Sand and Salt

We came to Pelican Shores on a Friday in late October, me and Albert, three years married and both of us twenty-eight going on twenty-nine, which we joked about the whole drive down the coast because Albert is eleven months older than me and never lets me forget it. The town was mostly shut up for the season, shutters on the saltwater taffy shop, a CLOSED FOR WINTER sign crooked on the fudge place, and the fog was already leaning on the boardwalk when we pulled into the gravel spot behind our rental cottage. It was one of those clifftop places with salt-stained windows and a woodstove that smelled like somebody else's fires, and I loved it before I even got the door open.

Of course the first thing we did was fight about the bags. Not fight-fight, the way we bicker, which is its own kind of foreplay if I'm honest about it, though Albert would tell you differently.

"You packed the whole trunk like a raccoon did it," he said, hauling a duffel out with one arm and holding it at arm's length like it might bite. "There's a bathing suit in here. Katrina. It's October. In Oregon."

"It's a backup bathing suit," I said, taking the other bag because somebody had to. "You always bring a backup. That's ranger thinking. If the hot tub at the place next door is open, we'll need it."

"The hot tub has been closed since August, I checked the website in the car while you were asleep."

"You checked the website while driving, which is a whole other conversation," I said, and he laughed and dropped the duffel on the bed and the argument dissolved the way ours do, into him grabbing me around the waist and me squirming off, both of us grinning like idiots. That's the thing about Albert. We had met in grad school when he was twenty-three and I was twenty-two and he fell so hard and so fast it embarrassed both of us, and six years later he still grabbed me around the waist in rental cottages like he'd just figured out how.

We got the woodstove going, or he got it going while I unpacked properly, I refolded everything he'd crammed in and he complained from across the room that I was recreating the trunk problem indoors. Around five the fog got thick enough that the ocean was just a sound, and we decided to walk down to the boardwalk and find the one bar that was still lit, a run-down looking place called The Salt Line with a hand-painted sign and a neon OPEN that buzzed pink through the mist.

* * *

The Salt Line was the kind of bar where the ceiling fans turn slowly whether anyone needs them to or not, and the bartender, a big quiet man named Dwayne, nodded at us like we were expected. We took a booth by the window because Albert always takes the booth by the window, and I went up to the bar to order while he read the beer list nobody needed to read.

That's when I saw her. A woman at the far end of the bar, thirty or so, sketching in a fat spiral notebook with a pencil worn down to a stub, a little travel case of paints open beside her glass of white wine. She had paint on her left wrist, actual dried paint, blue and a slash of orange, and she was drawing the fog, or trying to, which seemed impossible and made me want to watch her do it. She looked up right as I was staring, which is the way these things go, and she smiled like she'd caught me and didn't mind.

I took the two beers back to the booth and Albert watched me sit down and then watched me look back over my shoulder, which I hadn't exactly decided to do.

"You keep looking at that artist," he said, easy, no edge in it, just an observation, the way he observes things.

"She's painting the fog."

"Nobody can paint fog."

"Somebody's trying."

He took a slow drink and I could see a dare assembling itself behind his eyes, because that's how Albert flirts with the world, he dares it, and then he said, "Go talk to her. I'll be right here feeling like a third wheel in my own marriage."

"That's a terrible reason to talk to a stranger."

"It's a great reason. We came here to break our routine and our routine is we talk to nobody but each other for eleven months a year." He turned my stool slightly with one hand, aiming me at the bar like a piece of furniture. "Go on. Tell her the fog has beaten better artists than her."

So I went, because he asked, and because I wanted to, and I want to keep those two things separate on the page even though they weren't separate at all. I sat one stool down from her and said the fog had beaten better artists than her, and she laughed this low unbothered laugh and turned the notebook so I could see.

"They all think that," she said, "and then they see the finished piece. I'm Sakura. Thirty-one, currently unmoored, formerly of four coastal towns in two years."

"Katrina. Twenty-eight, extremely moored, married to the man in the booth who is pretending not to watch us."

"Oh, he's watching," Sakura said, without looking, and she was right, he was, over the rim of his glass. "Does it bother you?"

"Which part?"

"That he watches. That I noticed."

"Neither," I said, and found it was true. "Both are kind of flattering, honestly."

Sakura closed the notebook and turned on her stool to face me fully, wine in hand, and she had a way of giving you her whole attention that felt like sitting in front of a fire. Dwayne drifted down the bar and she ordered another round for the three of us and asked what we were celebrating, and I told her our anniversary, six years, three of them married, and she said anniversaries were the only holiday she believed in.

