One Final Wave

Mason was restocking wax bars behind the counter when the bus hissed to a stop outside, and there she was. Annabel, thirty-one, still in her grey driver's uniform with the reflective stripes catching the last of the afternoon light, reading glasses pushed up on top of her head like a little crown. He watched her step down, wave the driver off, and stand there a second looking at the shop like she was memorizing it. Which, to be fair, she probably was. Last week ever.

The sale had gone through in September. Papers signed, money in the escrow account, the buyer a retired couple from Inverness who wanted to turn the place into a fudge shop, of all things. A fudge shop! In a building that had smelled of fiberglass resin and salt for eleven years. Mason had signed without hesitation, because that was the deal, but watching Annabel look at the front windows now, he wondered if she'd signed quite so easily.

She came in shaking snow off her shoulders. Snow, in April, on the northern coast, of course.

"You're still open," she said, frowning at the OPEN sign.

"Technically. Nobody's come in since half two. A man asked if we sold kites." He shrugged. "We don't sell kites. Never have."

"He asked that in a surf shop?"

"He asked that in a fudge shop's future location, I think. Hard to say."

She laughed and came around the counter, and he kissed her, quick, the way you do after eleven hours of driving a bus full of schoolkids from Thurso. Her cheeks were cold. Her hands were colder. She'd left her gloves on the bus, he'd bet money on it, she left her gloves everywhere, the shop had a drawer full of gloves she'd abandoned over the two years of living together, and on Monday that drawer would belong to strangers.

The party was at seven, out at the old Fraser barn, her school reunion, a whole year group's worth of people she mostly didn't like getting drunk under a rented heater. They'd agreed to go. It would be the last time most of these people ever saw either of them, and Annabel had been strangely excited about it all week in the way she got excited about things that didn't matter, painting her nails, trying on three dresses and asking which one said I escaped.

At four o'clock a couple came in. Older, dry-looking, the man in a coat that probably cost more than the shop's monthly lease. They walked the length of the store without speaking. The woman picked up a longboard fin and put it down. The man looked at the repair counter, looked at the price list, looked at the floor.

"Buying or browsing?" Mason asked, cheerful, because what did it matter anymore.

"Just looking," the man said, and they left, and the door bell rang behind them with its stupid cheerful jingle, and the final open house was over. One man asking about kites. One couple just looking.

Annabel turned the sign to CLOSED herself and left the deadbolt alone. Then she stood there with her hand still on the latch, and Mason could see something working behind her face, some idea forming, and he knew better than to interrupt it. Four years he'd known her, but it felt like twenty-nine sometimes, and when she went quiet like that you just waited.

"Come here," she said, and took his hand, and pulled him through to the back room.

The back room was inventory and repairs, racks of wetsuits in descending sizes, the ding-repair bench with its lamp, boxes of leashes, the smell of wax and neoprene. She shut the door partway and leaned against the repair bench and looked at him with that look.

"We have two hours," she said. "Reunion's at seven, barn's twenty minutes away, and I refuse to show up smelling like a wetsuit, so two hours, minus shower time."

"Ninety minutes, then."

"Ninety minutes." She bit her lip. She was doing the thing where she talked fast when she was nervous. "Okay, so. I've been thinking. About the shop, and about us, and about before us, actually."

"Sounds ominous."

"Let me finish! So. You know how I used to be? Before we moved in together, before the mortgage and the van and the Monday shop accounts. I used to be fun. I used to be reckless. I used to walk into parties like I owned them." She gestured at the ceiling, at the world in general. "And I know the sale is done, I know, I signed it, we both signed it, and I'm not trying to undo it or feel bad about it or make it a whole thing. It's done. But this is the last night this room is ours, and there are going to be people walking past that window all evening getting drunk in a barn, and I had this idea, and you can say no, obviously, you can absolutely say no."

"Annabel."

"Let me say it before I lose my nerve." She took a breath. "I want to play the old game. The one from that weekend in Oban, remember, where we pretend we don't know each other? I want to be a stranger who came in out of the snow. And I want the back room door left open. Not wide, just ajar. And I want you to watch me. From in here, in the dark, while I undress out there in the shop, slowly, like you've never seen me before. Like a stranger watching a woman she doesn't know get ready for something."

Mason leaned back against the doorframe. His mouth was dry, which was ridiculous, they'd been together four years, she'd seen him do everything there was to see, and still his mouth went dry.

"The door open," he said.

"Ajar. Just a crack. Enough that if anyone walks past on the path to the barn, which they will, people start drifting over around six, they might see. Might. That's the fun of it, the might." She looked at him steadily. "Nobody will, probably. It's a village, they'll all be at the barn. But the possibility of it. That's what I want. I want to feel like there's a stranger's eyes on me one more time before we become the couple who moved south and stopped being interesting."

"And you want me to be the stranger."

