Drawn to the Tide

Author's Note: Drawn to the Tide is a brief slice-of-life glimpse into a single day between longtime lovers. No dramatic plot twists or heated arguments here—just the quiet intimacy of two women who've loved each other across landscapes and decades. I wanted to capture how desire can deepen with familiarity rather than fade.

If you're looking for epic drama or intricate plot, you might want to sit this one out. I promise something more substantial next time. This is just a small window into a single day of connection.

Special thanks to my editor, Crimson, who somehow always knows which words belong and which don't. Any remaining mistakes are my own stubborn doing.

-Nora

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5:42 a. m. - Dawn

I woke to absence.

The indent in her pillow radiated warmth beside me, faintly scented of sage shampoo and the linger of sleep. Beyond the window, dawn broke hesitantly over the Sound—pink blushing brilliantly against a reluctant gray, slow to yield to morning. The sheets whispered faintly as I stretched, listening. The floorboards downstairs creaked in familiar, recognizable patterns. Rune drifted through her morning ritual: coffee sighing into the pot, granola clinking in its jar, thermos humming full with heat. Field notes reviewed under the kitchen light, shut off the moment the sunrise brightened enough to illuminate her work.

She appeared in the doorway, backlit, more silhouette than detail, her hip against the frame with field pants already on, thermal layers beneath worn flannel. Her blonde hair, long and curling naturally at the tips, was pulled back into a bouncy ponytail adorably swishing from side-to-side whenever she ran for the dock.

"You're awake," she said, voice still thick with sleep.

I smiled into my pillow. "Barely," I mumbled, extending my hand, palm up. An invitation.

Rune crossed to the bed, her weight dipping the mattress as she sat. Her calloused fingers—scientist's hands, field-hardened, firm yet gentle—traced the blue veins of my wrists, her touch light as moth wings.

"Tide's turning," she whispered. "I should go."

"Should," I agreed, but stubbornly tugged her closer.

The kiss began gently, dripping of dawn, aware of the day's demands. It transformed with the slightest change in pressure. Her hand found its way beneath the blankets, callouses catching on my silk sleep shorts. Located heat there, making me moan into the cold morning air.

"Fucking tide tables," she whispered against my neck, even as her fingers slipped beneath the elastic.

My laughter caught, broke against the ceiling. Became something else entirely as her touch turned deliberate, knowing exactly how to undo me after twenty years of practice. How the right pressure made my breath stop. How circles just so made me clutch at her shoulders, fingers gripping worn flannel.

"You should go," I gasped into the morning light.

"You should come," she countered, two fingers slipping inside me. Curving, searching, probing—

"There."

"I know, baby."

My hips rose off the bed, toes curling, breath quickening as her fingers thrust inside me, over and over, driving me near the edge. I tightened around her fingers, already quaking inside.

"You're close already?" she mused.

I shot her a look that made her laugh.

"Fine," she murmured. "I suppose you earned at least one orgasm for being so ready and willing at ass o'clock in the morning."

I couldn't even laugh. She picked up the pace, driving those long fingers inside me, curling deep, finding my g-spot and hammering against it with no sign of stopping.

When I came, desert memories flashed like bright sun on a windshield—eighteen and fearless, making love in Rune's ancient Jeep beneath the shade of saguaros. The same catch of breath, the same name on my lips, though we'd both worn different ones then. Before college entered like a tide and carried us someplace new. Before we became fully ourselves in tandem.

"Now you'll be late," I said, breathless.

"Worth it." She pressed a kiss to my forehead. "Make good art today."

"Go save salmon."

The house creaked, empty and hollow, after the screen door clanged shut. From bed, I heard familiar sounds: dock boards protesting, engine turning over, water displaced by the boat. The day began, as spring days had begun for the seven years we'd lived on Puget Sound. So different from the desert mornings of our childhood, where heat already settled at dawn. Where we'd grown up scanning the horizon for cacti and coyotes, not surfacing orcas.

