The sand is warm under your calves. Sun-soaked, clinging to your skin in patches where the sunscreen didn’t stick. You’re lying flat, towel half-wrinkled beneath you, the sound of waves folding in and out like the breath of something ancient.

Timothée’s next to you. One leg bent, arms crossed behind his head, curls damp and still faintly smelling of salt. His shirt is bunched beside him, forgotten. His chest rises and falls in a rhythm that doesn’t quite match the sea — slower, deeper.

The tide’s further out now. Someone’s flying a kite down the shoreline. You watch it dip, the string tugging against the wind.

Timothée shifts. His fingers brush yours where your hands rest between the two towels. They’re warm. Dry.

“Are you gonna miss this?” you ask, voice low.

He turns his head to look at you. “Miss what?”

“This. Us. Here. Before it all picks up again.”

He doesn’t answer right away. Just studies your face like he’s still trying to memorize it.

“Of course I will,” he says. Quiet. Certain. “I already do.”

You don’t say anything for a moment. Just breathe in — sunscreen, seaweed, distant barbecue smoke — and keep your gaze on the kite.

A gull cries overhead. He closes his eyes again, arm bent lazily behind his head.

Three days.

You haven’t said it out loud — not this morning, not yesterday — but it hums between you, constant and quiet. Three days until he boards a flight, until the sand looks different, until his voice comes through a phone instead of across a pillow.

His hand finds yours again. This time, he keeps it.

The heat is thicker now. Not oppressive — just enough to make everything slow. You listen to the tide. The distant buzz of cicadas near the trees. Somewhere down the beach, someone plays a song from a speaker, too low to recognize, but you know it’s sad.

“You’ll call, right?” you ask, half-joking. “Not just send, like, cryptic texts at 2am?”

Timothée laughs, head tipping back. “You act like I’m vanishing into the desert forever.”

“You kind of are.”

He glances at you again — softer this time. Less amused. “I’ll call.”

Later, he’ll jump in the water. You’ll follow. You’ll both laugh too loud. You’ll get sunburned in odd patches, and the backs of your knees will ache from crouching too long near the shore. You’ll eat something too salty for lunch and rinse your hands in the ocean.

But right now, everything is still.

And his thumb brushes the inside of your wrist, absentminded.

You don’t speak after that. There’s nothing left to say.

The wind pulls at his curls. The waves inch closer. And when he finally lets go, it’s only to stretch, slow and loose, like he’s trying to hold onto the afternoon before it slips into evening.

So you stay.

On your backs, bare feet brushing. The last good day of summer, folding softly around you.