Night Tide

The town of Dune Haven goes quiet in late November, and I do mean quiet, the kind of quiet where you can stand at the front desk of the Sandpiper Motel for three hours and hear nothing but the furnace clicking and the wind dragging sand across the parking lot. I'm Luce Ames, thirty-four years old, and I've worked the desk here for three seasons now, which is long enough to know that the off-season guests are a strange and wonderful breed, salesmen who got lost, birders chasing some gull nobody else cares about, and once a man who only wanted to know if we had a phone book.

I live in the little apartment above the office, so my commute is a flight of stairs and my commute home is the same flight of stairs backwards. I eat a lot of soup. I watch a lot of television. And on long empty nights like this one I do a lot of thinking, which is sometimes a blessing and sometimes the exact opposite.

Here's the thought that kept coming back to me that particular night, the one I'd been shuffling to the back of the drawer for years and years. I've dated men. In my twenties I dated a handful of them, some nice, some not, one who cried at a seafood restaurant for reasons I never learned. It was fine, mostly fine, fine in the way a frozen dinner is fine. But every so often, and more often the older I got, I'd catch myself looking at a woman on the beach or at the gas station or in the checkout line at the IGA, and I'd feel this slow warm pull in my chest that I never once felt looking at a man. I never did anything about it. I never even said it out loud. I just knew it was there, sitting in the corner of my life like a suitcase nobody claimed, and I figured it would sit there forever, because in a town of nine hundred people in the off-season, where exactly does a girl go to find out?

That night the rain had quit around six and the sky went that flat gray-pink color that makes the whole coast look as though it belongs to another era. I had my feet up on the spare chair behind the desk, a paperback I'd read twice open on my lap, when headlights swung across the office window and a car I didn't recognize crunched into the lot. I heard the door of it slam and boots on the walkway, and then the bell over our front door did its little jangle, and in came a woman shaking rain off a green canvas jacket.

She was thirty-something, tallish, dark hair cut short and pushed back like she'd been fighting the wind all day and winning some of the rounds. A camera bag hung off one shoulder, the big kind with the worn straps, and she had that look I'd learned to recognize, the look of somebody who had been outside all day and liked it.

"Hey there," she said, coming up to the desk and propping the camera bag on the floor with a thump. "One room, just the one night. You got anything with a decent view, or is that a lost cause in November?"

"We've got a second floor corner room that looks right at the water," I said, sliding the register book toward her. "The dune grass is dead but the ocean hasn't gone anywhere."

She laughed at that, a real laugh, and I liked her immediately. "Sold. How much is the ocean running these days?"

"Seventy-eight with tax, and I'll throw in my personal recommendation for the chowder place two blocks down, since it's the only place open."

While she dug out her card I watched her sign the book, and that's when it hit me, that sideways feeling of a name being familiar before you've even read it. Sierra Fulton. I stared at the letters and something in my brain scrolled back ten years like a receipt printing out of a machine.

"Okay, this is going to sound random," I said, "but did you ever take a photography class at Tillamook Community College? Like ten years ago, evening class, the one with the guy who wore the same three flannel shirts?"

She looked up from the book and her whole face changed, eyebrows going up, and she pointed at me with the pen still in her hand. "No way. You were in that class. You sat by the window. Luce, right? You did that whole series of shots of the crab boats?"

"Sixteen shots of crab boats," I said, feeling my face go warm. "Nobody else got it. Professor gave me a B minus."

"He gave everybody a B minus, it was his whole personality. Sierra." She stuck her hand across the desk and we shook like it was a job interview, which made us both laugh. "Man, that was a lifetime ago. What are you doing here, are you local?"

"I work here, I live upstairs, it's a whole glamorous situation. What about you, are you shooting something around here?"

"The winter shoreline erosion, there's a magazine piece about it, how the coast keeps eating itself and everybody just shrugs." She leaned an elbow on the desk and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "I've got two weeks of it, actually, working my way down the coast, so I'm only here tonight. I booked online because I figured I'd find the good light first, but honestly your motel almost makes me wish I'd booked longer. It's got character."

"The character is mostly a furnace that moans," I said. "But it grows on you."

I gave her the key and pointed her up the outside stairs, and she carried her bag off into the gray evening while I stood there at the desk feeling something I hadn't felt in a while, which was glad, plainly glad, that another human being had walked into my quiet. It wasn't anything yet. It was just a laugh and a handshake and a shared memory of a bad flannel shirt. But the office felt less empty after she left, and I made myself some soup and thought, well, that's a nice little bonus for a Tuesday.

She came back down around eight, when the chowder place had closed and the town had folded up its sidewalks, and she stood at the counter in a gray sweater and her green canvas jacket with her hands wrapped around a paper cup of motel coffee like it was the only warm thing in Oregon.

"That chowder was amazing, by the way, thank you. Then everything closed at seven thirty like the whole town has a bedtime."

"It does. Dune Haven goes to bed at seven thirty and I respect it deeply." I came around the counter and sat on the edge of it, because there was nobody else in the world to serve and sitting on the desk is the one perk of being the whole staff. "How was the light today?"

"Terrible, it was perfect." She smiled into her coffee. "Storm light, you know, everything gray and mean. Do you still shoot?"

I shook my head. "The camera lives in a drawer now. Life kind of happened sideways for a few years and I never picked it back up. What about you?"

