Page 55 of Café Diablo

Yellow mud splatters across the windshield as Olivia hits the gears and guns us down the road. The truck swerves and fishtails, but like when she’s on her moped, she’s got everything under control, despite the queasiness in my stomach threatening to throw up my dinner.

Olivia is a maverick with this old hunk of rust, knowing exactly how much pressure to put on the gas, when to rev the engine, and around what bends the mud traps are. She’s right, neither my car nor her scooter would have made it fifty feet in this slop, and frankly, I’m surprised we’ve managed to defy the laws of gravity and get this far.

“You have a thing with driving recklessly, don’t you?” I say, grabbing the ‘oh shit’ handle above my head. The cab is a mess. It’s filled with garden equipment and old rags and trash, and my feet can’t even find the floor there’s so much old junk on it.

“I like to live fully, Edwin!” Olivia veers around another corner at fifty miles an hour, spraying mud and sludge in her wake. I can’t help but admire the woman sitting next to me, gripping the steering wheel like a hooligan, hooting and hollering as if we’re in the jungle and hot on the trail of a wild boar we’re hunting.

She’s positively fearless. Or insane. Maybe both.

I can’t remember the last time I took a risk—a real one—one I hadn’t precalculated to the nines so it wasn’t a risk anymore. My heart thrums in my chest as we swing around another curve and the truck does an entire donut in the middle of the narrow road. I brace myself on the dash, glad the seatbelts are at least functioning.

“Are you trying to kill us?”

“Yeehaw!” Olivia yells, and I’m not sure if she spun us on purpose, or if she’s just embracing the twist and spin of the road and following the mayhem.

A tiny fleck of gold twinkles on her shoulder and I reach over to pluck it off. God-damned glitter. She looks over at me quickly with a question in her eyes and I flick the glitter onto the floor of the cab with the rest of the abandoned garden equipment.

“Devil’s dust,” I grumble, to which she smiles, giving me the impression that the glitter is all part of her strategic plan. Perhaps it’s all a ruse to get me to touch her each time I find a fiendish speck of gold. “That was a mercy,” I say. “I’m not picking anymore glitter off your body. You’ve been warned!” Olivia just continues to smile deviously as if she’d like to see me try to keep my hands off her.

Finally, the road opens and the trees split to show the ocean. It’s dusk and the sky is a deep pink, that slash of color hovering above a pool of turquoise water that’s glazed gold and sparkling.

The cove is small, no larger than half a football field, with large boulders of rocks piling up on each side of it. The rocks curve in a rough semi-circle, several jutting out into the water and effectively shielding the wind. There’s a narrow inlet where the rocks almost touch and the cove opens to the wild ocean beyond. But in here, inside the cove, the water is calm.

Olivia’s right, it’s spectacular.

She parks the truck at the edge of the sand and looks out at the ocean for a long moment, like she’s seeing it for the first time. The setting sun turns her skin a luminous gold color and all those freckles on her cheekbones become dark in contrast.

“Welcome to my favorite place in the world,” Olivia says softly, her voice full of reverence and I feel like I’m peeking into an important corner of her life—a secret. “I always want to paint this cove, but I don’t think I could ever truly capture it. It’s just too…” She trails off, words abandoning her.

“I’ve never seen your art,” I say. “But if the look in your eye is any indication, I’m sure it would be spectacular.”

Olivia blushes, looking over at me softly like she’s not used to being complimented, particularly about her art.

“Okay, shoes off!” she says, cutting through her own shy tension. “Bare feet only.”

She kicks off her pink Chucks and leaves them by the pedals, pushing open the door and slipping out. I start untying my shoes as she runs like a wild woman through the sand, heading for the ocean with her arms spread.

The sunlight silhouettes her and from my angle it looks like she’s running into the setting light, the edges of her body swallowed by a halo of brightness. I kick off my shoes and socks and sit in the silence of the cab watching her. The image of Olivia ringed in sun seems like her pure form, as if she cannot help but run wildly toward hope and possibility. It’s part of what makes her so irresistible.

I get out of the cab and the air is surprisingly crisp. To my left, fresh mud is splattered along the whole side of the truck, and for a devious moment I imagine pressing Olivia up against it, taking her hard against all that dirt and grime in an uncontrolled shedding of my better judgement. I know I won’t do it, but for a second it shoots a rush of excitement through me.

The sand is cold, tickling between my toes as I walk down the beach to meet her at the edge of the turquoise pool, which, to my surprise, is already a deep green color from the sun setting so quickly behind the surrounding boulders.

Coming up behind Olivia, I wrap my arms around her waist and pull her back against me, nuzzling my face into her neck and feeling her body arch back against my chest. It isn’t heated. It feels more inevitable than anything, like breathing—needing to hold her against me, to smell her skin, to feel our bodies curved against.

We stare at the ocean, not speaking. We smell the air and watch the sun slip behind the water and rocks, the brightness of the day transitioning its color upon the horizon: pink fades to blue, orange sets to violet. I’ve never noticed so many colors in the sky.

“Tell me how you’d paint this,” I say in Oliva’s ear, and her body tilts against me like I just said something precious. She lifts her arms and reaches back, locking her fingers behind the back of my neck, her elbows open and wide as if soaking in as much of the light as humanly possible.

“I’d start by mixing colors,” she says softly. “The light changes so fast I’d have to work quickly. Emeralds and cerulean—she points to where she sees the hues in the surf, one hand still idling against my neck—and those copper flecks on the rocks. Do you ever feel like there’s just too much and you can’t contain it all? Like you’re so small and you want to touch all that infinite-ness, but it feels like it’s going to swallow you instead?”

She’s quiet for a moment, breathing in the salt, making me want to stretch this moment all the way to the horizon.

“I could mix colors for hours and never paint a single thing,” Olivia says eventually. “I could paint this cove over and over again and never capture it. It’s too perfect. That’s why I won’t paint it. I don’t want to ruin it.”

I slide my hands under her tank top and over the warmth of her stomach. She reacts with a hot sigh as my mouth runs up the side of her neck.

“You’retoo perfect,” I say softly. “And I don’t want to ruinthis.”

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