Short coastal drive with Phaedra

Phaedra and I got up "college student" early, around 10:00am. I introduced her to my favorite cereal, Marshmallow Mateys, and told her the story about the mouse in my old Davis apartment that would steal the cereal and hide it under the couch, and how my friends joked that it wore a little eyepatch and went "Arrr!!" in a squeaky pirate voice as it bounded across the carpet, dragging a little bag of loot. We'd been pretty filthy housekeepers but at least the stories were good.

We hung around for a bit, arranging things in her room and tidying up the van. I listened to a message on the answering machine from Ken, saying that he would arrive in the afternoon instead of late at night. Phaedra and I decided to stay with our plan for a trip down the coast, but make it shorter. We took off a little before noon.

The drive down highway 1 was a delight. She hadn't been along the route during the day, and we discussed our hobbies and friends, relaxed in each others' presence. She leaned back and propped her feet on the dashboard for a while, and I admired her thick calves through her stretchy jeans. As I'd done in the past, I reached over and held her hand on impulse a few times, and she gladly took it.

All the time a part of my mind was testing itself, wondering what it would be like to see Phaedra daily; to live with her. The reactions were complicated and hard to unravel. Despite some murky nervousness, I figured that in enough time and with enough context I could grow very romantically attached to her. This was deep in my mind though -- not out front. Out front we were friends enjoying some leisure time. That context was running fine so, like a good engineer, I wanted to stand clear of it and keep the tinkering to a minimum.

An hour or so passed and we stopped near the same beach that I had brought Skot and Torrey to almost a year ago. I changed shoes and we tromped out to the shore hand in hand, weaving up and down the steep wet sand to keep our shoes clear of the long waves that slid towards us. We stopped at the rock formations on the southern end of the beach, and did some rock-hopping.

Like a big cowboy I always stood between her and the cliff edge and kept my arms at the ready when she climbed. It almost felt against my principles to be so protective; I was treating her like something fragile, and while it felt right to some parts of me, it also felt weirdly out of character. There was some collision between principles, instincts, and politics going on in my mind.

We examined the tidepools and the strata of the walls. I'd brought my leather welding gloves, and we collected shells in one of them, and talked about the different species we saw. Phaedra was keen on marine biology. She paused to pull out a weed, explaining it as one of her "little quirks" that Mike was good to tolerate: She had to stop what she was doing at times to uproot invading non-native plants. I grinned and shrugged at her.

We followed the rock formations back up the beach and sat down on the crest of the slope leading down to the waves. We looked over our little shell collection and I warned her that I was feeling the urge to curl around her again, which I promptly did. "Oh no, it's the mad curler!" She chuckled and leaned back onto me.

We relaxed and talked a bit more. Eventually we both walked back to the van and continued our journey. We drove a bit further south and I stopped at a gas station and unexpectedly got full service. It felt almost like a violation of my space to have someone else putting fuel in the van. I ate some banana bread from a tupperware container.

Though we wanted to continue south, we realized that it would be bad if Ken were to show up at the house and find nobody home. Phaedra suggested we stop at a seaside national park, but the admission fee of seven dollars each turned us around. We drove back to Watsonville and bought a greasy lunch at Foster's Freeze, then returned to the house.

It was actually quite a while before Ken called, asking for directions. We obliged and got another call from him a couple hours later. He was at a Chevron station in the city and wanted us to drive out and meet him, which we did. We had a merry reunion, with lots of hugging and excited chatter about travel and tomorrow's plans.

Ken slept in the middle of the floor in my room. I was a bit unhappy that I didn't have Phaedra all to myself anymore, but also glad that she had someone else to connect with. Her visit was, after all, to see everyone -- not just me. Besides, I was getting a bit nervous, wondering just how much closer I would drift to her before one of us had to hit the brakes. Ken's arrival postponed that decision, which seemed like a good move, and seeing Ken was awesome in its own right, so I fell asleep feeling content.