When the sun started to fall beneath the western clouds, dropping into the sea, he remembered a time when they were caught in that storm, with a mile left of the rising and descending trail they ambled down. The cold wind pushed them to and fro, and though the path was usually a scenic wind over empty beaches and mammoth rock jetties to their right, they now couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of them as the rain fell in icy spiraling dives. It was two in the afternoon, and all they could see was gray, and every wind in the path was a dare by the sky to keep moving forward, to risk an accidental misstep and a painful plummet into rock or sea. But they were invigorated by the cloudburst, by the sudden hysteria that snuck up on them from behind, and they slipped, slopped, and slid their way back toward their car.

And it was also the first time he had held her hand. For the full forty minutes of slogging into the disorienting sky, she gripped his as he guided her forward. When they got back to his Suburban, they were soaked, freezing, and giddy, and with teeth chattering, they laughed like children as the heater whirred at full blast. And he was transfixed in joy, because he had loved her for some time.

Shortly after that, in an evening that began at the theater and ended at her apartment, he found himself locked in a long passionate embrace with her that ended in the morning. His heart was swollen over her, and he modestly told her he had loved her before, had loved her for a long arc. And as she followed him to the door to send him out into the day, she politely thanked him.

And over a number of months, their friendship changed. Sometimes it was all passion, and sometimes it was merely pleasantries. He worked days and she worked evenings, and busyness abounded. Passion always brought them back together though: the cataclysmic catharsis freed them both from the normality that otherwise sealed their lives in. And always, afterwards, she politely thanked him, and his heart was swollen for days, and though he was working- drawing, drafting, designing, designating- his mind slipped back, thinking about her, the many dimensions of her.

They talked briefly here and there daily, until another convulsive rendezvous seized them. He would wonder about children and holidays, but then he always run back into her words, which let him know he was beautiful and desirable and precious, but beyond which he was merely a distant possibility of many to her.

Now, as a quarter of the fading sun reclined on the horizon and a shallow set of breakers strode up on the beach below, he gripped the steering wheel in front of him. Surely she had landed in Portland by now. California was behind her, and so was he.

And he realized now what it all had come to for him.

Despite all of their intimacies, which had been glorious and delicious, in which she made him feel like a conquering king and a hero of a man, outside of those he had merely been a possibility, a nice guy, a good friend, and he had never really had her affection. Her affection. That, which he had hungered for all along.

He started the Suburban, stared at the waves tripping in on the beach for another few minutes as the sky reddened, and then, as if shocked from a coma, he looked at the clock, exhaled. Hands trembling, he then drove away from the overlook lot, leaving a pair of gulls crying in the sky behind him.