they were at, and of, the beach. she with her tanned skin in shades of wet sand, and he with his heavy lidded sleepy blue eyes of seaside rainstorm skies. they had been hiding together, away, and apart for a tumbling collection of days. everything in this temporary place felt like the linen curtains that were pulled out of the window by forces that seemed more pressing than wind, they flailed there white and sweet.
she hadn't know that she had been saving the cerulean dress until she realized he was leaving - it then occurred to her, laying out on the bed that she had. she pulled it on, in a movement without thought - that she would have believed bereft of grace- except without her expecting it he had informed her of quite the opposite a day or two before- and suddenly felt like a silent spectacle of femininity.
'everything you do,' he had said, 'motion and movement, is beautiful...'
she had not blushed, they had been too exposed these last few days for that. but she felt some part of her, inanimate recoil from his words. hours later she finally recognized it, it had been disbelief. no words could shake her conscious critique that her arms, reaching back and behind to work the three buttons, could be anything other than awkward and clumsy, but the look she received to the shake of her head, the messy toss of her long hair - several shades darker than sepia - left her startled, it was confident and unargumentative, and suddenly she was sure no matter how much she felt the opposite, that she was wrong.
the last button done. out through the door, left ever open, a few steps to the sand, then to the berm where everyday but one she had waited for him. she knew he would be in the water, to the waist of his green shorts, or drifting off between the sand bars nearly swallowed by the waters. it was not because she could not swim, or had no love for the sea- for she had, that she waited. and she had been part of the sea long before the morning after the third night when she had awoken and found that she was now part of him.
but because he had only asked her to come once.
only a few days old, the memory of their brief tryst in the sea was already bleeding. she didn't know if it had been the sensory confusion of the rain and the water, or the bizarre sensation of being in the water in her ankle length skirt that had rendered the memory so difficult. she hadn't really swum though, or even clung to him really, rather she had let him just hold her- a rarity- his hands holding her steady at the waist as around her the waves had pushed past to collapse, while the sky surrendered, like an eclipse, its liturgy of air. she couldn't say now how long they had been there in the seastorm, or why then he had pulled her out with him on that day. but without being able to understand or explain it she knew that it would not happen again.
he was out there alone now as he seemed to prefer it. the wind moved as if to say something through the rattling of the surrounding sea oats. she thought then that the sea was his, and would now always be. she did not know what was hers, she would find it some day- though not with him. the only thing she would ever share with him was that day, and all these other days, and that room, and the cerulean dress she had saved to wear as she said goodbye.
