NATALIA
Nearly a week.
That’s how long Johnny has been living in my beach house, sleeping in my guest room, drinking my coffee, and testing every rule I set for myself.
Three days since we kissed. Three days since I promised myself it wouldn’t happen again.
I squeeze the last of the shampoo into my palm and work it through my hair, scrubbing hard enough that my scalp tingles. The bathroom window is cracked open, and salt air drifts through the steam, mixing with my coconut shampoo until the whole room smells like a spa on a budget.
I rinse, condition, shave. A week ago, I would have stood under the water until it ran cold, letting the heat work the tension out of my shoulders. Now I catch myself rushing through it, eager to get to the kitchen. To see him.
He makes my coffee before I’m out of bed. I study at the kitchen table while he sketches at the other end, close enough that I canhear the scratch of pencil on paper every time I pause between paragraphs. Dinners, beach walks, bad movies.
I’m the one who drew the line. Johnny hasn’t crossed it. Hasn’t even leaned toward it. And I wish he would, which makes me the worst kind of hypocrite.
Two nights ago, we sat on the porch after dinner with the waves low and steady in the dark. He was telling me about a dream he’d had, something about a parking lot and a woman’s voice he couldn’t place. I told him it was a good sign that the details were getting sharper. He said if that’s the best his brain could offer, he wanted a refund. He laughed. I laughed harder. The kind of laughing that feeds on itself until my stomach ached and I had to set my drink on the railing because I couldn’t hold it steady.
When I looked over, he wasn’t laughing anymore. Just watching me. Mouth still curved but his eyes had gone quiet, and there was something in the way he was sitting, angled toward me with his arm along the back of the chair, that made the air between us feel thin.
I stood up and mumbled about doing the dishes. There were no dishes.
Now I wrap my towel around myself and catch my reflection in the foggy mirror. Flushed cheeks. Damp hair. The look of a woman who is lying to herself and knows it.
I get dressed, pull my hair back, and find Johnny at the kitchen table with the pencil and notepad I dug out of a drawer for him a few days ago. He’s finishing another sketch. A man’s face, strong jaw, dark eyes. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was drawing a self portrait.
He flips the pad shut when he notices me looking. Quick, like a reflex. The set of his mouth saysdon’t ask.
I don’t push it. I’ve learned that much this week. Press too hard and he retreats behind that sarcastic grin like a door closing. So I drink my coffee, and we head out on our walk.
The beach is quiet this morning. Tide pulling back, ribbons of foam drying on the sand, the sun hanging pale near the horizon, the kind of thin November light that makes the sand look almost white. We walk in the comfortable silence we’ve gotten good at, shoes off, the wet sand chilly and firm under our feet.
Somewhere ahead, a dog bolts past us chasing a tennis ball into the surf. Johnny watches it, his eyes going distant.
“I dreamed about a dog last night. Benji. We were playing fetch, and I was a kid, maybe nine or ten.” A pause. “Wasn’t mine though. Belonged to a friend.” He squints at the horizon. “Can’t remember the friend’s name. Can’t remember my own damn name. It’s getting real fucking old.”
His frustration has been building all week. I can see it in the way his jaw tightens, the way his hands flex at his sides. The bruises along his ribs have faded to yellow-brown, capillaries reabsorbing the blood, the body cleaning up its own mess. His wrist barely bothers him now, though I catch him favoring it when he thinks I’m not watching.
His body is putting itself back together. His memory is another story.
I glance at him sideways. He’s got his eyes on the water, expressions unreadable. The late morning light is doing something unreasonable to his face, cutting shadows under his cheekbones, catching the scruff he’s accumulated.He’s attractive in a way that’s been a persistent, low-grade inconvenience for six days.
“Memory is strange,” I say. “I was reading about it for one of my modules. New environments can help with recall in amnesia patients. Different sensory input forces the brain to make new connections instead of running the same loops.” I gesture at the stretch of sand ahead of us. “We’ve walked this same beach twelve times and eaten every meal in that house. Your brain might need something it hasn’t seen before.”
He considers it for a moment. “Alright. Where’d you have in mind?”
I grin. “You’ll see.”
Ronnie’s Fish Shack sits where the tourist boardwalk gives way to the working waterfront—a clapboard shack with a corrugated roof, a long wooden bar open to the salt air, and mismatched stools that Ronnie refuses to replace because, as she puts it, “Character isn’t something you buy at Pottery Barn.”
I found her my second week here, after a phone call with Nikolai left me shaking and desperate to be around someone who didn’t make me feel small. I’d wandered down the boardwalk, ordered fish and chips, and somehow stayed three hours.
She talked about her ex-husband, a shrimper who ran off to Savannah with a dental hygienist, her plans to expand the shack into a real restaurant, and her theory that mercury retrograde was responsible for the island’s plumbing problems.
I laughed until my ribs ached. Hadn’t laughed like that in years.
Since then, she’s become the nearest thing I have to a normal friendship. We text about garbage TV. She tells me when the hush puppies are fresh. Once, when I mentioned I’d been reading about wound irrigation techniques, she didn’t ask why. Just said, “Girl, you’re going to make one hell of a nurse someday,” and went back to battering fish.
As we approach, Johnny leans toward me. “Let’s keep my memory loss private.”
