When Kevin found the woman on the sea road, she was curled into a ball, knees to chest. Hair loose in the gravel. Over the dunes, the ocean beat its slow drum.

“Miss?” Kevin said.

He helped her stand. She was soaking wet in a strange fur coat that was coarse and spotted like a fawn. Black eyes, black hair. Nipples poking through her white T-shirt. Her long, cat-like whiskers glistened in the sun.

“Smokeshow,” he’d tell his buddies later. “Total smokeshow.”

* * *

Kevin brought her back to his apartment because she seemed to have nowhere else to go. When he started peeling off her coat, she stopped him.

“I’m just going to hang it up to dry,” he said.

“My mother made it,” she replied, clicking her teeth. “Please be careful.”

When he asked where she came from, she widened her eyes so the whites showed all around her irises.

“Okay,” he said. “I get it. You don’t want to tell me.”

* * *

She slept in his living room that night, and the next, and the next. Each morning, she blinked at him sleepily from his couch, the sun on her face like butter. After a while, he thought she might stay.

* * *

He’d drive her to the shore and they’d look at the sea together. Her head tilted, listening to the tide. “It wants to kiss you,” she’d say. Or, “It wants to eat you.” Once, she waded in, floating, rising and falling on the waves’ curved spines, until he lost sight of her. He found her later napping in the shallows, submerged except for the small round of her pale face.

* * *

He bought her an Apple Watch and taught her about time and texting. When he gave her the watch, she rubbed it against her cheek like it was the smoothest stone. Really, he liked being able to track her location, to follow her pulsing blue dot.

* * *

He loved her claws. Her small, sharp teeth.

* * *

When his best friend Joey came over for dinner, she narrowed her eyes at Joey’s biceps.

“You’re not a fisherman, are you?” she asked.

“Nah. I’m in finance.”

Kevin distracted her by laying out the sushi, tiny pink slabs gleaming in rows.

“Dude,” Joey said, after. “What’s she like in bed?”

“Man, shut up.” Kevin pretended to be offended, though he and Joey often talked like this, because he was embarrassed she hadn’t had sex with him yet. Only kisses: small bites, no tongue, his lips left sore.

* * *

Once, when Kevin got home from work, he found her shucking oysters at the kitchen sink. He wrapped his arms around her from behind and put his mouth on her neck, but she shrieked and wriggled. One of her claws carved a hot stripe down his arm. Blood welled up, red as a desert but so much wetter.

“Jesus, fuck,” he said. “I was only trying to kiss you!”

After she calmed, she explained. “If you’re snuck up on in the ocean, you die.”

* * *

Besides that, things were good. Sometimes she asked him to brush her hair with a mother-of-pearl comb she’d gotten somewhere. Smell of salt and wind and rocks rising from the crown of her head.

* * *

Eventually, he coaxed her into sex, tasted her brine. Ran his fingers over the hard stripes of her ribs.

* * *

“I love her, man,” he told Joey.

* * *

She began to ask for her coat.

“It’s at the cleaners,” Kevin lied.

“It’s time for me to have it back.” She rapped her claws on the counter.

“Sure, babe. Soon.” But he hoped she’d forget about it. He suspected she wouldn’t leave him without it. He also didn’t think she’d look in the hall closet, where it hung with the other coats; her fingers weren’t good for opening doors.

* * *

At night, he began to hear the tippety-tap of her claws on doorknobs. Clickety-clack. Scritch-scritch-scratch. The noises scraped at his heart. Which of them had trapped the other? They’d both cast their nets.

* * *

He bought her a new coat. Canada Goose: he wanted her to be warm when the beach turned to ice.

“The cleaners need more time with your old one,” he said.

She declined the jacket and stared at him. “Where do you keep your coats?”

“I don’t have any.” He’d never had a problem lying. If he thought about his lies enough, they felt like the truth: familiar. 

“Where will you keep this?” She pointed at the Canada Goose.

“Just—right here.” He draped it over a kitchen stool.

* * *

He daydreamed about marrying her. For their honeymoon, he’d take her to a resort and show her white sand beaches. Blue lagoons, neon fish. Different kinds of seas. He imagined her holding a piña colada between her slender, webbed fingers.

* * *

“I don’t think you understand about my coat,” she said one day. “It’s part of me.”

“I get it.” He smoothed hair off her forehead. Her eyes were like sea caves: wet, black, swallowing him up.

“Can I have it back?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “The cleaners lost it, remember?”

* * *

By the time winter turned the sun white, she was gone. Her coat, too. The closet door ajar, wood trim raked jagged, hangers strewn everywhere. Kevin felt tricked. She’d left him a note, but it was just drawings of waves with ink dots like sand. He called Joey.

“She’s gone,” Kevin said. “She broke up with me.”

“Damn. Sucks, man. I’m sorry.”

Kevin touched the Apple Watch on the counter and thought about the tide dragging itself in and out each day. Full moons and new moons. She’d told him it was hard to have a real ending in nature because things grew out of death.

“I think she’ll be back,” he said.