Excerpt from The Forgetting Time by Sharon Guskin, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Why do this to herself? Can't she let herself have anything?

He was pointing out the shells scattered across the beach while she was stuck there in her thoughts.

She nodded absently.

"No, look," he said, taking her head in his big warm hands and pointing it toward the shore. "You need to look."

The shells were scuttling across the beach to the water, as if the sea was drawing them in with the power of its charm.

"But—how?"

"Sand crabs," he said. His hands were still on her face, so it wasn't hard for him to turn it toward him and kiss her once, twice, only twice, she was thinking, just a little taste and then they'd turn right back, but then he kissed her a third time and this time she felt all of her hunger rise up like a perfumed plume of smoke from a genie that had been locked in a bottle for a hundred years, encircling this man she barely knew—though her body knew him, it wrapped itself around him fiercely and kissed him as if he was the dearest of the dear. Their defenses fell away, like their clothes. And maybe it was some uncanny combination of chemicals triggering pheromones, and maybe they'd been lovers back among the pharaohs and had just now found each other, and who knew why, really? Who fucking knew?

"Jee-sus," he said. He pulled back from her a little, and she was pleased to see that all the confidence was rubbed clean away from his face and he was as stunned by it as she was—by the force of this passion that had no business being there but was there just the same, shocking the bejesus out of both of them, as if some Ouija board hijinks at a slumber party had summoned an actual ghost.

To have sex on the beach (Wasn't that a drink? Was this really her life, a cheesy cocktail?) with a man she didn't know, who fooled around with women, without using a condom, was a very, very, very bad idea. But her body didn't think so. And she'd never surrendered fully to anything in her life and perhaps it was time. She could hear the steel pan drums ringing like metallic bubbles loop de looping in the air, and the happy shouts of the revelers who were dancing, and the laughter of the bride and groom who were dancing, too, under that high, thatched roof. And she was almost forty and might never marry. And there was that lovely wife sleeping in that big bed with all those rosy-cheeked children and she had no one she was going back to, no house and no children and no husband, there was no one to love her at all except this warm body with its quick steady heartbeats and its burning life force. It was as if the page she'd been living on had been suddenly ripped from the binding, and she was on the loose side now, the torn, free side, fluttering down to the sandy shore, the moon rearing up high overhead.

When their bodies had had their fill at last they clung to each other on the beach, gasping.

"You…" He shook his head, smiling wonderingly, those alive and admiring eyes taking in her white, sand-abraded body glowing on the beach. He didn't finish the thought; he stopped himself before finishing, having had an adult lifetime of just such discipline, and she didn't know what it was he was going to say about her, though she knew she'd have the rest of her life to consider the possibilities. She had a sudden impulse to tell him something—to tell him everything, all her secrets, quickly, now, before the warmth began to fade, in the hope that there might be something she could continue to hang on to, a connection she might keep—

Keep? She almost laughed at herself. Even with the present moment grinning in her face, she couldn't help turning the other way.

The end unraveled quickly. She was still processing what had happened, still replaying it in her mind as they walked slowly back to the hotel in silence, side by side, his hand touching her lightly on her back as they walked in a gesture that was part caress and part moving her onward.

Excerpted from The Forgetting Time by Sharon Guskin. Copyright © 2016 by Sharon Guskin. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.