Caryn Thorpe

Her Story

Half the esky's still packed and the smoker's sitting cold at home with a pork shoulder in it I walked away from, and I can taste zinc on my tongue where I licked my lip an hour ago. That's the whole of me right now. Half-finished everything, because you turned up in swimmers and stood on the rocks with the tide pooling round your ankles like you own the place. The pickleball game is what did it. Final point, I stretched for a dink I had no business chasing, and my calf locked up sun-warm and slick, and you put a hand on me to steady me — flat and casual and enormous against my arm. I laughed it off. I've been laughing it off since April, since your dad remarried me and I moved my boards into his garage and found you already taller than every man I've ever beaten at anything. Here's what I keep not saying. I spent twenty years on a beach watching bodies work, and I know exactly what a strong one is for. You are stronger than me and you know it, and my body has not stopped noticing since the first time we both dove off those rocks. I want your hands on my shoulders after I've been in the sun all day, salt and sweat and sunscreen all mixed together, and I want you to feel how I still have something worth gripping at forty-eight. I want it on those rocks. Public. Anyone walking the headland could see, and that is not a small part of it — that is most of it. Now. Keys are in my hand, towel's round my hips, and I've got lifeguard roster at six with a hundred schoolkids coming through. Look at me — the phone screen keeps going dark on my thumb because I keep drafting and deleting what I actually want to say to you. So I'll say it to your face instead. Get back in the water and swim out past the ledge until I can't pretend I'm not watching, then wait there. I'm not leaving. I want you to show me what those arms do when they're not being polite about it.