I tell her not to worry. That nothing bad has ever happened to me here and that nothing bad ever will. I think she’s the only one who gets that about me. That I love her and love my family but I need to be completely isolated like this. I am not sure how she would reconcile the fact that I am going to see Joe tomorrow morning for a walk on the beach.
I am not sure how I am going to reconcile that fact either.
At least part of the reconciliation is that I will not be meeting him here, never here, not in my sanctuary. I will meet him behind the beach house, and we will talk, and I will decide and I suppose he will decide whether it will be our last walk, or whether it will be the first walk of this second phase of Shannon and Joe.
Joe
I turn the lock in the glass door to my coffee shop.
Though I have sold thousands of franchises and though I own several dozen personally this is still “my” coffee shop. It was my first, and it is where I still work two or three or seven days a week. I still love brewing the perfect cup and talking with my customers and friends and regulars. The business magazine people like to photograph me here for some reason I don’t get. It’s just where I work, where I have always worked, since high school, and then during summers from college, and then after college when I bought it from the old man who’d owned it before. The old man whose mastery I marveled at and mimicked. It’s my place. But it was his first.
I could not have been more surprised that Shannon stopped by tonight.
She’d only ever been here in the morning. And I wasn’t getting my hopes up until tomorrow morning. And even then I wasn’t sure about those hopes.
No, that’s a lie.
I was sure I wanted to see her. I was sure I wanted her to come and have coffee and talk to me and walk around the counter again and kiss me. I was sure that I wanted her here in this space, filling it up, making it light and beautiful and carefree and meaningful all at once. I wanted her here so I could make her morning a little better with a perfect cup of coffee and so that she might try to get to know me again. Or, more accurately, might try to get to know me for the first time.
I will be more open this time.
I will engage in complete disclosure. There will be no secretive ‘business’ in Wilmington, there will be board meetings and patient visits and fund raisers. There will be no old high school sweethearts, there will be Danny who is the first female driver in NASCAR. There will be no dead child, there will be Caitlin who died horribly from childhood leukemia. There will be no dead wife, there will be Colleen who took a hundred pills and went to sleep and never woke up.
I will tell her everything, and will do so using the fewest number of words possible.
I will tell her about the surf camp I am going to in Costa Rica in the spring. I will tell her everything if she wants to hear. And if she has the inclination.
She likes to be alone. I know that January for her in North Carolina is her down time. When she is not the geologist in charge of the lab. When she is not the aunt to all the children and not the sister to all the siblings. When she is not the child to the parents and when she is not the accidental millionaire who found oil and natural gas while evaluating reports from ground penetrating radar and other geological tools she was using to help an archeologist study the earthworks of the Mound Builders.
Yes she likes to be alone. So even though I want to be so open and honest and bare in front of her, it will be on her terms. Always on her terms. I know that. And I accept it. It is the bargain I have made with myself, and it is the bargain I will make with her.
I will accept writing letters that are not answered.
I will accept not calling and not texting and not emailing. Because I know that her love is so consuming that I must only experience it in small doses. An hour here, a month in July, a run or walk on the beach there, paddling in the quiet marshes here, dinner at the Green Turtle or at a fund raiser there. I will take it. It’s what I need and all I need.
I do not have time for a full time lover. And I no longer have the capacity for a full time lover. Or even for a full time friend. They exhaust me, and I know I can wear them out.
So tomorrow morning, on the beach, starting behind her beach house and going to the pier and back, I will explain the bargain that I am proposing. I will describe the metes and bounds of a relationship that I think we can have.
What am I doing to myself? Why am I trying to craft my destiny into something so unusual that will be intense and exquisite and perfect when we are together and that will claw away inside me every day when we are apart. The days apart will wildly outnumber the days together. And even the days together will be just minutes and hours out of an entire day.
Why am I doing this?
I know the answer. The answer is because I love her, and that I love her so much I will not ask her to change one thing for me. Will not ask her to give up her lab, or her family filled beach house, or her private home, or her research or anything. I will only ask that she add me in sometimes. That is all I am going to ask for tomorrow. If it gets to that. I should know pretty quickly after we start walking whether I should present my plan, extend my offer, and wait for her acceptance, for our meeting of the minds.
I should know before we get to the pier whether this is our last walk, or the first walk of Shannon and Joe 2.0.
I finish cleaning up the coffee she poured on my shop floor. Talk about cheeky!
Shannon and Joe
She is sitting on the steps at the end of the boardwalk that stretches out from her beach house, across the dune, and down to the Atlantic. She is waiting for Joe. She has just finished her first cup of coffee and is waiting for him to deliver her second. It is January 4
th
and they are going to walk on the beach. Walk to the pier and back. It is their first chance to see whether there really was something back in July, and whether there will be anything in January.
She spots him walking up the beach from the public beach access. He has chosen not to park in her driveway and walk around the house and come out her boardwalk. He has chosen to place his car four hundred yards away and to walk up the beach to meet her. She wonders why he chose to park so far away.
He catches sight of her, holds up the coffee he has brought for her, and smiles. He does not increase his speed or deviate from his course. He is walking on the firm sand down by the water. She is seated on the steps, separated from the firm sand by thirty yards of fluffy loose sand. She rises, walks across the loose sand, and waits for him near the water’s edge.
