They slip into dry clothes and are shepherded back to the camp where they gather around the large table in the main house. The driver switches jobs and becomes a breakfast waiter, taking orders and delivering fresh juice and more water. Coffee for those who want it.
The louder campers regale the group, but mostly themselves, with stories of the big waves they caught, of their wipeouts, of trying to turn, and of hoping for bigger waves and smaller more manageable boards. The quieter campers share looks that only those fresh from the experience of surfing Playa Jaco in the early morning sun before the rainy season can share.
Breakfast is ordered and eaten, and the campers drift off to their bungalows to shower, to dress in tropical summer clothes, to rest and to wait for dinner. Perhaps they will read, or go into town for a drink, or just lie in a hammock, suddenly realizing the tiredness of the work of having been in the ocean for two hours. Some may lay by the fresh water pool whose water is constantly being refreshed from the natural spring on the grounds. The pool bottom is deep blue tiles surrounded by lighter blue tiles whose shades change as they approach the edge. Mango trees shade the pool deck and the three or four tables there are further shaded by Cinzano umbrellas. Chairs and chaises are scattered in an ever changing random pattern on the deck.
An open air yoga studio is perched twenty stairs above the pool, with two of its sides open to the ocean, and two of its sides literally in the rain forest. There are no chairs up in the studio. Yoga mats are hung over a clothesline and swing in the early morning breeze.
Joe and Shannon finish their breakfast, look into each other’s eyes, excuse themselves and begin the long slow walk up the hill to Joe’s bungalow, the angle of the ascent raising Joe’s pulse only a fraction over the rate at which it is already racing with anticipation.
Shannon
We are walking up the hill to his bungalow. I have surfed and eaten and seen Playa Jaco and now I am going to make love to Joe. Perhaps until it is time for dinner, or perhaps until we are both sated and asleep in each other’s arms.
The waves were sublime. They were orderly, regular, well behaved, with none of the dis-organization I see at Topsail. They were designed just for me. This morning, this place, this day were all designed just for me. The man with whom I will spend the day making love was designed just for me. Had I known it would be like this I would never have hesitated about coming here. Even if no other day here is ever like this, today was like this and will forever be a part of me.
We reach his bungalow and he slides open the door. We shower separately, me first in the small shower with the lukewarm but fresh water. I let it rinse and rinse and rinse the salt from my hair and from my eyes. I let it wash away the sand that has worked its way between every toe and under every fingernail. I think no shower has ever been like this. I luxuriate in the lukewarm water in the tropical morning that is becoming tropically hot while my lover waits his turn, while my lover waits for me.
“
Your turn,” I say to him as I leave the shower room. I am naked but for a towel that I am using to pat at the wettest parts of my hair. There is no point in even trying to dry off in this equatorial humidity. I lie down in his bed, feeling how I am soaking the sheets, not caring, and wait for my lover.
He does not luxuriate as long as I did in the water. He is anticipating another luxury for his senses. He comes to me and makes love to me in his way, starting slow and patient but ultimately surrendering to the waves of passion and feeling and intensity that always grip him. I too surrender to his body, to the sensations that he brings to me again and again. I come and then come again and then he comes inside me in a sudden, involuntary contraction that leaves him in breathless convulsions on the bed beside me. But for the soaked sheets I would soon be asleep, but no sleep is possible in this sodden bed.
I pull on one of his moisture wicking t-shirts and nothing else and give in to the magnetic draw of the hammock. The soaked sheets and the drenched air explain the abundance of hammocks and suspended rope chairs. The porch shades the hammock and as I rock slowly in the ever warmer breeze I hear Joe begin to snore in his post-coital way. Then more and more sounds come from the rain forest. Birds and monkeys and things I can neither name nor imagine. I close my eyes and drift away in this paradise.
Joe
I wake in my bed, covered in sweat, feeling the dampness in the sheets and the mattress below. It is light out, and hot. I look around the small, airy, light-filled room and do not see her. My eyes travel out the front screen to the porch and see that she is asleep in the hammock. She is wearing one of my t-shirts and it barely reaches her thighs. It has slipped off one of her shoulders and she is as near to peace as I have ever seen her. I study her. Her shoulder, her calf, her thigh, her hair, her face. I am in love.
I thank God for sending her to me on that beach in Topsail, and then I thank Him again for sending her to me here in Costa Rica. She has come to surf and to see me. She has taken me into this bed and made love to me and now is sleeping in my hammock. I have no agenda for today, no plans, and think how lovely it might be to just stay here, mostly naked, making love time after time and drifting in and out of that languorous equatorial slumber that we gringos quickly discover in the heat and humidity that are spiced with the smells and sounds and birds from the rain forest. Cinnamon, vanilla, chocolate, and coffee all grow wildly just yards from my bungalow. Their barely domesticated cousins are cultivated in the garden below and scent the air with each languid puff of air that blows up the midday hillside.
I take a bottle of water from the fridge and drink it in one pull. A half a liter of fairly cold water and I am still parched. I twist open another bottle and drink it more slowly.
“
Do you have one for me?” she calls from the patio.
I take two more bottles from the fridge, and a couple of single serving cans of nuts. I pull over the chair that she sat in last night and hand her the water and the nuts.
“
Thank you,” she says.
“
You are welcome,” I answer. I have nothing else to say. And she needs nothing more. She drinks, nibbles the nuts, and stays reclined in the hammock.
Later, after maybe half an hour on the porch, she swings down first one leg, and then another.
“
I can still feel the ocean,” she says.
“
I can still feel me inside you,” I answer.