I pressed my face into her pillow, inhaling the lingering scent of her. Caught at that place between sleep and waking, I drifted into memories: teenage Rune pointing out prickly pear blooms, naming each cactus flower in Latin while I sketched their translucent petals in the margins of a physics notebook.

That bright, blinding yellow against blue-ruled pages.

Life captured.

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8:17 a. m. - Morning Light

The drawing table faced east—Rune's insistence when we'd renovated.

"Morning light is brightest," she'd said, her engineer's mind already calculating angles through seasons. "Best for detail work."

I adjusted my chair, uncapping pens arranged by line weight. A bull kelp specimen floated in a shallow dish beside my reference photos, golden-brown, sinuous. I'd collected it the day before from our beach, carefully preserving its delicate structure for the conservation journal illustrations due Friday.

Beyond the glass of the window, Rune's research vessel—the unfortunately named Data Point (a grad school joke that somehow stuck)—cut a white wake across gray-blue water. Through binoculars I kept on the windowsill, I watched her silhouette at the helm, competent and sure. Twenty years, and that look of quiet intensity still made something in me pause.

The kelp drawing began with pencil, light touches of lead establishing a rhythm I'd solidify eventually with ink. My hand remembered other sketches as if by muscle memory: desert blooms trembling with color after a rare rainfall, our bare feet in the red dust after a storm, teenage Rune sleeping beneath mesquite shade, her golden hair spread like warm ropes of honey across my sketchbook.

We'd been different people then. Isabel instead of Sable. Rune, just Rune, instead of Dr. Larsen. Desert daughters with college dreams beyond the mountains ringing our small Arizona town. Me already filling notebooks with delicate illustrations of every flowering cactus in sight; her collecting soil samples and recording rainfall amounts in a precious weather station her grandmother had given her.

My pen traced the flowing curves of the kelp's stripe—from holdfast to pneumatocyst bulb to blade. Scientific accuracy merged with my artistic interpretation, finding beauty in the details, just as Rune did with her data points and statistical models.

The boat disappeared around the headland. I worked in silence, broken only by pen scratches and the distant call of a kingfisher. The illustration emergedbeneath my hands.

Life captured in black lines.

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11:03 a. m. - Work Interruption

My phone vibrated against the drawing table, startling a sudden line out of me, streaking across the page. Cursing, I reached for the eraser before I checked the message.

Rune: Orcas. J pod. Heading north.

A second message arrived—a photo of distant black fins breaking surface. Even in a hurried field shot, she'd framed it perfectly.

I momentarily abandoned the ruined kelp illustration, texting back:

Beautiful. Like that time we saw javelinas in the wash behind your house.

Her response came quickly: Better. They're breaching. Made me think of you.

How so?

That thing you do when you're close. When your back arches just before—

Heat bloomed low in my belly. Twenty years, and still her words could unravel me.

I replied: Careful, Dr. Larsen. Your scientific observation is showing.

I'll never stop observing you. I don't even think I can. Remember that time by the reservoir? When you pulled my hair and begged to come?

My fingers hovered over the screen. Through the window, the spring sunlight scattered diamonds across the water of the Sound. No sign of her boat, but somewhere out there, my scientist was thinking of this—of us—while surrounded by colleagues and equipment.

God, it was so like her.

I wrote: I remember your fingers inside me. How you made me hold my orgasm until I couldn't take it anymore. Do you remember the hikers who heard us? They thought we were wild animals.

The typing bubble appeared, disappeared, and appeared again.

Then: Fuck, Sable.

I smiled, added: Yes, that was the general idea.

There's a tide cliff at 3:48. I'll be home early. A moment passed, and then: Edge for me, but don't come. Not until I can feel you shatter on my fingers.

Heat pounded in my ears as I set the phone down, painfully aware of the quickened pulse at my throat, the throbbing between my legs. I returned to the kelp drawing with ruined lines, but all I could see was Rune's face hovering above mine.

Like that first desert night, lit by stars strung across the sky.

