I want you to be able to find me. I want you to change your mind.
There’s a phone number and an email address. No name.
I stand there, holding the scrap of paper while the warm breeze flutters it and my hair. I feel shaky, off balance, knowing she’s gone and this—whatever it’s been—is over. Unless… I turn the paper over and over in my hands. Unless…
Back in my lair, in my world, surrounded by the mundane things of my life, I unfold that piece of paper again. For months it’s lain ignored at the bottom of a drawer, crushed beneath keep-sakes: a necklace of shells, a miniature wood carving of some bird decorated with colored glitter and varnish, as useless and exotic as these things.
But the souvenirs haven’t haunted me, taunted me silently every time I pass the drawer.
With the email I find a picture online and an offer to click her into my life. But it feels too intimate yet, and too cheap. “Friended.” Easy, acceptable, uncomplicated, banal.
Instinct, intuition tells me it’s not what she would want either, if she even still wants anything of me.
I close my eyes for a moment against the pain of that thought. When I open them again, I find the phone number instead. The letters bleed black over the white screen of my phone, glare at me impatiently until a tap of my thumb on the keypad sends them flying beyond my reach, into the impossible.
Tell me where to find you. Tell me how.
I steer the rental car, top down, along miles of highway under a relentless sun. Horses and brown dirt and scrubby grass roll by. Where the land slopes into pretend hills piney trees crowd its face. Cattle drowse in the meager shade behind wire fences. This is her country. Wide open spaces, amazing in their sparseness.
She sent me an address, directions, dates. She didn’t have to tell me she would be there alone.
The gates of the property are open. I drive up to the house at the edge of the lake, and she comes up from the waterfront and around the side of the house, like a nymph from her domain, to meet me. Hair loose and half dry in distracting tangles, T-shirt damp and revealing dark nipples, skin kissed by the sun into gentle bronze, hinting at some heritage native to this wild, sun-baked land.
If I thought her beautiful in the exotic tropics, here in her habitat she is beyond words, beyond my power to do anything but gape and stare and sweat, feeling ridiculous and old for having come this far in my pearl earrings and khakis. For what?
“It’s insane, but I’ve missed you. God, you look like fucking Jackie Kennedy,” she says as she kisses me, getting lake water all over my perspiration-soaked shirt. Her hand slides up my spine, her tongue into my mouth.
I was hot before, but this… this is a different kind of heat. This sears. Incinerates logic and caution and prudence. It withers uncertainty.
I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. But she does.
I lift the T-shirt over her head and her breasts bounce free. I stare. Slowly I reach out to touch, to catch her nipples between my fingers and squeeze. She moans between folded lips.
My thumb slides down the line of her torso, to stomach and navel and the waist of the wet pair of shorts clinging to her hips. She sucks in a breath. Her flesh moves under my hand, and I feel an answering quiver between my legs.
“Undress me,” she says, quietly. Her voice is loud in this silence of wind and water.
“Here?”
She doesn’t answer, and after a moment, I unbutton the shorts. I trace the shape of her pussy through the wet panties hidden under the shorts.
“Mm…” she sighs. I can feel her breath on my cheek and smell her body, a trace of perfume lingering under the scent of earth and water. I smell her arousal as my fingers press the wet cotton into her crotch, rubbing harder.
Hesitantly, I lean forward and let my tongue flicker across one stiff nipple. I feel her body under my hand jerk. Her intake of breath is sharp and sudden.
I look up because fingers are twisting, tumbling my wind-blown hair, pulling my head up. She kisses me again, my hand still trapped between her legs, still playing with her, sliding now beneath the panties to touch her hot, wet flesh. With a moan, she pulls my hand away and breaks the kiss.
“You…” she breathes.
I lean back against the car where she pushes me, unresisting while she lifts my shirt. The light dances red and harsh against my closed eyelids. I feel the heat on my bare skin as she slides my pants down, conscious of my exposure, even in the seclusion of this place. I should say no. But my chance for saying no happened before I got on the plane to come here, happened a year ago on that distant beach.
A shadow falls over my face, and I open my eyes as her naked skin presses into mine. Tiny jolts of awareness ripple along my skin as I reach up to pull her closer, tighter. Her panties are gone and the hair between her legs brushes the nude skin between my own.
So different, even in that detail, I think as the hard metal of the convertible digs into my back and I caress her shape, finding it by touch.
But does it matter?
Her lips at my earlobe, my neck, the swell of my breast, tell me nothing matters but them, their hot kiss. She’s on her knees in the dirt, spreading my legs. Her tongue tests my wetness, laps at my clit. I shudder. I try to push my palms against the bones of her shoulders, but she’s stubborn.
She will force me to orgasm here and now, like this, with the sun and the damp heat of sex burning me up, outside and in. Her fingers move in my cunt and my ass, and I tighten up against her patient tongue. My head is on fire as release floods my limbs. I don’t know how to breathe.
Scolding, she slathers sunblock over my body as we lie on a towel at the water’s edge. Her hands linger on my breasts, filling them with dangerous heat.
“You’re going to kill yourself with skin cancer, running around out here without it.”
I want to tell her sunburn is the least of my worries. I just take the tube from her and return the favor, massaging the cream into her ass and thighs and the backs of her calves. I end up lifting her feet and kissing the arches of each instep. I run my tongue in little circles around the skin and she moans and wriggles.
“Don’t!” she says, which means “Yes.”
We roll together, bodies slick with grease, tongues moving hard and fast. The sunblock tastes god-awful, but it’s not long before it’s washing off again as I chase her into the water, as we struggle and writhe together. My fingers probe her cunt as she tries to float, and I find the places that make her shiver and squirm and lose her equilibrium. She drags me under with her as she splashes down, and we come up laughing, coughing, swatting stinging fans of water in each other’s faces before she falls into my arms again.
We’re like children.
She is. I remind myself of that daily even as I try to avoid remembering whose house I’m in.
“My parents don’t come here anymore,” she tells me. “Not since I was a kid. I’m the only one who gives a damn about the place.”
“Boyfriends?” I ask, a little bit jealous as I say it. She shakes her head.
“I was trying to escape them. All of them.”
I imagine slideshows of the stories she tells me: nailing shingles on the roof and repairing a toilet herself. Writing her thesis. The months of one long winter, living on coffee and a broken heart. Endless southern summers on the lake.
Like the lake, it all lies hidden beneath the toss of silken hair and the hard flash of diamonds. Her hair hasn’t seen conditioner in the days I’ve been here. Not a scrap of jewelry except when she absently snaps her watch around her wrist out of habit while she works. Lost in lines of code for hours at a time until she rouses to the smell of dinner or my touch.