It was a fucking hole all right, right in the middle of the high wooden fence. Lucia crouched down, and I realized now why she’d worn all black.

“You dressed like a cat burglar,” I pointed out, “so you wouldn’t be seen tonight.”

“Maybe,” she said, voice muffled as she attempted to wedge the fence further apart. “And you wore a dark suit, which means neither one of us will get caught.” She looked up, winking. “My plan is working.”

“You said you had no plan.”

“Did I?” she said breathlessly, sitting back on her heels. “Also, I think I fixed this hole. Fixed it so we could slide through, I mean.”

“Do you think I’ll do well in prison? Emotionally, I mean. I could always go back to school, get that Master’s degree I always wanted…”

“Chill, nerd,” Lucia groaned, and then shimmied her way through the hole. I blinked—there one second, gone the next.

“Lucia,” I hissed. No answer. I crouched down to peek through a hole that would allow me in just fucking barely. Her gorgeous face appeared, laughing silently. “Come and get me,” she whispered.

“If I slide through here, I’m going to get stuck and firemen are going to have to cut me out.”

“Classic 30th birthday shenanigans, Cal,” she said, reaching through the hole to grab my arms. “And that won’t happen because I’m going to pull you.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“This is fun. Now come on,” she said, giving me a look that told me her naked body and wild, primal sex awaited me on the other side. So I got down, in the dirt, and gave my hands to Lucia.

“If we wrote a poem about this moment, what would it be?” I said through gritted teeth, working my body through the fence as Lucia yanked on me.

“This isn’t a poem,” she said, slightly out of breath. “This is a moment in your life you’ll remember forever, when you’re back at your boring-ass office job, doing whatever-the-fuck it is you do with numbers—”

“Software engineer, and I—”, my hip was caught on something, but if I jiggled it I could just—

“And you’ll remember this time a snarky supermodel pulled you through a fence hole at a mysterious spirituality retreat.”

With a hard yank, I slid all the way through—with my face in a pile of dirt, my tie smearing mud everywhere, my shoes getting caught on ragged edge of the fence. I looked up, to see Lucia surrounded by moonlight, and burst into nervous laughter.

“Shhh,” she said, laughing too. “Shhh or we’ll both go to jail.”

“I’m sorry it’s just—” I said, trying to catch my breath, “it’s so quiet and I have this feeling that any fucking second now a giant security officer is just going to wallop me on the head with a flashlight.”

A pause. Hands back on her hips, corner of her lips twitching. “Excellent use of the word wallop.”

“Thank you,” I said, still flat on my back, dirt on my face.

“Are you ever going to stand up?”

“No, I, uh…I like it here. Feels safe—” But I barely finished the sentence before she hauled me up, dusting the dirt off and straightening my tie.

“Christ, you’re strong.”

“Have you ever held lion cubs? They’re heavy. And squirmy. And you need to bring the volume of your voice way down,” she said in a dramatic whisper. I bit my lip to keep from laughing—it was the whispering. And the drama. And the fact that we were now standing in the middle of a large field, dozens of cottages, and not a single soul was out except us. She took my hand, leading the way in the darkness.

“Do you know where we’re going?”

“Not a clue.”

“Okay, good.” Her hand was warm, the night was slightly cool and I knew, without looking, that the stars would be phenomenal. We walked in silence for a minute, the threat of being caught hanging over us. We could hear the sound of the ocean and Lucia instinctively head that way, passing a white gazebo, a yoga center, trees decked with Buddhist prayer flags like splashes of bright paint. Meditation pillows, gongs, the slight scent of sage still on the wind.

A large, low wall with a huge mural appeared out of nowhere. I couldn’t tell what the background image was, but the letters stood out stark and white against the night sky. We both read the quote silently, Lucia’s hand squeezing mine in recognition.

“Now this,” she whispered, “is an actual poem. And, dear Calvin, a sign.”

In large white letters was a quote from Mary Oliver, a quote both of us knew, a famous quote, two lines absolutely fitting for this intense moment in time:

 

Tell me: what is it you plan to do

With your one wild and precious life?

 

I looked over to catch Lucia wiping tears from her cheeks. I pulled her closer.

“It just happens when I read a poem I love,” she said. “Always has. And I love her. Not just the message, what she’s trying to say, but the use of ‘tell me.’ The juxtaposition of the words ‘wild’ and ‘precious.’ It makes my heart ache.” She turned to me. “What about you?”

“Your one life…” I said. “I don’t know how a person can sum up the full magnitude of life’s beauty and life’s wretchedness in so few words.”

A pause. “I love the word ‘wretched,’” she said.

I pressed a kiss at her temple. “I like using words that you love.”

We kept walking, but the gravity of that moment: those words, at that time, had settled over us like a heavy cloak. Not in a bad way, necessarily, but Lucia and I were two people meeting at a crossroads in our lives. This night might be like pressing the pause button, but once the sun came up, we would both split, back on our separate roads.

We passed a large, nondescript building, a statue of Buddha. The fields here had been cleared and almost immediately we could see the ocean: a black, swirling mass ahead of us, white caps of waves illuminated in the moonlight. We reached the cliff’s edge—I could smell, faintly, the scent of sulfur which meant the hot springs were close, but Lucia seemed glued to this spot, staring.

“This is a poem,” she said. “This is why I fell in love with poetry when I was a little kid.”

“What specifically?” I urged.

“Just…the power behind each word. It’s not the same as prose, there’s no natural wordiness, or the ability to prattle on. You’re reading the words a writer has chosen out of every word in the universe. Sometimes using words to describe things you could never imagine doing—or, a moment in time, like this. A moment in our lives we’ll forget if we don’t write it down. Before modeling, all I wanted to do was to write like that—I had a very Emily-Dickinson-style sense of my life.”

“Being discovered after you die?”

“No,” she said smiling, “but a quiet life, writing poems in my little cottage in the country. No distractions, just creativity, dry wit and a pencil to keep me company.”

“I can’t quite imagine you in such a…matronly life.”

She shook her head. “I’m no matron. But even a few years into modeling, when I was still writing on the side, I thought I would go back to it. Just make a shit-ton of money, enroll in the country’s finest creative writing program and then…well, to be honest, I don’t know what after that.”

“That’s okay. I don’t think dreams have to be completely fleshed out—there’s always a level of uncertainty.” I paused. “It’s what makes them so terrifying.” We were both silent, watching the waves. “Why didn’t you do that? Go back to school?”

“Oh, well, I got famous, I guess. As a teenager, which really screws with your head. You already have this grand, egotistical sense of yourself, and then when you see your face on a magazine cover, it’s like your brain just explodes.” She laughed quietly. “I remember tossing that little poetry journal into a suitcase and forgetting about it for years. But then, every so often, this…feeling would roar up inside of me. I’d get antsy, and anxious, and my fingers would actually itch.” She looked at them, bathed in moonlight. She had beautiful fingers. “And this feeling would always coincide with long periods of unhappiness.”

I moved closer to her, my hand making big, soothing circles on her back.

“You know what’s funny?”

“What?”

“I’ve been feeling kind of off this past year,” she said. “Different, about things. Even Josie’s noticed. I didn’t write, but I think that’s where some of the feeling was coming from. And when I stepped out of the car that first morning, and saw the bookstore. And the trees. And…and you, the feeling came back. And it hasn’t let up since.”

“Big Sur is the ultimate writing inspiration.”

She held my gaze for a long time and I felt trapped by it, drawn into her web. Never leave me, I suddenly wanted to shout, and when she stood on her tiptoes and pressed a passionate kiss against my lips, I almost did.

“So are you, Calvin. So are you.”

 

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