Tramontana

Leo

Jannik tips his beer bottle toward the bar. “What about the one in the white shirt? Tall, good arms, all alone.”

Leo turns on her chair to look at the bar, a wooden shack at the edge of the sand, strung with bulbs, a speaker on the counter playing French rap at half volume. The man in the white shirt leans back against the counter on both elbows. He has a nice face, and he knows it. He sweeps the tables with his eyes, straightening a little and setting his jaw each time a woman walks past him.

“He’s checking who’s watching him.” She turns back, smiling. “He’d bring a mirror into the tent.”

Jannik laughs and drinks. “You’re picky.”

“I’m on vacation. I get to be picky.”

Over his shoulder the beach runs dark down to the water, a few steps past the last string of bulbs. The wind that blew down off the mountains all day has dropped and left the sea flat. Under the music the small waves fold over at the edge with a soft slap. The still air lies mild and heavy on her face. Half the tables stand empty. The families drove home on the weekend, when French school vacation ended. Most of the noise rises from a long table in the middle of the sand, a dozen people in their twenties in the bright T-shirts of the beach restaurants along the promenade. In front of them stand a row of empty glasses and a cake with a sparkler stuck in it, probably to celebrate the end of their summer.

Leo pushes her toes into the sand under the table, cool a finger’s depth down. She has sand in both sandals. Her dress, the only one she brought, has a long crease from a day rolled up in the bottom of her pack. She was on a train out of Freiburg at six this morning, and her legs are still stiff from the long day of sitting.

Across the table Jannik, her friend since school, sits smiling happily, his long arms folded in front of him and his T-shirt stretched over his shoulders. He came down out of the Pyrenees yesterday after two weeks of walking alone, his face browner than she remembers and stubbled along the jaw under his short dark blond hair. His brown eyes still go narrow when he laughs. A woman at the long table keeps looking at him. Leo spotted her a while ago and has been saving her.

“Your turn.” Jannik nudges her foot under the table. “Find me someone.”

She takes her time. At the bar a woman with her curly hair piled on her head talks with her hands and laughs loud and bright. “The one with the curls. She’s fun.”

He glances over and shakes his head. “She laughs like Paula.”

“Who’s Paula?”

He turns the bottle on the table. “My ex. We were together a year. It ended in March.”

“A year?” Leo stares at him. “You had a girlfriend for a whole year and I didn’t know?”

His smile is a little crooked. “You weren’t around much.”

His answer stings, and it is true, so she lets it stand. A whole year of his life, and she missed it, the beginning and the end. She drinks to cover it and looks for a better answer than an apology. The woman at the long table gives her one.

“Okay. Then the one at the long table, in the orange T-shirt, with the afro. She’s been looking at you for ten minutes. Probably trying to figure out if you’re available or if we’re together.”

Jannik turns his head, not very subtly. The woman holds his gaze and lifts her glass an inch. She is small and strong, dark-skinned, with a snub nose and a big round afro. Her eyes are almost black, the whites shining under the bulbs. She looks very sure of herself. His mouth falls open a little.

Leo smiles and murmurs, “Stop drooling, Jannik.”

He turns back with red ears.

“Okay,” he admits. “You’re good.”

“I know.” She grins at him.

He studies Leo across the table, his chin on his fist. “What about you? Are you even ready for this? First one since Florian.”

“More than ready.”

She means every word, and she keeps her voice light, so he asks no more. The rest she keeps to herself. She ended it with Florian in June and moved out of his apartment in July, with four boxes and a bike, into a room with three roommates, where the shower drips all night. She has been calling her old friends one by one, the ones she let slide while she was with him. A few were kind about it, the rest only polite. Jannik was the first she called. He picked up on the second ring, somewhere high in the Pyrenees, and said “Leo” as if they had spoken last week. By the end of the call they had agreed to meet where the mountains run down to the sea and walk south along the coast together.

“Then let’s get you somebody.” Jannik sits up straight. “The tent is the problem.”

“One tent, two of us.” She shrugs. “Whoever has a bed somewhere else goes there.”

