Parallel to the Shore

A short story by T.C. Mill

This story contains: her and her, queer, contemporary romance, strangers, outdoors, cunnilingus

Mercedes was the last person left on the beach. In the west, the sun tucked itself behind the hills, its rose-gray glow filtering through the crowns of trees. She hadn’t meant to stay so late and wasn’t entirely sure she was allowed to. But unless someone came to throw her out, she’d keep wandering. 

The beach was smaller than it had looked on the website. This past winter’s snowfall–more than a foot above average—swelled the lake, its waves creeping toward the dunes that reared high and steep behind a ribbon of flat sand. In places, Mercedes walked at a slant, left foot rustling through wiry dune grass, right foot rinsed by the water, its cool tongues licking grit from her toes. When she came to the wooden stairs at the end of the beach, she climbed them, but turned away from the empty parking lot at the top. It would be a long trip home, inland and south, and she didn’t want to make it yet. Nothing waited for her there. 

She wove through picnic tables and toward a gravel track along the cliffs north of the beach. No railing guarded the edge, just tangles of bushes and trees that clung with thick roots in the thin soil. Waves slapped the stone a dozen feet below her. She couldn’t see the other shore as she peered toward the horizon. Not even city lights, not across this Great Lake. Mercedes narrowed her eyes, straining for a glimpse of a passing boat. Her aloneness on the rim of such vast distance became claustrophobic. 

Then her searching gaze found a glow ahead on the cliffs. As she approached, it resolved itself into a lantern, the kind campers used. Beside it lay a pile of loosely folded clothes.

Mercedes leaned over the edge, peering into the water under the lantern’s light, and a woman looked up at her.

The swimmer’s limbs glided in a confident motion that kept her above the waves. The outcropping where Mercedes stood was the first of two rocky arms embracing a hollow not much larger than her apartment’s bedroom. Each surge of water lifted the woman closer to Mercedes, then brought her down again. At the back of the hollow, soft limestone had been eroded by waves, forming a cave deep enough that the lantern light vanished inside it. The woman swam toward the cave mouth, then let the receding surge bring her back under the sky. All the while she kept sending glances to Mercedes.

“Hey,” she said, as if greeting a friend. The familiarity struck Mercedes’s heart like surf against rock, teasing at its fractures. 

Not that Mercedes’s heart had fractures. She’d never broken it, really. She was being overdramatic. Was she that lonely? Or was the swimmer that gorgeous?

Her eyes, large and dark, opened wide like her beautiful, smile-curved lips. Under the lantern light her brown skin shone, looking smooth as a pearl in the water. She swam with elegance, not as effortlessly as an angel flying—even if the comparison came to Mercedes’s mind—but in watching her, you sensed the force of the water moving around her body, felt her meeting it. She made her way, not by cutting through the waves, but by flowing between, around, and with them. 

She grinned and raised one hand in welcome. 

Mercedes waved back. Smiled back. The lake had seemed eerie before, huge and empty. Now this woman filled the world. 

“It’s not that cold,” she called up. Maybe it was true; her teeth didn’t seem to chatter. The swing of her limbs in the water must have been keeping her warm as well as afloat. She tilted her swim-capped head. “Do you want to join me?”

“Oh God,” Mercedes blurted. “I, uh, hadn’t. . . Yes. Okay.”

She’d done riskier things in the fluttery restlessness of a crush. . . maybe. Mercedes brought her toes to the edge. The rock outcrop slanted, so the drop was shorter than it had first seemed–maybe nine feet. The water looked deep enough to absorb her jump. She began to gather herself.

“You’re swimming in that?”

“In what?”

“All those clothes.” The woman smiled again as Mercedes’s face heated. 

“Guess not.” She stepped back to the clothing beside the lantern and started to remove her own. She folded her jeans and put them next to the pair already on the ground. Then came her shirt. In panties and bra, she stood and shivered. The end-of-summer evening air wasn’t chilly, but it felt very much like what it was—outside air, carrying the sound and scent of the lake and trees as it blew over her bare skin. 

She’d jump in wearing her underwear, she decided, and drive home in dry jeans. Commando. 

The thought created a twinge between her thighs. Maybe her jeans wouldn’t be that dry. Not if she was rubbing against their seam while remembering the swim with this woman. . . A swim she hadn’t even started yet. 

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