Out of the Loop

Chapter Twenty-Four

“I’m glad you convinced me to come down this trail instead of into the woods.  This place is beautiful,”  Maz smiled.  She stood on a boulder at the base of a steep cliff.  All around her, the ocean tumbled between tide-worn rocks, decorating them with seaweed and sea foam.  A salty breeze lifted the hair off of Maz’s eyes as she tilted her face to the noon sun.  After a moment basking in the warmth, she turned to see Derek’s lanky frame haphazardly leaping from rock to rock out to a tidal pool.

“Maz!” he yelled with a wave.  “Come see this!”  His last distracted jump to a boulder landed him in a patch of sodden algae. He slipped, pinwheeling his arms for a moment before landing with a thump.  Ignoring his stinging rear end and Maz’s laughs, he sprang up.  

“Come on!”

“I’m getting there, jeez!” she choked out through laughter.  “Just don’t move, or you’ll end up flat on your back again, you klutz!” Derek rolled his eyes as Maz picked her way over to where he lounged on a seaweed-free rock.  

“Didn’t you want to look into the tidal pool, or are you just afraid of falling in?” Maz grinned widely and sat down beside him.  

Derek blinked, not used to Maz’s rare full smile.  “Um, okay then.”  He said up and peered into the shallow water.  “Hey, here’s a starfish, and this-” he plucked a shell from a rock- “is a periwinkle.”  He held out the minute shell to Maz and flipped it over.  “See the purple on the inside?  Shells with this color used to be used to make purple dye, although probably not periwinkles because they’re so small.”

Maz reached a slender finger out to the shell.  “Where’d you learn that? You always have some little fact about animals.”

“I guess I just absorbed it from books I read when I was little.”

“Ugh, I could never stand nonfiction.”

“Your loss,” Derek smiled.  His hair had grown out over the past month or so, the fringe of his bangs nearly touching his rather long eyelashes.  Something flickered behind his eyes at he met Maz’s gaze for a moment, but he turned back to the tide pool before she could decipher it.  He reached a long arm into the water, gently placing the shell onto a rock, then beckoned to Maz, completely focused on the activity in front of him.  “Look at this!”  He pointed into the pool as Maz settled onto her stomach next to him.  

A hermit crab with a baseball-sized shell scuttled across the sand underwater.  Sea urchins waved their spiny arms, and periwinkles clung to the rocks.  A miniscule black crab scampered from under the cover of a patch of seaweed to a rocky overhang.  

Maz’s eyes lit up as she watched the animals in their tiny, isolated world.  “Wow... I’ve been to the point a million times, but I’ve never seen this.”

“Hey, that’s what I’m here for,” Derek smiled.

“Here,” Maz said as she stood up with a smile.  “Let me show you my favorite place here.”

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“Now this is amazing,” Derek whispered.

He and Maz lay on an enormous, thirty-foot boulder in the middle of a clearing, staring up into the treetops.  Sunlight streamed through the fall leaves, making the trees seem to be on fire.  Twenty feet to Derek’s left, the rock abruptly dropped off, forming a wide gap between the rock and an old stone wall.  The right side gently sloped to the ground.

“I can see why you love it out here.  It’s just so peaceful and quiet,” Derek continued.

The pair had walked back up the ocean trail, then traveled so far into the woods that any noise from humans or the ocean was completely extinguished.  The only sound either could hear was a slight breeze ruffling the leaves overhead.