I actually said it. Out loud. With my mouth. To her face.
It wasn't just a safety issue.
I'm walking across the sand toward the public showers near the parking lot. The plan is: rinse off, get in the truck, drive back to the marina, never speak of this again. Simple. Mechanical.
I reach up and find the scallop shell still perched on my head. The crown. Given to me by three eight-year-olds who spent twenty minutes feeding me goldfish crackers like a baby bird. I pull it off and look at it.
This is what passes for romance when you haven't said an honest thing to a woman in over adecade. A shell crown. Goldfish crackers. A cryptic statement about a navigation light.
I can hear my father already.At least I brought Vivian coffee. You gave the woman a lightbulb and a riddle.
I drop the shell and keep walking.
The shower is one of those concrete pillar setups with a push button that gives you forty-five seconds of cold water and shuts off like it's personally offended. I step under it. Push the button. Sand runs down my face in rivulets, off my neck, pooling at my feet. I push it again. More sand. A third time. I absorbed the entire shoreline.
The cold water should be clearing my head.
It's not. My head is full of the way she looked at me when I said it. The way she didn't move. The way she was still standing there when I walked away, like she was waiting.
I'm clean. I can get in my truck now and nothing will be ruined—not the upholstery, not the careful ten-year project of convincing myself that I don't need anything I can't fix with a wrench and a wiring diagram.
My feet stop.
I didn't tell them to stop. My brain is saying keep walking, get in the truck, forget thishappened, but my body takes orders from my chest, which is doing something it hasn't done in ten years—beating like it remembers what it's for.
I turn around.
She's still there. She didn't leave, or go back to her towel and round up the boys. She's standing exactly where I left her, hair blowing sideways in the salt breeze, and that's the part that gets me.
I might not be brave enough for this. I've spent a decade making sure I never have to find out, but I'm already walking back across the sand toward the woman who plugs in too many appliances and fills every silence with warmth I can't ignore.
She watches me come. Just stands there with those eyes that see everything—she's a photographer, seeing is literally her job, and right now she's giving me the same focus she gives her camera. I am not equipped for this.
I stop in front of her, closer than neighbor distance, closer than landlord distance. Close enough to see the freckles the sun has pulled out across her nose. Her breath has gone shallow, which makes two of us.
"You came back." Her gaze flicks to my hair, still dripping. "And you rinsed off."
"I wasn'tgetting in my truck like that."
"Very practical."
"I'm a practical man."
“One who turned around and walked back."
I don't have an answer for that.
I fix things. That's what I do. Diagnose the problem, repair it, move on.
This isn't a problem I can fix.
She's looking at me like she's waiting for something, and I don't know what it is, and not knowing makes my hands itch for a wrench I can't use here.
“Paul?”
“Yeah.”
“You said you forgot something.”
