“Dorian,” I complain, hopping after him. “This had better be worth—”
And then my words winnow away on the breeze coming off the sea, and I pace forward slowly, silently, my pulse quickening.
This beach is studded with bare, skeletal trees, bone-white andblack. They lie like the graceful skeletons of broken gods, huge and still and silent on the glossy sand. Sheets of frothy water skate in, wetting the flat sand afresh, keeping it mirror-smooth. Farther down the beach, the sand is corrugated, and a lone dead tree stands in a glassy tide pool. Its limbs lift toward the sky like antlers, like the fingers of a supplicant.
On and on it goes, all down the stretch of beach—blue-gray waves marbled with white foam, with the twisted forms of dead trees rearing out of the surf. There’s a strange, salted pallor to many of them, a pathos to the lines and angles of each once-living thing.
“Welcome to the Boneyard,” says Dorian. “Hunting Island is a barrier island, and the combination of erosion and storms has resulted in this tree graveyard.”
I barely notice when he hands over my phone. I’m walking, then running, right into the center of it all. In front of me is a huge fan of interlaced roots from a tree that lies prone in the shallows.
The closer I look, the more I see. Tiny pale barnacles growing along cracks in black weathered wood, like minuscule crystals set into dark bone. Sun-seared ivory branches splayed like queenly fingers. Twisting limbs, worn smooth by the wind, contrasted with broken trunks so sharp they could draw blood. Churning surf and glassy sand, pale glistening bubbles on ebony wood. Tall erect trunks elongated by their reflection in the mirrored pools around their base.
The shadows of the tree carcasses are just as compelling—bold and thick and threatening or delicately interlaced or strangely distorted by the flow and ebb of the tide.
Over it all arches the limitless sprawl of the blue sky, faintly hazy, lightly strewn with cottony bits of cloud. The dead forest extends as far as I can see, some trees half-submerged in the sea, others jutting up from the sloping sand.
I could wander this strip of beach, this maze of morbid beauty, for hours—no, days—and still keep seeing new angles, new contrasts, new microcosms of the mortal cycle.
I place my hand on a sun-warm arch of wood, white as whalebone, smooth in places and seamed in others. Where it curves down toward the sand, cone-shaped white bumps erupt from the branch, and the cracked grain of the wood is frozen in swirls that mimic the thin veil of water washing my toes.
Speechless, I look up at Dorian. He’s walking behind a screen of crisscrossed roots taller than he is. His warm flesh and human beauty form a startling contrast to the thorny black-and-white fence of dead wood between us. His blond hair shines like spun gold, like the halo of an angel.
My throat is tight, my voice choked with emotion. “I’ve never seen anything like this, Dorian.”
“I thought you would like it.”
“‘Like’ isn’t strong enough to express how I feel about this place.”
He nods, gives a cool half-shrug—but he can’t hold back the grin. It breaks out, carving his dimples deep, illuminating his whole face. “I brought you some painting supplies, sketchbooks, pencils. I’ll find a dry place for all the stuff, and you can come get whatever you want.”
As he turns away, I grip the bone-white branch harder, struggling with an emotion bigger than anything I’ve ever felt for anyone.
It’s so intense I can’t bear it. Can’t find an outlet for it, so I hold it in with all my might, wrap it up inside me, and crush it down deep.
I start taking pictures and videos, trying to capture the scope, the endless enormity of this scene. Trying to collect each vignette—the exquisite beauty of the minuscule barnacles, the salted crystalline decay, the infinitesimal perfection of all the textures I’m seeing.Impossible to truly capture it all with a camera. Only through my fingers, my art, can I express how this place makes me feel. It’s wild beauty. It’s the tide of life, arrested midflow by catastrophic death. It’s stillness and motion, a forest of statuesque monuments to the lethal power of sea and storm.
“Sibyl told me to be sure you put on sunscreen,” Dorian calls from the blanketed area where he has set out the art supplies. Grudgingly, I walk over and let him spray the parts of my back and chest exposed by my racerback tank top. He sprays my arms and legs, too, and then he sprays some of the sunblock on his fingers and rubs it along my forehead, cheekbones, and temples, dabbing a little on my nose.
He thumbs my chin, curling his fingers around my jaw. And for a second, he doesn’t let go. His teeth catch his lower lip briefly.
I’m reflected in his sunglasses—the shaved swath of my head exposing my ear, decorated with sparkling studs and tiny hoops, my black hair, streaked with pink, tumbling over my other shoulder. My own sunglasses mirror him and my reflection, an endless sequence of us.
In this moment, we are infinite, Dorian and I.
And utterly alone, because this part of the beach is empty except for a man and a dog barely visible in the far distance.
Dorian leans in and presses a warm, tender kiss to my mouth.
Then he turns away, kneeling on the blanket to move the paints into a bit of striated shade cast by a dead tree nearby.
That kiss wasn’t an “I want to fuck you” kiss or a “we’re dating so we should suck face” kiss or a “you look hot today” kiss. I’ve had plenty of those.
That kiss was heartbreakingly sweet and frighteningly intimate.
Dorian shucks off his shirt, baring himself to the sun.
“Can you tan?” I ask him.
