When she returns, he is in the shower. She can see his wet silhouette, distorted and lanky, through the orange glass of the seventies beach bungalow he rents. It's in the backyard of a local tradie who smiles at her wryly as she walks past his loungeroom, squeezing beside the ute and the EH Holden panelvan that are rusting away there, navigating the paint-splattered white buckets and milk crates piled with rusty spare parts. She hates the smile. It's as if he knows she won’t last here long. The sound of local talkback radio yaks from the back porch, clashing with the warm crackle of a vinyl record playing from inside the shack. Sisters of Mercy.

And her hallway
Moves
Like the ocean
Moves

She doesn’t have a key, which makes her feel even more out of place. Still, he’s left the door open, which she supposes means something. There’s a bong on the table. There’s always a bong on the table. The room smells of smoke and faint mildew. The monstera in the corner, propped up with a timber stake and garden twine, threatens to topple. It needs careful pruning, but she appreciates the effort he’s made to save it. Huss, the pup named after Husker Du’s guitarist, wags his tail and licks her fingers before returning to his bed by the laundry, where a pair of his black jeans hang from a wicker basket, their cuffs stained orange with clay. He'd been out watering his crop again, she notices. She’d steal it if she knew where it was. Go west. But she softens at the sight of the dog; she cannot quite yet leave a man who tends to plants and puppies.

She nudges the door to the bathroom open, noting the wetsuit dripping over the shower glass and the sandy footprints on the floor. From the shack, they hear the waves roar at night. The early winter swell had thundered very early this morning, waking her to a mouth tasting of Jim Beam and cigarettes. Regret. She crawled out of bed, tugged on her jeans, and left. He never wants to go out. She should never crawl into his bed at 2 am, but at that time, she wants him more than anything.

"Hello, spud," he says. He calls her 'spud' or 'potato.' He doesn’t hold her hand in public. She suspects he loves her but is frustrated she has to guess. She doesn’t know it yet, but when she finally leaves, he will sleep on her doorstep one night. She won’t know until he admits it in a letter written in rebellious capitals because he never learned to write in cursive. He begs her for reprieve. He will change. He loves her. He wants to move in with her. He wants to give her everything he had withheld from her until she was no longer there.

"Hey. How was it?" she offers, stepping naked into the shower. His eyes are blue. They are as cold as his fingers de-icing in the hot water. Her body desires him even if her heart tells her that she should be elsewhere.

'Fun' he says, and pulls her toward him, and she obliges. She knows the waves were big, magnificent. It was a swell he had been anticipating for weeks, reading the synoptic chart in the paper. She had watched him from the cliff tops, sheltering from the artic wind against the tea trees. His praying mantis frame cut across the verdant faces of six-footers, his back to the wave as he found his line down the valley. She had watched him for hours. If he had looked up to the cliff at any point, he might have seen her, but he was so present in the water that nothing else existed.

He kisses her. His mouth tastes like dope, smoke and salt water.

It is raining outside now. It hammers on the tin roof of the shack and slides in thick streams along the window. The water rushing down the shower screen makes it appear as if it's raining inside and out. She feels a little seasick. The tap digs into her back. The anger of the morning dissolves as his skin defrosts against hers. She cannot push him away anyway — the cubicle is too small. She notices black flecks of mould in the frayed silicone that joins the tiles to the screen. If they slip, she fears the glass will shatter.

Later, she'll want something from him but is too inexperienced in love to ask, and he is too injured from life to know what she needs. She will leave and come back, leave and come back. It’s tidal, rhythmic. She wants him, she does not want him. But there are the waves of bodily desire and the desire of the soul for something steadier. When her soul is not fed, there is an awful gulf between them, and despite his sad efforts to fill it, he does not know how.

It’s not that she never wants to be with him again. "I'd never say never," she’d say, notice her friend's wince, and then feels like a bitch. She couldn't expect him to wait. She doesn't want him anymore. But it's true. She fantasizes about them a half-century hence, making his signature stir fry with pineapple and bean sprouts in the kitchen while she reads by the fire. She imagines looking into the courtyard and seeing the pots of plants he has been tending all these years. Perhaps the monstera has been replaced by a more sophisticated fiddle leaf fig. She will still like the way he tenderly pushes seedlings into the earth and carefully prunes dead flowers from the banksia. He is careful with plants and dogs still. Perhaps after little black-and-tan Huss, he has another kelpie, with grey hair around the muzzle and arthritis in her joints. She hopes he’s still surfing, perhaps on a longboard now. She will always love his salty kisses. His hair will be grey, his blue eyes faded. There will be an easy silence between them, and she will no longer mind the things unsaid. She will no longer mind what he cannot give her and feel happy with what he offers.

Perhaps the years she will have doing all the things he does not care to do with her will have left her considerably more satiated. She will travel. She will have lovers that will offer more, ones that talk about the universe til late at night and climb mountains with her instead of disappearing into the sea or making her ache with cold silences she cannot fathom. She will read poetry with one in Krakow and another will write a song about her he will busk in the street in Berlin. She will spend a year in the mountains with another, looking for snow leopards.

For now, he is part of the future she imagines because she cannot let him go entirely. They will snuggle up on the couch, two old people, in a kind of love, content at last.

The water slips between them, between breasts and toes and hips.
She does love him, she does.

She just needs some long, long years without him at all.

This is in response to The InkWell's weekly prompt 'never say never'. Edited photographs are my own.

With Love,

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