“And if neither of us does?”

“Then we’re bad at this, and we play cards.” She bumps his foot back under the table, then takes the two condoms out of her dress pocket and slides one across to him under her palm. “Just in case.”

He laughs, pockets it and looks over the tables, serious about it now. She likes watching him do it, the narrow eyes, his mouth pressed together. He passes over the man in the white shirt and two boys speaking Dutch by the bar and stops at the long table.

“Him. Next to my one. The curly hair, green T-shirt.”

Leo looks over at a man about their age, not tall but fit and strong, with dark curls and a tanned face, sitting sideways on the bench with one knee pulled up. He seems the most relaxed person at that loud table. He listens more than he talks, turned toward whoever is speaking, and he laughs easily.

Leo watches him for a while. She likes him, and Jannik saw it before she did. She is glad that he still knows what she likes, after a year and a half of silence.

“Yes.” She smiles at Jannik. “Him, definitely.”

Leo empties her bottle and gets up, squeezing his shoulder on her way past.

Jannik grins up at her. “The bar is behind you.”

She only smiles and walks off the other way, around the long table.

Behind the bench there is just room to pass. The man with the curls still sits sideways, one knee pulled up. Slipping past him, she lets her hand brush his arm, as if the soft sand had thrown her off balance. “Pardon.” He looks up. She gives him a long look over her shoulder as she walks on to the bar.

She buys a fresh beer and sits down on a stool at the end of the counter, facing the tables, pleased with herself. Now and then she glances over, and each time he is already looking back.

After a while the man with the curls gets up and crosses the sand to her, his glass in his hand. In French he asks whether the stool beside her is free.

She answers in the French she learned at school and on two exchanges in Besançon, rusty from years without use. “It is free. And now it is not.”

He smiles, surprised, and sits down beside her. Up close she can see his dark eyes and a short, crooked nose. On the back of his right hand a small pink burn is healing.

“You are German?” His English is slow and careful.

“Is my French that bad?”

“No. It’s very correct.” He grins. “Like a school book.”

She laughs and holds out her hand. “Leo.”

“Leo?” His eyebrows go up.

“Leonie. Nobody calls me that.”

He starts to laugh. “I am Théo. Leo and Théo.”

“It sounds like a children’s book.”

“Or two clowns in a circus.” He knocks his glass against her bottle. “The good clowns.”

Past Théo she watches Jannik walk over to the long table, his hands in his pockets. He stops at the empty place beside the woman in the orange T-shirt and stands there, one hand on the back of the bench, plainly lost for words. The woman pats the wood beside her. Leo hides a grin behind her bottle.

Théo has spent the summer carrying plates at the restaurant with the blue umbrellas at the far end of the promenade. The others at the long table worked at the beach restaurants too. The season is over, so in the next days they all go home, Théo tomorrow, to Toulouse.

A girl of nineteen at most, with a long braid down her back, comes up to the bar for another round. She leans on the counter right beside Théo, nudges him with her elbow and looks Leo over, openly curious. Théo sighs, smiling. “This is Camille, the youngest of us.”

“Hi, Camille.” Leo shakes her hand. “Do you all come back every summer?”

“Not me.” Camille beams. “Next summer I go to Ireland. To work with horses. At a stable on a beach.”

“That sounds wonderful.”

Camille carries her drinks back to the table.

The burn on his hand is from a plate that came out of the kitchen too hot. He picked up his English from the tourists.

“I can say ‘the card machine is broken’ in six languages. And ‘the toilets are only for customers’.”

“That’s all you need.”

“For the job, yes.” His eyes stay on hers. “For other things, maybe not.”

Her cheeks go hot. She tells him about the walk, down the coast over the border to L’Escala, with a tent on their backs. He stares at her, then at her legs, brown and scratched from a bramble by the campground fence.

“On foot? In this heat?”

“That’s the point.”

He shakes his head and laughs, at her or at himself, and she likes the sound of it. She likes his hands too, the long fingers wrapped around his glass, and how he listens with his head tipped toward her. She wants him. The wanting surprises her, quick and low in her stomach after a whole summer of feeling nothing of the kind.

