Her au lait skin looked darker at dawn. Head lowered on her knees, her mother’s hair curtained around her face. She dug her bare toes into the sand, and tried to give herself only to the sound of the waves washing up like pleasure, receding, coming again, stirring the wet sand at the edge of the tide.

"Wash me clean," she whispered.

Memories of those last moments with Tina crawled under her skin, clawing into bone and sinew, sucking down the only life she’d known for seven years. Seven years! A lifetime. A life. Her pulse hammered in her throat when she closed her eyes and saw Tina’s face, not just the despair or the loss, but the knowledge that Bette had moved beyond infidelity, beyond betrayal. Tina KNEW something Bette did not: that Candace was not just a seven-year itch. She was more, so much more. She was something that Tina was not. She was something–no, someone–someone Bette needed and wanted.

Bette tried to subvert Tina’s pain and her own truth the only way she could think of…with her hands on Tina, in her. She had never in her life lost control of herself like that, never lost control at all until…She hadn’t meant to tear Tina’s clothes, she hadn’t meant to be so hard, she only wanted…What? To obliterate the pain with pleasure? The worst of it came when Tina flipped her, something that would have paralyzed her with desire under different circumstances, and jammed her fingers inside her and ridden her hard in such sheer desperation.

She couldn’t even remember if they’d said goodbye. She only remembered the gunshot-loud click of a softly closed door.

The pain surged forward in her from a place deeper than she ever knew existed, a moan to a howl to a scream, head thrown back in agony, hot tears pouring down her face, dripping into the sand that sucked them up like sustenance.

The ocean took her sorrow and brought it back, pulled it out of her and pushed it back, again and again and again.