I Went Back Alone to the Beach Where I Met Her

I didn’t go to the beach to swim. I went because it had been three months since I’d heard anything from her and because, in the absence of her body, all I had left was the place where I’d last had it. Sometimes you go back to places the way you reopen a letter you already know by heart.

I arrived at night, with summer still stuck to my skin. The sand held the day’s heat, and the sea sounded closer than it was, that strange thing water does in the dark: it seems to breathe beside you.

I wasn’t afraid. Dark places never frightened me, and this one less than any. It was here I’d kissed her for the first time, against the cold wood of the lifeguard shack, while she laughed and told me someone was going to see us.

—Let them see us —I’d answered then.

That night, though, there was no one there. Just me, the shore, and a name I no longer dared say out loud. I’ll call her Mariela, though that wasn’t her name. Some names wear out from being repeated too often inside your head.

I walked to the line where the water leaves its foam and sat down. And I started remembering.

***

The first thing that always came back were her breasts. Not for any cheap prurient reason, but because they were the first thing she let me touch, as if she were testing me with them before opening up the rest. They had an exact weight in my hand, not more and not less, and her nipples hardened with a kind of ease that embarrassed her.

—Don’t look at me like that —she’d say, covering herself with her arm.

—I’ll look at you however I want —I’d answer, and slowly move her arm aside.

I remembered the first time we were really together, in my apartment, with the window open and the city humming below. I undressed her without rushing, as if I had all the time in the world, though my hands were trembling inside. She let me do as I pleased up to a point, and then she took control, which was what I liked most about Mariela: you never knew who was going to be holding the reins.

We’d had perfect fucks. That was the word we both used, half as a joke, when something went so well it was almost funny. “Perfect,” she’d say in that rough voice of hers, still breathless, and laugh against my neck.

I also remembered the dead afternoons, the ones that never make it into any story because nothing spectacular happens. Her reading face-down on my bed, me tracing her back with the tip of my fingers until her skin rose in goose bumps. The way she’d turn over without warning and pin me with her gaze, and suddenly the book would be on the floor and we wouldn’t. It was in those unplanned moments that we worked best, when desire appeared without either of us summoning it.

That was what I truly missed, sitting there in the sand. Not just sex. The way sex was only the tip of something much larger that had slipped through our hands without either of us fully understanding how.

And there were more things missing. That was what hurt me, sitting in the sand: that there were so many more missing and maybe they would never come.

***

I wondered what it would have been like to do it there, in the sea, with her. We never dared. We talked about it once, laughing, with our feet in the water, but there was always people around, it was always daytime, there was always a lack of nerve at exactly the wrong moment.

And then, sitting alone in the dark, I imagined it.

I imagined her walking into the water ahead of me, looking back over her shoulder to make sure I was following. Moonlight outlined her back, the curve of her waist, the place where the back stops being back. The water rose over her thighs and she kept walking, unhurried, knowing exactly what she was doing to me.

I caught up to her when the water reached our waists. I held her from behind and felt all her wet skin against mine, the cold of the sea and her heat mixed into a single second. I kissed the salty curve of her neck, bit her shoulder, and she threw her head back, resting it against my chest.

—See? —she’d say to me—. The world isn’t going to fall apart.

I turned her toward me and kissed her for real, with that tongue of hers that sought out mine and rubbed against it, eager, impatient. Her breasts floated just a little, heavy and light at once, and I covered one with my hand while the other pressed against my body.

The water held us up. She wrapped her legs around my waist and I held her by the ass, and for an instant there was no above and below, only the sea’s sway pushing us into each other. I felt her open sex brushing me, searching for me, and the two of us played at holding back, at not going in yet, at stretching out that moment when desire is almost unbearable.

—Now —she’d say in my ear, and the word sounded like a command and a plea at the same time.

***

I opened my eyes. I was still alone in the sand, with the tide licking my feet and my imagination burning me from the inside out. There was no Mariela, no warm water around us, no her legs around my waist. There was a man sitting on an empty beach, painfully awake.

But the body doesn’t understand absence. The body only understands what you tell it, and I had told mine too much.

I lay back on the still-warm sand. Above me, the sky was so full of stars it seemed fake. I closed my eyes again and let my hand do what reality could not give me.

I imagined her climbing out of the water and pushing me down into the sand, the way she had done that night in my apartment when she decided to take control. I imagined her weight on top of me, her knees on either side of my hips, that look she had right before lowering herself onto me slowly.

My hand moved. Slowly at first, as she always began, measuring me, making me wait. I squeezed with just the right pressure, traced every inch thinking of how she did it, of how she changed the rhythm when she saw I was close, of how she’d laugh softly when she felt I could no longer hold on.

—Slow —she always told me—. We’re in no rush.

But that night I was in a rush. I had the urgency of someone who knows that after pleasure comes silence and the empty beach and the lonely drive home.

I imagined myself entering her. First in the water, slowly, with the sea moving us. Then in the sand, her beneath me, her hands buried in the wet sand, her back arched, her hair full of salt. I imagined her saying my name in that broken voice that only ever came out at the very end.

I sped up. I held the rest in my other hand, the way I did when I wanted it to last, and I stopped thinking about holding back. The images came tumbling over one another: her salty breasts in my mouth, her wet nipples against my tongue, her sex opening, closing, calling me. The curve of her back. The sound she made just before coming.

I came looking at the horizon, where the night was only just beginning to lighten, that gray band that warns the sun isn’t far off. I came thinking that one day, maybe, that desire would stop being only imagination.

***

I stayed like that for a long while, stretched out, my breathing settling back into place and my heart still pounding. The sea kept rising, indifferent, slowly erasing the outline of my body in the sand.

I thought about texting her. I thought about it the way you think about those things at five in the morning, when everything seems possible and nothing has consequences. I took out my phone, looked at the screen, searched for her name. Three months of silence condensed into a conversation that ended with her dry “take care.”

I wrote: “I came back to the beach.” I erased it. I wrote: “I imagined you in the water.” I erased that too. In the end I put the phone away without sending anything, because some things work better inside your head than outside it, and because fantasy has one enormous advantage over reality: it never tells you no.

The sky kept brightening. The beach started to get its colors back: gray turned blue, blue turned orange over the water. A couple of fishermen appeared in the distance, dragging a net, completely oblivious to what had just happened there.

I stood up, brushed the sand off, and walked back toward the car. In my hand I carried the memory of the memory, that double, slightly sad thing of having desired someone who now existed only in my mind.

Someday, Mariela.

That’s what I told myself, opening the car door as the sun finished rising. Someday I’m going to tell you what I imagined tonight, and you’re going to laugh, and tell me I’m crazy. And then we’re going to come here together, and there won’t be any need to imagine anything.

I started the car with the window down and the smell of salt still clinging to my body. The beach shrank in the mirror until it was just a line, until it was nothing. But desire came with me, intact, waiting for the next night when I’d need to come back.