maybe you were the ocean
Wane hides it well, but is rather pleased with himself when Eszka simpers in his lie. His delight, however, he only lingers on a moment. When she repeats her name, Wane (ever the actor) mimics the movement of the sound with his mouth as though he is, in fact, listening when he isn’t. Now he’s thinking about the ocean instead, how he’s felt empty for weeks until now, here, with the sea-foam lapping at his skin and the taste of salt water on his tongue. The ocean stirs something in him.
Memories, perhaps; feelings beyond himself. It distracts him from what might otherwise be an obnoxiously flirtatious encounter.
His wild eyes find hers again only as she answers his question, but he is still thinking about the waves.
“Sometimes not knowing is easier,” he offers, without really holding any tangible evidence to say why, and when she asks him then where home is for him he recognizes the ploy to deviate from talking further about herself, but obliges it readily. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, now does it?
He swings his great head to look out across his shoulders at the ocean horizon beyond them. Wax, Lanai, Texas - they were home; faces rather than places. He misses Wax the most. She had been his comrade; his other half. She had eyes like wildfires, and her legs could move her like a hurricane through the waves, spraying wind, and sea-foam, and ocean mist alike. He had learned to love her shadows, because she cast them far and wide. She was wild when he knew her, and as he smiles softly to himself he wonders if she is wild still.
But he doesn’t tell Eszka that.
Instead, he moves closer to her because the roar of the ocean is deafening as the waves break across his back, again and again. “Here and there,” he says instead, grinning close to her ears. “The ocean, I guess. It was the only place we really spent a lot of time.” He drops the ‘we’ without meaning to while conjuring their faces in the back of his mind, straining to remember every detail.
Because today, in the ocean, his heart’s moved for the first time in weeks.
@[Agnieszka]