"Sorry, Adam," she said in a rather quiet voice, almost a whisper. She looked at me, into my eyes for what seemed like a very long time but was probably only a few seconds. It felt like she was searching my eyes for something.
"I don't know. It's, um, kind of personal." She went on, "I don't know…I just got this weird feeling, or idea, for a minute, but I guess it's really kind of ridiculous. Let's just pretend I didn't say anything."
"Was it something I did?" I asked her.
"No, " she answered, and won me for the hundredth time, already, with her incredible smile. "No. You do everything just right.”
I relaxed as we continued spinning slowly in giant, vertical circles. You do everything just right, she said. That was the first time anyone besides my parents had said anything to me like that.
****
My adoption was something I had quit thinking about a long time ago. When I was a teenager, it was neat to show it off; it was something that I thought made me unique. It never failed to raise interest in whoever happened to be my audience at the time.
“Well, I’m not sure who I look like…I was adopted,” I would say, relishing my moment in the spotlight.
“Adopted? Aren’t you curious about your parents?” was the normal response.
Yes, I always admitted. I was curious about my parents. I wanted a heritage, just like all of my friends. I wanted to be able to say, “I look just like my dad.” Every kid I knew, except me, had that ability.
Somewhere along the line, though, the interest faded. It was around the time I turned twenty-one or so. I remember the less attractive of the two women Sean and I were talking to one night asking me, “Don’t you wonder about your real parents?”
All I could respond with was, “I have real parents.”
I didn’t know if my biological parents were out there or not. I didn’t know if they thought about me. I didn’t know if they were alive. It seemed like a lot for me to wonder about, so I just accepted the fact that I had two parents that picked me, and that they loved me. Maybe I didn’t look like them, and maybe they warned me about diabetes in the family even though I didn’t share the same blood, but they were mom and dad, and it was all I had. The idea of having any other sort of parents became a pipe dream to me, and seemed about as attainable as winning the lottery. My parents had told me that it was better than being the average kid because they had actually chosen me as their son.
I used to like to think that, somewhere in the world, a woman spent Mother’s Day wondering about me, or a man spent October 17 thinking about his child that was born on that day, but I quit those thoughts. Rather than pursue any knowledge of my heritage, I played with the hand that I was dealt, and it had treated me fine so far. I had decided that my parents were right about it.
****
The ride ended, and we exited the car once the man came to us and unlocked the safety bar. After a brief second spent gaining my equilibrium back, I put my arm around Sara’s waist, and we stepped off the steel platform to the hard-packed dirt below.
“Well, Miss DuBeau, did you enjoy your Ferris wheel ride?” I asked her, keeping my spirits up despite the questions gnawing at me.
“Yes, I did, Mister Fluke, and I thank you very much.” She smiled at me, and we walked aimlessly for a few moments.
The lights were flashing all around us, multi-colored lights with no pattern, no rhyme nor reason. People walked by us…kids, parents, young couples holding hands, and the one thing everyone had in common was laughter. The carnival was a well of good moods for thousands, and it was being tapped generously tonight.
Sara’s mood showed no reflection of her brief trance from minutes before. She was smiling and looking around, as interested and excited as a little kid. Her eyes lit up when she saw a snack booth containing a cotton candy machine.
“You know what it’s time for?” she asked, poking me gently in the side with a fingertip.
“Umm…time for a nap?” I ventured, joking.
“No, silly. Time for a big old batch of cotton candy,” she said. She grabbed my forearm and started pulling me in the direction of the snack booth.
“I thought you wanted a candy apple,” I commented, allowing myself to be pulled along.
“I changed my mind…I’m a woman, remember?”
God, did I. How could I forget?
We reached the booth and stood in line behind two teenage girls. The large lady behind the counter was wrapping the wispy pink filaments onto a white cardboard cone, rolling it until the cotton candy formed a basketball-sized lump on the cone.
