The smell of coconut and almonds finds me half asleep in my sailboat.
I check my watch. 2:40AM.
My navigation tablet wakes with a touch. A satellite streaks overhead, beaming wind forecasts through my companion way. I fold my arms along the washboard and rest my chin in the crux of my sunburned elbow. The marbled night sky tilts as the earth spins.
No one said after weeks at sea I would smell land before I saw it. I didn't know I spent my whole life acclimated to it's scent or that in three weeks my nose could forget entirely then rediscover the rich and strange taste of land.
It surprised me the first time I crossed from San Diego to Hawaii. A friend and I were still two days from Oahu when Hawaiian red clay, volcanic rock, and the sweet decay of thirsty broad leaves decomposing in the rainforest found my tastebuds among the waves. Now its coconut, almonds, and sunbaked plantain skins carried in a sillage of ripe sugarcane reaching me in the dark.
I'm so close to Puerto Rico I can taste it.
I'm strolling through a neighborhood built when this was Spain eating everything served from carts. I ran a line on the sail from Turks and Caicos but gave each of those little fish a second chance at life. I get a refill of Coke and another to-go box of bacalaitos then find a bench.
I share a bite with a tabby street cat sneaking between my feet. Another appears. I leave the rest with them and stroll along the waterfront.
I pass a fried dough confectionary, a tourist portrait painter, and a henna art stand and...
I glance back. A stunning young woman dots henna ink along the forearm of a tourist girl giggling from the pen's tickle. The artist looks familiar, like a beautiful echo coming back to me.
It can't be.
My fists clench and I forget to breathe. I don't like to feel knocked off kilter. I'm glad she can't see me staring. She pauses her work and glances my way, but I slip back into the passing crowd and don't stop walking until I'm back in the marina chewing the last of my Coke's ice on my boat. I turn on the fan and lay across my hammock. I let the final ice cube melt against my chest.
"Impossible" I finally say aloud.
I chalk it up to something like deja-vu. Fate arrives in vague suggestion, like a soon to be lover sharpening the moment.
There's just no way its the same young woman.
The one I saw at the airport when I was stuck in Atlanta. I watched her twist the top off a water bottle and take a drink.
I implored the universe to let me see her again.
I dream I'm in a temple of warm sandstone with walls of translucent pink and purple glass. The outer windows are almost translucent, while opaque and frosted glass form inner chambers, each unique. I pass a cube, a sphere. I can see the faceless shapes of people sitting inside them, some close together, their limbs mingled. I press my ear to a curved facet of the largest shape; a glass bulb twisted like the head of a rose about to bloom. It feels warm against my ear.
I hear a woman moaning. Maybe two.
A man's handprint and the hips of a woman smear condensation across pane next me. I can make out another figure with them, but a film of condensation obscures anything more than a phantasmal suggestion of a woman. I feel moans humming against my palm when I press my hand flush against the lightest, thinnest facet of glass. The lone person joins the other two. I know they aren't alone in there.
I look up for a ceiling, but the temple's inner ward carries towards a pyramid's point. A silhouette looks down at all the chambers from a perch. I feel her eyes on me, pushing my back on my heels.
I find the stairs and skip two at a time, I don't know what I'm going to say when I find her. She's still looking down as I catch my breath.
She tilts her head and looks back at me, the robe that seems to be the uniform in this place slinks off her well tanned shoulder. She tugs it back.
"Your echo found me," I tell her.
"Ah" she says.
She reaches for my shoulders and rests her forearms on my traps. Her thumb nail cuts through my beard and traces the angle of my jaw. She lets the robe part enough for my hand to slide pass the loose knot and tuck into the small of her back, fingers wide. I drag my thumb close to her ribs so I have just enough purchase on her skin to squeeze. She cups her hands against my chest and smiles. Rivulets of water warmed by my flushed muscles spread across my stomach.
"Where did you get the ice?" I ask. She keeps the secret. The temple is always warm as an intimate whisper. I run my folded knuckle from the notch between her collar bone to the cusp of her breast as she indulges the parting neckline of her robe. She has this smirk as my palm grazes her nipple, then fills with her perfect breast. Her hand sneak into my pants and seem to weigh my manhood in her fingers, touching just enough to feel her the aching contemplation. She smiles wide at how fast her touch makes the head of my cock press against her palm. My thumb swipes across her nipple as she nibbles her lip.