***

1:26 p. m. - Lunch on the Deck

I carried my plate outside, fingers gripping the ceramic. Avocado toast with the first radishes from our garden, spicy and sharp. The deck wood had absorbed enough spring sun to warm my bare feet. Salt air filled my lungs, so different from the dry heat of my childhood.

Below me, water lapped at pilings dark with algae. Tide, receding now, revealed corrugated patterns of sand, the tumble of rocks usually hidden away. Our shoreline. Well, technically public land, as all beaches in Washington were, but remote enough it remained mostly ours.

I sat languidly in the Adirondack chair Rune had built for me last summer, weathering now to silver-gray. The house behind me was weathering too, cedar shingles absorbing that particular Northwest patina. It bore no resemblance to the stucco and terracotta of our childhood Arizona homes, where we once biked from house to house in the brief, golden window before the heat pinned us indoors.

The toast journeyed a path halfway to my mouth when sudden movement caught my eye. Beyond the tidal zone, half buried in sand—a flash of cobalt blue. Sea glass. I set the plate aside and clambered down the rough-hewn steps to the beach.

Chilling sand squeezed between my toes as I retrieved the glass. Smooth, tumbled by earth, and perfect. A rare color, too. I held it to the light, remembering Rune's eighteenth birthday. The cobalt blue wildflowers I'd gathered from secret places throughout the desert, and how I'd arranged them in her grandmother's crystal vase, a declaration of intent beyond mere friendship.

We'd made love that night for the first time. Nervous, whispered requests and directions. Awkward, beautiful fumbling toward newfound knowledge of each other's bodies. Morning had discovered us glued together, limb lost in tangled limb, her grandmother's quilt pulled over our nakedness, those blue flowers watching from the nightstand.

I slipped the sea glass into my pocket and returned to lunch, my appetite sharpened by memory.

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4:05 p. m. - Afternoon Rain

The clouds surged together with urgent speed—typical of Pacific Northwest spring weather's sudden shifts. One moment, sunlight flooded the deck through the open door; the next, I looked up to see shadows rolling in fast from the west, swallowing the sky. I snatched my sketches as the first heavy raindrops began to fall, freezing cold and insistent.

I stared out at the restless water, the dark clouds swallowing the horizon where Rune had disappeared beyond my sight in the morning. She was out there with her fellow researchers, facing the storm—but she had experienced storms far crueler than this. I knew she was capable, fierce, unyielding. But knowing wasn't the same as feeling it. My chest ached with a helpless longing, wishing I could reach across the miles of the Sound and hold her safe, shield her from every drop of rain and every gust of wind. Even from afar, she was everything to me, my anchor in the wildest storm.

Inside, the radio murmured weather alerts as I wandered to the bookcase. Our shared library held field guides to two completely different ecosystems—desert volumes beside coastal companions. Taxonomies of cactus flowers pressed against marine biology texts. A physical representation of our transplanted lives.

My fingers brushed the worn spine of Peterson's Desert Wildflowers. Opening to pages I'd referenced in a hundred illustrations, I found familiar scrawl in the margins. Rune's handwriting, as neat and precise as her thinking: Superbloom Devil's Canyon 2011 w/ Sable. Proposed here.

Rain drummed harder on the roof, streaming down windowpanes, heavy with memories. Our bedroom called to me, my body aching for the sensory memory of her. I carried the field guide with me, kicked off sand-crusted jeans, and slid between crisp sheets.

The book fell open of its own accord to a place marked by a pressed ocotillo bloom, its delicate structure flattened by the years, yet remained the same unyielding orange-red. I touched it tenderly, remembering the day Rune had picked it, her hiking boots dusty, cheeks sunburned beneath her hat brim. She'd explained its adaptation strategies while attentively placing it between the pages of her notebook.

"For your next drawing," she'd said, but I'd started sketching her already. The curve of her lips as she spoke. The animated way she used her hands to illustrate botanical concepts.

Adorable. I'd found her positively adorable.

Still adorable, I thought. Always.