She pulls the t-shirt over her head, sits in my lap and starts to kiss me. She kisses me until I am as hard and aching for a woman as I have ever been. Sensing that I may come in my pants she stands, takes my hand, and brings me into the bedroom. She finds a dry towel and picks the driest space on the bed and lays down.
“
I want you inside me,” she says. I oblige. We sleep, and are awakened only when Howler monkeys shriek through the jungle behind the bungalow.
“
It must be nearly six,” she says.
“
Yes. Nearly time for dinner,” I answer.
“
I will meet you down there. I’m going to go back and change.”
I feel the overwhelming urge to take her again, and then an even more overwhelming urge to say ‘I love you’ a hundred times. But both feelings move too slowly in the heat and humidity and she is gone down the hill before I connect the feelings in my heart to the part of my brain that makes my mouth speak.
“
I love you,” I whisper into the last light of the day that trails her down the hill.
Did her head tilt just the tiniest fraction when I whispered those words? Or was she simply looking down and shifting her gaze to keep her footing on the track from the top of the hill to the bottom? It doesn’t matter. She is gone and I have not told her I love her.
But there can be no doubt in her mind that I do. Not after July, and January, and today. Today. This glorious day of splendor and beauty and intimacy in the cinnamon scented air after the low tide waves on the warm and endless Pacific.
Shannon
I am completely alive, insanely hungry, and desperately tired. I have packed a lot of living into this one day in Costa Rica. I have spent the day with my lover, a day of abandon, a new day in a new place. My ex would have liked it here. Rick would have been interested in the ocean and the rain forest and in the differences between Costa Rica and the states. He would have been frisky here, he was always frisky when we were ‘away’. I might have been a little frisky too, in the beginning, but not near the end. Was it me that had changed or him? Did I push him away? Did I cut him out?
Why am I thinking about Rick? Especially here in Costa Rica where I have been surfing and then sexing for an entire day. Where I have worn a bathing suit and clothes that I would never wear at home. Where I am putting on an outfit suitable for the tropical heat and humidity for dinner, an outfit that is breezy and gauzy and that I barely believe I am wearing. Is that why I am thinking about my ex? Because I know he would have loved to see me here, to see me like this? That seeing me like this would have made him and us come alive again?
Would a place like this have let him temporarily forget about the baby? Or let me forget about the baby? Did he really push me that hard? Or did I embrace the failure so tightly that it expanded until it consumed us both, consumed our relationship, defined my end of the relationship? Did I project my want and my failure onto him? Did I do that? I will not think about it anymore.
I am dressed, ready for dinner, ready to see my lover and the other surfers and our host who will drive us to Hermosa for dinner and then back. I am already longing for my lover inside me. But I am ravenously hungry. So he, and I, will have to wait.
Joe
I wonder what she will wear to dinner? Will she wear that loose shirt that caused all the men at the table and in the restaurant to lose their focus on their food and shift it instead to her almost nakedness? She is not demure here. She is sexy here. She is nearly insatiable here. She is still essentially herself, but there is something additional, or different. I’m not sure if it’s additional or different. Whether it is always there, even in a Topsail July or January or an Ohio February, or whether it has been cultured quickly and then released here.
I would like to know. But I am so fuck-drunk that I lose the thread and start thinking again about her breasts and imagine being inside her and rocking until the sensations bring me around the bend again.
Hermosa
Salvaro parks in front of the restaurant and the surfers walk the slippery steps and then grassy path down towards the large Tiki hut restaurant that sits a hundred yards from the Pacific on the beach in Hermosa. It is dark. It gets dark at almost exactly six o’clock so that practically every supper is eaten in the dark. There are no white nights here, no eighteen hour summer days, so every dinner and every evening feels like a ‘night out’ for the visiting gringos.
Every eye, male and female, is on Shannon as she slinks into the restaurant. With her hair up, her comfortable and revealing outfit, and her runner’s body she is a delight for every man, and a challenge to every woman. Hers is not the sexiness of a twenty year old surfer hottie. Even so, she is unaware of the effect she is having on those around her, everyone but Joe whose thigh she caressed in the van in the dark on the drive over. She can see through his Dockers that he is ready. It is agony for him. He is looking for dark places, maybe down the beach, where he could lead her to release what she has created inside him.
Dinner is tuna that was swimming that day. Enormous tuna steaks that not even the hungriest surfer can finish. Tuna with fresh salad and fresh fruit, fruit that also was likely on the tree or vine that day. Things in Costa Rica seem to be more immediate, especially the food. The food seems to be entirely immediate and in the moment. Refrigeration and microwaving are not part of the storing and preparation of the fresh food and are not part of the culture. The fish swims on the day it is eaten, the fruit swings on the tree the day it is eaten, and the berries hang from their vines on the day they are eaten. Cinnamon is plucked from the rain forest and shaved into coffee made from beans that were plucked and roasted just yards away.
For the surfers, the day revolves around the tide. Always the tide. It defines when the surfing will start and when the surfing will end. Not the rain or sun or heat or wind. It is the tide.
“
Low tide is at 7 tomorrow morning, so we will leave for Playa Jaco at 6:30,” Salvaro says.
“
Why do we go at low tide instead of high tide,” a surfer asks.
Joe only partly listens. His eyes rove over Shannon as he tries to gaze down or through her top. He only partly hears the answer.
“
The shape is better at Jaco at the low tide, because of the sand bars. At high tide the waves lose their shape crossing the sand bars and then are more like humps, not breaking waves,” Salvaro answers.