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I met Suzanne one cold spring morning on an Alaskan beach, where a river spilled into the sea. My Bio 180 class was on a field trip to gather specimens at low tide, and my classmates all scurried around, taking pictures and samples. I was bundled up in two hoodies and an Army jacket, and could see my breath white in the air every time I exhaled.
A woman sat on the sand, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette and staring out to sea. She was wearing jeans, a plain white t-shirt, and flip-flops, along with a fluffy scarf made of fake purple feathers. My fingers itched to touch it.
I approached slowly so I wouldn’t startle her. She had long black hair pulled back in a careless braid, and toes that were pale white in the morning sun.
“Aren’t you cold?” I asked.
Her dark eyes slowly drew away from the horizon to focus on me. She blinked and ground her cigarette into the sand. “Yes, I suppose I am,” she said in a clear soprano.
I shrugged out of my jacket and offered it to her. She was smaller than me, and even though her breasts, nipples standing up proudly in the cold, were easily a cup size bigger than mine, I thought the jacket should still fit her.
“I know my tits are great, but this will go better if you look me in the eye,” she said, clearly amused.
I blushed at getting caught checking her out and glanced back at my professor, a hundred yards down the shore, surrounded by the rest of my class. If he noticed me wasting time over here I’d probably get in trouble. I should …
She snatched the jacket out of my hands and pulled it on, looking up at me with a snaggle-toothed, infectious grin. “What’s your name, sweetheart?” she asked, patting the sand beside her.
“Heather,” I told her, plopping down on the cold sand.
“Suzanne,” she responded, and looked back out across the ocean. We had blue sky over-head, but dark clouds were churning out at sea. “Lovely, isn’t it?” she said. And it was.
Suzanne lived on a little houseboat in the harbor. She was an artist; her living space crowded with unfinished portraits and seascapes in charcoals and pastels. There were fantastical drawings, too. Two mermaids embraced on a bed of seaweed. One dragon mourned another, fallen onto a bare rocky shore under a stormy sky.
The first time Suzanne asked me to pose nude for a drawing I thought it was a come-on, like the ‘plot’ in one of those ridiculous lesbian porno movies I’d driven fifty miles from my home town to rent.
When I took off my clothes Suzanne directed me into a pose on the bed with gentle words and soft touches that left me trembling, then lit an oil lamp and positioned it by the bed. I closed my eyes and fought the urge to pull the sheet up to cover myself. I knew all my body’s flaws; I had catalogued them in the mirror a hundred times.
This was ridiculous. I wouldn’t be one of those women who only had sex in the dark, like their own bodies were something to be ashamed of.
I opened my eyes. Suzanne was looking down at me with wonder. “Perfect,” she breathed, and stood by her easel to draw.
I could feel her eyes on my skin, roaming over me, as she drew me. I listened to the sound of the waves lapping against the hull and drifted into a fantasy of her joining me on the bed. Suzanne hummed happily. I realized I’d gotten so wet that I’d dripped down my inner thigh, an embarrassing tickle that left a wet patch on her bed.
Suzanne brushed off my apologies about her sheets. “It’s only natural,” she said serenely.
When she showed me the drawing I could barely recognize myself in it. I’m not sure if it was the sheer coat of grey seal fur I was emerging from, or the look of naked yearning that made the figure in the drawing so unfamiliar.
Suzanne tacked that drawing up over her bed. She said it gave her beautiful dreams.
“So how old is this chick?” my roommate Jen demanded.
“Mid-thirties, maybe?” I said uncertainly. Suzanne had crows-feet around her eyes, but she collected pretty beach rocks and saw shapes in the clouds like a little girl.
“I don’t know,” Jen said. “I mean, I’m all for your big lesbo romance, but she sounds like a psycho. Does she even have a job?”
Jen sounded like my mom. I shrugged. “She probably sells her drawings.”
Suzanne and I were sitting on the deck of her boat a few days later eating lunch when I asked her about it.
“I would never sell my art,” she insisted, even though I’d seen her give drawings away to people who stopped to admire them.
“So how do you afford all this?” I asked, gesturing at the houseboat and the fresh fruit and the fancy green tea we were drinking from tiny porcelain cups.
Her lips curled into a little smile. “Jesus provides,” she said. I didn’t even know Suzanne was religious. She focused on my mouth. “You’ve got some juice there, at the corner,” she said.
I licked my lips.
“No, the other side. Here, I’ll …” but Suzanne wasn’t reaching with a napkin, she was leaning in, and then her lips were pressed to mine, and she licked her way into my mouth. Suzanne tasted like oranges and cigarettes.
I studied for my finals stretched out on a blanket at the beach with Suzanne lying next to me, drawing, or napping, or smoking and reading trashy novels she bought from the second-hand bookstore. It was still a little chilly, but the one time I’d tried studying in the cabin Suzanne had distracted me with gentle, brushing touches. I’d slammed my textbook closed, tackled her onto the bed and tickled her until she shrieked. Then I kissed my way down her soft belly to her pussy. She sighed and whimpered as I licked and pressed my fingers inside her, soft little noises better than the moans of those porn stars.