“Oh, decisions, decisions,” Sara said, turning to me. “Do I want blue or pink?”
“Let me think. Well, it tastes the same no matter what color it is, like pure sugar on a stick,” I responded cynically, pinching her side lightly, enough to make her jump.
“Hey!” she said, laughing, pulling back. “No tickle! Just for that I’ll get one blue and one pink!”
“Man, you’ll be wired all night after all that sugar,” I commented, smiling.
Seductively, she looked at me and said, “Oh, and you’d love that, Adam.”
Wow.
She turned to ask the lady for a pink and a blue when I felt the tap on my shoulder. It was a light tap, gentle enough to not seem rude, but hard enough for me to know it was there. It felt like a woman’s tap, I thought, irrationally. How does a woman tap, Adam-boy? I turned around and saw Heather standing there.
Shit.
“Hey there, Fluke,” Heather said, crossing her arms over her chest. She was staring at me with a look that could have been either angry, aloof, or a combination of both. She was wearing a denim skirt with a green T-shirt, and I briefly thought to myself that she looked really good in it.
“Hi, uh, Heather,” I said, feeling very close to the edge of something. “Enjoying the carnival?” I asked her, feeling stupid but not knowing what else to say.
I saw her peer over my shoulder to where Sara was getting her pink and blue cotton candy. She looked back at me.
“Is she one of the things you’re working on right now?” I thought she sounded a bit hurt. Or maybe that was just my recently inflated ego talking.
Look, Adam-boy, you lucked into Sara. That doesn’t make you some kind of heartbreaker.
I started tap-dancing. “Look, Heather, I didn’t mean…”
“Here, Adam, hold this,” Sara said in my right ear. I glanced over to her, and she was holding out a wad of pink cotton candy. She was struggling just a bit, with cotton candy in each hand, and a few dollar bills sticking out from between her fingers. She looked up and realized that I was talking to someone. I reached out and took the pink cotton candy from her.
“Oh, hi,” she said, smiling at Heather. “I’m Sara.” Sara wiped the residual sugar from her hands onto her shorts and held her hand out. Heather reached out and gave it a small shake. Two women that I could have taken out tonight, standing within five feet of each other, shaking hands, me in the middle.
“I’m Heather. I work, well…worked, I guess, with Adam at the Pizza Palace. Nice to meet you.” Heather smiled and I grasped at a fleeting thought: maybe this won’t go so bad.
“Well, I guess we sort of have something in common. You worked with him, I was his last delivery,” Sara joked. She moved a hand to my back, and I felt fingertips begin to rub up and down my spine.
“Really? I didn’t know that,” said Heather, shooting me a quick glance. Actually, it was more like a glare with sharp teeth. Heather had never asked me why I quit Perry’s so suddenly, and now I think she was starting to understand.
Feeling extremely uncomfortable and not knowing what to do, I shoved the cotton candy into my face, tearing a hunk off with my teeth and letting it hang. The sugary sweet substance melted the instant it hit my tongue, and a large portion stuck to my lower lip and hung down to my chin. I let it rest like that for a moment and looked back and forth between Heather and Sara.
“Is there something on
my face?” I asked, feigning ignorance.
Sara started laughing at my joke; Heather glanced at me and shook her head. One woman that I chose to take out, and one that will probably no longer talk to me, standing within five feet of each other, me in the middle, I thought.
Sara reached up and pulled the sticky candy from my chin and popped it into her own mouth. I watched her eyes close and her tongue move out to lick her lips and realized that I was with the woman I wanted to be with.
“Well, we’re off to the Tilt-A-Whirl,” I said, ready to move on from this awkward moment. “It was good seeing you, Heather.”
“Yeah, you too. Nice meeting you, Sara,” Heather said, turning to walk away. “I’ll talk to you later, Fluke.” It sounded like a threat when she said it. Sara and I stood eating cotton candy as Heather walked off in the direction of L’Amour.
