I really thought they would have sex again, until I got to the end of his sonnet. I do apologize for the shortness of this part, but that was where the story broke this time. I'm still trying to set the stage. Early days.
There is no sex in this part of the story. If there were, it might be categorized as an Erotic Couplings yarn, but overall Meet Me in Moonlight is a ghost story, so it is categorized as NonHuman.
*****
My first week on the new job was spent filling out paperwork at HR and going through all the mandatory training sessions for new staff. It was exciting to me to be out of academia, and this was a for-profit medical group, it was a lot different than the hospital work I'd done to pay my bills while I was in school. People were friendly, but it was a different vibe.
I didn't try very hard to keep names straight, I was going to be a home care nurse and might not see most of my new co-workers for months. They were all very professional and impersonal; I could tell they were going to want to see how hard I worked before anyone got to know me more personally. I didn't tell anyone except HR about my issues with noise and crowds.
Friday, they cut me loose as soon as the last training video was done; on Monday I would meet the lead nurse that I'd be working under, and get introduced to the patient or patients I'd be responsible for. I knew I'd be working up on the mesa, because they'd checked to see if I had wheels of my own.
Friday night I set out my uniform and gear so I wouldn't have to worry about it Sunday night (or worse, Monday morning). I felt keyed up and laid back at the same time; it would be the first day working with other nurses and patients on the new job, but I'd been working in various nursing positions for nearly 5 years. I started reading my notes from the training sessions, when I looked up it was past midnight, so I went to bed.
Saturday morning, I woke up thinking about Amber. She hadn't told me where she lived, and neither of us had thought to swap phone numbers. I didn't even know her last name; all I could do was wait and see if she came back to the pier. I spent the day doing all the drudgery I'd put off during the week; washing clothes, cleaning the apartment, and stocking my pantry with stuff I could cook on the fly or that would last in the freezer.
Late in the afternoon I found myself driving out to the club; I parked my Subaru in back, next to the gate. I grabbed a jacket and a couple of sandwiches and strolled out to the end of the pier to eat my dinner. There was one old guy fishing, I saw some tails sticking out of his bucket. He left about an hour after I got there, his Mustang spitting gravel behind as it rocketed out of the parking lot.
I found a comfortable spot and watched the sun go down, reading a romance novel on my phone (my English professor told me once that Romance was where all the old-school porn writers went, once the internet made so much free porn available). By the time the heroine had gotten her 'happily ever after' it was after 8 pm, the pier was quiet, dark, and lonely. I could just hear the beat from the club when waves rolled back off the beach. It was cool but with the jacket I was comfortable. I pocketed my phone and lay back to consider the stars. A whiff of tobacco smoke was the only clue I wasn't alone. I sat up to look at Amber.
"Are you sure you aren't a ninja?"
She laughed. "You were head down into your phone, I walked for 50 feet on top of the railing and you never looked up. Dodging the crowd again?"