A familiar ache originated low in my belly at the memory of her. My hand glided beneath the sheets, finding wet, slick heat already gathered between my legs. I closed my eyes, conjuring Rune as she'd been last weekend—naked in our bed, hair wild from my hands. The raspy moans when my tongue had swirled patterns around her sensitive clit still made me dizzy. God, the taste of her, salt and sweetness.

My fingers influenced by remembered rhythms of the morning, her fingers drawing an orgasm out of me in the dawn light. The practiced touch initiated as exploration decades ago in desert darkness, her blue eyes sparkling with the reflection of the night sky. Now a well-mapped journey to release.

I nearly came, imagining her bare breasts pressed against mine, her muffled moans against my neck, her teeth sinking into my earlobe to draw a gasp from my very core—but I remembered her text.

Edge for me, but don't come. Not until I can feel you shatter on my tongue.

It took everything in me to stop. To obey. To wait.

"Rune," I whispered.

Only rain answered, persistent against the windows. On the bedside table, my phone eventually lit with a message notification.

Heading home. Specimen jars full. Heart fuller.

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6:38 p. m. - Evening Preparation

Steam rose in plumes from the pot. Linguine with clams Rune had harvested last week. I hummed to the kitchen radio, wine already opened to breathe. Outside, the rain had finally gentled to a mist capturing sunset colors and scattered them across watery surfaces.

Her presentation notes spread across the kitchen island: data on salmon migration patterns affected by warming waters. My preliminary sketches for accompanying illustrations showed silver fish suspended in currents, anatomical details exact enough for scientific publication. All composed with an artist's eye.

Beneath them, maps of our watershed displayed red marks indicating trouble spots. Rune's handwriting cramped into the margins—tight, impassioned bursts championing restoration and rehabilitation. The same intensity she'd once applied to desert conservation efforts.

The same wild passion she held for me.

I traced the notes with my fingertip, feeling the indentations her pen had inscribed. Passion leaving physical evidence behind on paper.

Obsession like her skin on mine. A bright bloom of post-orgasmic bliss enduring all day long.

The kitchen timer chimed as the dock boards creaked beneath familiar, beloved footsteps. Her key turned the lock, the distinctive sound of field equipment set aside. Coming home to me, as she had across deserts and mountains, across the span of our entire adult lives.

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7:12 p. m. - Reunion

She entered with a gust of frigid air and sea salt. Still wearing her waders, her gold-spun hair escaped her knit cap in rain-curled tendrils. Her cheeks flushed with harsh wind, eyes bright with discovery.

"You won't believe what we found," she said instead of hello, already reaching for the specimen containers in her pack. "The kelp forest structure is changing with the temperature shifts. Sable, look—"

I grasped the jar she thrust toward me, examining the floating organism while she shrugged off her outer layers. My Rune immersed in her element, words tumbling over each other in excitement, hands gesturing to illustrate concepts words couldn't contain.

"... implications for the entire food web," she continued saying, toeing off rubber boots. "The data set is—"

I arranged the jar on the counter, caught her cold-chapped face between my hands, and kissed her mid-sentence. She tasted of rain and salt wind and cherry ChapStick.

She emitted a small sound of surprise that transformed into something deeper. Her cold hands glided their way beneath my sweater, icy against my warm skin, fingers trailing upwards.

"Sorry, baby," she murmured against my lips. "Hello."

"Hello yourself," I said, helping her with the suspenders of her waders.

"Something smells amazing."

"Linguine with your clams. But it'll hold."

Her smile softened then—from scientist to lover. "I've been thinking about you all day."

"I got your texts."

"Not just that." She shook her head, fingers still chilled against my upper ribs. "That night in Sedona. When we snuck out to the hot springs."

I smiled. "I remember that night."

"You were scandalizing the poor astronomy students with your moaning."

"You were doing unspeakable things under the starlight."

Rune grinned. "I was inspired."

The waders dropped to the kitchen tile with a drenched, wet sound. Underneath, the thermal leggings did nothing to hide the muscled contours of her thighs, strengthened by fieldwork. I traced their shape through the fabric, watched as her pupils dilated.

