Lovely.
“He’s my horrible ex.” I dimmed the phone screen, disgusted. “He’s long gone, but I’ve still got that stupid gorilla suit in my closet.”
“I’ve got one of those.”
“A gorilla suit?”
“No, a horrible ex.”
“Did she work in a marijuana dispensary, too?”
He chuckled. “Nah. She’s an Instagram model.”
Of course.
Trey looked past me, his gaze stretching down the beach toward the water. Then his hand was on my forearm and the heat of his unexpected touch made me shiver.
“Check it out.” His voice was a throaty whisper as he nodded toward the ocean. I turned and took in the glorious view: the sun kissing the horizon, painting the cloudless blue sky with broad pink strokes.
No matter how many times you’ve seen it, a sunset over the Pacific Ocean would always blow you away. We sat in awestruck silence, watching the sun slip from view, inch by inch, until it was nothing but a single speck of bright yellow light, and then, nothing.
“Did you see the green flash?” Trey asked.
“I’m pretty sure that’s a myth.” Despite witnessing countless sunsets in my twenty-five years, I’d never once seen the green flash, the fleeting display of green light that supposedly shows up during the last moment of a sunset.
He laughed, his eyes crinkling again. “It’s a scientifically proven phenomenon.”
“In theory, sure. But conditions have to be just right for it to happen, so it’s rare. People probably think they see it a whole lot more than they actually see it.”
“So you think all those people are lying?”
“I think they’re fooling themselves because they want to say they’ve seen it.”
He leaned over the arm of his chair, a glint of mischief in his hazel eyes. “Do you think I’m fooling myself?”
My mouth hung open, unable to form a response. I’d been staring at that sunset, too, and I didn’t see anything but pink and yellow and blue. Not a single flash of green. But I wasn’t about to tell the man who’d carried me across the beach when I was blinded by pain that he was a fool.
Finally, I said, “I think you’re an optimist. And I think that’s refreshing.”
His lip quirked, like he was about to say something else, but the lifeguard returned with yet another kettle of hot water. “We’ll be closing down at dusk,” she said. “That’s in another twenty minutes or so. You should be good to go by then.”
“Great, thanks again.”
Trey nodded at the lifeguard, then stared out at the sand and the water, the waves as they rolled gently onto the shore. He looked bored.
“You don’t have to wait here with me,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
“I know.” He flicked his gaze toward me, then back again at the water. “You’re really never going back in the ocean, huh?”
“Afraid not.”
“But you live so close to it.”
“Well, I love going to the beach. I just prefer to stay on the sand.”
“Why?” His eyes were on me again. “What was the first bad experience you had in the water?”
There was no escaping him, and I wasn’t about to make up a lie. So I took a deep breath, and told him my truth.
“When I was ten, I went to a birthday party. At SurfRack, actually. They had some instructors show us the basics of paddling out, popping up, riding a wave. They kept us together in a small group and didn’t take us out very far, but I wasn’t very coordinated, so I had a hard time with the whole thing. At some point, I started drifting and couldn’t get back to the group. Then a big wave came, and I lost my footing and fell over. Before I could stand up, another one came, then another one. I was tumbling head over heels, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see. For a second, I thought I was going to die.
“Eventually, a lifeguard came and pulled me back to shore. Turns out, I hadn’t even been in deep water, I just panicked and couldn’t get my bearings.”
My cheeks started to burn, a reflexive response from all those times Rob had teased me about this. Admittedly, now that I said the whole story out loud again, it seemed completely ridiculous. I was a grown-ass woman, still holding on to a childhood fear. My life probably hadn’t even been in danger that day. I’d simply surrendered to anxiety, convincing myself the ocean was a perilous place.
I steeled myself for the mockery that would inevitably ensue. But Trey only looked at me, his eyes soft and kind. “That’s awful. Your surf instructor never should’ve let you out of their sight. I can see why you were traumatized.”
It felt as though I’d melted into the chair, my skin melding with the plastic beneath me. Here was a man who lived his life in the ocean yet understood my irrational fear. Unlike Rob, who rarely left the couch, and regularly used my weakness as an opportunity to ridicule me. The difference between them was staggering. Just the thought of it caused my stomach to lurch.
And rumble. Loudly.
On second thought, maybe that was hunger.
Trey bit back a smile. “Hungry, huh?”
Humiliating.
“I guess so,” I said, right as my stomach rumbled again.
He kneeled at my feet and slowly lifted my left foot out of the water. With a delicate grip, he turned it over in his hands, examining it from all angles. The pain had mostly subsided. It was hard to believe that mere minutes ago, I’d been totally anguished, shrieking like I’d lost my mind.
“How’s it feeling?” he asked.
“Better,” I said. “Still not a hundred percent, but compared to before, it’s nothing.”
“Great.” He set my foot back in the water, then went into the lifeguard tower and returned with a towel. As he tenderly dried my foot, I felt a pang of despair. Because this evening, though fraught with panic and pain, had also been magical, and I didn’t want it to end. Not yet, anyway.
So, I took a cue from Trey and faked a little optimism. “Wanna get something to eat?”
Oh, boy. That was a mistake. I could tell from the lines creasing his forehead. They spoke volumes, saying things like, Who does this girl think she is? I only date Instagram models.
I fumbled with my dress, pulling it over my head to cover my shame. No matter what positive energy I put out there, the universe wasn’t going to perform some miracle and convince Trey Cantu to sit down to dinner with an ex-GrubGetter who couldn’t stick a toe in the ocean without spiraling into uncontrolled hysteria.