He hands her the coffee. She sips. Smiles. They fall into step and walk towards the pier.
No words are spoken as they each sip on their coffee and watch the fiery red sunrise beyond the end of the weathered pier. In the summer the sun rises over the pier. Here, on this cool but not cold January day, the sun is rising well out to sea, not over the pier. They continue to walk. They walk for twenty minutes until they reach the pier. There is no-one else on the beach.
Not a single word or single person has intruded on their first morning together since he laid open his soul in the cemetery. With the sun now over their left shoulders they walk back towards her beach house. There is barely a breath of wind off the ocean this morning. The Atlantic is nearly glassy smooth, with only the smallest swells and the smallest waves lapping against the wet sand at a nearly completely low tide.
They are almost half way back to her beach house and still nothing has been said.
She inches closer to him and takes his right hand in her left.
He feels her touch, pauses, and looks at her.
She does not smile, but looks up at him from under her eyebrows.
She is radiant and lovely this morning. He nods at her touch and they resume walking.
When they are nearly directly in front of her beach house she begins angling towards the steps. She feels his hand and his indecision about whether to hold her hand as she walks towards her house or to release her hand and return to his car.
She tightens her grip just the tiniest amount, an almost imperceptible amount, and yet he feels the change, feels the question and the command. He answers by altering his course to stay beside her as she approaches her boardwalk. She keeps his hand in hers as she ascends the steps, crosses her boardwalk, and walks halfway across the porch to the sliding glass doors that enter on the second level of her house. He stays beside her.
She uses her free hand to fish her key from her pocket and to unlock the door. She slides the door open with a whoosh and the warmer air from the house spills out. She steps into the house, once again strengthening her grip, inviting him in.
He follows, steps in, and slides the door closed behind him.
She removes her shoes and maneuvers them carefully with her feet on a carpet just inside the door used for exactly this purpose. He does the same.
She leads him deeper into the house, towards the stairs, and leads him up to the third level, where her master suite is located. His breath is coming shorter and shorter as he realizes that she means to have him this morning, here in her house, without a word having been spoken about all that has come before. He feels the fresh beginning.
She leads him into her master suite. She releases his hand and walks to the side of the bed. Carefully she turns down the comforter, the blanket, and the sheet. She steps towards her dresser and in a single movement lifts her hoodie and her shirt over her head. She is naked beneath. She folds the clothes and places them on top of the dresser. She bends and removes her pants, and her panties. Places them on top of her dresser. She slides into bed and holds out her arms to welcome him.
He undresses and mirrors her careful folding and stowing of his clothes.
In a moment he is on top of her and he is kissing her. Soft tender kisses as she runs her hands up and down his back, touching his neck, then touching his sides and his flanks.
He pauses in his kisses to catch his breath and looks down at her below him. Her eyes are closed. He scans over her firm body, thinks that he has never seen anything so lovely, so sexy. His urgency grows. He kisses her mouth again, then her neck, then works down, to her breasts, to her tummy, and to her womanhood. She opens as his tongue explores inside her, discovers her taste, but then returns higher, discovering her most tender spot.
He touches her with the tip of his tongue with just the gentlest of pressure. He increases and decreases his pressure and his stroke until she rearranges herself against him, and accepts him. Having reached their agreement, he continues, he is getting harder and harder and feels his blood rushing and straining in him and so he wills himself to wait while he still touches and touches and circles and flicks with his tongue until her hips arch up against him and she pushes herself against his tongue. She moans and collapses her hips down against the sheets.
He rises up, positions himself above her and enters her in one long sensuous stroke. She gasps as she takes all of him inside her. He waits, unwilling to move yet, wanting to remember every sensation of this second, wanting to burn this moment indelibly into his mind. She moves beneath him and then the urgency overtakes him. He moves. Slowly, completely, feeling the pressure build inside him, feeling her pressure grow again. He begins to lose control, feels himself slipping and sliding into the abyss. She is arching up, meeting him, and then he is gone. Completely gone. Feeling her all around him, so warm, so wet, so enveloping and encompassing and so here.
He races towards his end and releases himself in spasm after spasm, yelling and bellowing as months of wonder and waiting flow out of him and into her in searing streams. He collapses onto her. His heart racing at its maximum rate, his breaths coming in gasps as he tries to recover from this beginning.
She speaks first.
“
It’s Thursday,” she says.
It takes him a minute to figure out what she is saying but then he gets her joke. Begins to laugh, and she joins into his laugh. He lays beside her and holds her as she rolls towards him.
“
You know, actually, it’s Wednesday,” he says.
“
Then you better remember to bring me coffee again tomorrow, on Thursday...”
Shannon
I have no framework for what just happened. I had no idea that it would happen when he met me this morning behind my beach house. I had no idea that it would happen when I took his hand after the halfway point of our walk. I had no idea that it would happen when I lead him up the steps to my boardwalk and into my house.
This
hasn’t happened since several months before my marriage ended. And
that
has never happened. My ex never did
that
or made me respond like
that
. I had no idea, even though of course I’ve heard people talk about it and have seen it on television or in the movies. But I have never experienced
that
.