Dinosaur Beach

17

For a long time neither of us spoke. We lay spent in the amber light; the surf boomed and hissed softly, the wind fluted around the tent.

Her eyes opened and looked into mine, a look of utter candor, of questioning, perhaps of surprise. Then they closed again and she was asleep. I rose quietly and picked up my clothes and went outside, into the heat and the dry wind from the dunes. A pair of small saurians were on the beach a mile or so to the south. I dressed and went down to the water’s edge and wandered along the surf line, watching the small life that scurried and swam with such desperate urgency in the shallows.

The sun was low when I got back to the tent. Mellia was busy, setting out food from the field stores. She was wearing the robe, barefooted, her hair unbound. She looked up at me as I came in; a look half-wary, half-impish. She looked so young, so achingly young…

“I’ll never be sorry,” I said. “Even if…” I let it hang there.

She looked faintly troubled. “Even if… what?”

“Even if we proved the theory was wrong…” She stared at me; suddenly her eyes widened.

“I forgot to—,” she said. “I forgot all about it…”

I felt my face curving into a silly smile. “So did I—until just now.”

She put her hand over her mouth and laughed. I held her and laughed with her. Then she was crying. Her arms went around me and she clung, and sobbed, and sobbed, and I stroked her hair and made soothing noises.