Tide Pool Tryst

Mila was twenty-seven years old and had been guiding rivers and coastal trails out of Bar Harbor for five summers, and in all that time she had never once had a client show up at the lodge for dinner a week early.

"Here it is," she said, running her finger down the reservation book. "Brady Bryant. Party of one. Next Friday. Today's the twelfth, sir."

Brady stood there in his brand-new hiking boots, still clean, still stiff, and he looked as though he had just driven four hours from Portland for nothing. He was twenty-nine, tall, dark-skinned, with a short beard and glasses he kept pushing up his nose. He'd booked the full guided package, the coastal hike, the lodge dinner, the whole thing, and he had the email confirmation right there on his phone.

"It says the twelfth," he said.

"It says the nineteenth," Mila said, tilting the screen toward the hostess.

The hostess, a heavy woman named Dot who had been there since before Mila was born, squinted at it and shrugged. "Kitchen's booked solid tonight, hon. Big wedding party. Nothing I can do."

"Great," Brady said. "Just great."

He didn't yell. Mila liked that. A lot of guys would have yelled. He just laughed, a short rough laugh, and put the phone in his pocket as a man would who accepts a losing hand at cards.

"Okay," he said. "So I drove four hours, paid for two nights at a campground that's basically a gravel lot, and I get no dinner and no hike."

"Whoa, hold on," Mila said. "The hike's still on, I'll fit you in whenever you're up for it. It's just the dinner that's dead."

He looked at her. She was still in her guide clothes, canvas pants and a fleece with the outfitter's patch on the chest, her brown hair yanked back in a tie. She was white, freckled across the nose, and she knew these rocks better than anybody on the peninsula.

"You got a plan," he said. It wasn't a question.

"I got a truck, a snow shovel in the bed of it, and about four hours before sunrise," she said. "That's a plan."

Dot called after them something about the wedding party eating all the chowder, but they were already out the door.

The truck was a rust-colored Ford with two hundred thousand miles on it and a shovel, a tow strap, and a cooler rattling around in the bed. Mila grabbed the shovel and a headlamp off the floorboard and handed him a second headlamp.

"There's a private trail down to a cove about a mile east," she said. "Old gate, padlocked. Nobody's used it since the family that owned it moved to Florida. Gate's buried under sand half the time anyway. Shovel takes care of that. The lock takes care of itself if you know what you're doing."

"That sounds like breaking and entering," Brady said, buckling the headlamp on.

"It sounds like a snow shovel," she said. "Get in."

He got in. The truck smelled like old coffee and rope, and he said so.

"It smelled like old coffee and rope before you got in and it'll smell like it after," she said. "Buckle up."

They bumped down a dirt track in the dark, the headlights picking out spruce trunks and potholes, and she talked the whole way, easy, the way she talked to clients, except it wasn't the client talk. She asked him about the museum. He was a curator, some kind of maritime collection in Portland, and he'd been there nine years.

"Honest answer?" he said over the engine noise. "I booked this trip because I couldn't stand one more morning of cataloguing anchor chains. There's a drawer in that building with two hundred brass buttons in it. Two hundred. I've looked at every single one."

"So you came to Maine to look at rocks instead."

"Rocks that move. Tide's a thing. Buttons don't do anything."

Mila laughed. She laughed a lot, loud, and she didn't apologize for it. "You're a city boy, you know that? A city boy with a button drawer."

"I own one pair of hiking boots and I bought them Tuesday."

"I can tell. They're gonna eat your feet alive tomorrow."

The gate was where she said it'd be, sagging between two granite posts, half buried in windblown sand and blown spruce needles. She got the shovel out and went at it, and Brady took a turn too, and between them they dug the bottom bar free in about ten minutes. Then she knelt in the sand with a coat hanger she'd straightened out, and in another two minutes the padlock clicked open.

"Guide school?" he asked.

"Cousin had a junkyard. Different skill set, same locks."

She pocketed the coat hanger and swung the gate wide.

The trail dropped through spruce and then over bare granite, and it was dark enough that the headlamps made a small world of white light with nothing around it. Mila went first, calling out the bad spots. Root. Loose rock. Step down, big step. Brady paid attention and didn't fall once, which she told him was better than average.

"Most guys your build end up on their can by the third switchback."

"My build?"

"Office build. Button-drawer build."

"Damn," he said, and she could hear him grinning in the dark.

Then the trees quit and the sound changed, that low steady push of the Atlantic, and they came out on the shelf of rock above the cove. The stars were thick. The horizon was a hairline of gray getting ready to become something.

"This way," she said. "Watch your feet."

She picked down the last slope to the pool she'd found when she was twenty-two, her first season, and never brought a soul to. It sat between two barnacle-crusted boulders, maybe eight feet across, sheltered from the open water by a rock spine, filling and spilling with every surge. In the starlight the water was black glass.

"Okay," she said, shrugging out of her jacket and kicking off her boots. "Fair warning. It's cold."

"Cold how?"

"Maine in April cold. Low forties. Maybe high thirties."

"In the water?"

"In the water." And she waded in.

The sound she made was a yell and a laugh at the same time, and then she was in to her waist, gasping, whooping, splashing water at nothing as a child might at a birthday party, and Brady stood on the edge with his boots on and watched her. Her skin was pale in the daylight but out here, under the stars, wet, it had a dark gleam to it, and her shirt clung to her and she did not care one bit.

"You are insane," he called.

"You are dry!" she yelled back. "Get in, city boy!"

He got in. His whole body seized at once and he made a noise that started high and dropped two octaves.

"Oh my God. Oh my God, that is not water, that is a punishment."

"Welcome to Maine!" She was laughing so hard she had to grab the boulder. "Breathe. It's fine. It's fine in a minute."

It was not fine in a minute, but it got to be tolerable, and then it got to be something else, because she was right there, close, and the water was only a thing they were both standing in. He got a look at her face up close and she got a look at his, and the laughing slowed down but didn't stop all the way.

His hand came up, slow, and he touched her arm where the water ran off it. His fingers were dark against her wet skin and she looked at where they touched and then up at him.

"You're shivering," he said.

"I'm always shivering. I live in Maine." She didn't move away. "You want to kiss me or keep worrying about my temperature?"

"I want to kiss you," he said, plain, no