Mavens, I want to talk about anticipation.
Not the nervous kind. Not the kind that keeps you checking your phone and rehearsing what you’ll say. I mean the other kind — the slow, golden, not quite entirely physical kind that lives in the hour before something wonderful and asks nothing of you except to welcome it. And prepare to feel it.
Anticipation is the finest currency a woman can spend. Never rush it, Darling.
My day had gone like this: a breakfast eaten slowly. A walk I hadn’t planned along a coastal path that kept offering itself like a promise, just ahead and around the next corner. A cove I found by following the sound of waves. And then, Darlings — a swim that I can only describe as a negotiation with myself about what I was willing to feel and why following that whisper always leads to a splash more than even I could have imagined.
The cove was almost empty. A family packing up at the far end. And Him, as it turned out — because apparently the universe had decided that the character of the literary man from before was going to be a recurring feature of this chapter. However temporary.
He was already in the water when I arrived. Didn’t acknowledge me. Didn’t have to. There is a particular brand of attractive man who understands the erotic power of not trying, and he had clearly studied at its altar.
I left my things draped over a branch. Walked in slowly. This particular Australian beach — if you have never had the pleasure — does not ease you in. It hits you all at once, cold with a tingle and then suddenly warm, like a conversation that starts formal and ends somewhere else entirely.
The sea holds heat the way a memory does — longer than you expect, warmer than you remember.
We swam, separately, without speaking. At least, not with words.
Parallel at first, then, as the current made its own not so subtle suggestions, less so. The water was that glass-clear variety that makes even your toes peek up at you with ease. The back of my mind acknowledged the brilliantly perfect pedicure colour I had picked. Clarity through the depths can be either brilliantly thrilling or decidedly terrifying I decided. Since I hide nothing, it was perfect.
He surfaced near me eventually. Close. The sun was doing something very agreeable to the water on his shoulders.
“You swim like someone who has had to think about it,” he said.
“I had to learn twice,” I said. “Once as a child and once later, after I forgot I was supposed to.”
He looked at me the way people do when you’ve accidentally said something true.
We swam back separately. I dressed on the rock with the practiced ease of a woman who has been choosing her own scenery for years now, pulled my hair up into the knot that means I’m not trying and that’s the point, and gathered my things.
The walk back to the hotel took twenty minutes. He walked it too, half a length behind, which is a very specific distance that communicates a very specific thing.
At the hotel gate I turned.
“Dinner?” I asked. Not an invitation. A question with no wrong answer.
He smiled in a way that rearranged something I hadn’t known was out of place.
And then his phone rang.
I saw the name on the screen. It was one I had not thought about since the taxi ride out, several years ago. From this same place but not this same place.
He knew I had seen. And he, quite deliberately, turned the phone off.
Your Weazelle