“She was nice.” Sara said. Either she had missed or was choosing to ignore how strange that situation had been for me.
Yep, I thought, Heather is nice. But she was no Sara.
“Come along, now. We’re gonna tilt and whirl, then we’ve got to hit the ring toss. I’m feeling lucky tonight,” I told her.
“So do I,” Sara said, wrapping her arm around my waist and squeezing me close.
It was a really good time after that, the best time I had had in a long while.
****
Sean and I had a theory about the beach at night and the effect it had on women. It was a great aphrodisiac, but not something to throw around to any woman available. It took a special woman to be a partner on a night beach outing, someone who would appreciate it, someone who was capable of feeling it like we felt it.
Sean often said, “It’s powerful, man. The sand squeaking under your feet, the slow crashing of the waves, the moon reflecting off the water.”
I agreed with him wholeheartedly on that. My addendum to that thought was that it wasn’t just the physical characteristics of the beach at night, it was the readily available and welcome sense of isolation, of ownership, you could achieve. A beach so long, an ocean so big, could make you feel like it belonged to you and no one else. It was a perfect place to be alone and write, think, listen to music, drink, all of which I had done on the beach at night. Alone.
Sean had found at least four “special” women that he had taken to the beach at night. Four that I knew of. Up until last week, I had found none.
****
“Park over here,” I told Sara, pointing at a half sand, half asphalt area located off the side of the road. The area was bordered by highway 98 on the left and by a white sand dune to the right.
She pulled into the area and shut off the engine. The silence was big and not at all uncomfortable this time. The uncomfortable silences were growing rare between Sara and I, and moments like the night I picked her up at her apartment almost seemed funny to me now. The silences we had now were comfortable, and neither one of us felt the need to fill them with chatter.
“Watch out opening your door,” I told her, even though traffic was light. It was a Monday night, nearly midnight, and the majority of the traffic was on the other side of the road, cars full of happy people leaving the carnival, heading home.
On our own way home, I had told Sara to make a U-turn in order to bring us to the spot we parked at. It was my favorite piece of beach, not trampled by sunburned tourists, not littered by drunken teenagers, and best of all, not blotted out by condominiums. I often thought of it as my beach, as I had spent several hours at the section by myself and had only encountered two other people in all the time I spent there. Those encounters consisted of me sitting on the sand just out of the tide’s reach and silently watching the people walk by, hoping they wouldn’t be prompted to talk to me. Whether it was because of the headphones I usually wore on the beach, or the fact that I may have looked a bit like a drifter, neither one spoke to me.
This section of highway was lined with dunes, massive white ones, scattered with sea oats which wafted back and forth in the warm, light breeze. After removing our sandals and tossing them in the back seat, Sara took my hand, and we started walking towards the sound of the water.
The rest of our time at the carnival had been good, and neither of what I considered incidents, the brief trance on the Ferris wheel or the meeting with Heather, came back up between Sara and I. We rode a few more rides, and I lost at the ring toss (she goosed me as I threw what would have been the winning ring, and it actually hit the vendor’s foot, to the delight of two small children watching). I did manage to win her a medium-sized teddy bear at a game in which I had to pop balloons by tossing darts at them. She had seemed delighted with the teddy bear, naming him Flukey, and talking to him as though he were a real live companion with us.
“Want a soda, Adam?” she’d ask me.
“Sure,” I’d respond.
“And how about you, Flukey?”
It was silly, and it was fun. Most of the rides had stopped running, and only a small fraction of the flashing lights were still flashing by the time we left. When we got into her car, she actually buckled the teddy bear in the back seat.
“Don’t want Flukey to get hurt,” she laughed. I couldn’t help it when I was with her, I laughed raucously, not unlike a hyena. We left the carnival with Sara driving, me riding shotgun, and Flukey chilling in the back seat.
“Maybe I should get him a car seat?” Sara wondered aloud as we left the carnival.
