I closed my eyes. The cool wind that brushed against my skin brought the ocean to me – I could feel the tug of seaweed against the tide and the little dragon-creatures that hid among the waving stalks, zebra lines of shadow tattooed across their chins. The softness of underwater translated smoothly to my surface-world in the cool and shifting sand beneath my bare feet and the ethereal comfort of his shoulder, against which my head rested. Warmth emanated from every pore in his body as if there were a sun burning within him. I could see it shining vividly through his smile and his eyes. His presence was wrapped around me like a cloak, settling across my bare shoulders and drawing me in with irresistible sweetness, as if I were a fly drifting inexorably towards the brightest light, unable to resist – but why would I want to? I settled against him, my body like a puff of smoke blown towards him, infusing with his skin and tangling with the cotton threads of his shirt. Our hands found each other, like little crabs scurrying across the sand, only content to be together.

I opened my eyes. He was there, as he always was and always would be, taller than me, stronger than me, satisfying every terrified little girl inside of me screaming for protection. But the sweetness in his brown eyes, the gentle caress of his hands – these aspects yielded to a side of him that only I saw, a side of him that melted like chocolate when he saw me, a side of him that needed my protection; a side of him that I was responsible for, that tied me to him, that was soft and vulnerable and supple and kind and sometimes, a little scared. I could see it in his profile, in the soft, curving line of his forehead, his nose, his sweet lips, and his chin – when he turned towards me and faced me fully it became all angles, all delicious, masculine angles that I equally enjoyed. But I was particularly enthralled with the vulnerability of his profile.

I turned towards the ocean. The horizon swelled with the colors of blood and oranges and the grapefruit that spits acid in your eye; the sun rose at its leisure, slowly, a behemoth stirring from ash and liquid flames. I looked upward into the sky, darkened at the outskirts where the sun did not yet reach like the burnt edges of a piece of toast, and laser beams shot through the sky as laughing stars fell to earth to have their hearts cut out and sold to witches seeking immortality. He looked with me, and held me tighter, as he does when I’m cold, even though I wasn’t because the growing sun was shedding beams of heat, so he must have been holding me tighter for some other reason.