"Dinner will wait?" she asked, her voice pitched lower now.

"Let me turn off the stove."

We abandoned a trail of discarded clothing up the staircase. My sweater on the third step. Her thermal top on the landing. By the time we reached the bedroom, she wore only the silver chain with its tiny pendant: a compass rose I'd given her for graduation.

She sat on the bed's edge, reaching for me. In her eyes, the same wonder I'd seen when we'd first made love—a little fear, a little awe. As if I were some rare specimen she'd discovered.

"The orcas made me think of you," she said, hands finding my hips, guiding me between her spread legs. "How they breach. How they seem to be reaching for something beyond their element."

I stared adoringly at her. "And that reminded you of me?"

"Every time you come. Like you're breaking surface."

Her calloused hands slid up my sides, thumbs brushing nipples that tightened at her touch. "Like you're transcending from one element to another."

"Only you," I whispered, "would make marine biology metaphors during foreplay."

She smiled against my breast, tongue tracing circles over my hardened nipple. "Only you would appreciate them."

Then words failed me as her mouth moved lower. Her hands urged me onto the bed. She proved, with tongue and fingers, the truth of her observations. How my back did arch like a breaching whale. How I transcended, again and again, from one state of being to another.

"You waited for me," she murmured against my sensitive, tingling skin.

I could only manage a nod. She could always tell when I edged. I came harder. Moaned louder. Nearly ripped her beautiful hair clear off her head.

After, she lay with her head on my stomach, hair spilling golden secrets across my skin. "I love watching your face," she murmured. "Same expression you had the first time. Like surprise."

I traced her cheekbone, the proud arch of her nose. "I am surprised. Every time. That this is real."

She turned to kiss my palm. "We made it real. Stubborn desert girls."

"Now stubborn coastal women."

"Who have excellent sex."

I laughed, tugging her upward to share the sound with my mouth. "And pasta, which is getting cold downstairs."

"Some sacrifices," she said with an infectious smile, "are worth making."

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11:52 p. m. - Night Sounds

Rain returned hard against the windowpanes. In the darkness, I listened to water—streaming from the sky, lapping at dock posts, rushing through Rune's dreams beside me.

Her breathing possessed the deep regularity of earned rest. One arm flung above her head in abandon, the other curved protectively around my waist. The sheet barely covered her nakedness. In sleep, her face relaxed into the girl she'd outgrown in twenty years.

The girl who'd shyly asked me to sketch her butterfly collection for a science fair display.

How strange, the path from there to here. Arid desert heat to coastal torrential rain. Yet through it all, this constant: her body beside mine. Her mind intertwining with my own. The shared language we'd built across the sands of time.

I remembered the question she'd asked that morning at the superbloom, ocotillo flowers blazing around us like a desert flame. How she'd pulled the small box from her pack with shaking hands. How I'd said yes before she finished the question, both of us laughing and crying beneath that impossibly blue Arizona sky.

From the nightstand, her phone illuminated briefly with weather alerts. High wind warnings for tomorrow. Small craft advisories. She would check tide tables first thing in the morning, adjust her research schedule accordingly.

And I would adjust with her, as I had when we'd moved from the desert to the coast. As we had for each other, through all the adaptations life required. Not like the rigid cacti of our youth, but like the kelp forests she studied—flexible, resilient, anchored but moving with the currents.

The rain tapped tranquil questions against the roof. Another tide would rise with morning, pulling Rune to the water, then inevitably back to shore.

Back to me.

She murmured in her sleep, pulling me closer, as if even unconscious, she couldn't bear any distance. Twenty years from desert to sea, and still we responded to the same gravitational pull. Like moon to ocean, like pencil to paper, drawn to the tide of each other, again and again.

I pressed my lips to her shoulder, tasting salt. We had always existed this way. A current stronger than memory. Deeper than the ocean. More permanent than anything I could capture with pen or she could measure with science.

We were the perfect illustration of one breathtakingly beautiful, utterly wonderful thing:

Love.