Sliver

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Coming out of the tall grass onto the sand at the top of the beach, she paused. Saw him before he saw her. Not too late to take control, she told herself. Not too late to let the frontal lobes have their victory over that limbic stem goosing her. She had no illusions that whatever wholeness she might feel here on the beach would be anything but temporary. Still, she couldn’t make herself stop.

She saw him sitting on a graying drift log, watching a seal floating on its back and chomping a large fish. The wind shifted and the brine was in her nose and on her tongue. She snugged her bikini top and bottom, making sure all her mounds and cleavage were accentuated before she called out to him.

He turned, lit up when he saw her, and sprang from the drift log. She walked half the distance to him, then half-pirouetted, arched her back while looking over her shoulder and held the old Coppertone ad pose.

“Wow. And here I was getting worried you weren’t going to come.”

“That’s one thing you don’t have to worry about.”

He continued standing beside the grayed cedar drift log, actually ogling and licking his lips, which made her shiver. She went to him then, quickly closing the gap of hot sand.

“Here I am.”

“I was thinking right here. It’s the perfect height.”

He held his hands out over the drift log as if they already held her rump, and she could see her intuition about him being a back door man had been correct.

***

She met him at Starbucks while her three kids were in the car parked just outside the front door. She was behind him in line. Only her height, which wasn’t usual for her, but he kept turning around to look at her: smiling, looking her up and down, nodding—blatant, in a way that would turn most women off. She found his method amusing: clearly calculated to push away the maybes and leave him only with sure things. A technique he probably honed in meat-market bars. Black hair streaked with grey. Her age; late thirties. Brown eyes. Deep tan. Lean. A runner. She waited while his eyes lingered on her cleavage, waited until he looked up, then held his gaze, smiled, showed the tip of her tongue, and saw recognition in his eyes. She held out her hand to shake: “I’m—”

“No names,” he said, shaking her hand with his right and holding up his left so she could see his wedding ring. But she’d noticed that right off, was the reason she answered his initial eye appraisal with a flirt. Her M.O. was married men only.

“—pleased to meet you.”

Small talk then about the CDs on sale while they waited to place their orders. He effortless, a salesman, a natural she could follow easily. He ordered an Americano with room and she a triple-shot mocha. While they waited for the drinks he asked what she was doing after and she asked what was he looking for.

“I was thinking we could go to the state park, the north beach.”

She thought that was a better place than the homes neither of them could go to. Better than the hourly motel down on 6th Avenue. She hadn’t done outdoors in a while, and thinking about it gave her goosebumps, which was her answer.

“Do you want to follow me?” he said as they approached the door to leave the store.

“I’ll meet you in fifteen minutes,” she said, “I have to drop something off at my sister’s.”

Outside, he went left and she had to go right—ignoring for the moment her car with her kids. She walked slowly past the row of parked cars, waited until he got into his black Mercedes SL and drove off. She called her sister.

***

He slapped her right butt cheek as he thrust and she felt a sliver of parched cedar sink into the palm of her hand. Her knees ground into the pebbly sand and she saw gulls drift-gliding over the dune grass with a screech. His hands pulled hard on her hip bones and held her there, in deep, nearly against her cervix. She shimmed her butt. “Fuck yeah,” he said and began again with slow strokes, “keep doing that with your ass.” So this is what she got for saying she wasn’t the romantic type? She wondered what this meant to him—how he really thought about doing her. She knew he would never say. Her sister had said, “But you don’t even know him.” It wasn’t about getting to know him—already, she didn’t want to know him. She knew plenty; knew enough. All she wanted was to be taken outside herself, outside this scary person, this person who couldn’t stop.

In the sand in front of her was a red bottle cap turned upside down with a prize code imprinted—4W6L5F9X499T. The kind where you went to a website and typed in the code. She wondered about its worth and tried to memorize the code in case she forgot to pick it up after she was done getting fucked. As she looked closer at the sand she became amazed at what else she saw, so much more than sand. A yellow mangled straw. A wormy apple core that had been bitten. Red berries. Green seed pods. Pine needles. Feathers. Plastic wadding from a shotgun shell. A crab claw. Leaves. A purple Bic lighter. Gray shrunken kelp heads, all frayed and gnawed.

Her fingers sifted the sand and found a small tube. A clear plastic cylinder with colored rings that looked like the outline of balloons around the cylinder: lime green, magenta, and pink. A rose colored cap. The label read Strawberry Kiwi “Liquid Lipsmacker,” the letters multi-colored in a fat and juicy font. She smiled. His thrusts sounded like lips smacking. And she was lip smacking good. She suppressed a giggle. The tube was filled with liquid for smudging the lips. Had a prow shaped applicator. Made in USA. Bonnie bell(reg), Lakewood, Ohio, 44107. She imagined another woman, a younger woman, a teenage girl, also getting her lips smacked here on the beach, and the parts of herself she couldn’t stand began to spiral away.

He was driving into her hard then, hitting her spot and she tightened her fingers on the drift log, released the lipsmacker tube and reached between her legs with her other hand and grabbed his balls, hoping to make him come quick while her forearm sawed against her clit. Her shadow scrubbed the pebbles on the beach, abrading away layers of self. His shadow head climbed over her shadow shoulder. Right, left, up the middle, in her head. In rhythm, his shadow rode her, too.