The Towing Order

There were plenty of good reasons not to let a salesman onto my dock at eleven o’clock at night, and I’d said most of them to his face at one time or another, and when my headlights came down the hill he was already standing on it.

I’d left the Chamber dinner before the pie because of a text. It came in during the salad, from my bookkeeper, while a Coast Guard lieutenant commander across the tablecloth was asking about my three-year record, and it said it’s handled, don’t ask me how. A woman who runs a barge fleet knows exactly what those words cost. We’ve never had a lapse, Commander. I’d smiled when I said it, with the phone face down under my hand like something I’d dropped.

And I hadn’t asked. That’s the part. My daddy got turned down for that permit twice for telling the truth about a lapse smaller than this one, and here was his only child about to get it by letting her bookkeeper lie for her and not asking how. I’d had the whole dinner to text back one word. I’d ordered the fish.

So I came down to the fleet after, in the dress, because the river had come up another foot since supper and I check my own lines when it’s up. That’s what I told myself in the truck. That was true. It just wasn’t all of it.

The man on my dock had his back to me, leaning on the rail, looking at the water like he’d paid for it.

“You’re trespassing,” I called down the ramp.

“You left before the pie,” Yannick Prosser called back without turning around.

“I don’t like pie.”

“Everybody likes pie, Bernie.”

“Don’t Bernie me, I’ve known you a month.”

“Six weeks.” He turned around then. “I was in your office the second week of April selling you engine monitors you didn’t want.”

“I still don’t want them.”

“I know,” he admitted, cheerful about it. “I keep coming anyway.”

“I noticed. Everybody in that yard has noticed. Dwayne asked me the other day if you were slow.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“I told him you were from Cincinnati.”

He laughed, and it carried over the water the way a laugh does at night, and I came the rest of the way down the ramp in shoes nobody should wear on a wet dock. The river was a foot under the planks, brown and loud, moving the whole thing under my feet like a floor that was thinking about something. Diesel and mud and wet rope. His white shirt was stuck to him, sleeves rolled, the watch he never takes off, river light on one side of his face.

“You’re soaked,” I noted.

“It’s a river.”

“How’d you get down here? I locked that gate at six.”

“It was open when I got here.”

It wasn’t. I’d put the chain on it myself, in the dress, with Tish’s text in my pocket, and I’d pulled on it twice the way my daddy taught me. I stood there and looked at him and he looked back, easy, and I let it go. I was getting good at that.

“I need to walk my lines.”

“I’ll walk with you.”

“You’ll fall in.”

“Then you’ll have to come in after me,” he grinned.

“I’d let you float to Paducah.”

He walked with me. I went down the dock in the shoes with my phone in my pocket and the river going by under us, and I put my hand on every line where it came over the bollard, the way I do, and everything was holding. My daddy died on this dock, on that bollard, with a cup of coffee in his hand, and the permit he got turned down for twice is on my office wall with my name on it, and it comes up with the summer, and under the new rule it takes a clean three-year record.

It’s handled. Don’t ask me how.

“There you go again,” Yannick murmured.

“Where’d I go?” I squinted at him over my shoulder.

“Somewhere behind your eyes. You do it in the office too. I’ll be in the middle of a sentence about fuel burn and you’re gone.”

“I’m standing right here.”

“You’re standing right here lookin’ at the river like it owes you money.”

“It does owe me money. It owes me about a hundred and ten thousand a month, and it pays late.”

He came up behind me at the rail, close, not touching, and the dock moved under both of us.

“Bernie.”

“Hush.”

“You’re on your phone.”

“I’m reading a text,” I said without looking up. “Still handled. Still don’t know how.”

“Put it down, Bernadette,” he coaxed.

I locked the phone and let it go into the pocket of the dress, where it sat against my hip like a secret, and I turned around.

I put both my palms flat on his chest the way I’d put them on a bulkhead to feel an engine through it. Cold, through the wet shirt. His heart going under it, not fast. Mine was.

“What do you want, Yannick?” I asked quietly.

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

“I want to know why a woman who runs six hundred barge slots came down to her dock at eleven o’clock at night in a dress like that.”

“I checked my lines. You watched me.”

“In that dress.”

“I was at a dinner.”

“I was at the same dinner,” he reminded me.

“Bernie.” He said it like he was setting something down careful. “You looked at me across that room for an hour like I was a bill you hadn’t decided whether to pay.”

And Lord, he wasn’t wrong, which is the most aggravating thing a man can be.

He’d walked into my office in the spring with a laptop bag and a smile, and the answer had been no every week since, and somewhere along the way there was a morning I caught myself fixing my hair in the window glass because his truck had turned in off Wayne Sullivan Drive.