The moon was bright that night, a big shiny disc in the sky, with its companion reflection wrinkled and shimmering on the water’s surface. We stopped about fifteen feet from the edge of the water, and I closed my eyes.
“This is what makes life worth living, Sara,” I told her, tilting my head back, sucking the salty air in through my nose, filling my lungs. I wiggled my toes in the sand, trying to cover my feet with the cool, slightly moist grains, listening to the slight grinding sound as my feet dug in.
“It’s so beautiful,” she commented, and her hand tightened its grip on mine. I had found the perfect person to take to the beach with me at night, during the day, anytime.
We sat down, and she leaned against my side, my left arm wrapped around her. We felt like a perfect fit, sitting like this, and I felt like I wanted to say something thoughtful. I wanted to commemorate the moment, but the words jumbled in my head, and I ended up saying nothing.
Neither one of us said anything for several minutes. We just sat quietly, occasionally adjusting our positions in order to get closer. The song “Enjoy the Silence” started playing faintly in my head.
As if reading my mind, Sara sang quietly, “All I ever wanted…all I ever needed…is here, in my arms,” and this woman once again blew me away.
I added the next line from the song, in my warbled baritone, “Words are very un-necessary.” She looked up from my shoulder and smiled, and the connection between us grew tighter and more unreal that very second.
She moved in front of me and sat with her back to my chest, her legs lying over mine, spread in the sand. I wrapped my arms around her waist, my biceps resting against the side of her breasts, and she spoke.
“You know, that girl at the fair likes you.” She said it nonchalantly, and I fought to not tense up.
“You mean, uh, Heather,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant myself. I had an inexplicable feeling of guilt creeping up in me, though I had done nothing wrong.
“You know what I’m talking about, Adam. Did you see the way she looked at you when I touched you?”
“I didn’t really notice,” I fibbed. “What makes you think she likes me?”
“I told you earlier tonight. I’m a woman,” she said, turning her head up to face me. She smiled and elaborated, “We can change our mind when we want, and we can see right through other women.”
“Well, I guess I’m just a dumb guy, because I didn’t get that feeling at all,” I said. I hoped I wasn’t digging some kind of hole for myself.
“Whatever. She was jealous of me, trus
t me. She wanted to be the one that grabbed that cotton candy off of your face,” she said, and I didn’t respond. The sound of small waves breaking filled the silence.
After a few moments she spoke again. “Do you think she’s pretty?” she asked.
As soon as the question ended, I felt my guts tighten up. Oh, man, how do I answer this?
By being honest, Adam-boy. That’s how you answer this.
“Yeah, she’s attractive,” I said. There, it was out. Time to prepare defenses.
“I thought so too,” she agreed, and I eased a little bit. “Would you go out with her if you didn’t have me?”
“I don’t know, Sara,” I answered, carefully. “Truthfully, I haven’t really thought about anything in the context of not having you.”
“What do you mean?” she asked. She sat up and shifted her body sideways to look at me.
Man, when did this wonderful, relaxing beach moment turn difficult?
It wasn’t the question that I minded; it was the answer I had that worried me. I was afraid that no matter what I said or how I put it, she wouldn’t like it. I had been accused by friends before of falling for women too quickly, of giving too much of myself too soon, and I was inclined to believe it, though I denied it to my friends. I had probably scared women off before by my eagerness to get serious quick. I didn’t want to do that now, not with Sara, but I had to be honest.
“I don’t know. I mean, I just don’t really think about things like other women. When I think of people in my life, I think of you first,” I paused, trying to gauge her reaction, looking for signs of panic, signs of fear, signs of flight. There were none.
I continued, “I’ve had the most fun with you than I’ve ever had with anyone, male or female, and when I think of Heather, I think of a friend. When I think of you, I think of a woman that I want in every part of my life. I think of the only person I want to see when I fall asleep, and the only person I want to see when I wake up. I mean I’ve fallen for you in a huge way, and you’re all I want. That’s what I meant.”
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