Page 30 of It's a Love Story

“We’re digging a pit for a big tug-of-war, losers get wet. But my friends aren’t here yet and I just have a bunch of little kids helping and it’s taking forever.” He holds up his shovel.

“Sure,” Dan says and gets up. From where I’m still lying, I am now looking up the length of his legs; they’re legs you’d see at the Olympics or on a drawing of the human muscular system at the doctor’s office. I need to stop looking at his legs, so I get up too.

I follow Dan and Tucker over to the hole in progress. Dan jumps in and holds out a hand for me. I was going to jump in too, but I take his hand anyway. And there’s that feeling again; I am definitely a monkey starved for touch. The hole is filled with eight-year-old kids and too-big shovels, and I love the squishy feel of the wet sand under my feet. I pick up a shovel and start digging. This hole feels like another world with no wind and a distant threat of waves crashing. Each time I toss a shovel full of heavy, wet sand out of the hole, I see the waves coming closer. The first one to hit trickles cool water up to our shins, and everyone screams. It’s exciting, digging deeper and deeper and knowing what’s coming.

“We’re going to get soaked,” Dan says, looking at my legs.

“We’ll be fine, get back to work,” I say just as the big wave comes and crashes over our heads. The hole is deep enough now that the water settles at Dan’s shoulders. The surprise of the ice-cold water has me disoriented, but not as much as the feel of his arm around my waist.

“Okay?” he asks. He wipes water from his eyes with his free hand, and his hair is briefly neat, slicked back against his head. The rectangular shape of his eyes seems exaggerated, and I have the thought that I would cast him as a vampire. The kind that wouldn’t kill you but might break the bed.

“I’m soaked,” I say, still close. He picks a strand of seaweed out of my hair and lets go of me.

The kids scramble out of the hole, and Tucker says, “You two against us.” Which is how it came to be that I am soaking wet on one side of a giant hole with the Atlantic Ocean to my left, pressed in close to Dan Finnegan behind me, pulling at a thick rope with all my might against a bunch of little kids. The newness of this fills every part of me—as the screams and laughter fill my ears, I realize I did not play like this as a kid. And as the back of my thighs rub up against the front of Dan’s, I realize the lemony hand on my tingly lips was just a warm-up. Dan’s head is right over my shoulder, and his arms are around mine as we pull. I can feel the strain in my shoulders, but not as intensely as I feel the brush of his stubble on my cheek. “Ready?” he says.

“Yes,” I say because that’s the only word my body knows right now.

He gives a giant tug, and we fall backward into the sand. All the little kids land in the hole. We’re side by side on our backs, recently wet and now covered in sand.

“We won,” he says, breathless.

“Feels good,” I say. We look at the sky for a bit, catching our breath, the hot sand warming our backs. “I don’t know how I’ll ever get all this sand off.”

Dan gets up and leads me into the ocean. “This is the only way,” he says.

He dives under a wave and then peels off his T-shirt. He does it in a functional way and dunks it again and again in the ocean to get the sand off. But I see it in slow motion, like he’s a vampire who’s also a firefighter, and he’s just left the burning building.

He mistakes my stunned expression for confusion about the de-sanding process. “Come on,” he says. “It’s like laundry.”

I pull off my T-shirt and shorts and dunk them in the water. I empty my pockets of sand. I honestly cannot believe I’m wearing this bathing suit.

Dan dives under another wave, shakes out his hair, and comes toward me with that muscled chest and ridiculous stomach. My hands want to poke him to see if he’s real. “I’ll lay this all out to dry,” he says and takes my clothes. “Are you staying in?”

I need to gather my thoughts and monkey hormones, so I say, “For a minute.”

I dive under a wave. I imagine there’s a sound that goes along with it, a whoosh as I’m washed clean by the salt water. I dive under the next wave and the next, feeling the water cool my shoulders. I look out at the horizon, and I realize I have my back to Hollywood. If I had a giant’s legs, I could take big steps over to England and start new there. Maybe I’d sing in a pub and pour pints during the day, greeting the regulars and not caring what my future looked like.If I can’t get this movie made, pints are always going to need to be poured—I think this in Cormack’s voice.

The air is starting to feel cold, so I head back to our towels. Dan has placed two of Tucker’s big shovels upright in the sand to hold our drying clothes. He’s leaning back on his elbows and he’s watching me. I train my eyes on the sand and try not to envision what I look like in this bathing suit.

“I wasn’t checking you out,” he says when I’m lying face down on my towel.

“Oh yeah? Was there a very important hawk behind me?”

He laughs. “Are you funny? I’m starting to think you are.”

“Try not to be,” I say. My head is resting on my hands and I’m turned away from him.

“You don’t try that hard,” he says.

I turn my head toward him, and he’s rolled onto his stomach, chin on folded hands, a clump of hair resting like a single parenthesis over his forehead. We are very close, and I can see each of his black eyelashes, a dusting of white sand on the ridge of his left cheekbone. I want to wipe it away with my thumb. I have the sense that we are in a small space now, that the sound of the waves and the kids has been muted. He’s looking at me like I’m something he’s unsure of. His eyes run along my hairline, my jaw. They land on my eyes. My body feels hot and loose like lava. Anyone lying this close to shirtless Dan would feel this way, but it’s neither convenient nor appropriate for me at this particular time. One thing that’s abundantly clear as I scan the slope of his shoulder and the way it flows into the ridges of his back: Dan needs to put his shirt back on.

“Men don’t really like funny women, like to date,” I say.

“Not true.”

“It’s absolutely true. Name a comedian you want to sleep with.”

“I’d have to think about it.”

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