted his head.
“The two of you got married yesterday,” Trevor said. “Nobody has even said congratulations.”
I couldn’t look at him.
“Ells.”
I looked up.
“Congratulations.” He was smiling. Small, but smiling. “Best wishes. The whole bit.”
I looked down at the rug. I wasn’t going to let any tears fall. I wasn’t.
He continued. “Helixis doesn’t change hands until the fifteenth. Jules has burned up every holiday and weekend he had moving the legislation. You haven’t seen the sun in three months, Ells. You didn’t even get any flowers.”
He picked the sticks back up. Tapped them once on the table. “My two best friends in the world got married yesterday. Married. And you’ve both been walking around like that hurts you. A marriage is supposed to be a happy thing. Something to celebrate. You know. With a joyful little thing called a honeymoon.”
He set the sticks down again. “I want to take you both to Tulum.”
I drew a breath.
“You’re going to tell me you’ve been too, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
Trevor put his head in his hands. Jules laughed. The first real one all day.
“With my family. When Jane graduated. Our dad was on sabbatical.” I turned the ring. “We had him to ourselves for a month and he took us all to Tulum for two weeks of it. He’s been a bunch of times for work. He took us all to the ruined city and spent a whole day telling us about it.
“It’s hot. It’s so hot. Your whole body goes loose. You can’t wear much. You drink water all day. The stone is warm when you touch it. Everything smells like dust and the ocean.”
“Dad couldn’t walk past a wall without telling us who built it, how, and why. Mom just let him. Jane and I had our dad telling us about the things he loved best, and our mom along for company.
“We sat on the dirt floor inside The Temple of the Descending God. It’s a tiny space. Smaller than a garden shed. Just four walls and a carving of the little upside-down Bee God coming down out of the sky. Me and Mom and Jane sat on the dirt floor together and Dad showed us the carving, and told us all about how the Maya kept stingless bees inside hollow logs, and how the bees and temple were sacred to them.”
“I was sitting on a dirt floor five-thousand kilometers away from Vancouver. I was at the far end of the world and I was home. Home because…” I trailed off.
“Home because mom had one arm around me and one around my sister and our dad was telling us about some half-forgotten bee-god.” I finished in a rush.
“I went back by myself after. After Dad was done giving us the anthropology professor version of it. I wanted to walk where the Mayans had walked. I wanted to feel the stone under my hands. I wanted the dust on me.”
“It sounds like you loved it,” said Trevor.
“I did.”
I turned the ring twice.
“There’s a big temple on the cliff. Right on the edge. You can climb up behind it and kind of wedge yourself in between the wall and the drop. The ocean was that perfect colour, Trevor, exactly as Jules said. There was just ocean and wind and—”
I stopped.
“And?” said Trevor.
“And nothing. I just sat up there.”
“Oh yeah?” said Trevor.
“It’s embarrassing.”
“Good,” said Trevor. “Tell us every little embarrassing detail about it.”
I pulled at the rug. My face was hot.
“I sat up there daydreaming I was the God-Queen of Tulum,” I said to the rug.
“The God-Queen of Tulum,” said Trevor.
“Extremely serious business. I had duties. Obligations.”
“What kind of obligations,” said Jules.
“Good governance. Good fortune. Good fishing. Good harvests.” I couldn’t look up. “I had companions.”
“What kind of companions,” said Trevor.
“A priest-king. In charge of gifts from the land. He chanted and drummed. Wrote poems. Sang.” I turned the ring. “Ensured fertility of the land.”
“Ensured it how,” said Trevor.
“The usual ways.”
“And?” said Jules.
“A sea-king. Boats. Fishing. Negotiating with distant city-states. Ensuring fertility of the sea.”
“Also in the usual ways,” said Jules.
“Obviously. When his sails came in, the city knew I would stand on the steps of my temple to receive him.”
“To receive him,” said Trevor.
“Yes.”
“Ceremonially.”
“Very ceremonially.” I looked up. “You need both. A sea-king and a priest-king. None of my subjects thought there was anything unusual about any of it. That was the order of things.”
Trevor’s hand came up and covered his mouth. Jules looked at the ceiling.
“We’d only just moved in here together when I had that daydream,” I said. “I knew exactly what it was telling me.”
I pulled at the rug.
“But I never told anyone. Until now.”
Neither of them said anything. Trevor’s shoulders were shaking slightly.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” I said. “Both of you.”
“No,” said Jules. His voice was careful. “It’s adorable. Can I hear more?”
I tipped my head back against the sofa so I could see him. The corners of his lips quirked.
“Do you have daydreams like that?” I said. “The kind that tell you something you already know but won’t say out loud? The kind you keep to yourself because they feel silly?”
He looked at me for a long time.
“Yeah,” he said. “I think I know what you’re talking about.”
“I’d love to know what you daydream about,” I said. “If you’d tell me.”
He looked past me at the window.
“You might not believe me if I did.”
“You might be surprised what I’d believe.”
He was quiet.
“I think about you,” he said.
The rain on the glass. The black wet cedars. At the table Trevor had not moved.
“I think about tying you. I think about you not being able to stop me. Not being able to pull away. Not being able to decide, in the middle of it, that you’re done. I think about taking you all the way through it whether you think you can or not.”
“I think about taking you somewhere I’ve always wanted to go. Somewhere I’m afraid to go by myself.”
I thought about the scarf at Whistler and the silk tied to the bedpost. Him saying I didn’t have to balance. I didn’t have to hold myself up. I could let the silk take my weight.
“Something like the scarf?” I said.
He looked at me.
“Yeah. Something like that,” he said, dropping his eyes.
Trevor tipped his head back and blew out a long breath at the ceiling.
“Yeah. No.. That’s not quite what he means, Ells.”
You’re reading the free version of this story. Free versions update monthly and don’t include bonus chapters, extended scenes, or the uncensored content.
Subscribers get weekly updates, instant access to every WIP and completed book, and all the bonus content I can’t put here. You’ve already missed 1 Bonus Chapter!
And if subscriptions just aren’t possible for you, message me (email in my profile). I might be able to do something special for you.-