Albert came over with his beer when she waved him down the bar, and the three of us ended up wedged at the end of the counter because the stools were better for talking than the booth, and somehow we got onto the subject of desire, maybe because Sakura asked questions nobody asks. She asked how we'd met and Albert told the grad school story and she listened with her chin on her hand like it was a documentary, and then she asked, "Do you ever want things you don't say out loud to each other?"

"Sakura," I said, warning and amused at once.

"I'm serious. I've watched a hundred couples in two years of bars and the happy ones and the unhappy ones differ in exactly one way. The happy ones say the wants out loud, even the strange ones. Even the ones that scare them."

"That's a very convenient philosophy for a woman who travels alone," Albert said, and she laughed her low laugh again.

"Convenient, sure. But think about it. Love doesn't have to be a fence. It can be a lighthouse. It shows you where home is, and you can still sail."

"You sail," Albert said slowly, "and come back."

"Or you sail together and let other boats come alongside," Sakura said, looking at me, then at him, then at me again, and the pink neon hummed and Dwayne wiped a glass that was already clean and the fog pressed on the windows like it wanted in. "I'm not proposing anything. I'm a guest in your anniversary. I'm just saying the water's there."

Albert looked at me across her, and I looked back, and we had been married long enough that a whole conversation happened in about two seconds, and not yet did either of us say anything out loud.

* * *

We walked home through fog that had gotten serious, the kind that made the streetlights into halos with no lamps inside them, and Albert held my hand the whole way and said nothing, and I said nothing, and the silence wasn't the bad kind, it was the kind where you can hear a person thinking. The cottage was cold when we got in and he built up the woodstove while I stood in the kitchen doorway watching him kneel there in his flannel feeding sticks into the fire, and I thought, well, now or never, because Sakura had handed me the words and they were sitting in my mouth getting warm.

"Albert," I said, and he looked up, match still burning, "I want to speak the want out loud."

He blew out the match and set it in the tray and gave me his whole attention the way he does, which is one of the reasons I married him, and he waited, because he's smart enough to know that when I start a sentence like that you don't fill the pause for me.

"I want to know what it's like," I said, "to share you. Just once. Just with her, maybe, if she'd even want that, I don't know that she would, and maybe I don't even want it, maybe I just want to have said it." I laughed a little, because my voice had gone shaky on the last part. "There. It's out. It's on the rug. Somebody pick it up."

He was quiet for a while, long enough that the fire popped twice, and I want it known that I sat there and let him be quiet, because we'd agreed years ago that quiet wasn't an insult in this house, whatever house we happened to be standing in.

"Okay," he said finally. "Huh." He put another split of wood on the fire and watched it catch. "Can I say the want out loud too?"

"That's generally how the exercise works, yes."

"I've thought about it. Since the bar, and honestly, before the bar, since she turned around on that stool. Not the way you'd think. Not me and her. I kept picturing her kissing you and me getting to watch your face while it happened, and I don't know what that makes me but it doesn't feel like a bad thing, it feels like wanting to see you surprised by joy." He looked over his shoulder at me. "Is that the same want as yours?"

"Close enough," I said, "that we should probably sit down."

So we sat down on the little sagging loveseat in front of the woodstove and talked until one in the morning, and I'll spare you the whole transcript, but the shape of it was this. Rules first, feelings second, because that's how Albert does everything, he reads the instructions all the way through before he plugs anything in. Nothing happens without everybody saying yes out loud, each new thing its own yes. We tell each other everything afterward, no editing for comfort. And if anybody at any point says stop or wait, it stops, full stop, no negotiating in the moment. And I added one of my own, which is that nobody touches anybody until somebody says please, because I'd been a park ranger for six years and I believed in signs and boundaries and staying on the trail.

"And she has to want it," I said. "Not perform wanting it. Want it. She's a guest in our anniversary, she said so herself."

"Then we ask her," Albert said, "like reasonable adults, and if she laughs at us we laugh too and buy her breakfast."

"She's leaving town Sunday morning."

"Then we shouldn't wait too long to ask."

I kissed him then, on the mouth, because three years of marriage plus three years before that means I know exactly when a conversation is over, and we went to bed and I lay awake a while listening to the ocean, which was just a sound in the dark, and I felt like I was at the edge of deep water deciding, and the deciding felt like flying.

* * *

The next evening, which was Saturday, we asked her, more or less by accident, which is the most honest way anything has ever happened to me.