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"What do you know?" I say, a panicky feeling growing inside of me. Is he someone from my past – the past I can't remember?
"Everything." He gets up and walks back towards the tripod. "And now, I have to go. I've probably already said too much, which is completely unlike me normally, but you've always had that effect on me."
"What do you mean?" I say but he doesn't stop. "Tell me how you know me."
He doesn't reply and I just stand by the tripod and watch him walk away, listening as the timer hums and clicks, recording the heavens as they whirl around us, invisible, inaccessible without these artificial eyes.
I wonder what the heck he is and how he knows everything about me.
I don't see him for a week and my little quiet life goes on as it has for the past month. I get up and eat on the patio, then walk the beach. I spend the afternoon playing music at Grant’s music store or reading. My foster parents have no piano at the cottage and so I come to Grant's music store and play on an old baby grand in the back. Mr. Grant lets me, pleased to hear someone play with a modicum of talent. At dusk, I walk the beach again, and at night I gaze at stars. I sleep with the salt air in my nose.
One morning, he's swimming the beach again when I go down for a morning walk.
"Hello, Eve," he says, emerging from the waves and he's so attractive he looks like some god of beauty born in the foam like Venus. "I thought I'd find you here."
"Are you going to be cryptic again and get me all confused? Not tell me how you know me?"
"Probably," he says and grins, his smile lopsided. I can't help but smile back and he makes this little sound in his throat and closes his eyes for a moment. I see the strange marking again, and can't stop myself from asking about it.
"What is it?" I ask as he dries off, pointing to the mark on his back. "Is it a scar?"
"Of a kind, I suppose."
"What's it from?"
He pulls on his sweater.
"Does it matter?"
I'm silent for a few moments, fighting my desire to know, to understand. It's more important for me to have him as a friend so I shake my head.
"No."
"Good," he says. "I'd rather not talk about it. Let's just say that I did something that cost me far more than I anticipated."
I say nothing more about it. Instead, we walk along the beach and I look for the perfect shell to use for a little project I've been working on. I'm making jewelry for my foster mother's birthday, and want the perfect shell for a bracelet.
"What are you looking for?" he asks as I kneel down and pick up one after another empty shell.
"I thought you knew everything."
I glance up and he's grinning. I grin back and the smile falls from his face and it's replaced by something like need.
"Something for my foster mother," I say, glancing away from that naked expression, wondering if I'm misreading him. "I'm making her a present for her birthday."
He kneels down beside me and helps sort through the pile of bivalves and mollusk shells that have collected against a rocky outcropping on the beach. He holds one up – the white shell a smooth spiral, the lip of the shell a beautiful translucent pink nacre like that on a pearl oyster.
"Here," he says, holding it up in the sun so that it shines. "What about this one?"
"It's perfect," I whisper. "So beautiful."
He puts it in my hand and closes my fingers around it with his.
"Like you."
I look at his face, in his so-blue eyes, checking to see if he's teasing me, but he isn't smiling. I think he's going to lean in and kiss me, and he briefly moves closer. I close my eyes, waiting, but then he stops as if thinking better of it.
I open my eyes only to see him pull away, kicking myself mentally for being such a silly female, my cheeks hot.
