I crave the nights when we sit together in the kitchen, talking like old friends. He asks about the world I left behind, and I tell him about satellites and smartphones, podcasts and social media. The Cold War has ended, but many others have begun. I tell him about civil rights and AI and how no one talks to strangers anymore unless it happens online.He doesn’t respond, just frowns or shakes his head—in confusion or disbelief. And I wonder if it’s better to not know how everything has changed—better to remember the world how it used to be.
How it is here, on the island. Uncomplicated.
Other nights, we sit silent on the front porch, sipping tea with honey, and I like the quiet between us. No need to muddy the minutes with words.
Sometimes he looks at me, really looks, and I wonder what thoughts churn inside him. Sometimes I can’t pull my eyes from his. Like I’m waiting for the song to begin, the riddle to be unraveled—waiting for the feeling to pass. For his eyes to turn a different shade of blue.
Waiting. For so many things.
The days feel like weeks, months like years.
It’s early evening—a breeze curling up from the sea, sailing through the open windows, smelling of the basil growing beside the back door—when Clay walks into the kitchen holding a barber’s blade. His eyes are soft, flickering. I see the question he doesn’t know how to ask, jaw shifting side to side as if he’s working over a length of seagrass.
“I’ll warm some water,” I say in response.
Outside, Clay drags a wood chair to the edge of the porch, then sits facing the sea. I gather a cloth, a bowl of steaming water, and a bar of sheep’s milk soap that Clay made himself but hasn’t yet taught me how—there are limits to what I want to know. If I’m not staying, if soon I’ll be departing, then there’s no use knowing everything. No point tethering myself too tightly to this place.
I stare at Clay from the shadow of the doorway—the profile of his bearded face like some sculpture or oil painting, a man who belongs in stories, whose life out at sea is written into the lines of his silhouette—where shadow and sunlight turn him into something immortal. And ageless.
He is a man who stirs up faraway thoughts that shouldn’t belong to me.
I touch the engagement ring on my finger, absently, before striding out onto the porch.
With the bowl of water resting on the railing, I hold the blade between my fingers, scraping the edge with my thumb to check the sharpness. “Have ye done this before?” he asks, sapphire eyes flicking up at me.
“Once.” Months ago, early one spring morning, James and I had showered together, made love beneath the spray of cool water, and then he’d asked me to shave the stubble along his jawline. I felt so connected to him that day, that I doubted all my doubt. I wondered why I was always so hesitant with him. Why I always pushed him away. But the enchantment was broken by the time he left my house and walked to the café. All the questions came roaring back in, and I had a terrifying sense that I was living someone else’s life. That somewhere I had taken a wrong turn onto a dirt road, and now it was dark, and I didn’t know my way back.
Now, I run my hands along Clay’s jawline, his chin, softening his skin with the bar of soap. It feels odd, being this close to him, touching him in this way. I hadn’t realized how blond his beard was—a dark, sandy color threaded with a few strands of red—while the hair on his head is a light chestnut, streaked by the sun.
“Did you inherit your father’s hair or your mother’s?” I ask, trying to ease the tension in my chest, the restless patter of my heartbeat.
He squints, like he doesn’t understand the question, then answers. “Neither.” His eyes settle back on the sea, sunlight sparking off the waves. “My father would say it was the Viking in our blood that granted me the light hair.”
I smile, wondering if it’s the Viking blood that gave him his striking blue eyes and the tall, hardy posture of someone who has conquered lands and slayed kings. Who is unafraid of death, of anything the sea might toss his way.
He is quiet as I slide the blade easily, cleanly across his jaw, slicing away the hairs. Only his breath stirs the air between us. The thick curls of his beard fall through my fingers to the porch. The unease Ifelt when I started melts away, and there is an effortlessness in the motion of my hands against his face. A comfort in it. It almost feels devotional—each stroke a ritual as I delicately curve around his mouth, his temple, every breath from his lungs into mine. The evening air we share. And the more his face is revealed, the shape of his jaw, the slope of his chin, my heart starts to beat heavy against my ribs in a strange, nocturnal way.
Almost unbearable.
At last, I wipe the blade clean with the cloth, then lightly run my fingers across his temple, brushing away the last of the soap.
He looks up at me, blue and blue and blue, every feature of his face exposed, his jaw clenched down. And I suck in a breath. His skin is golden, eyelashes suspended over ocean-deep eyes, a tiny scar across his chin—healed jagged. Without stitches.
He looks younger than he did with the beard. Years scraped away. Revealing the youth in his skin. He’s in his mid-thirties, but the overgrown beard had made him seem rougher, older, and weathered. But now I see who he is beneath. The structure of his face, the symmetry.
He rubs a hand along his chin, feeling the smoothness of his skin. And I realize… all at once. He is not different, as I had first thought.
I am different.
When I stepped onto the island all those years ago, I was just a girl. But now, standing beside him as the sun melts into the Atlantic, we are the same age. And he is striking in a way I could never have seen or noticed before. He is… impossible. Improbable.
He is a man I hardly know. Who is nothing like James.
And yet, the feeling inside me is like mercury: silvery, slippery, untrustworthy. And most of all, dangerous. Foolish.
A symptom of exhaustion, most likely. Of stress. Of feeling all alone. Lost at sea, with no way of getting home.
But then, delicately, he takes the blade from my hand. “Thank ye,” he says, and I swear I hear it in his voice: the same uncertainty, thesame near breaking, the same thinking of things neither of us will say aloud. He smiles, and his face is sunlight. A small dimple pulling at his left cheek.
