I tried to sleep. The guest room’s wall of windows, overlooking the cliff side and the ocean, didn’t have drapes or shades. And why would they? Why would you ever want to block that view out? And who was there to look in at you, other than the seagulls?

Well, maybe I wanted shades because there was a full moon, and I had to bury my whole head under the covers to find complete darkness. Which made me too hot, which made me throw the covers off.

And oh yeah. The other thing I’d seen that night. Andrew, naked, plunging into the pool. Sometimes your eye just photographs an intense moment, and you can’t forget it. Most of the time, working in EMS, it wasn’t something you’d want me to tell you about. But for once, it was a picture I didn’t want to forget, ever.

But I also did want to forget, how I felt in that moment, the throat-clutching desire, the falling-stomach ache. How much I wanted Andrew.

So you can imagine what I felt when the bedroom door clicked open. I was hard instantly, my pulse spiking to at least 90. Andrew had come to me, it was a miracle, it was real…

“Hey,” he whispered. “Wake up.”

“I’m awake,” I croaked. I turned, breathless.

He was dressed, wearing a t-shirt and swim trunks, his teeth-flashing grin visible in the moonlight.

“Remember we said we were gonna do three crazy things on this trip?”

“Yeah…”

“Time for number one. Get up and get your swimsuit on.”

* * *

“It’s fucking cold,” I said as we crossed the acreage between the house and the cliff. I had a windbreaker on, and a watch cap, but per Andrew’s instruction, I was in my swimsuit and my legs were tingling from the stinging sea breeze. I could have put on a pair of sweats over it, but, again – if Andrew was sacking up and going without insulation, so would I.

“I know!” he shouted. “Come on! Follow me, I know the way.”

We were at the sea’s edge. Sea Ranch isn’t a beach resort. There was no path down the nearly vertical rocky edge.

What there was, though, was a breathtaking waterfall, breaking on the rocky “beach” below. Its foamy cataract captured the moonlight, creating another light source on the cliff side.

“Remember the bouldering class we took?” he asked me.

“Yeah…”

“This is the same thing in reverse.” Then I watched as he put his back to the sea and carefully felt with his feet for each foothold, and gradually disappeared from sight.

“Come on!” he shouted over the roar of the waves below.

What choice did I have? I gingerly followed him, forced to break the first law of climbing: Don’t Look Down.

“Don’t look down,” Andrew said from below. “Use your feet, not your eyes.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said nervously. My mind was already seeing the rescue copter, the sled, the spotlights, all focused on lifting my broken body off the rocks below.

But then that man thing kicked in. Andrew was doing it. I could do it. Andrew never had to climb into a barn loft to kill rats with a shovel. Andrew never had to lunge for the last piece of bread on the dining room table, faster than any other kid. Or get in a fight with a psycho with a knife, armed only with a plastic tray.

Fuck this. I can do this.

It wasn’t a huge cliff, maybe fifty feet high. And before I knew it, I was at the bottom, standing on the sea’s rocky edge, staring up at the waterfall, staring at the moon, at its reflection on the sea.

“Fuck,” I whispered. I’d never been anywhere so beautiful in my life.

Andrew nodded. “I know. Come on. Leave your shoes on, though.”

I knew what he wanted. I tossed off my cap and coat and we ran across the rocks, threaded around a few boulders, and dived into the ocean.

“FUCK!” I shouted, the cold searing my skin.

“FUCK ME!” Andrew laughed.

We turned right around, too familiar with the science behind hypothermia to linger in even a few inches of cold ocean water.

Andrew surprised me by going to the base of the cliff and opening a battered old travel trunk that had been wedged into a crevice. He hurled a beach towel and a huge blanket at me.

“You put those down here?”

He nodded. “A long time ago.”

I thought about that. A box with two towels, two blankets… Who had he expected to take down here, to this magic spot? Who had he imagined having the balls to do it with him? A boyfriend, a girlfriend, a friend…

There was a thick mattress pad in there, too, which he spread out in a curve of the cliff, shielded from the wind. Once I was dry and under my blanket, I was warm, and I was happy.

“This is fucking gorgeous,” I said. “Do you come here often?”

We both laughed, as I realized I’d just said the corniest pickup line in history.

“Seriously.”

“I used to,” he said. “I spent summers here with my grandfather when I was growing up.” He paused. “My dad spent his summer making the rounds of pharmaceutical ‘conferences,’ you know.”

I knew. They’d cracked down on it lately, but in the old days, doctors were rewarded for overprescribing certain medications with all expenses paid invitations to medical “conferences” in Tahiti, or Bora Bora, or some legendary golf resort. They’d arrive, register, and then enjoy their paid vacation.

“Even if he wasn’t gone, the last thing that he wanted was a kid around the house,” he said distantly, his eyes on the moon. “Such a distraction,” he drawled, no doubt an imitation. “That’s why it was boarding schools for me in the school year, and staying with my grandpa in the summer.”

Andrew had a family, yeah, but I could see it now, how having a family who didn’t want you around could be as painful as, if not worse than, losing the family who did.

“Your grandpa was a doctor, too, right? All those medical antiques were his?”

“Yeah. He was a professor of medicine. Funny enough, he was the only one who supported my decision to become a medic instead of going straight to med school. He’d seen enough kids come into med school because they ‘had to,’ because their families just had to have a kid they could call, you know, my son or my daughter the doctor, to fucking impress other parents and lord it over them. He said to me, ‘Don’t ever go into a field you don’t love. You’ll fail yourself and you’ll fail the people you’re there to serve.’”

“He sounds…awesome.”

Andrew nodded. “He was. He left me everything, he cut my dad out of the will completely. He knew I wouldn’t be a playboy, he knew someday that I’d… I’d figure out what the fuck I was really gonna be.”

I got that. Even if you could live on the meager salary, being a medic wasn’t a lifetime job. Just the physical toll on your body limited the span of your career, all the lifting, all the sitting, all the stress. Very few people stayed in the job for a lifetime.

“He told me once, whenever you have a big decision to make, climb down those rocks and sit on that beach, right by that waterfall. That was what he had done, until he was too old to do it. He said that everything just got clearer down here. Where there were no people, no lights, nothing but the water and the wind.”

I couldn’t disagree with that.

Because what was clear to me down here was that I was in love with Andrew, fully and wholeheartedly, and there was no stopping it, no denying it, no fixing it.

What I was going to do with that clarity, if anything, I didn’t know yet.