Excerpt from Tides by Sara Freeman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

In the room, there are two twin beds, which he insists on pushing together. I'm a gentleman, he informs her. You had me fooled, she says. She lies down, closes her eyes, falls into shallow sleep: She is in a wading pool, filling a red plastic cup with water and pouring it back out. Happy as a clam. She likes to watch the water moving with her, draining out over the lip of the plastic tub. You taste so good, he tells her, his mouth wet, a dog lapping water up from its bowl. Salt and sand and sea urchins, she thinks, and the vanilla crap she spritzed at the waistband of her undies. How did she know to do that? B and A is BA. Just like that. He crouches over her; she opens her mouth just wide enough to let him in. This is what he tastes like: dirty dog, pickled organs, ashtray, grout.

She wakes up, throat dry, head in her mouth. The two beds have slid slowly apart, the man crucified on one, she clammed inward on the other. The last thing she remembers is his slim dick prying open her mouth. She rolls onto her side: one leg down and then another. She is jelly, the room a spinning top. She finds her backpack, rummages through it, puts on her pants, a shirt that is clean enough. His wallet is on the ground; a ten and three ones. She leaves the ten and takes the ones, then takes the ten and leaves the ones. She could wait for him to wake up, big boy in his tiny bed. She could stroke his head, beg him for a few more nights. But this cannot be that, she thinks. She returns to the wallet, takes the university ID and slides it into her pocket. He should know better: there is no way back to the past.

It is early in the town. Earlier than she thought. The stores are shut, the air still cool from the night. The gulls sway and swerve. They land on the lips of garbage cans, tipping beaks into wide-open mouths. She would not say: I am hungry. She might say: I feel like a trash can emptied out.

She used to say to her husband, if she can still call him that: Not feeling is a feeling too.

Excerpted from Tides by Sara Freeman. Copyright © 2022 by Sara Freeman. Excerpted by permission of Grove Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.