Their German Shepherd, Norman, caught it before it hit the ground.
Actually, he didn’t. He missed it completely, overshot by two feet, corrected mid-stride with a scrambling loss of dignity, and then retrieved it from the sand triumphantly. He galloped back toward Nellie with the ball in his mouth, enormous and golden-eyed and shedding his coat in tufts that the wind rippedsideways. Nellie dropped to her knees to greet him, soaking her sweatpants in the wet sand.
Smiling at her own good fortune, Sawyer watched them, utterly transfixed.
Nellie was now sprinting down the beach in the wrong direction. Norman had apparently decided that the point of fetch was to determine which of them could run faster, rather than to return the ball, and he had set off at full speed parallel to the waterline. His ears were flat with velocity. He appeared to be having the time of his life.
Sawyer cracked the window.
“Nellie!”
The wind ate most of it. She tried again, louder.
Nellie pulled up short, nearly lost her footing on the wet sand, and turned. She shielded her eyes against nothing in particular—the sky was overcast—and squinted at the cottage.
“Do you want tea?” Sawyer called.
“Yes, please!” Nellie bellowed back.
The back door soon opened to a gust of cold air and the yapping of a dog who had opinions about transitioning from outside to inside and wanted those opinions acknowledged. Norman’s claws skittered across the stone floor. He made three full circuits of the kitchen before determining nothing catastrophic had occurred in his absence, then pressed his enormous head against Sawyer’s hip.
“You need wiping down, young man,” she scolded him gently.
He blinked at her with soulful eyes.
She grabbed a towel and wiped him down.
Nellie kicked her boots off against the wall and crossed the kitchen in her damp socks. She looked—there was no diplomatic way to approach this—comprehensively windswept. Her cheeks were a raw, vivid pink, her braid had loose strands flyingeverywhere, and her sweatpants were soaked dark to the thigh. Cold radiated off her in an assaulting wave as she reached past Sawyer for her mug.
“Thank you,” she said, wrapping both hands around the chamomile infusion and planting her frigid lips on Sawyer’s.
Flinching violently, Sawyer groaned as Nellie’s mouth, then her nose, then both cheeks found Sawyer’s face like she was trying to defrost herself from a heat source.
“Your face!” Sawyer yelped, pulling back.
“Mm?” Nellie’s eyes were still closed. She was leaning in.
“It’ss freezing cold!”
“Well, yes, dear, that’s because I’ve been outside,” Nellie explained, with perfect patience, “in the wind.”
Sawyer narrowed her eyes and then looked pointedly down at Nellie’s pants. “You waded.”
“There was a rock. I wanted to look at it.”
“You waded into the North Atlantic in December to look at a rock?”
“It was atidalrock,” Nellie clarified, as though the specificity resolved the matter. “You could see the colonization patterns on the base very clearly from the water.”
“It’s still December.”
“You’re very grumpy for someone who’s been talking to engineers all day.” Nellie reached up and patted Sawyer’s cheek with a hand that was still criminally cold. “Come here.”
Sawyer kissed her back this time and would have continued doing so for significantly longer had the sweatpants not been actively transferring cold water to her own leg.
“Those,” she announced, stepping back and looking at the offending fabric, “need to come off.”
“Ahead of you.” Nellie set her mug on the counter, took Sawyer’s wrist, and walked toward the bathroom.
