THE LAKE IN NOVEMBER
The written exam is a week away, and Nan sends me out to the breakwater on a Sunday afternoon with strict instructions to "get some air that doesn't smell like a pit office," which is Nan's particular way of telling me I've been working myself into the ground and she's not going to watch me do it in silence.
I've always loved this stretch of shoreline best in the cold months, when the summer tourists have thinned out and the beach reverts to something closer to what it must have looked like a century ago, wild and gray and entirely indifferent to human company.
Hollis used to bring Birdie and me out here every November before the real snow set in, letting us throw rocks into water too cold to swim in, calling it "getting our winter legs," a phrase that never made much literal sense but that I understood anyway, in the specific way a child understands the emotional logic of a beloved adult's odd traditions.
I don't expect to run into Micah out there.
The parking area's nearly empty this time of year, just a single other truck belonging, I'd guess, to some hardy soul out walking a dog along the shore path, and the emptiness of the place only adds to the sense that whatever happens out here today is happening in a space carved out specifically for the two of us, away from the town's watchful eyes.
I should have expected it, honestly, because the breakwater's the kind of place a person goes when they want to think without an audience, and apparently that's true for both of us, because he's already out at the end of it when I arrive, sitting on the concrete with his jacket collar up against the wind, looking out at a lake that's gone the color of hammered pewter under a low November sky.
I almost turn back. I don't.
Part of me wants to blame the wind for that decision, the specific bracing cold that makes turning around feel like more effort than it's worth.
But I know myself well enough, even now, even mid-grief and mid-confusion, to recognize the truer reason: some part of me has been looking for him every single day since the funeral, cataloguing his absence the way you catalogue a missing tooth with your tongue, unable to leave the gap alone.
I sit down before I let myself think too hard about what that means.
"Didn't expect company," he says, when I sit down a careful distance from him, close enough to talk, far enough to pretend it's not deliberate.
"Nan kicked me out of the office. Said I was starting to smell like diesel."
"Nan's not wrong. You do a little." There's a smile in his voice, faint but real, and it eases something in my chest to hear it. We sit in silence for a while, watching whitecaps roll in off the big water, the wind sharp enough to sting.
The lake out here never quite settles, not even on calm days, always some restless motion beneath the surface calm, and I find myself watching it instead of him, grateful for something to look at that isn't quite as complicated as a man's face.
Gulls wheel low over the water, riding some current of air I can't see, and far out past the breakwater's end, a lone ore boat moves along the horizon, slow and massive, the kind of vessel that takes a mile just to come to a full stop once it's decided to.
"You used to say the lake reminded you of grief," I say, surprising myself with the memory. "Something about how it never fully calms, just gets quieter sometimes."
"I remember saying that." A small, wry smile. "Might've been trying to sound deeper than I actually was, that year. Twenty-four-year-old me had a lot of opinions about grief he hadn't actually earned yet."
"You've earned some since."
"More than I'd have liked, yeah." He looks out at the water, jaw tight. "Guess the lake and I have that much more in common now."
"I've been thinking about what you told me," I say finally, because I've been circling the words for days and the lake seems as good a place as any to finally say them.
He goes very still beside me, the particular stillness of a man bracing himself for a blow he's decided he deserves, and something in that bracing, the total absence of any attempt to deflect or soften what's coming, makes me choose my next words more carefully than I might have otherwise. "At the shed. About Dutch. About why."
"You don't owe me a response to that. I told you because you deserved the truth, not because I expected it to buy me anything."
"I know that. I'm giving you a response anyway.
" I pull my knees up, wrap my arms around them, look out at the water instead of at him because it's easier.
"I keep thinking about the fact that you were scared, and instead of telling me you were scared, you decided for both of us how the story was going to end.
You didn't trust me enough to survive being afraid together.
You just made the choice alone and left me to live with the consequences of a decision I never got a vote in. "
"That's exactly right." He doesn't defend himself, doesn't soften it.
"That's the whole shape of what I did wrong, better than I managed to say it myself.
I took your say away from you. Twice, really — once when I did it, and once again every day after, when I let you carry the story that it was about wanting somebody else, instead of the truer, uglier story about my own fear. "
"I'm still angry about it."
"You should be."
"I don't know how to stop being angry about it and still keep myself safe.
" My voice cracks on the last word, and I hate that it does, hate how exposed it makes me feel out here in the wind with nowhere to hide the sound of it.
"That's the part I can't figure out, Micah.
How to let any of this back in without it costing me everything again. "
He's quiet for a long moment, and when he speaks, his voice has gone low and careful, like he's handling something fragile.
The motel room's small enough that his voice fills it entirely, low and rough with two hours of driving and eleven days of careful, deliberate restraint, and I find myself holding my breath without quite meaning to, waiting on whatever comes next the way you'd wait on a detonation countdown, braced and certain and somehow still not fully prepared for the moment itself.
"I'm not going to tell you it's safe. I don't think love like this is ever safe, not really, not the kind worth having.
I think the best I can offer you is that I know exactly what it cost the last time I chose fear over you, and I have spent fourteen months learning I'd rather live scared and honest than safe and silent.
That's not a guarantee. I know it's not enough on its own.
But it's the truest thing I've got to offer you. "
I look at him then, at the wind moving through his hair, at the particular steadiness in his face, and something in me, some last careful barrier I've been holding in place since the funeral home parking lot, gives way all at once.
The wind has picked up while we've been talking, whipping whitecaps harder against the breakwater's concrete edge, and somewhere behind us a gull cries out, sharp and lonesome, the kind of sound that usually makes this stretch of shoreline feel emptier than it already is.
Today it just underscores the specific privacy of the moment, the two of us alone at the end of a long concrete finger reaching out into cold water, no one else for a quarter mile in any direction, nothing but gray sky and grayer lake and the particular gravity of a man who's spent fourteen months learning to wait for exactly this.
I kiss him first. I want that on record, in my own accounting of this, because for fourteen months I've told myself the story of what he took from me, and I need to also tell myself the truth of what I chose, out here on a windswept breakwater with the whole gray lake bearing witness: I closed the last of the distance myself.
He goes still for half a second, like he can't quite believe it's happening, and then his hand comes up to my jaw, careful, like I'm something that might startle and run if he moves too fast, and he kisses me back with a kind of gentleness that undoes me more than urgency ever could.
When we finally break apart, both of us breathing hard against the cold, he rests his forehead against mine, and neither of us says anything for a long moment, the wind whipping around us, the lake churning gray and endless at our backs.
"I'm not saying yes to everything," I say finally, my voice not quite steady. "I need you to understand that. This isn't me saying it's fixed."
"I understand that." His thumb brushes my cheekbone, slow, reverent. "I'm not asking for everything. I'm just grateful for this."
We sit out on the breakwater until the cold gets to be too much, his jacket eventually around my shoulders, my hand in his, and I don't examine too closely what any of it means, not yet, not out here with the wind still roaring and the light starting to fail.
At one point he tells me about the winter he spent teaching himself to letter properly, months of ruined practice stones before he got the serifs right, and I tell him about the first live shot I ever ran solo, my nerve holding right up until the detonator clicked and then abandoning me so completely that Hollis had to take the box from my fumbling grip before I dropped it.
We trade stories the way we used to, easy and unhurried, and for a little while the fourteen months feel less like a wall and more like a bridge we're both, cautiously, learning to walk back across.
I just let myself have it, for as long as the afternoon holds, one November hour on a stretch of concrete over cold water, before I have to go back to being a woman with a decision still fully unmade.