I saw her for the first time at the beach. She appeared to be in her forties and had this mysterious aura about her, and during the afternoon I watched her, her hands were constantly busy; if they weren’t flipping the pages of her book they were bringing her cigarette to her mouth, if they weren’t wrapping around the neck of her bottle they were rubbing suncream over her shoulders, her arms, her legs.
When she beckoned me, I didn’t let myself think — it was possible that the constant heat had melted my brain — and almost threw myself at her. Up until that point, I’d never had a summer fling that I would reminisce later in life, I had never fallen in love, never been in a real relationship. At the age of 25, I was already worried about how I was too late to my definitive young-adult romance moment. I felt like an overripe fruit falling from a branch and no one was there to catch me as I desperately hoped someone would.
Will you help me with my back? She asked me.
Um, I replied, Okay.
I sat behind her and squeezed a general amount of cream on my palm, almost breathless by the skin-to-skin contact when I started rubbing it on her. I don’t know where my stance is on touching; I crave it and I recoil from it at the same time, and I was trying to do that then, too.
I saw you before, you know, she said between wafts of smoke. She tapped the ashes into a plastic cup and sighed, body pliant as dough under my hands. Spend a few more days here than your average tourist, and you become familiar. Someone who belongs.
Her shoulders were dotted with freckles, white stripes peeking under the straps of her bikini. I’d seen her too, before this, mostly at the beach, tanning during the day and walking during the evening, but she also liked the corner store down the street, the small gorcery shop downtown with its AC always on a bit too high, the cafe at the end of the road. She wasn’t a people person. She made small talk with people when it was necessary, but she was almost always busy with a book from which she didn’t look up, sometimes for hours on end. I wanted to ask her what it was she was reading more than once, but I wasn’t brave enough. I also felt like she wouldn’t want to be disturbed while reading.
When I was done with her back, she thanked me with a brief nod. She asked me if I swam, if I liked the town, what I liked to read. I’d been trying this openness thing for a while now, so I told her that I liked swimming only because it made me feel weightless, that I liked the town only when I was away from my family and could be myself, and that right now I was reading a novel called The Lover. I wasn’t sure if it worked or not, for there is no middle ground with me; you either pry the truth from my fingers with hardship, or I throw it at you like a bomb. Both are intense in their own ways.
Duras? She asked me. I told her I was in the process of writing my own novel, something similar to The Lover, but it would have two women in it instead. My heart was beating red and purple against my chest.
She had a quaint little place in up the hill, walking distance from where I stayed. I liked her garden the most with its birdbath and its bushes and the eucalyptus that cast a blue, cooling shade over us as we sat side by side, but I also liked her living room where she stacked her books like she was building a fort around herself against the real world. She didn’t bother closing the doors or windows when we had sex. Said it got too stuffy inside.
I was almost sure it wasn’t going to happen, the first time. When we were sitting on the sunbeds dripping saltwater on the sand, and I blurted out how I’d never done this before as she traced a faint line of jellyfish-induced blisters on my arm. I was almost positive she was going to drop it.
There are usually no jellyfish around here this time of the year, she told me instead, her touch lingering. I’d been feeling the same lingering in her gaze this past week, at my mouth and my chest and my milk-white legs that I’d managed to not tan, and it was only because it felt childish to hide from it that I wasn’t doing so. I already felt childish next to her; she was witty, worldly, well-read. I was a bumbling idiot stumbling my way through life.
Her sheets were soft. The good kind. One night as I laid on them, slowly grazing the covers with my fingertips, I hoped that I would be like her — I wanted, as I grew older, to be a woman who couldn’t de-clutter if she tried, every little nook and cranny at her home a new hiding spot for a memory, a woman who kept an ashtray on her bedside table just to fill it with fruit rinds. Oranges, mandarins, kiwis. I wanted to be unapologetic in my eccentricity, I wanted to eat my mangoes, seasoned with lime and chili flakes, in my bed, and then let my lover lick the juices from my fingers, my mouth. I wanted people to hear me before seeing me when they came for a visit, bossa nova flowing out my wide-open windows. I wanted mohair sweaters and jade hairpins, slippers so soft they could slide right off your feet. The version of me inside my head was enough to make my breath catch. When I started crying, she shushed me without even asking why.
I liked her constant salt-sand-sunscreen smell, rising from her skin so fresh and so warm; the feeling I got from her was equivalent to being in a bakery first thing in the morning when fresh pastries were out of the oven. I liked being able to bury my nose in the sweetest, softest parts of her skin and just inhale her scent, and I liked that she raked her fingers through my ocean-tangled hair when I did so, humming contently. Her voice changed into a more primal, private thing as I lowered my nose, following the line of moles that led me from the crook of her neck to her navel. Her scent changed into something sweeter, mouth-watering. She tasted like the sun, like the afternoon breeze, like whatever it was we ate or drank together before the sex.
On my last day, she gave me a bookmark. Her number was written on the back, and her name, and she told me she didn’t use her phone much but she would try to keep in touch with me. For me. I was sad to let her go, and that was a given, but I wasn’t expect her to feel the same way. I don’t know why. When she put a hand on my cheek, eyes glassy, I was almost convinced to tell my parents that I wasn’t going home with them, that I had my place now and I wasn’t ready to let go. It was hard. I should be able to do hard things, I told myself. Not her. I wasn’t sure if it would offend her.
We spent the day together falling in and out of sleep in her private yard, under the shade of her beloved eucalyptus, surrounded by the songs of the birds. I came undone lying underneath her for the last time, so hard and so sudden that my vision went white-hot for almost a full minute, my breathe liquid fire in my lungs.
Will you write about us in that book of yours? She asked me some hours later. She was looking up at the cloudless sky, a cigarette dangling loosely from her fingers. The tips of them sticky with pineapple juice.
Do you want me to? I asked back. I grabbed the last slice of pineapple and fed it to her, dumbstruck with the damp heat as she licked my fingers clean one by one.
Would you even stop if I said no?
I gave her a smile. Guess you’ll have to find out.
