Off-Season Lessons

Okay, so let me tell you how I ended up kissing a total stranger on a cold beach in September, because honestly I still can't quite believe it myself.

I'm Linda Forrest, I'm thirty-five years old, and I've been married to Yuri for eight years. Eight! And somewhere in those eight years we turned into two people who communicate mostly through grocery lists and comments about the thermostat. So when my best friend Bonnie offered me her beach cottage in Port Merrick for two weeks, off-season, all to myself, I said yes before she even finished the sentence.

"Go," she said, pushing a key into my hand. "Write your thesis, sleep in, get salt in your hair. You look like a houseplant nobody's watered."

Thanks, Bonnie. Love you too.

* * *

The cottage was perfect, which was almost annoying. Little yellow kitchen, a desk under the window with a view of the dunes, a quilt on the bed that smelled like cedar. I set up my laptop my first night, opened my chapter on coastal sediment transport, and typed four hundred words of absolute garbage.

The problem wasn't the thesis. The problem was me. I kept catching myself staring out the window at the gray water, feeling this hum under my skin like a radio stuck between stations. When was the last time anyone looked at me? Really looked? Yuri used to look at me like I was dessert. Now he regarded me like I was a spreadsheet.

I'm not saying I went to the bar looking for anything. I'm saying that on the third night, after another day of typing garbage, I put on the green dress I'd packed for no good reason and walked down to the Anchor, because it was the only place in town still open past nine.

The Anchor is the kind of place with a dartboard, a crab tank, and a bartender who calls everyone "hon." Off-season crowd, so maybe ten people. I got a stool at the bar and ordered a glass of the local white, and I was halfway through it when the guy next to me turned around and said, "Okay, you've been staring at that crab tank for ten minutes. What's the crab done to you?"

"Nothing!" I laughed. "He's the only one in there who looks like he wants to leave."

"His name's Gerald," the guy said, very seriously. "Gerald is a philosopher. Gerald contemplates the tank wall because he has seen beyond it."

Oh no, I thought. He's cute and he's weird. That's my exact weakness.

He was maybe thirty-three, black hair going everywhere, a face that looked like it spent actual time outdoors, and a hospital-white lab shirt with a little embroidered squid on the pocket. A squid!

"Please tell me that's not ironic," I said, pointing at the squid.

"Marine biologist," he said. "Daniel Wong. I'm out at the cove for another week counting sea stars. The squid is aspirational."

"Linda. And I'm out here for two weeks failing to write a chapter about sediment."

"Ooh, sediment." He wiggled his eyebrows. "Say grain size to me slowly."

I laughed so hard I almost knocked over my wine. We ended up talking for two hours. He was from Seattle, never married, in town doing intertidal surveys before the grant money ran out. He had this way of making everything sound like a story, even the part where he'd gotten seasick into his own sample bag.

"Okay, real question," he said, leaning in. "Tide pools. Best thing on earth or overrated?"

"Best thing on earth," I said immediately. "Are you testing me?"

"I test everyone. Most people fail. They say 'the aquarium' or worse, 'the beach, generally.' The beach generally! Linda, that's not an answer, that's a shrug with sand."

"Well, what's YOUR answer, since you're the professional?"

"Second peak of a minus tide, October, pocket cove, no wind. The whole pool goes still and you can see an anemone's tentacles individually, and there's this moment where you think, nobody else on the planet is looking at this exact configuration of animals right now, it's just me." He shrugged. "It's like church, except with better music and no guilt."

"That's the most romantic thing anyone has said to me about invertebrates."

"It's not even in my top five. Ask me about octopus parenting sometime and you'll need a cigarette."

I finished my second glass and he was on his third local IPA and somewhere in there the bar started emptying out and neither of us mentioned the time. At some point he said, "It's low tide in the morning. Minus point-eight. If you want, I'll show you my church. Seven a.m., end of the public access path."

"At seven in the MORNING?"

"Science waits for no one, Linda!"

"Fine. Seven. But if you stand me up I'm telling Gerald on you."

"Gerald would be devastated. He'd have to start his whole philosophy over."

I walked back to the cottage that night grinning like an idiot at nothing. Two weeks to write a thesis chapter and here I was, day three, planning a seven a.m. date with a man who had a squid on his shirt. I did feel a little twist of guilt, I won't pretend I didn't. But it was just tide pools. People look at tide pools all the time. It's basically a museum.

* * *

He was there at seven, holding two thermoses and looking smug. "You came. Most people fail."

"Most people aren't me."

The morning was that soft gray-gold that only happens here in September, and the tide was out so far the rocks were all bare and dripping. He was exactly as good as promised. He crouched over pool after pool and narrated like a sportscaster, and I found myself crouching next to him with my sleeves shoved up, genuinely yelping over a chiton.

"Oh my GOD, look at its little teeth!"

"Radula. Eight rows of them. You're one of us now, I'm promoting you."

"Don't promote me, I have enough deadlines."

We walked the whole cove like that, and somewhere along the driftwood line our hands found each other, and neither of us made a big deal about it, and that made it a bigger deal somehow. His hand was warm and his thumb kept brushing my knuckles and my heart was doing a frankly embarrassing amount of work.

At the far end of the beach he stopped and turned to me, and the wind pushed my hair into my face and he tucked it back, slow, like he was asking a question with his hand first.

"Can I kiss you?" he said. "Because I've been wanting to since the crab tank, and I promised myself I'd ask instead of being weird about it."

"You've wanted to since the crab tank?" I laughed. "That's at least an hour before I was kissable, I had wine breath and wind hair."

"Linda. You could have had seaweed in your teeth."

"Well then. Yes. Kiss me, for God's sake, before I lose my nerve."

And oh, he kissed me. He kissed me like the tide pool thing, all his attention in one place, one hand cradling my jaw and the other at the small of my back pulling me in against his coat. Cold air, warm mouth. I emitted a noise into it that I will never acknowledge, and when we separated I was clutching the front of his squid shirt like it was a ship's railing.

"Wow," I said. "Okay. That's. Um."

"Yeah," he agreed.

I looked up at him, at that windblown mess of hair, and something in me that had been humming under my skin for three years went quiet and then rang instead, loud, as if a bell had been struck. I knew exactly what I wanted. Terrifying, but true.

"Daniel," I said, "there's a cottage about a mile up that road, and it has a very comfortable bed, and I'm thirty-five years old and I know what I'm doing. Do you want to come back with me?"

He didn't even blink. "Linda, I would follow you off this beach if you were walking into the ocean."

"That can be arranged. I know a great tide pool."

"Show me everything," he said, and took my hand, and we walked back up off the sand fast, like the tide was coming in after us.

The walk to the cottage took about four minutes and we talked the whole time, which sounds crazy, but we did. He asked if I was sure. Twice.

"Daniel, I drove nine hours to get away from my life, and then I met you, and I'm telling you yes. Ask me one more time and I'm going to push you in a tide pool."

"Okay. Okay. Just checking. Enthusiastic yes is my favorite kind."

Inside, the cedar smell of the quilt and the gray light through the window, and he stood there in his ridiculous squid shirt like he wasn't sure where to put his hands. I fixed that. I pulled the shirt up over his head and he helped, laughing, and then we were pressed together on the bed and it was clumsy and warm and real.

"Can I take this off you?" he asked, fingers at the hem of my green dress.

"Yes. God, yes."

He pulled the dress over my head and simply gazed at me for a moment, and you know how that can either be wonderful or horrible? It was wonderful. He regarded me like I was the day's good news.

"You're so beautiful, Linda. Can you tell? Do you know?"

"I'm starting to," I said, and my voice came