A salesman. On my dock, behind a gate I’d chained myself. With the permit on the wall and a text in my pocket.

“Say what you came to say,” I told him.

“I didn’t come to say anything. I came because you looked at me.”

“Then why are you still talking,” I breathed.

He got the joke a half second late, and the way his face changed when he got it, I felt it low in my belly, that drop, the one you get when a boat comes off a wave. He put a hand on the side of my neck and his thumb under my jaw and he kissed me, and it wasn’t a salesman’s kiss. It wasn’t polite. He kissed me like a man who’d been told no all spring and had been keeping count.

I opened my mouth under his and I was gone.

Not all the way gone. That’s the trouble with me. I had my hands in his wet shirt and my hips against his and his tongue on mine, and some part of me was standing off to the side with a clipboard, the way I stand on the hill and watch Dwayne land a string, and that part of me said, you don’t know this man.

I pulled back.

“What?” His voice was rough.

“Nothing.”

“Bernie,” he pressed, gently.

“I said nothing.”

He didn’t argue. He stood there with his hands on my hips and let me look at him, and down the dock a harbor boat cycled her generator and the lights dimmed and came back. He didn’t say anything nice. That’s what undid me.

I put my mouth back on his.

This time I didn’t stop. He got the knot of the halter loose at the back of my neck with one hand, which he’d no business being able to do, and the top of that dress came down and the river air hit my breasts and my nipples went hard before his hands ever got there. He looked. He didn’t hurry and he didn’t pretend not to.

“Jesus, Bernie,” he breathed.

“Don’t say anything nice.”

“Wasn’t gonna.” He put his mouth on me. “Was gonna say I’ve been thinking about these since the first day I walked in your office and I’m not even a little bit sorry.”

“That’s nice.”

“That’s honest.”

“Same thing in a man,” I sighed.

He laughed against my nipple and the laugh did something, and then his mouth did something else, and I had one hand in his hair and the other one holding onto the dock rail behind me so I wouldn’t go over into the Ohio River topless in a Chamber of Commerce dress. My breath went. My knees did a thing. I heard a sound come out of me and it wasn’t a sound I make.

“Talk to me,” he said into my skin.

“About what,” I panted.

“Anything. I like your voice. Tell me what you want.”

“I want you to quit asking me what I want and do what you were doing.”

“That’s not an answer,” he chuckled.

“It’s the one you’re getting.”

He slid his hand up under the dress and found the inside of my thigh and stopped there, right there, with his fingers flat and still, and the stillness was worse than anything. My whole body went looking for that hand.

“Yannick,” I whimpered.

“Mm.”

“Move it.”

“Tell me where,” he whispered.

“You know where.”

“I want to hear it.” He kissed under my ear. “I’ve heard you say no to me forty different ways in six weeks, Bernadette Kilgore. I want to hear you say one yes. Just one.”

I was wet. I was embarrassingly wet, standing up on my own dock with a salesman’s hand an inch from where I needed it, and I’d have sooner gone in the river than tell him so, and my body told him anyway. He moved his hand the inch. His fingers slid over me through the lace and his breath caught against my neck when he felt it.

“That’s a yes,” he murmured.

“That’s not a word.”

“It’s good enough.”

He pushed the lace aside and put his fingers in my pussy standing up, and he didn’t move them, just held them there, in me, and I made the sound again and he smiled against my throat like a man who’d just closed a sale.

“There she is.”

“Shut up.”

“There’s the yes.”

“Yannick, I swear to God,” I moaned.

“Say it.”

“Yes.”

“Yes what,” he pushed, his fingers barely moving.

“Yes, there, yes, don’t you dare stop, yes.”

He didn’t stop. He got his thumb on my clit and his fingers curled up inside me and he talked the whole time, low and filthy and cheerful, which should not go together and did. How wet I was. How long he’d wanted this. What he’d thought about in his truck in my lot with the engine running. His voice was the thing. His hand was good but his voice was the thing, and I rocked on it, and the dock rocked under us, and the towboat lights came across the water in stripes, and somewhere back behind my eyes the clipboard part of me put her pen down and shut up.

I was close. I was right there. My hand was in the back of his shirt and I was pulling it like I meant to tear it.

He took his hand away.

“No,” I said. It came out like a whine and I didn’t care.

“Not yet,” he said hoarsely.

“Yannick.”

“I want you to come on my dick, not my hand. First time. I’ve waited six weeks, I want to see your face.”

“Then get your pants open.”

“Lord, you’re bossy,” he laughed under his breath.

“I run a barge fleet. Get your pants open.”

He got his pants open. I got my hand on him, hot, hard, the pulse going in him, and he was thick enough that I made a noise that wasn’t about me, and he put his forehead down on my shoulder and swore into my skin, and the swearing wasn’t for my benefit either.

