Chapter 3: The Morning After
The dawn light through the shop’s front windows was the colour of bruised peaches. Marc fumbled with the heavy deadbolt, his hands stiff from a night spent clutching at nothing on his bedsheets. He’d slept in fits, jerked awake by dreams of crashing waves that sounded like a door slamming. The shame from the night before was a low-grade fever, a clammy film on his skin no shower could erase.
He pushed the door open, the familiar bell jangling overhead. He needed an hour. Just one quiet hour to stack boxes, check the schedule, to armour himself in routine before he had to face her.
The smell hit him first. Not just the usual blend of neoprene, fibreglass resin, and coconut wax. This was richer, darker. Freshly brewed coffee.
And then he saw her.
Sterre was perched on the high stool behind the register, her back to the counter, facing the door. She wore faded olive-green cargo shorts and a grey hoodie, her hair piled in a messy bun. Two paper cups sat on the counter beside her. Her expression was unreadable in the soft gloom.
Marc froze in the doorway, the early morning chill seeping in around him. His heart did a hard, sickening thud against his ribs. He hadn’t prepared. There was no preparation for this.
“You’re early,” he said, his voice rough with disuse. It was all he could manage.
“Couldn’t sleep.” Her tone was flat, observational. She picked up one of the cups and held it out. “Black, right? From Salty’s. They just opened.”
He moved forward slowly, each step feeling monumental. He took the cup. Their fingers didn’t touch. He brought it to his lips; the coffee was scalding, bitter, perfect. It burned a clean path through the fog in his head.
“Thanks,” he muttered, turning away to flip the light switches. The fluorescents buzzed and flickered to life, illuminating the colourful racks of board shorts, the rows of sleek surfboards standing like sentinels. He busied himself with the ancient CD player, pressing play on the usual reggae mix, anything to fill the silence. The music felt grotesquely cheerful.
“I spent the night thinking,” she said to his back. Her voice was clear, cutting through the melody. “Mostly I was pissed. Then I was embarrassed. Then I got curious.”
He kept his back to her, pretending to straighten a display of surf wax. “Sterre, about last night…”
“I’m not finished.” The stool scraped on the floor as she stood. He heard her footsteps approach, stopping a few feet behind him. “I was curious about what you were so afraid of. Was it me? Was it the… situation
Was it me? Was it the… situation?” She took a deliberate step closer. The reggae beat felt absurd now, a mocking soundtrack. “Or was it just the classic ‘oh shit, she’s actually a person’ panic?”
He finally turned to face her. The morning light cut across her face, highlighting the faint shadows under her eyes. She’d been awake, thinking, just like him. It leveled the ground in a way he hated. “It’s not that simple.”
“Then uncomplicate it for me.” She crossed her arms, leaning against a rack of wetsuits. Her gaze was direct, unblinking. “You looked at me last night like I was something you wanted to devour. And then you ran like I was poison. Pick a lane, Marc.”
The crude truth of it, the word ‘devour’, made his skin prickle. It echoed too closely the solitary, shameful act in his dark bedroom. He put his coffee down before he dropped it. The salty, wax-thick air of the shop was suddenly suffocating.
“You’re twenty-one,” he said, the words sounding hollow even to him.
“And you’re repeating a number we both know.” She pushed off the wetsuit rack, closing the distance to just a few feet. “That’s not an answer. That’s a placeholder.”
Frustration boiled up in him, hot and defensive. He ran a hand through his hair, tugging at the roots. “What do you want me to say? That it’s a terrible idea? It is. I’m practically middle-aged. I own a business. You’re in school. Your whole life is ahead of you, it’s… it’s not right.”
“According to who?” Her voice didn’t rise. It remained calm, lethally focused. “Your dad’s friends? The ghost of Emily Post? You keep telling me what the script says. I don’t care about the script.”
He turned away again, staring blindly at a quiver of new longboards. Their bright, flawless finishes mocked the grubby reality of his emotions. The silence stretched, taut and humming. He could feel her waiting behind him, a patient, pressing force.
“It’s just I don’t wanna be a pervert preying on woman in their early 20's,” he told the surfboards, his voice low and gravelly with confession.
The shop was so quiet he could hear the soft hiss of the waves through the glass door.
“But how is it preying if we’re two consenting adults?” she asked. Her tone shifted, losing its edge, becoming almost gentle with logic. “I already know that you think I’m attractive. The look on your face on the beach yesterday wasn’t exactly subtle.”
He winced, remembering the strap, the fall, his frozen gaze. The memory was a brand.
“But I’m not interested in that,” she continued, stepping into his peripheral vision. “I mean, I am. Obviously. But that’s not the point. It’s the way you treat me.”
