She started walking toward the beach, wind tugging at her shirt, hair already soaked. I pulled off my shoes and socks and climbed out of the Mustang, hurried to catch up with her. The rain was cool but not cold—windblown lukewarm bathwater. It was the first week of August, even if it didn’t look like it.
I caught up to her where the sidewalk ended and became sand. We walked onto the beach. The sand was wet and dense, glistening, the depressions holding pools of water. To the south, waves pounded against a pier that extended far out into the ocean. Half a mile to the north, another pier was all but lost in the rain.
“What’re we doing?” I yelled over the rush of wind and thudding sound of surf.
“When will you get to do this again, Mort?”
That was her answer. She laughed and spun in the rain, face upturned to the downpour. Only a few blocks away, condominiums were gray rectangular ghosts.
She grabbed my hand and started to jog along the shore, past hotels and condos with empty balconies facing the surf. Her blouse clung to her, molded to her breasts like plastic wrap. She didn’t care. We were the only ones out there.
We went a quarter mile, maybe more, before she slowed to a walk. “Isn’t this great?”
“Super.” Truth was, I meant it. I hadn’t done anything like it in a long time. Too long. This was the kind of thing kids do. Grow up too far, get too serious about life, and you lose it.
Dark green-brown stringers of glistening seaweed had washed up in tangled piles on the beach. Jeri ran partway out into a foaming tongue of gray, sandy water that came surging up high on the beach, wading in to mid-calf.
I went out after her. “We have to be on the plane in three hours, Jeri. We’ll never get dry.”
“Then we’ll fly back nude.”
“We can ask, but I’m pretty sure it’s not allowed.”
She laughed. “Wouldn’t you like to, though?”
“Yeah, sure.” American Airlines would love that, a moose like me naked in an aisle seat, downing a beer, fending off hordes of eager women once they found out what I do for a living.
Jeri looked down at her shirt. “You can see right through this little number, can’t you? Bra, too.”
“Sure can.”
Suddenly she hugged me, looked up into my eyes. “I have to tell you something.”
I didn’t know what to do with my hands, but I liked the warmth and the feel of her body against mine. I returned the hug awkwardly. “What?”
“Last night at that bar I told you I’ve never felt so alive as I have in the past few years.”
“Uh-huh.”
“That wasn’t true, Mort. Part of me isn’t, wasn’t. Alive. You’ve felt it, haven’t you?”
“I felt…something.”
“More than just something. I…I want you to know why.”
A cold breaker swirled up almost to our knees. Not wanting to end up in Bermuda, I drew her higher up on the beach.
She held me. “There was this guy, Beau.”
“Bo?”
“B-E-A-U, Beau.”
“Oh.”
“I was twenty-one. We were going to be married. I got pregnant and he took off. Just disappeared. Dumb me, I thought he and I were forever. I saw everything to the end of time, Mort—love, a Golden Retriever, white picket fence. Then, poof…I never saw him again.”
“Jesus, Jeri.”
“I miscarried at two months. It wasn’t an abortion. I wouldn’t do that. It just didn’t take, whatever.”
“You don’t have to tell me this.”
She pounded a fist on my chest in what would have been a nice CPR move if I’d needed it. “Does it look like I don’t want to tell you, dope?”
“Not very.”
“Then shut up.” She pulled my head down and kissed me. It lasted long enough to make my head spin. She drew back an inch. “I haven’t had sex since,” she said. “Seven years, Mort. Little more than that. I just let that part of me die.”
Quicksand lay all around. I didn’t say anything. Seven years. Wow. Longer than me, even.
“I wanted to be smarter next time,” she said, “not some dumb kid. But I never trusted myself. All I saw was Beau again, over and over and over.”
“These things happen, Jeri. You can’t give up when they do, or you go nowhere. Life passes you by.”
“Easy for you to say. I was looking at having a child and no husband, no job. It was horrible, the kind of nightmare that happens to other people, not to me. It almost killed me.”
I looked up and down the beach. Mist, rain, and wind, pennants whipping in the gale on the roofs of nearby hotels that were indistinct gray blocks in the storm.
I shivered. “We better go back.”
I turned away, but she jerked me back and looked into my eyes. “I would sleep with you.” She waited a moment, then said, “If you ever asked or anything.”
My heart skipped a few crucial beats, leaving me lightheaded. “Thanks.”
“Hey, that’s not a commitment or a trap, dummy, it’s a statement of fact. I know you’ve got Kayla, okay? I just want you to know. It’s important to me, Mort. I don’t want to keep it inside. There isn’t any room for it, not anymore. I just want you to know, that’s all.”
“Well…thanks. For telling me.”
“God, you’re so stiff.” She smiled. Water spilled into her eyes, ran off her chin. She pulled me against her. “You can’t help it, can you?”
“I’m lost, that’s all. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t either, in your shoes.”
I lifted a foot. “Hey, look, no shoes.”
She took my hand. “Okay, fool. Let’s go.”
We walked back, arms around each other’s waists, as wet as if we’d swum in from England. A man, sixtyish, in pretty good shape and wearing only a blue Speedo thing not much bigger than a jock strap came jogging by with a happy Doberman. He waved as he went by. Seagulls spiraled awkwardly overhead, struggling to stay aloft.
Back in the car Jeri wrung water from her hair. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“What