"You'd be better at it than an actual stranger. An actual stranger would be a problem." She grinned, and it cracked the nervousness right open. "I want you watching, and I want you wanting me, and I want to pretend for one hour that we haven't already memorized each other. That's it. That is the idea in its entirety. If you hate it, we shower, we go to the barn, I drink two glasses of warm prosecco and come home."

"I don't hate it."

"You look like a man doing arithmetic."

"I'm trying to remember if the path light works. The one by the gate. If anyone does walk past, I'd rather they see you and not me lurking in the dark like a burglar."

She laughed, loud, delighted, the laugh he was going to miss when the shop was fudge and the house was someone else's. "It works. I changed the bulb in October, remember, you held the ladder and complained about your knees."

"My knees are a legitimate concern."

"So." She pushed off the bench. "Yes or no? Because if yes, I'm going to go out there and stand by the window in my uniform, and I'm going to take it off very, very slowly, and you are going to stay in this room and not make a single sound, no matter what."

"Yes," Mason said. "But come here first."

She came. He kissed her, quick and ordinary, the way they kiss each other before work, and she pulled back grinning.

"That doesn't count," she said. "You're not supposed to know me yet."

"Then get out of my back room, stranger."

She went. Mason dragged a crate of foam blanks over near the racks of wetsuits and sat down on the stack, which wobbled and then held. The room was dark except for the thin line of light coming under the door and the grey glow of the window beyond it. Through the gap she'd left, about three inches of shop was visible, and Annabel, and the window, and beyond the window the path and the gate and the bulb she'd changed in October burning its little cone of yellow down onto the frost.

"Can you see me?" she called, in her own voice.

"Aye."

"Then stop talking! You're a stranger, strangers don't chat!"

She turned to face the window, which was also, roughly, facing the door, and began. She unzipped the grey uniform jacket first, the one with the reflective stripes, and she did it slowly, the way she'd done the zip of the smock in Oban that weekend, inch by inch, looking at her own reflection in the glass the whole time. Mason could see her throat move when she swallowed. Under the jacket she had on the white shirt she wore under the uniform, because the bus depot was cold in the mornings and she never dressed for the afternoon.

She took her reading glasses off her head and put them on.

Mason nearly laughed. "What are those for?" he said, and then remembered he was a stranger and shut up.

"For seeing," she said anyway, glaring in the direction of the door without actually looking at it, because looking at it would ruin it. "I want to see myself properly. I want to see what a stranger would see." She turned her head side to side in front of the window, checking her reflection, and the lamplight from the repair bench caught the frames and threw two small shadows on the glass. It was such a Annabel thing to do, bringing her glasses into a game like this, all practical, that Mason had to press his thumb hard into his own knee to keep quiet.

Outside, on the path, gravel crunched.

Annabel froze with one hand on her top button.

Mason froze too, on his stack of blanks, hands flat on his thighs, absolutely still. Through the gap in the door he could see her whole body had stopped, one button half undone, head tilted, listening. The crunch came again, closer, and then a shape moved into the cone of light from the path lamp, an older man in a big coat, and behind him a woman, both of them holding leaflets, and it took Mason a second to place them and then he did. The retired couple from Inverness. The buyers. The couple who had signed for the shop in September and were already, judging by the leaflets, planning the fudge.

They were not drifting to the barn. They were walking the path, slowly, the woman pointing at the shop, at the old sign, at the window.

At the window where Annabel stood with her hand on her button.

Later, Mason would not be able to say exactly what Annabel's face did in that second, because he could only see her in profile and three quarters of a dark room. But he saw her throat, and her pulse was visible in it, jumping twice, quick, and then she turned her head and looked straight through the glass at the couple, and they looked at her, a woman in a half-unzipped bus uniform standing in a lit shop at dusk, and nobody moved.

Then Annabel let go of the button.

She didn't do it fast. She did it deliberately, fingers steady, and the shirt fell open the rest of the way down to the second button, the one below that, showing the strip of skin and the white bra underneath, and she stood there and let them see it, chin up, pulse going in her throat, until the man tugged the woman's sleeve and the two of them hurried on up the path toward the barn, coats flapping, walking fast without running.

The gravel faded. The gate clicked. Nothing but the sea sound.

Annabel let out a breath that shivered at the end of it. "Oh my god," she said, quietly, in her own voice, to the window. "Oh my god, oh my god."

"Was that them?" Mason whispered through the gap.

"That was them. That was the fudge people. They saw my bra, Mason, they saw my actual bra, and we signed the final paperwork last month and on Monday I'm handing them the keys over what's about to be a fudge counter and they'll think, that's the bus driver, she showed us her bra." She was laughing, low and helpless, both hands pressed over her face. "I couldn't stop. I don't know why I couldn't stop. My whole body said stop and my hands said no."

"Are you all right?"

"I'm fantastic. I'm appalled. I'm both." She dropped her hands. In the reflection her eyes were enormous. "Don't you dare come out here."

"I wasn't going to."

"You were absolutely going to."