I wondered if this was love. She’d never said the words, and neither had I. It was more than the paralyzing crushes I’d felt for girls in high school, but I wasn’t sure how it compared to the love I saw my mom and dad share. The practical, every-day kind of love that had kept them together for decades, even when things got hard. Even when they caught me making out with Margie in my bedroom, and dad wanted to send me to some special counselor, but mom defended me; told him it was just a phase some girls go through.
I tried to imagine Suzanne with me in ten years, with a dog and a mortgage. The picture didn’t make any sense. The one time she’d tried to cook for me in the ship’s galley, the pasta had been a sticky, inedible mess. Suzanne had laughed and taken me out for sushi.
I told Suzanne I needed to spend finals week on campus, so that I could study. If I didn’t pull at least a 3.5 GPA, Dad would kill me. Suzanne agreed easily; everything was easy with her. I aced the exams, with nothing to do but study in my stuffy, fluorescent-lit dorm room. I had to be back in Denver by May 20th, when my internship started. That left me with a week to say good-bye. I hoped Suzanne would be waiting for me when I got back in the fall, but I wasn’t sure how to ask.
I walked down the dock towards the houseboat that night with a paper bag of Ginger Spiced Fruit Tarts, Suzanne’s favorite. I could see the flickering light of the oil lamp through the porthole. Good, she was still awake.
I opened the hatch and walked down the stairs into the cabin. The place stank of sex. Suzanne was standing at her easel. There was a naked man with warm brown skin and sleek muscles posed among the disordered sheets on the bed.
“You must be Heather,” he said, eyes roaming appreciatively over the tight red shirt I’d worn for Suzanne.
Suzanne rushed over to me and half lifted me off my feet with a bear hug. “You’re back!” she exclaimed. “I missed you so much.” She led me by the hand over to the man in our bed.
I averted my eyes and fiercely blinked away the tears prickling behind them.
“This is my man, Jesus,” she introduced him enthusiastically. “And this is Heather. Isn’t she even more gorgeous in person?”
“She is,” he agreed, his voice a deep, approving rumble. “Hey, thanks for looking out for Suzanne while I was gone,” he said.
“Jesus just got back yesterday from working the herring run in Topiak,” she said happily.
I couldn’t believe how badly I’d misread her. How fucking stupid I’d been.
Suzanne reached out a hand to my chin and tilted my face towards the light. “Oh, sweetheart,” she said. “What’s wrong? Did you get a bad grade on one of your exams?”
“No,” I muttered. “I won’t get my scores until next week.” I cleared my throat. “I came to, uh, to bring you some of these tarts,” I said awkwardly, dropping the bag on the bed. “I’ll leave you two love-birds alone,” I told them as I turned away.
“Heather,” Jesus called as I reached the stairs. “Don’t go. We’re planning on sailing up to the Kenai Fjords for the summer to see the glaciers. You should come.”
“I can’t,” I told the hatch. “I’ve got a summer internship lined up in Denver that starts on the 20th.”
“Denver?” said Suzanne, sounding appalled. I risked a glance at her. She looked really upset. “But won’t you miss the sea?”
I would. I would miss the sea, and the sky, and Suzanne’s laugh, and her touch; the way she saw magic everywhere she looked and let me see it too.
Suzanne ran to the footlocker by the bed and started frantically rummaging through it. Jesus sat up and pulled a sheet over his lap, watching me carefully.
“You don’t even know me,” I protested to Jesus. I didn’t know him. “Why would you invite me sailing with you?” I’d have to be crazy to sail away blindly on a little houseboat with some strange guy I’d just met, and Suzanne, who’d never even bothered to mention him.
He shrugged. “Suzanne knows you. She loves you. That’s good enough for me,” he said.
Crazy was starting to sound pretty good.
Suzanne stood up. She was holding my Army jacket – I hadn’t seen it since that day on the beach. “You can have it back, if you want,” Suzanne offered, with a quaver in her voice, as if she truly believed, once I took my jacket back, she’d never see me again.
She might not. If I spent the summer working at the job Dad had set up for me at his pharmaceutical company while Suzanne and Jesus sailed away to see the fjords, they might never return to this particular harbor. I looked up and saw the picture Suzanne had drawn of me as a selkie. I liked it. I liked her crazy, beautiful vision of me better than the plain, sensible girl I’d seen in the mirror all my life.
I shook my head. “Keep it,” I told her. “We might get cold up in the fjords.”
Suzanne folded my jacket up tight and put it away in the footlocker. Jesus nodded and mouthed a, ‘Thank you,’ at me. Then he picked up the bag of tarts, fished one out, and started munching on it.
Suzanne stepped close and brushed her lips against my cheek. “You won’t regret this,” she promised me.
I believed her.