Natural, yes…but so were lightning, and electricity, and fire. Her hand tingled where it met his; heat raced up her arm and flooded her body, her heartbeat quickened. With a mumbled “Just a minute…” she slipped out of her shoes, one by one, then scooped them up in her free hand while he waited. “Thanks…” Breathless, she straightened, and she could feel his eyes on her, narrowed with a puzzling frown.
“Someday,” he said on an exhalation as they walked on, leaving their own footprints beside the children’s smaller ones, “I imagine this will be the only wild beach left on the southeastern coast.”
“It’s beautiful.” But Summer felt a heaviness inside, a yearning ache behind her smile. She could go no farther but instead halted and raked her hair back from her face and lifted it to the sun and the breeze in an almost defiant gesture, as if by sheer will she could hold the loneliness at bay.
“I sense a ‘but’ in there,” said Riley softly. She glanced at him in surprise and guilt, wondering how he knew.
She took a deep breath and shook her hair free, letting the warm wind have it-and to hell, she thought, with the frizzies. “It’s funny,” she said with an attempt at a laugh, “but it reminds me of the desert-the Mojave Desert, you know?-where I grew up.”
He looked at her with curiosity in his smile. “That is funny-our beach reminds you of your desert? How so?”
She tried another laugh that failed, then gave it up and walked along in silence for a time, smiling at her bare feet making footprints in the wet sand and thinking, How is it people smile most determinedly when they are trying hardest not to cry? But Riley didn’t press her-again, she wondered how he knew-and after a while, when she felt quiet enough inside, she lifted her eyes to the horizon and said softly, “My sister Evie used to say it gave her a case of ‘the wild lonelies.’ The desert, I mean. It’s beautiful, you know, in a wild sort of way, and there are things about it I still miss-the huge, endless vistas, the way the colors change from day to day, hour to hour. You know, the desert never looks the same way twice-the flowers in the springtime…the enormity of the sky. But it can suck the life out of you, too. And the hope. Evie always says the desert is a great place to be from. I’d have to agree with her about that, but about the loneliness, I guess I never really knew what she meant until…”
“Until now?” She nodded, and once more felt his look, this one more penetrating than curious. “What about this place makes you feel lonely?”
She shook her head but found it easy enough to answer him-too easy. If this keeps up, she thought, I will have no secrets left! “I don’t know why, really-the openness, maybe. The quiet…the wind…the marshes. And yes, it does make me feel lonely.”
Riley was silent for a long time, and she was afraid she might have wounded him somehow-as if she were inappreciative of his generosity in bringing her to his special place, for she knew that was what it was. But again he surprised her, when after a while he said in a voice as quiet as hers had been, “Or…maybe it’s not that the place makes you feel lonely, so much as it makes you know you are. There’s an…absence of distraction out here. Nothing to hide behind. No shelter, no choice but to confront who you are…all the things that are inside you-the thoughts and feelings, the hopes and dreams, the lies and truths. As beautiful as it is, this place can do that to you.” And then it was his time for introspective silence and hers for patient waiting, before he drew a deep breath and murmured, “And beautiful as it is, like your sister said, it’s a great place to be from.”
She threw him a quick, startled look, surprised not as much by the revelation, which she’d already begun to suspect, as by the fact that he’d shared it with her. “You are from here, then?”
“Well, not from here here, but…around here, yeah, I am.” And his smile grew enigmatic once more. “As I said, this island has sheltered me more than once. Brasher taught me how to drift in on the tide when I was still too small to row very far. He taught me how to fish for crabs…taught me a lot of things, Brasher did.”
“Is he the one?” Summer asked, casting him a sly, sideways glance.
“The one…what?”
“The one who taught you to make biscuits.”
And he laughed out loud and didn’t answer her. Instead, they walked together, holding hands like lovers, trading surreptitious glances and hiding them in discoveries of shells and sand dollars. Summer understood that they had each come as close to admitting to loneliness as the constraints of pride and personality would allow, and she was certain Riley knew it, too. She felt a trembling inside that was not of fear or exhaustion or excitement or desire, but more like the wobbliness of a vulnerable newborn creature, standing for the first time on uncertain legs and gazing at the world in wide-eyed wonder. The world seemed miraculous to her, and all things new.
And when she found a whole and perfect sand dollar, showing it to him with a cry of delight, he cupped his hands around hers and gazed down into her eyes as if it were she who were the treasure. She felt it not only possible but even somehow inevitable that he would kiss her…simply the culmination of something that had begun at that moment when he’d first taken her hand.
He whispered something she couldn’t hear for the rushing in her own ears. She felt his warm breath on her lips, and her own breathing ceased. Her body rocked with the force of her beating heart. Incomprehensible tears pricked her eyes.
I will remember this moment, she thought. I will remember this kiss, whether it is the first and the last, or the first of ten thousand more. I will remember this place, this day, this moment… this kiss. And treasure it, like the rare and perfect sand dollar she held pressed against her breasts, against her heart, pressed between their bodies as his mouth covered hers.
Time stopped, and the world retreated. She felt nothing-not even the mischievous waves that ran in to tickle her feet and then run away again-except the warm, firm pressure of his lips, the raw silk texture of his skin. Heard nothing-not the wind, the shushing of the waves, the high, bright calls of seabirds-except the singing of his name inside her head, and the rush and thunder of her heartbeat, like the noise of a storm.
And then, too soon, she felt him pull away, gently, reluctantly, and the world rushed in like the waves around her feet. She felt the shifting of the sand underfoot, the cooling breath of the wind, and in the distance, like the cries of seabirds, the children’s voices calling to them.
How glad she was then that Riley’s back was toward the children! As it was, shielded by his body, she had barely time to step back, brush the telltale evidence of his kiss from her lips with trembling fingers before they were there, David first, breathless and excited, yelling, “Mom! Mr. Riley! Come see what we found-it’s something really weird. Hurry up! Come on-come on…”
And then they had to run to investigate, Summer on legs she wasn’t sure would carry her, far down the beach and around the point, the children hopping and dancing and urging them on.
“There!” David’s voice was a whisper of awe as he halted and pointed. “What in the world is it? I never saw such a thing, did you?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact I have,” said Riley, as with a wink for Summer he took each child by the hand and moved closer to the strange markings in the sand. “What this is is a sea turtle’s track. A mother sea turtle-most likely a loggerhead-came in last night to lay her eggs. This right here is the track she made when she went back to the water. Her nest should be…right up here somewhere…”
With the children following, silent and tense with awe, Riley led the way up the beach to a spot above the high-water mark, just where the dunes began, where the sand had been recently disturbed. “Yeah-here it is, right here. See, she digs out a hole in the sand with her hind feet, and then she lays her eggs-dozens of ’em. They look sort of like Ping-Pong balls-” Helen giggled “-and then she covers ’em up and drags herself back down to the water and swims away. Then, in about two months the eggs hatch, and the baby turtles have to dig their way out of the nest and make their own way down to the water.”