She is back. Twenty years have passed and yet the years fall away as she soon as she sees the distant sea burning blue upon the horizon.
She had almost let herself forget. Memories gradually transformed into figments of her imagination, erotic fantasies that sometimes returned to her in the middle of making love to her husband. Back home, inside the cool and neutral bedroom of their London apartment, she would imagine the sun beating down on her bare back, the rub of tiny grains of sand beneath her bare skin, and the taste of the salty sea bonding their kisses. She was young again and it was her first time.
Now as they drive towards the eerie salt plains of La Camargue in the South of France, towards the flat expanse of land and sheer blue sea, populated by clouds of pink flamingos, her memories become all too real. She is returned to the summer she was nineteen, when the key to her heart was turned and her desires were unlocked.
A heat haze shimmers above the road, spreading out across the hots and, and the wildness of the landscape stirs the wildness within her.
‘Stop the car.’
Her husband pulls over, turns to look at her with questioning eyes. She takes in this man; looks at his elegant yet strong hands still gripping the steering wheel, and his khaki eyes. His presence is as familiar as her own, yet in this place he seems altered. It dawns on her that they are drifting apart. Subtly, day by day, their passion has been draining away.
‘What is it?’ he asks her.
‘Let’s walk to the sea,’ she says.
She leads him across the caked, sun-parched beds of marsh land, through reeds so dry they whip their bare legs and across rolling dunes, and yet the sea still seems so far away, a tantalising strip of blue. She remembers another summer’s day, and the feeling of her young body as she entered the sea, let the waves lap against her naked flesh, her tiny bikini bottoms tugged down by the weight of water, and her bare breasts pert; expectant to the stroking breeze, and to the object of her affection. A French boy the same age as her, a friend of the family she was an au pair for, who had just taken her riding along the baked sands of La Camargue. Hot and dusty, her heart racing, they had dismounted the horses by the edge of the sea. He could not speak English, and her French was meager, yet she knew by the look in his eyes that he wasn’t just asking her to go swimming with him.
In the water her shyness melted away. She knew with certainty that she wanted to make love for the first time in her life. She wanted to feast on sensation.
She pushed against the incoming tide, towards him, and he stepped back into the sea with a teasing smile, his lean dark figure emblazoned against the sky, flattened into a dense cerulean line. She followed him in deeper and deeper, squeezing her toes as the sand oozed between them. He pushed back against the water and floated upon it, his arms and legs splayed like a starfish. She turned around to face the shore, committed the land to her memory: those vast bleached sands, the horses grazing lazily in the dune grass, a distant mountain of white salt that glistened in the sun like a snowy hill, all of them a part of the essence of this young man. She let the pull of the tide take her, falling onto her back and floating. She looked up at the cloudless sky and sensed his body, weightless beside hers, drifting upon a sea of promise. His fingertips brushed hers as he reached for her hand, and now they were linked like two entities from the deep blue sea, unanchored and castaway. He pulled her towards him so that their bare bodies skimmed each other. She felt his strong legs against her own, the jut of his hip against the soft mound of hers, the side of her left breast grazing against his chest. He gave a sudden powerful tug on her arm and together he took them under the water.
At first her eyes were closed, but as she felt his hands on her waist she opened them to their underwater world. He stared at her unblinking, and she took in the beauty of this French boy in their cocoon of bubbles beneath the waves. She looked at his cock with a boldness new to her, and felt an ache deep within her. She wanted to join with him, be one, more than anything else. They rose to the surface together, laughing into the sunlight, the parts of them that were still children giddy with abandon. Yet within another second they were again a young woman and a young man unable to deny their attraction, pulled together by forces beyond their control.
He lifted her up, and she wrapped her legs around his waist. She had long ago lost her bikini bottoms. She could feel her pussy yearning for him, the tender bud of her clitoris rubbing against the wet skin of his cock. She kissed him first, teasing her tongue between his soft lips. He held her tight to him and,with an intelligence all of its own, his cock pushed up inside her. For a second she felt compressed, tight, but then as he was gradually drawn into her she began to feel herself opening up, tension flooding out of her body.
Their lovemaking didn’t last for long, yet its intensity created a memory that was to last forever. They climaxed together, as one, and it was a dizzy cohesion of salt on the lips, her breasts blooming against his warm wet flesh, fullness within her, so full, and a trembling in her thighs.They took flight as they bucked in the water, spraying each other like two dolphins at play. Their sex was as deep as the blue sea that cradled them and as light as the wide open sky that sailed above them.
She holds her husband’s hand as they stand on the shoreline. They have finally reached the sea. She gathers these precious memories of her first time as she turns to him. She is becoming that girl again, her free spirit unleashed by the elements. She knows she will take her husband here on this lonely beach in La Camargue and she will make love to him in a way she has not done for years. He too will touch her with new adoration, reveling in the miracle of their love and the many circles of desire it leads them to. They will retrieve their passion from the sea, and this time she will take her time, savour each tentative touch between them, each moment where love and sensation combine. She will reunite with her husband in the place where they first made love.