Chapter 8
“I gotta get back to work,” Erik said to me as he climbed out of the backseat on our arrival back at the inn. “Thanks for letting me shadow you. It was really exciting to see an actual day in the life of a travel writer!”
“You saw about five minutes in the life of a travel writer,” I corrected him. “All we did that had anything remotely to do with my job was eat that cake.”
“You have such a cool job,” Erik said, giving me a last starry-eyed look as he turned to head inside, clearly still not listening.
I sighed. Ricky had come around and leaned against my side of the car, and he grabbed my arm and pulled me back as I started to follow Erik toward the inn. I yielded, leaning against the door next to him.
“Cute kid, huh,” he said.
“I feel bad,” I replied. “I think he thinks my job is always like this, and he won’t listen to me when I tell him it’s not.”
Ricky shrugged. “He’s not bad at the detective thing, though. I think he mostly wants to be a travel writer so he can escape small town life. And the fact that he has a huge crush on you isn’t helping.”
“Maybe,” I said uncomfortably, avoiding Ricky’s eye. I looked around before turning back to Ricky. “Why are we hanging out in a parking lot?”
“I wanted a minute alone. Erik’s a nice kid, but we’ve spent enough time with him, and I want to make it clear to him that I have dibs on you.”
I pursed my lips at him to suppress a smile, and leaned into his side a little. “Pretend dibs, anyway,” I said.
Ricky pulled his phone out of his pocket to check the time. “We still have a little while before our spa appointment,” he said. “Want to walk down to the beach? Get ourselves in the mood for our massages?”
I followed him toward the trailhead that led down the bluff to the inlet below. “What mood? You need to be in a mood for a massage?”
“For a couples massage, yeah, it helps,” Ricky said over his shoulder as we began our descent. “Remember our assignment? Romance. A couples massage is supposed to be romantic.”
“Really? Aren’t you, like, lying face down during a massage?”
The trail was narrow, but broadened a little as we reached a long set of stone steps hugging the side of the bluff below the inn. Ricky paused to let me catch up, grinning at me as we started going down side by side. “You’ve never had a massage, have you?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Okay, well, if you went by yourself to get a massage, it would probably be all about relaxation. But a couples massage”—he smirked at me—“is meant to be sexy.”
I gulped. “Sexy how?”
“I’m not sure what it’ll be like today, but a lot of the time there’s a Jacuzzi or a big bathtub, and they give you time before the massage to bathe together. Sometimes they’ll give you Champagne to drink in the tub.”
I tried not to picture being in a tub with Ricky. An alarming thought about bathtubs came to me as I continued to try not picturing it.
As if reading my mind, Ricky continued, “And, of course, you’re both naked the whole time. With a fluffy robe for modesty when you’re not in the tub or on the massage table, but otherwise …”
I was glad I was walking on the inside, hugging the wall of the bluff. Otherwise, I might have fallen off the side of the staircase.
“We don’t have to be … though, right?” I hoped there wasn’t too much panic in my voice. “I don’t think a pretend relationship covers getting … um.” Naked. My mind was working overtime, conjuring up all kinds of exciting, terrifying images against my will.
Ricky grabbed and squeezed my hand, his eyes melting into concern that he had gone too far. “No. Oliver, I’m sorry, I was only teasing you. It’s totally fine to wear a swimsuit, or keep your underwear on, or whatever you’re comfortable with. And I’ll avert my eyes, if you tell me to.”
“Only if I tell you to?”
He grinned and shrugged, the wickedness returning to his eyes as he dropped my hand and pulled ahead of me as the trail narrowed once again.
There was a final, slightly steep downhill curve before we reached the small cove far below the inn.
A few scraggly trees and a low, tangled cover of bushes spilled down a short distance at the base of the bluff before giving way to a half-sandy, half-rocky beach strewn with driftwood, fallen branches, seaweed, and other natural detritus that gave it a wild, untamed feel, nothing like the broad bathing beaches I was used to.
At the north end of the cove, the bluff jutted far out toward the ocean, capped by a distant lighthouse.
Ricky pulled his ever-present camera off his shoulder, snapping a few different angles of this sweeping vista.
I found a large log and sat down, pulling off my shoes and socks, trying to stay clear of Ricky’s camera as I crossed the beach to the water’s edge and waded in.
