Lingering glow

The sun hovers over the horizon, in a state of descent or ascent, I cannot fully tell which. It never gets truly dark this time of year, but in the west, the full moon is starting to show its pale face, promising that the night is encroaching. Even as the glass walls struggle to contain the thumping music on the dance floor inside, a cool silence lays over the lake. It settles over me where I sit on the deck terrace, instilling in me a much-needed sense of clear-mindedness. I dangle my legs from the edge of the table on which I’m sitting, letting my high heeled shoes topple off my warm, aching feet to balance on my needlessly manicured toes. The floating deck sways in the waves. My drink is empty, and I sway along.

My heart skips a beat when I notice in my peripheral vision a familiar figure stepping out onto the deck. With her comes a wave of loud music, which she quiets by shutting the door behind her.

"May I join you?" she asks, and I nod, despite knowing that she's not waiting for me to answer. I have been bracing myself for this ever since I saw her from across the room. She caught my attention with her gait first, a familiar pattern of movement that felt like catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Then her eyes met mine and that round, curious face lit up my chest with familiarity. She is paler than I know her to be, every other freckle has faded, and I was struck by the idea that if I kissed her cheeks and across the bridge of her nose, they might blossom again.

She sits down next to me, and the wind grazes her hair. It's shorter than I know it, she has cropped off the tips that were torn apart by saltwater and bleached by the scorching Mediterranean sun.

"Hi," I say, but the word is swept away by a soft breeze that carries her beeswax scent toward me. I want to breathe her in until I know her again, know everything about her to the point where her skin is as familiar as my own and her mouth tastes like mine. There is so much I want to talk to her about. Is it fate that we meet here, now, in another city, in another life, after all this time? I want to know everything that she has been doing, every moment since I stood on that port in Dubrovnik, crying mercilessly, the way you can only do when your heart has been broken for the first time, and watched the sails of her boat descend over the edge of the Adriatic Sea. I want to ask her why she came alone, but I don't want to hear the answer. Even suggesting the possibility that she might be with someone else puts a pressure on my esophagus that invokes a sour taste in my mouth. I take a slurping sip of my drink, scraping at the melting ice with a dissolving paper straw. She reaches her half-full glass over to me and wordlessly offers me a sip of gin and tonic, which I accept, leaving a semicircle of dark lipstick on the rim. I hand the glass back to her and wipe my palm on the navy skirt of my dress to rid it of the lingering condenses. The dress brings out the blue of my eyes. She once told me that they were the color of the water off the Amalfi coast. I wonder if she remembers that now, if that memory is as precious to her as it is to me, or if she’s said the same to many other women.

"So, bride or groom?" she asks.

"Bride. You?"

"Groom."

I collect my hair over one shoulder, and then change my mind and toss it over to cover my bare back. I don't dare to look at her, but even looking straight ahead, I feel the heat radiating off her, even though she's not sitting that closely, not nearly closely enough, but at a safe distance. Instead, I focus on the flower arch that stands in front of us, under which the couple pledged their love to one another just hours earlier. We're positioned perfectly in its middle. The bride's teary eyes and quivering lips flood my memory and I wonder how it's possible to look as genuine as she did in that moment, as if everything other than the two of them just fell away.

"I wish I could love like her," I say, with an unfocused gaze at the waves through the flower arch. "Just fall, with no safety net. Swimming out to sea with no plan of how to get back, disregarding the riptide, or even hoping that it will take hold of you and tug you further out, as far away from the shore as possible, because you're so sure that you want to be consumed by the sea that you never even considered getting back." 

She doesn’t answer right away, but there is something unsettled about the silence that falls, stirring subtly like the rolling waves that rock the deck beneath us. I look down at my hands resting on my lap and pick at the nail polish on my thumb, it's already peeling off in the corner. I allow myself to glance toward her hands, which are gently grasping at the tops of her linen pants, pinching the fabric together and smoothing it out. The red of the cherry tattoo on her hand has faded to a contour-less pink.

"I don't think that you should," she says, in a voice that is hoarse from singing. I think of the time we docked in Split and danced all night under the stars and went swimming while the sun rose, the way the soft light prismed off the water droplets on her neck, and she told me in that same strained, tired voice in which she speaks now that she was so happy that she'd met me.

"No?"

She shakes her head, and one of the short strands of hair that frame her face falls forward and lands on her cheekbone. I sit still, longing to tuck it behind her ear, so much that it physically hurts not to. She looks at me from under her fringe and I meet her amber eyes, light in the middle and darkening around the periphery of her irises. I look at her closely, now, letting myself remember all the marks and creases. She has a small scar on her left upper lip, shifting the curvature of her mouth ever so slightly, and normally it’s barely noticeable, but in this light, I can think of nothing else.

"No," she says, "I mean, maybe I don't know you that well. But I think you say big things in small, private ways. And a lot of people appreciate that."

I wonder if she means that she doesn't know me well because time has put distance between us, or if she means to say that she thinks that she never really knew me. I ache to find out, but I don't ask, because if she means the latter, I might never be able to look at her again.

“Do you still have your boat?” I ask her instead.

“No. I mean, yes, but I don’t get out much.”

I think about the thin, green mattress in the cabin of her boat, how it seeped filling and smelled damp and sour but I possibly slept better next to her on that mattress than I ever have otherwise in my life.

“Did you become a lawyer?”

“Yeah”, I say, with a snorting exhale, as I’m saying something funny.

“So, you’re like, saving the world now?”

I think about my job and smile a twitching smile, trying to conceal my teeth.

“No.” And with that, my laughter boils over, and she laughs too, the same way she used to, but it puts unfamiliar wrinkles around her eyes; deepens the vertical line between her eyebrows. Our laughter dies out and we sit still, not closely enough, but also not far enough apart, and listen as the fervor of the dance floor drums against the glass that prevents it from encompassing us.

"I really did love you, you know," I say.

"I know," she says. The water ripples audibly against the side of the deck and the back of my mouth tastes like salt. "Me, too," she says, so softly I think I might have imagined it. 

I look up at the sky above us, wondering if there was ever a way that things could have turned out differently. The moon has been brightening, pressing itself out of the darkening sky to clash with the air around it and become an entity of its own. With each passing minute it becomes more difficult to believe that it was blending into the light blue sky just hours prior. I know now that the sun is descending, preparing to set, and one of these days, it's going to burrow in underneath the horizon and the sky will darken completely. For tonight, I'm content sitting in its lingering glow.