“Where,” he said, strained.

“Here.”

“On the dock.”

“It’s my dock.”

“Bernie, there’s a man on the harbor boat,” he whispered.

“Dwayne’s asleep in the galley with the TV on and he sleeps like he’s been shot.” I had my hand on him the whole time I said it, up and down, and his eyes closed. “Nobody’s on this dock but you and me and the river. Now are you going to fuck me or are you going to sell me something.”

He opened his eyes, and whatever cheerful thing lived in that man’s face was gone. There was something underneath it. Something still. I saw it for one second, and then he turned me around and bent me over the rail, and I forgot I’d seen anything.

The rail was wet and cold under my forearms. He got the dress up over my hips and his hands on my ass and the river was right there, a foot under me, brown and loud, and he lined up and pushed into me slow, an inch, and stopped.

“Talk to me,” he demanded, low.

“I can’t,” I gasped.

“You can. You’ve been talking the whole time. Tell me how it feels.”

“Full.”

“More.”

“Like I waited too long.”

“For what.”

“For this. For somebody. Yannick, please.”

“Please what,” he growled.

“Please fuck me, please, I’m asking, that’s the yes, that’s all of them, please.”

He gave me all of it then, and I said his name into my own forearm so the river could have it. He went slow enough to start that I felt every bit of him, and then not slow, and his hands were on my hips and then on my breasts and then back on my hips, and he was talking again, in my ear, bent over me, how good I felt, how he’d known, how I was his the second I looked at him across that room, and I told him to shut up and I told him don’t stop and I said both of those in the same breath and he laughed and did neither.

It came up through my feet. It started in the arches of my feet on that wet dock and it went in, not out, and I had both hands on the rail and my hair in my face and the whole river in front of me, and I came so hard my knees gave and he held me up by the hips and kept going, and I heard myself, loud, on my own dock, and I didn’t care who heard, and then he said my name once, rough, not cheerful at all, and went still, and then he wasn’t still, and then he pulled out and finished on the backs of my thighs with his mouth on my shoulder and his whole weight on me, and the two of us stood there bent over the Ohio River breathing like we’d run up the hill.

Nobody said anything for a while.

Then he laughed, soft, against my back, and I laughed too, and the dock moved under us, and that was the best part of it. Not the coming. That. Two people laughing on a dock at midnight with their clothes half off.

“I’m not buying the engine monitors,” I said.

“I know,” he said, lazy and warm.

“I’m serious.”

“Bernie, I have never once thought you were going to buy the engine monitors.”

I straightened up and got the dress down over my hips, and he got the halter tied back at my neck, and his fingers were steady doing it, which I noticed. Mine weren’t. I found my phone in the pocket. Still there. Still a text on it. Still handled.

“I’m walking back up.”

“I’ll walk with you.”

“You’ll fall in,” I said, and he grinned, and I didn’t hush him this time.

We walked the dock back the way we’d come. The fleet sat out in the dark in its long strings, riding high on the flood, and the bridge upstream had its red lights on, and for one minute the whole thing was mine and it was all right.

Then I saw the clipboard.

It was lying on the dock by my daddy’s bollard, face up. My towing order, the night sheet that says which barges move and where, with my signature at the bottom because nothing in my water moves without me. I’d signed tonight’s before the dinner and hung it on the hook in the office, and the office was locked, and I had put my hand on that bollard not an hour ago with Yannick Prosser two steps behind me, and there had been nothing on the dock but the dock.

It was wet. The sheet was spotted all over, the ink gone soft at the edges, and the rain had quit before the salad.

I looked at his shirt. He was looking at the clipboard.

I picked it up.

It was tonight’s. My signature. My hand. The moves were right, all of them, the ones I’d written, Dwayne’s string to the outside, the three empties to the Tennessee side.

And at the top of the second page, in the slot where the first move of the night goes, was a barge number I didn’t know.

I know every barge in my water the way you know the cars on your street. This one wasn’t mine. It wasn’t on any manifest I’d been sent, and it was written in a hand that wasn’t mine, to be moved to the inside of the string where nobody would look at it, on a sheet with my name at the bottom.

My name, on paper I hadn’t read. For the second time this year. The first time I’d done it on purpose.

“Bernie?” Yannick was behind me. “What is it?”

I didn’t answer him. I was looking at the number.

“Bernadette,” he said carefully.

Down the dock, the radio on the harbor boat crackled, and Dwayne’s voice came out of it, thick with sleep, saying the one thing a fleet operator never wants to hear on a night with the river up.

“Hill, this is the Marcy K. We got a barge in the string I don’t have paper on.”