An Atlantic Love Affair

My eyes shot open and I sat up in the sand. I had been sleeping on the beach, shielding my eyes from the sun as it died over the horizon, when I saw her.

She was older than me, but not so much that I looked at her with a mixture of pity and disgust. Her skin was tanned by years of sun exposure, but not as to suggest she was an outdoorswoman. She wore a simple white dress that flared around her knees and revealed just enough of her legs to allow my adolescent mind to fill in the blanks with what I had seen of the girls at school. She smiled at me, her teeth a little crooked, but still white.

"Hello there," she said, sitting down beside me in the sand. "Aren't you a bit young to be out here all by yourself?"

I laughed nervously and scratched my head beneath my backwards baseball cap. It wasn't as if she could read my mind or anything; she just wanted to strike up conversation. "Nah," I said. "I don't live anywhere near here."

She raised an eyebrow at me and flashed another smile. "Oh? Where do you live then?"

"Oh," I said again, trying to come up with something believable on the spot, "a couple hours north by car." That seemed good enough for her and she nodded along with my answer.

We sat next to each other in silence for a while; neither one of us had anything more interesting to say to each other than what we already had, so we just enjoyed our time together in silence until she spoke up again.

"So... What's your name?" She asked. "I'm Doris." Her voice was smooth and calming; it didn't have quite the same level of maturity as her face suggested it should have had, which made me feel a little better about myself for being attracted to her looks in the first place.

"Kyle," I replied after spitting out some sand that had gotten into my mouth during our walk from the water back onto dry land. We continued walking along in silence for another minute before Doris broke it again:

"What's your favorite color?" This sounded like something someone would ask when they were trying to get to know someone better, but it seemed silly since Doris was an old woman who probably hadn't cared about such things for decades now. In any event, I knew right away what my favorite color was: Blue, like the ocean behind us and the sky above us; like her eyes that had turned dark blue against the night sky behind them as she walked towards me on the beach earlier tonight; like- *Wait.* Her eyes? How did I know those eyes? They were exactly how they looked when she first approached me! How could that be? Was this another dream? No... This couldn't be a dream because-