At the long table Jannik stands up, the woman in the orange T-shirt holding his hand. He looks at Leo over the heads of the others and raises an eyebrow. She raises her bottle to him. He grins and lets the woman pull him away up the sand toward the promenade.

Théo watches them go. “Your boyfriend?”

“My friend. We’ve known each other since we were ten.”

“And he goes with Manon.”

“And I’m here.” She turns her bottle on the counter.

Théo leans toward her and stops halfway. She leans in too, and he kisses her lightly, his lips cool from his glass. She kisses him back, longer, one hand on his chest.

At the long table Camille is grinning at them and raises her glass, and two of the men beside her whistle. Leo laughs, caught.

“Where do you sleep?”

He makes a face. “In a room behind the restaurant, with Karim. Karim snores.”

“I have a tent.” She looks at him straight. “And tonight there’s only one person in it.”

He tips his head, smiling. “Tomorrow I am gone.”

“And I walk to Spain. Just tonight, then.”

Théo puts down his glass.

The campground lies in the pines behind the beach, ten minutes along a dark road. Crickets chirp in the dry grass by the roadside and go quiet as they pass. Above the pines the cloud hangs low, a gray lid without a single star, lit orange from below by the town. She breathes in the thick resin smell of the trees. After the first hundred steps his arm slides around her waist. His hip brushes hers at every step, and she walks faster.

At the pedestrian gate Leo types the code into the keypad, reading it off her phone, and the lock buzzes. Somewhere a radio plays softly. Low lamps light their way between the sites, past campers gone dark.

Their tent stands at the back beneath a crooked pine, small and green, with the two packs pushed under the rain fly in front of the door. In the camper on the next site a man is snoring, slow and deep. Leo kneels and opens the door, the zipper rasping through the quiet loud enough to wake the whole row. Théo snorts into her shoulder.

“Karim followed us,” he whispers.

She shakes with laughter against his chest, embarrassed, and drags him inside by his T-shirt.

The lamp on the path shines through the fabric and fills the tent with a dim green dusk. It smells of nylon and sunscreen. Under her the two sleeping mats shift, hers with her sleeping bag spread out, Jannik’s with his kicked down to the foot.

They kneel face to face, their heads brushing the roof. Théo takes her face in both hands and kisses her. He tastes of beer, his mouth soft and in no hurry. For a second she thinks of Florian, who kissed with his eyes shut and his hands at his sides. Théo slides his hands down her back to her hips and pulls her against him, and she forgets about Florian.

He gathers the hem of her dress in his fists and lifts it. She raises her arms, her elbow hits the wall, and the whole tent shivers. They freeze. Next door the snoring goes on. Théo pulls the dress over her head and drops it behind him.

She has nothing on under it but her underwear, the close air of the tent on her bare shoulders. In the dim light she can see him looking at her narrow body and her small breasts, and it pleases her that he looks. He cups one breast in his palm and strokes his thumb across the nipple until it tightens. He bends his head and takes the nipple in his mouth, and the pull of his lips runs straight down into her belly. She digs her fingers into his curls.

She wants his skin. She tugs his T-shirt up, and he ducks out of it. His chest is lean and smooth, his arms brown to a sharp line where the sleeves ended and pale above it. She runs her palms over him, down his flat stomach to the button of his shorts, opens it and pushes them down with his underwear. His cock springs up hard against her wrist. She closes her fingers around it and strokes once, slowly. It twitches in her hand as he breathes in through his teeth.

He lays her back, and she lands in the crack between the two mats. The mats squeak like rubber toys. Théo swears softly and drags Jannik’s mat against hers with one hand. They are both laughing again, muffled.

Kneeling between her legs, he hooks his fingers into her underwear and pulls it down, and she lifts her hips for him. He kisses her stomach below the navel, her hip, the inside of her thigh. His breath gives her goosebumps. She is wet before his mouth reaches her. He licks her slowly, the flat of his tongue over her clit. Each pass winds her tighter and draws a sound up into her throat. She presses her forearm against her mouth to keep it in. Her hips rise against him, and he holds them down with both hands. Her thighs start to tremble around his head. She could come like this, but she wants him inside her more.

