The yellow jacket

He’s sitting at a restaurant table by the seaside with his feet up. His brown hair, messy as the shore, is tied up in a bun as cute as his yellow vintage jacket. As untidy as his curls, is his beard, which reminds me of someone I am yet to remember. He stares at the world’s biggest waves for most of the time, while occasionally scrolling through his phone. By his side there’s a book, I can’t see the cover but it looks old, I somehow get the feeling that the book has been read by hands other than his. Oh, his hands.

I am weak for a man’s hands. His right wrist wears a bracelet made out of three warm colors. His skin is tan and flawless, the sort of skin you wouldn’t be able to stop touching. His feet wear trainers and plain looking socks.

For a second he stares at me while I type and then moves his head back to the endless and raging sea of Praia do Norte.

I wonder how much of that second he is contemplating now. If he is still thinking about the shy girl behind him, he’ll probably be wondering what’s a girl like me doing in a place like this.

‘Staring at some beauty’ I’d reply if given the chance.

He looks back at me and this time he takes longer to work me out.

He’s thinking I should be staring at the sea too, rather than being on my laptop. Little does he know that sea viewing is my second favorite activity, but watching someone stare at the ocean is my first.

There’s magic in looking away at the horizon, where the water crashes with the clouds, while thinking about life. But to wonder what another human being is thinking about while doing so, that is music to my ears.

If I was to have a superpower, it would probably be mind reading. Together with another fifty two I have written down somewhere in my diary from the year 2001.

The sun shines through a grey cloud and it hits the back of his head. He seems so golden I struggle to find the words to keep describing him.

I wonder what he’s doing on his phone. My wild guess is a google search about the highest surfable wave ever recorded, because yes, I do have a type, and if he was to walk me back to his car I’d probably notice the surfboard lying on top of it.

How could I, being who I am, not fancy a surfer type? A dreamer constantly chasing new highs, feeling the freedom that life has to offer without anything tying them down but nature?

My ideal lover is nothing but someone who doesn’t need me, who prioritizes their dreams over anything as mundane as emotions. Don’t get me wrong though, I am as romantic as they come. Not the happy ending type, but rather the tragic ending, short and intense lived sort of romances. I appreciate it when life faces you with a beautiful chapter and then ends it for you, like there you go, tell the world about it everywhere you go so that you can be free from it.

I do also wonder about his age, he’s probably in his late twenties. Although it is not the number I mind, but the heartbreaks. How many heartbreaks has he had? How many times has he had to let go of something he thought impossible? How many dreams did he forget about, and how many is he still pursuing? How many sunrises has he seen on his way home from a life changing night out?

While I am here contemplating his heartbreaks, he asks for the bill. He is not Portuguese, although he does easily look like he could be from here. There’s a certain expression on his face, I can’t really grasp it, but I’d venture to say he seems happy. The sort of happiness that you get cynical about. The sort of happiness that makes you want to ask, where do you come from? Where do you go?

He leaves a five euro note on the table and gets up to leave.

I want to say something, I want to get up and ask him about his dreams, if at least to have something else to keep writing about, but before I get a chance to be disappointed at my shyness, he turns his head to me, and with the cheekiest of eye looks, he asks me to follow.

I do.

He walks up the hill in front of me, not having hesitated one second about stopping to wait for me. Did he even ask me to follow with his eyes? One of the perks of being a storyteller is without doubt the constant struggle of understanding what is reality and what is the urge of the soul to create a story.

He keeps walking around 6 meters in front of me, casually looking back to make sure the sea is still there. The doubt offends.

As I get more curious about where we’re going, the sun breaks through the clouds once more and touches him back up, and as if it was magic, the rays of sunlight are surrounding him as he walks. I wonder if he’s able to tell that the spot where he walks is the only sunny spot on the road.

As we reach the beginning of what seems to be an angry forest, I stop and think for a second. At what point does the ‘Don’t follow strangers into the forest’ advice that mums give you stop being advice in adulthood? What if I am following this stranger into the forest for what could be the orgasm of a lifetime? Has anyone ever gotten straight into undressing without having said a word? For what it's worth, if my mum was here she would be begging me to keep walking towards him. She’s lost all hope in romance which means she would do anything to live it through me.

I look down and focus on putting one foot after the other, scared and excited in equal measures. I had promised myself I wouldn’t follow a man anywhere anymore. I remember the Luu three years ago looking at herself in the mirror repeating out loud that she was following only her instincts and her dreams after she had gone on a masturbation spree reinforcing the fact that she needed no man in her life. ‘I am that man’ I would tell myself.

As I enter this new dimension that seems to be the trees, I struggle to catch my breath. Before I can realize, he has slowed his pace and is now closer to me. Do I slow down? Do I try to catch up? I take my eyes off my boots and look up again. He’s standing just in front of me and for the first time I am able to look at his entire face. His eyes are green and penetrating, his breathing is as calm as his pose when he was staring at the sea. It is so silent that the only thing you could hear is the nervousness of the air coming in and out of my mouth. His hand grabs mine as he turns back to the path he has set us both to be and we keep walking. I don’t know what to make of his touch, his skin is soft, yet the grab is assertive and determined.

The sun is not reaching us here and a sharp sensation of cold and fear travels through from my hand to my spine, yet my thighs feel as warm as when I was sitting by the cafe at the beach.

I notice the earring on his right ear, and I instantly start daydreaming about all the different ways I want to lick it. I once read about the power of silent dates. My housemate, who I would define as a professional lover, has gone on a few and mentioned the incredibly arousing feeling of being next to someone whom you can only imagine. You base everything on how you look at each other, how you breathe, how you move.

We get to a little wooden cabin with not much else than its structure and a closed door, and I am still holding this stranger's hand while with the other one he reaches for the key in his pockets. The cabin is in somewhat good condition, the size of a small South East London room. It has windows with brown fencing on them, and the door is made out of a thriller movie where the little girl never made it out. ‘Not so little anymore’, I whisper to myself.

I step in first and he walks in after me. While I look around for signs of danger, besides the obvious, I hear him lock the door behind us. Too scared to look back, and ultimately aroused by the craziness of the situation, I leave my laptop bag on the floor, and I let my jacket fall off my shoulders slowly. I don’t know what I am doing, or how this stranger would have access to such a numb little cabin with nothing inside but a kayak, some old candles and a circular rug in the middle, where I am standing and where I will soon be dropping my pants.

I feel his breath on my neck. I raise my hand and look for his hair behind me, and when I reach those curls, I grab them and pull them towards me. He turns me slightly as if to face him, and I catch myself facing the window, where to my surprise I don’t find the tree scenery I left behind, but the beach we were at, with the waves and the horizon, with a hazy mist surrounding the sunset, and a tall stranger whose name I still don’t know walking towards the sea, with a yellow jacket as cute as his hair bun. I let go of his head and I grab myself closer, pulling my shoulders together, trying to gather the strength to understand what was going on.

-Two- he whispers in my ear. His voice echoes inside the cabin and overwhelms the air like a crisp sound breaking a silence that I thought unbreakable.

-Two what? - I finally hear myself saying after a long pause.

-Two heartbreaks.