Exposure by McKenna, Cara (the beach read .TXT) 📕

his world traveling, through language and music and books and recipes. Provençal is a blend of dialects, but I spoke well enough to make myself understood at the market.

She thumps our linked hands against my thigh. “I think it’s wine time. I bet we could both use a glass.”

“Agreed.”

We rise and head for the kitchen. We selected several bottles at the store, and she chooses the Clairette de Die.

“Something bubbly, to celebrate surviving the journey,” she declares.

I inspect the cabinets, finding no flutes but a couple of brandy snifters. “These will have to do.” I set them on the scrubbed-pine table and take the bottle from Caroly, ending her spirited struggle with the cork. I wrap it in the hem of my shirt and twist it free with a mighty pop. The spray wets my shirt and the floor, but Caroly catches most of the eruption with the glasses.

“I guess that was a bumpier ride than I realized.” She finds a cloth to mop the spill while I rinse my shirt, and we meet at the table and hold up our glasses.

“To Provence,” she says.

“This wine is from the Rhone.”

“Whatever. To France.”

And we toast, the fizz teasing my tongue.

After a sip and an admiring sigh she says, “We toast a lot. Like, every single night.”

“There is much to celebrate.”

“And we drink a lot.”

“There is much to drink.”

She laughs. “And yet I don’t know that I’ve ever seen you drunk.”

“I prefer indulgence to gluttony.”

She taps my glass with hers. “Well put.”

I examine my wine, holding it to the light to watch the streaming bubbles. “This is lovely.” White, when I so often drink red; sparkling when I nearly always drink still. It’s funny to find myself enjoying the newness of everything. Perhaps my need for the predictable is just a lie I’ve been fed by my disorder. Perhaps it really is people I fear, more than the unknown or the open.

Still, I must walk before I can run. In Paris I crawl, it feels, but perhaps in a place like this, I could even manage to stroll. Move with ease like a normal man, mind wandering through daydreams instead of hounded by waking nightmares.

We take our glasses through the bedroom and out the doors to the side garden. The sky is deep indigo now and already the stars are emerging. So white, like holes pricked through a shade, leaking pinpoints of pure sunlight. Which is nearly what they are, I suppose. Far off suns, winking through the cold, empty vastness. I breathe deeply of the cool air, quenching as a glass of water washing away a hangover’s sour glaze.

I’d worried this first evening would be lost, consumed by the task of simply waiting for my heart to recover from the journey and the change of scenery. But I feel far more at ease than I’d expected. Caroly notices.

“You look pretty relaxed,” she says, rubbing my shoulder. “Or is that just relief for the transportation portion being done for a few days?”

“It is, but it’s more.” I sip my wine. “I thought this would bother me—this hill, this gigantic sky, all this space. But I don’t mind it. Not as much as I’d feared.”

“Maybe it’s the chaos you’re afraid of, not the environment.”

I nod. “Is it what you imagined?”

“It’s absolutely perfect. Like walking into a Cézanne.”

We stare at the sky for ages, until all the blue has drained away, leaving pure blackness. Far-off windows glow to mark the village, a tiny provincial galaxy. The lights from the bedroom bathe the grass for a meter or so beyond where we stand, giving the hill a strange dimension, as though it ends where the light does and we could just take a handful of steps and drop off into the darkness.

“There’s the moon,” Caroly says, pointing. It’s just breached the scrubby hills, looking big, so close to the horizon.

My father taught me a trick, one of the summers I was sent to stay with him in Portugal. I was eight, perhaps. The moon had seemed so huge above the ocean one night, and he told me, make a circle with your thumb and forefinger. If you hold the circle over the moon, you’ll see how small it really is. That’s why photographs of a majestic full moon never look so impressive once they’re developed. Cameras know it’s always the same size. It’s the human eye that’s fooled. The huge moon shrank, fitting easily within the ring I’d made with my finger and thumb. I had preferred believing I’d been lucky, catching the moon looking so especially grand. The trick took away a bit of nature’s mystery. But my father also taught me to skip rocks and to dig deep in the sand until I found the ocean, and showed me fireflies for the first time.

I sip my wine, wondering if perhaps he thought he was letting me in on the moon’s secret, not spoiling a pleasurable illusion.

And I wonder—with an odd, slow-motion panic at the very realization I’m entertaining such a thought—what would I do if it were my child?

Perpetuate the myths, or let science be magic enough?

I move to stand behind Caroly, stroking her arm with my free hand. Her blouse has short sleeves and her arms are prickly with goose bumps. Such simple contact, yet my body rouses, warmth collecting deep in my belly. “You’re cold.”

“I could stand out here for hours, it’s so quiet. And dark.”

“Let’s go in, just until you’re warmed up. We’ll keep working on that bottle and eat some supper. There will be even more stars an hour from now.” We can shut off all the lights and spread a blanket on the grass, and her eyes can drink in the glittering sky while I quench my greedy thirst on her body. Let the sky watch us, and the moon. Let the security of roofs and walls and familiarity go to hell, for once in my cowardly life.

I take her hand and lead her inside. One glance at