“Wait, wait.” She tugs at his shoulders until he lifts his head.

She twists round, gropes behind Théo for her dress and finds the second condom in its pocket. In Freiburg the day before she stood at the drugstore checkout with the box and a bottle of sunscreen, feeling ridiculous and hopeful at once. She tears the packet open with her teeth. Théo kneels between her knees and watches her roll it down over his cock, his breath unsteady.

He pushes into her slowly. She feels the stretch and then the fullness and lets her breath out in a long shaking sigh. He waits, deep in her, and kisses her. On his first real stroke the mat under her squeals.

They both stop dead, and next door the snoring stops too. For a long moment they hear only the crickets, until the man in the camper grunts and starts again. Théo drops his forehead onto her shoulder, shaking with silent laughter, still inside her, and she laughs too, helplessly.

“On our sides,” she whispers. “It’s quieter.”

They roll over together onto her mat, Théo behind her, his chest against her back. She lifts her knee, and he slides back into her from behind, his mouth on her neck, his arm under her head. She is just finding his rhythm, slow and close, when his breath goes ragged against her ear. His hips buck as he drives into her, short and hard. Each stroke feels so good that she moans, her mouth on his arm, and pushes back to meet him, close to coming herself. She feels his orgasm inside her and all through his body. He groans into her hair as he slows, and she blinks, surprised that it is over so soon.

“Merde.” He holds her tight from behind. “Pardon, pardon.”

She laughs, embarrassed for him, and reaches back to rub his curls. “Has it been a long time?”

“No.” His breath is hot on her neck. “But you are… you feel…” He gives up on the sentence. “It felt too good.”

Flattered, she squeezes the arm under her head. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay. Wait.”

He slides out of her and turns her onto her back. Beside her on his knees, he kisses her mouth, then her breasts. He sucks each nipple in turn and nibbles at it until she arches up to him. Two fingers slip into her, wet and still open from him. He curls them inside her and circles her clit with his thumb, a little hurried and off to one side. She takes his wrist and shows him where and how fast. He learns quickly. Soon she lets go of his wrist, and he keeps the rhythm on his own, his eyes on her face.

Her body answers him as if it had been waiting all summer. Her breath goes short. Heat gathers under his hand and spreads into her thighs until they shake. She grabs the edge of her sleeping bag and bites down on the fabric. Her body clenches hard around his fingers, again and again, her hips lifting off the mat, her cry pressed into the nylon. Théo slows with her and keeps his fingers deep in her, gentle now, until the last shudders run out of her and she sinks back onto the mat.

They lie there a long time, damp and slow, the air in the tent thick with the smell of them. Théo winds one of her pink strands around his finger and lets it spring free. She had her hair cut the week she moved out, the pink strands put in the same afternoon. The air on her bare neck still surprises her. She likes it shorter. Her heart slows. She thought she might feel strange afterward, with a man she met two hours ago, or sad about Florian. She feels loose and heavy and very much herself.

Théo stirs at last, sits up and bumps his head on the roof. “I have to go. At eight the boss wants my room empty and the key on his desk.” He looks down at the two mats, then at his legs, folded half under him. “And in here there is no room for my legs.”

She grins, because he is right. The tent is made for two people who know each other well, and she wants to sprawl. “Go and pack.”

He gropes for his clothes in the dim tent and kisses her once more, slowly. “Bonne route, Leo. To Spain, on foot.” He shakes his head. “You are crazy.”

She catches his hand. “Bye, Théo. Thank you. This was nice.”

“For me too.” He smiles, squeezes her fingers and lets go.

He crawls out and dresses on the path. The zipper rasps one last time. His steps crunch away over the gravel.

Leo lies on her back across both mats, her arms flung out until her hands touch the tent walls on either side. Her skin still hums. Tomorrow she and Jannik set off down the coast, and she has missed walking with him more than she knew. She is happy, plainly and completely, as she has not been in months.