He dared a glance at her. She was looking at him not with anger now, but with a profound, unsettling earnestness.
“You talk to me. You argue with me about fin design like I have a brain. You didn’t try to pat me on the head when I mentioned Heidegger. You got nervous because of my mind, Marc. That’s what did it. That’s what I want.” She swallowed, her own vulnerability flashing for a second. “Who else my age, or any age, looks at me and sees that first?”
The question hung in the air between them, dismantling every one of his clumsy, age-based arguments. She wasn’t asking for protection or guidance. She was asking for recognition. And he had given it to her, freely, over pasta and beer, before he’d panicked.
He had nothing left to say. All his rehearsed defenses crumbled to dust. She had seen straight through to the core of his fear—that he was just another older guy leering at a young body—and she had calmly, intelligently, set it on fire.
The bell above the door jangled violently, making them both jump. A group of three teenage boys stumbled in, laughing loudly about the dawn patrol, dripping saltwater on the floorboards, their voices shattering the fragile, charged space.
Reality flooded back in, harsh and fluorescent. Sterre took a slow step back, her expression shifting into a neutral, polite mask. She looked from the boys to Marc, her blue eyes holding his for one final, loaded moment.
Then she turned and walked toward the back room, leaving him alone at the counter with the echo of her words and the jarring, everyday chaos of his own shop.
The teenagers buzzed around the rack of graphic t-shirts, their laughter too loud, their questions about leash lengths pulling him into a mechanical customer service drone. He rang up a block of wax and a pair of flip-flops, his hands moving on autopilot. His mind was a trapped bird, beating itself against the cage of his skull, flying back to the quiet precision of her final question. Who else looks at me and sees that first?
The bell jangled again as they left, the sudden quiet they left behind was profound. He stared at the swinging door, then toward the darkened hallway that led to the stockroom. He couldn’t just stand there. The unresolved energy was a physical ache in his joints.
He walked toward the back, each step on the worn linoleum echoing. The reggae music faded, replaced by the low hum of the industrial freezer for wetsuits. The stockroom door was ajar, a slash of dim light from the single bare bulb inside cutting across the hallway floor.
He pushed the door open slowly.
She wasn’t sorting inventory or stacking boxes. She was just standing in the middle of the cluttered room, surrounded by cardboard and racks of summer clearance, her back to him, looking at nothing. Her shoulders were tense, the line of her spine rigid. He saw her take a deep, slow breath.
"Sterre," he said, the word barely more than an exhale.
She turned. Her eyes were bright, but not with tears. With a fierce, resolved intensity. She didn’t speak. She simply closed the distance between them in three swift strides.
Before he could form a thought, her body was against his. Her hands came up to frame his face, cool and sure. She kissed him.
It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. Her mouth was soft but insistent, and she tasted of coffee and a hint of mint. Every argument, every fear, every scrap of rational thought dissolved into pure sensation. The warm press of her, the scent of her shampoo cutting through the dust of the stockroom, the surprising strength in her fingers on his jaw.
A dam broke inside him. A guttural sound escaped his throat, part surrender, part relief. His arms wrapped around her, pulling her flush against him, one hand splaying across the small of her back. He kissed her back, deeply, hungrily, all the suppressed want of the past weeks—the glimpse on the beach, the ache in his dark bedroom, the magnetic pull across her coffee table—pouring into it.
Time lost its shape. There was only the warm slide of her lips, the frantic beat of his heart against hers, the rightness of her curves fitting against him. When they finally broke apart, breathing ragged, their foreheads rested together.
Her voice was a husky whisper in the space between their mouths. "Was that so bad?"
He couldn’t speak. He just shook his head, his eyes closed, drinking in the feeling of her breath on his skin.
"So tonight," she said, her lips brushing his as she formed the words. "At seven. Pasta."
She leaned back, just enough to look directly into his eyes. Her gaze was unwavering, a blue challenge. "And this time," she said, her tone leaving no room for negotiation, "you don’t run away."
She extracted herself from his embrace with a gentle, deliberate push against his chest. She smoothed her hoodie, gave him a small, knowing smirk that sent a fresh jolt through him, and walked out of the stockroom.
He heard her footsteps recede down the hall. The front bell jangled once, briefly. Then silence.
Marc stood alone amidst the boxes, his lips still burning, his entire body humming. He lifted a trembling hand to his mouth. The ghost of her pressure lingered. The shop around him felt utterly, impossibly empty. He was completely flabbergasted, anchored to the spot, with only the fading scent of her and the echo of her ultimatum hanging in the air.