I sat gingerly on the near edge of the bed and found myself thinking, unexpectedly, of the summer we’d spent in California—taking turns behind the wheel of the old BMW that had once belonged to James’s father, driving all the way up the coast to some gray, fog-blurred beach where we got drunk on white wine, swam naked, and fell asleep in the sand.
“Do you remember that night in Del Norte,” I said, “when we passed out on the beach—”
“And when we woke up in the morning all our clothes were gone?”
He said it so readily that he must have been thinking of it, too. I almost laughed and turned to find him pulling back the comforter, eyes brighter than they’d been before.