"Full time, more or less. Nobody gets rich photographing erosion but I eat." She looked at me for a moment, not in any heavy way, just curious, and then she said, "You look exactly the same, by the way. Same face, just, older, in a good way. I hope that came out right."

"It came out right," I said, laughing a little. "You look different, short hair, and it suits you, I should mention."

We talked for I don't even know how long, an hour maybe, two. About the class, about the professor's flannels, about her decade of driving up and down the coast, about my decade of doing considerably less. The coffee got cold and she made more and the furnace moaned on schedule and it was easy, so easy, the way talking to a woman always was for me, and somewhere in the middle of all that easy talking I noticed the thought sitting up straight in my chest, the suitcase thought, the one I'd never said out loud in my whole life.

And maybe it was the hour, or the rain starting up again on the office roof, or just the fact that she was leaving in the morning and the whole thing had no consequences attached to it, but I heard myself say, "Can I tell you something kind of out of nowhere?"

"Please," she said, settling back in the chair.

"I've always wondered what it would be like to be with a woman. Like, always. I've never done anything about it, I've never even told anybody, I just sit up here and wonder." My face was hot but I didn't take it back. "And you're the first person I've ever wanted to say that to."

Sierra set her cup down slowly on the counter, and she didn't laugh and she didn't look shocked, she looked at me with an expression I'd never been on the receiving end of before, warm and steady and a little bit delighted.

"Well," she said softly. "That's a big thing to hand somebody at eight o'clock on a Tuesday."

"I know. I'm sorry, you don't have to do anything with that, I just, it came out."

"No, don't apologize!" She turned her chair to face me fully. "Can I ask you one thing before anything else?"

"Sure."

"Is this something you actually want, tonight, with me? Or is it just a confession you've been carrying and it needed somewhere to go? Because those are two different things and I only want to hear about the first one."

I thought about it, honestly thought, while the rain ticked on the roof. "It's the first one," I said. "It's been the first one for a long time."

She nodded, slow, and then she smiled that real smile again. "Okay then. Here's how I'd like to do this. We go slow, we talk the whole way, and any time you say stop or even hesitate, we stop, and that's not a failure, that's just how it works. And when the sun comes up, we're two people who had one good night, and there's no strings and no weirdness, deal?"

"Deal," I said, and my voice came out smaller than I meant it to.

"Okay," she said, and stood up, and held out her hand. "Then come here, Luce, and we'll start with just this."

I took her hand, and it was warm, and I was shaking a little, and she squeezed it once like she could feel that too and didn't mind at all.

She led me over to the couch by the window, the old one with the blanket that smells faintly of the ocean no matter how many times I wash it, and we sat down side by side with a careful little gap between us, like two people on a first date who already knew each other a decade ago, which is exactly what we were.

"This is a nice couch," she said, patting the cushion, and we both laughed, because the couch is a sagging green thing I got free off the curb in Rockaway two summers ago, and it is not nice at all.

"It's terrible," I said. "But it's mine."

"It's perfect. Okay. So before anything happens, I will offer one thing and then we don't have to be solemn anymore." She turned sideways to face me, folding one leg up under herself, and her knee rested light against my thigh. "I've done this once before, a long time ago, when I was twenty-two, and it was wonderful and it ended messy and I haven't been with anyone since, man or woman, so if I seem a little rusty, that's why. And I'm not looking for anything after tonight. I like my life the way it is, driving around, shooting pictures, going home to a cat. And since we're doing information, I got tested at my checkup in September, everything clear, and like I said, nobody since. That's not a speech either."

"Thank you for the information," I said, and I meant it, because the no strings part was the only way my brain could even hold the rest of it, the idea of wanting something and getting it and not having to rearrange my whole small life around it afterward. "I had my physical in the fall, all clear, and there's been nobody for a long time, so we're on the same page there. And I'm not looking either. I'll do another season here and then who knows. So we're agreed, one night, dawn ends it."

"Dawn ends it." She stuck her hand out solemnly and I shook it, and then we were both laughing again and the gap on the couch had gotten smaller without me noticing how.

"So how do we," I started, and stopped, because I genuinely did not know how to finish that sentence. How do we start. How does this go. In all the years of wondering I had somehow never gotten past the wondering to the actual mechanics of a beginning.

"However you want," she said. "We've got all night. Or," and her voice dropped a little, not dramatically, just softer, like turning down a radio, "if it helps, I could just kiss you, and we could see how that feels, and everything after that can wait until it wants to happen."

"Yeah," I said. "I'd like that." And because it felt important to say it plainly, out loud, the way she'd been doing all night, I said, "Yes. Kiss me!"

She smiled, and she reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, which made me shiver for some reason, the simple touch of her fingers near my temple, and then she leaned in slow, giving me every chance in the world to change my mind, and I didn't change my mind, and her mouth found mine.

I had kissed people before, obviously, I dated guys all through my twenties, decent ones and boring ones and one memorable disaster, and I knew what kissing was, I thought. This was not that. Her lips were soft and unhurried and she tasted like the coffee we'd been drinking all evening, and one of her hands came up to rest against my jaw, thumb brushing my cheekbone, and I made some small sound into her mouth that I hope she politely forgets. I kissed her back carefully at first, then less carefully, and my hand found the front of her green jacket and gripped it like I was afraid she'd evaporate.