Slow Tide

I moved to Saltcliff in October, right after the last of the summer people cleared out. I was twenty-eight and I'd been working as a sommelier at a place in the city for four years, and when the restaurant closed for a remodel I just sort of didn't go back right away. A friend of mine, Dara, knew somebody with a cheap apartment above the boardwalk, and I took it. The sea was gray most days and the boardwalk was half shut up for the season, and I loved it. Quiet evenings, a bottle of something good, the sound of the water hitting the pilings. That was the entire routine.

It was a Tuesday in early November when Dara called me and said a friend of a friend was in town for a few days and I should come have a drink with them at the Sandpiper, the beachfront bar that stayed open all year because the owner was stubborn.

"He's thirty-three," she said. "Recently single, well, sort of recently. Two years ago. He's an architect from the city and he's very tired of his own life, so he came here, which I find funny."

"Everybody comes here to be tired somewhere prettier," I said.

So I went. The Sandpiper that night had maybe six people in it. Dara had bailed by nine, something about an early morning, and that left me and Randall, who turned out to be tall and a little rumpled and easy to talk to. He had a way of asking actual questions instead of waiting for his turn to talk, which I noticed right away because it's rare.

I was sitting at the bar with a glass of something Spanish when he got up from our table and came over and slid onto the stool beside mine instead of staying put.

"You look like someone who knows her wine," he said.

I laughed. "That's my whole job, actually. I'm a sommelier. Or I was until about a month ago. Now I'm a lady who stares at the ocean."

"Sounds like a promotion," he said, and I liked him a little more for it.

We stayed at the bar. He told me about his firm and the project that had eaten two years of his life, and I told him about the chef I'd had a thing with in Portland when I was twenty-four, short and intense and over in a season, which was the last time I'd let myself get complicated with anyone. I mentioned it early because I'd rather a man know my history up front than find it later and act surprised.

At some point I looked at him and just said it. "Do you want to come back to my place for a nightcap? I've got better bottles than this place will ever stock, and honestly I've been wanting someone to share a quiet evening with. The whole off-season thing gets lonely."

He smiled at me slowly. "Yeah. I'd like that a lot."

We walked the four blocks along the boardwalk, past the shuttered ice cream stand and the bait shop, and the wind off the water was cold enough that he offered me his jacket, which was a corny move but I took it anyway. My apartment was on the second floor of an old shingled house, and the living room window was full of the sea, dark and churning under a sky with no stars in it. He stood at the window a minute while I went to the rack.

"I've got a Ribera del Duero," I said. "Big and bold, kind of the opposite of this town. It felt right for tonight."

"Pour it," he said.

I poured. We sat on the couch, not quite touching, and talked about nothing for a while, the wine, the town, his ex the marine biologist who he'd dated from when he was twenty-seven until two years ago and who he still spoke well of, which told me something decent about him. Then I set my glass down on the coffee table and turned toward him.

"I like you," I said. "I want to be plain about that. I'm not looking for anything serious right now and I don't think you are either, but I'd like to kiss you, if you're into it."

"Oh, I'm into it," he said. "Been sitting here trying to figure out how to ask you the same thing."

So I leaned in and we kissed. It was slow at first, just mouths, his hand coming up to the side of my face, and I let it stay slow because slow was kind of the whole mood of the night. Then it heated up. His tongue found mine and I made a small noise into his mouth and he pulled me closer, one hand flat against my back, and I felt the kiss turn from careful to hungry somewhere in the middle of it without either of us deciding. I pulled back enough to breathe and looked at him.

"Come to bed with me," I said. "The bedroom's through there."

"Yeah," he said, a little rough. "Please!"

I took his hand and led him down the short hall, past the kitchen with its one flickering bulb I kept meaning to fix, into my bedroom, where the window showed the same gray sea and the lamp on the