Nineteen summers married, and in all that time the same rented cottage every June, the same iron bed that complained under them both, and still, every single year, she managed to fall asleep face-down on the sand in exactly the way the summer before should have taught her not to.
She'd gone three hours past safe out there, deep in a paperback she wasn't really reading, and come back inside the color of something left too long in an oven, the straps of her green swimsuit printed white across her shoulders like a photograph's negative.
He found the aloe where it always lived, unmoved since some June neither of them could name, the cap seized with salt and the gel gone the pale ghost-green it turned every August.
"Lie down," he said, in the voice he kept for things that weren't really requests, and she did, on her stomach, holding the bottle herself, because handing him a job with his hands empty had never once worked in nineteen summers.
He worked it into her shoulders first, slow, along the clean pale line the strap had drawn, and she made a sound into the pillow that was half pain and half something that had learned, a long time ago, to live right next door to pain.
He knew the map without looking: the white stripe at each shoulder, the dip at the back of her neck that caught the sun every year no matter what either of them did about it, the small pale comma behind one ear from the one summer she'd worn her hair up for two straight weeks.
"You missed a spot," she said, when his hands had gone still at the small of her back, and for a second he didn't answer, because that particular stretch of her had never once seen the sun. Not that day. Not any day. Not in nineteen summers.
The bottle slipped out of her hand onto the sheet, and neither of them reached for it. His palm stayed exactly where it was, flat and warm and no longer pretending to be about the burn, the whole dim room holding still to see which one of them would move first.