The rain beat its tiny fists into the sand. Astonishment leapt back and forth between her and him, on each traversal picking up some new glow from the newly charged atmosphere. Fear. Urgency. Oddly, there was never a trace of irritation, though perhaps a pure, nonviolent form of anger could be discerned. The primordial thrill of being driven to action without thinking. Cinematic enthusiasm, and finally — raw lust.
She chucked the tea things back into her rucksack and he abandoned the firewood project. A half-formed heap of random driftwood then would sit — for how long? months? a year? — along the line between the packed sand and the loose. Tiny rivulets would form beneath this haphazard structure, decide without deciding where to turn and turn again and race on down the small slope, pausing to fill his and her retreating footprints, carressingly, before overspilling and proceeding on toward the freshening oblivion of the lake.
“Under here!” she cried, lifting a huge leaf and indicating a hidden glade just beyond the beach. He grinned, panting hard from the first exertion above a walk he’d had in weeks, and ducked under. As soon as he was inside the shadowy green, she followed close behind and let the leaf swing back to its natural pose.
At first he tried to take some form of control. But she seemed unmoved by his self-conscious onrush.
“I don’t think you really want to do that,” she said, and he was crestfallen but only momentarily until she moved in close, closer than he had tried to move in on her, and the heat of her, her scent, became more real than any of their words had yet been.
Her kiss, enforced by her hands’ tight grip on his arms — at first he held back, then surrender was the only viable choice. She made him take his shirt off and smiled at his shivering torso as she took hers off. She drew him against her and their skin was taut in all the right places, in all the right places puckered by the sudden chill of the rain. She laughed playfully as he struggled to hop out of his pants, and when she shifted her grip to his newly revealed vulnerability it felt so good he literally couldn’t stand it — he fell back into the soft sandy soil with a sudden sigh as she climbed on top of him, pressing his hips down hard into the ground.
They learned things fast.
And that’s all I know. It’s a little part of a little story about two people who had an intellectual connection, then a sensual connection, and then they ended up fucking in the temporary shelter of some wild greenery above the beach, and then they ended up in love. If you want to know more than that, if you want it to go somewhere else or mean something, you’ll have to go find them and find out for yourself, and I don’t know where they are so don’t ask me.
Years later she would remember him looking not away, not at the ground, nor even at her face but at the moment.
Years later, he would remember asking her, dizzy in the haze of diesel fumes as her RV idled in a kwik shop parking lot, “Where are you going?” And she would say “I don’t know. I don’t know. Gonna get on this freeway and go one way or the other, see what happens.” And that was probably the last time he would ever see her.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to remember how to wake up in a random house, again, with random sunlight streaming in, in the city of my dreams, Npydyuan, trying to remember how to not have to remember how to breathe all night long. Find some coffee. Find a source of heat. Will I need a weapon? Oh yes — I remember now. I was going to look for Bnabe. He’s here. I’ve seen the evidence. He’s out there somewhere. The first people I encounter, I’m gonna ask them, am I dreaming? And their mouths will change, and their faces will change, and the world will melt, and I’ll know my suspicions were well founded.
And then what?