"It's mine to bite."
I pull her close and kiss her with a gentle bite I drag across her bottom lip. I flick my tongue under hers. Her hand squeezes my cock and strokes it in my pants. I kiss her forehead as she looks down at me then up with at lust drunk eyes, smearing my precum around my head with her fingers as our foreheads touch. Her knees just begin to bend, and I wake up.
I sleep twelve hours a day for three days straight. Maybe I'm getting used to land, sleeping free of an alarm that woke me every two hours to adjust my sails.
Maybe I'm looking for her in the dreams.
The cat I fed slinks between my legs as I exit the marina.
"Lo lamento," I tell it. Whether its for nearly stepping on his tail or my lack of snacks, I'm not sure. I double back to where I saw her but the shops and stands appear closed. Only opened on the weekends, it seems.
It must have been deja-vu. I strain my memory; the girl in the airport had red hair. I'm almost sure of it.
The henna artist had dark hair. I'm less sure of it.
I find a neighborhood of narrow, brick streets lined with pastel stucco buildings. The shops are open here, packed tight with narrow aisles. Vintage clothes. A second hand book store. A bar packed with soccer fans gathered around an early plasma flatscreen television with the brightness cranked all the way up. I thumb through LPs at the vintage record shop that shares a wall with the bar. The hefty fellow working both the register, the record player, and the bar next door gives me the slick-guy finger gun.
I return fire.
"Te gusta el reggeaton?" He asks.
I shrug. I think he mentioned reggaeton. Maybe he loves reggaeton.
"No, mírate. Abandonado y perdido en el tiempo. Solo tengo el registro para ti, amigo" he says.
I'm out of my depth, Spanish wise.
He switches a record as soccer fans next-door drum their hands on the bartop. He dashes back to serve them.
The saloon doors dividing the bar from the record shop swing longer than I'd expect. They knock like a metronome.
I'm alone in the record store. Old JBL speakers hiss with the dead air. I reach over the counter to check the needle as I hear the first chirp of organ.
"You Showed Me," by The Turtles starts playing. The tune makes me feel what I describe as "erotic paranoia." Its not the sort of thing I'd play, so its always a surprise to hear though I like being reminded it exists. Lilting background vocals shift pitch with the ease of someone sinking in an old leather couch.
I could never decide if the words were about sex or drugs, but as my eyes trace cracks up the plaster wall to a ceiling fan that couldn't spin any slower and still be spinning, I realize its about sex as a drug, reveling in crossed lines, two people realizing themselves with the body of another.
The song ends. The speakers crackle.
I reach over the counter to reset the record player. The needle's cartridge balances on the pad of my index finger, ready to drop. I watch the old record wobble as it turns.
A bell above the door of a bookstore opposite this record shop jingles. Its metallic ping taps me on the shoulder. I look up and catch the last stride of a young woman walking away, an eggshell canvas book bag airbrushed with "San Paw'n Cat Shelter" swings by her knees.
I don't remember dropping the needle, but the song is playing, the erotic paranoia seeping back through the cracked plaster.
I try for a better look to see where she went, leaning over a window display of the shop's most valuable collection with my hands on the glass. The music stops with a scratch.
The shopkeep turned bartender must be back. I don't look to see what he's playing next. Probably reggaeton again after trying to sell me The Turtles' record.
I'm too focused watching the girl with the canvas book bag turn the corner out of sight.
Her bare shoulders.
It can't be her: the woman from the airport, from the henna stand, from my dreams. I'm just losing my mind, is all. Those were her shoulders, though. Those were her shoulders?
"All I Have to Do is Dream," by the Everly Brothers starts playing. The saloon doors hang perfectly still. A tabby cat sits jumps up and stretches out across the counter. It looks like the cat I fed, but all tabbies look the same. Women, not so much.
The girl with the book bag had dirty blonde hair, I tell myself. The girl in the airport had red hair. The henna stand girl, it was dark, I think.