I tried to let the chill of the water, rising and falling over my toes, my feet, sometimes up to my ankles, distract me from my nerves about the massage.
I wasn’t sure whether to be grateful to Ricky for preparing me in advance, or resentful of him for making me anxious about it in advance.
I waded out a little further, curling my toes around the smooth rocks underfoot to keep my balance, momentarily lost in thought.
As anxious as I was, I realized, I was also a little excited.
There was no deluding myself; as terrifying as they were, these repeated brushes with a scantily clad Ricky also came with an exciting, sexy sense of possibility.
Would the day ever come when I’d be able to bring myself to capitalize on any of those possibilities?
I wished I could feel any confidence in myself on that score.
I looked around, remembering how Ricky and I had held hands as we waded in the pond this morning and wondering if I could engineer a repeat performance by coaxing him to join me here.
As I turned, though, I caught Ricky snapping photos of me wading from his vantage point on the sand, grinning at me as soon as he realized he had been discovered.
“Cut that out,” I called, “and get out here.”
He sat down on the same log I had, removing his shoes and leaving his camera behind. He sloshed out to me, doing a slomo pretend run, then bending down and miming splashing me without actually kicking up any water. I waited for him with my hands on my hips.
“Why do you keep taking pictures of me?”
“You’re very photogenic,” he said.
“I don’t buy that,” I grumbled. “Maybe from behind.”
“I think you can take my word for what is and isn’t photogenic,” he said. “I am a professional photographer, after all. And I am myself a photogenic person, so I know of which I speak.”
I remembered a stray comment he’d made earlier. “Did you say you’d been a model?”
“Only a little,” he said, shrugging dismissively.
“A few times in high school and college. Mostly regional stuff. I only did, like, one national campaign. Maybe two. I was always more interested in what the photographers were doing. Well, and in my fellow models. There was some fun to be had there.”
I goggled at him. I mean, I could believe it—he was easily the best-looking person I’d ever seen in real life. It made a certain amount of sense. But it also made his pronouncements of my own suitability as a photo subject all the more suspect.
He narrowed his eyes at me. “Are you gonna be weird about this? It was not a major storyline in my life, just something goofy I did for a while, mostly at my mom’s urging.”
I recovered myself. “No, it all makes sense to me. My only question is, if our topic is ‘romance,’ won’t pictures of me by myself seem kind of … sad?”
“Hmm,” he said thoughtfully. “My take is, our readers, being mostly women and gay men, will see these pictures of this enigmatic, beautiful young mystery man”—I blushed and looked down at my toes rippling in the water—“and put themselves in the position of being here with you, being romanced. But you may have a point. Come here.”
He grabbed my hand and marched us purposefully out of the water, back up the beach to our log.
He sat me down and spent a few minutes moving our shoes, smoothing the sand in front of me, and getting more sand to stick to my wet feet.
Then he caked his own feet with sand, sat down close to me, and grabbed his camera.
“This might get weird,” he said. “I’m going to get a picture of the beach, with our outstretched legs and feet centered in the foreground.”
“I had gathered that. What’s going to get weird about it?”
“I’ll probably have to kind of lean into your lap to line up the shot.”
“Um, okay. I guess that won’t be a problem.” Unless I thought too hard about it.
It turned out to be a good core workout, me holding a controlled backward lean at about a sixty-degree angle while Ricky bobbed in front of me and snapped off a round of pictures.
“Okay,” he said, turning as we both straightened up, that wicked glint back in his eye.
“Let’s do another pose. Stay there, I’m going to scoot over here, and we’re going to angle our legs toward each other.
” He crossed his feet at the ankle, indicating for me to do the same. “Now, put your legs up on top of mine.”
“What are we doing here, playing Twister?”
“No.” He grinned as he leaned in to take a few photos in this new pose. “But we should do that sometime. Sounds fun.”
I laughed nervously. After another burst of his shutter and a moment’s inspection of the results on the screen, Ricky set his camera back down on the log, though he didn’t seem inclined to change position.
A big part of me wasn’t, either, but the louder, more persnickety part of me needed to get this sand off my feet.
“Are we done? Should we …” I searched for an excuse to put my shoes back on, which would give me an excuse to clean my feet, “… take a walk up the beach?”
“Sure,” Ricky said. “That sounds nice.”