Track 15 Glory Days
Track 15
Glory Days
Chase Logan
There was a reason that the bartender, Chase Logan, was drawn to the olive-skinned, dark-haired girl at the bar—and it certainly wasn’t just because she was pretty. His days of picking up women had seriously receded over the years, not unlike his hairline. He had gone from fighting off the hot ones to taking home a straggler or two, to barely receiving a look in his direction that didn’t come with a request for a beverage.
He stared at the girl because she looked familiar. And not yesterday familiar. Thirty years ago familiar, which of course was not possible, because she didn’t look to be over thirty years old now.
Something about her reminded him of a young Beatrix Silver. He knew that there was a girl walking the earth who possibly looked like Bea, who also possibly looked like him. Which this one didn’t, he thought, until he looked in her eyes and saw his own. She had the drop-dead gorgeous violet-blue eyes that he and many in his family were known for.
Chase hadn’t known that he had fathered a child until a few years ago, when a friend told him about a book called On Fire Island with a character fitting his description. Plus, the local author barely disguised his name, calling him Logan Chase instead of Chase Logan.
He was made to look like a real chump in the book, but truth be told, it was an accurate description of him in his twenties. He wasn’t proud of what went down that summer thirty years ago. He knew it wasn’t cool that he’d been sleeping with Bea and her sister, but he never imagined the chain reaction it would set off.
Thinking about it now, he wouldn’t be surprised if he had fathered a child or two. He’d been a real jackass when he was younger about using condoms, and he’d suffered unwelcome repercussions from that choice on more than one occasion. It was the reason he steered clear of those ancestry kits—he had nightmares that a mob of millennials would show up at his doorstep chanting, “Papa, can I borrow the car?” or in his case, his bike, now that he lived on the island full-time.
Over the course of a few summers, from the age of about sixteen to twenty-five, the Manhattan girls couldn’t get enough of the handsome lifeguard with the killer abs and shy smile. The funny thing about it was that he wasn’t shy at all. It was just that half of the time he had no idea what these sophisticated city kids who summered on Fire Island were talking about. He kept his mouth shut out of fear of embarrassing himself.
From the lifeguard stand on the beach, he could see them, lying on their blankets reading, or at least holding a book. And not just that one book that was assigned for summer homework; they seemed to like reading.
They were all educated at private or selective public high schools, and they would make jokes and remark on things Chase had no clue about. They watched foreign films, and frequented museums and Broadway shows. The only time Chase had been to the Theater District was when a cousin took him to the city to see a peep show. The topless woman on the other side of the glass had spun around a few times and shimmied at the end. Not quite a crowd-raising finale, but memorable all the same.
But Beatrix Silver was different. Beatrix listened to what he had to say and didn’t turn every conversation they had into some intellectual debate. She laughed at his jokes and didn’t act as if she were slumming, like the other girls Chase had bedded over those prime summers of his youth. Though bedded was a misnomer—since his MO was to bring them down to the beach with a blanket and a bottle of five-dollar Boone’s Farm wine. It wasn’t until years later, when one of those women returned and ordered a drink from him, recalling their pairing from her perspective, that he realized he was the one who was often being used.
“Look at the hot lifeguard I screwed on the beach this summer!” echoed proudly through prep school halls each September, the sexual equivalent of boasting about winning a blue ribbon at the Hampton Classic.
If he were being honest with himself, he knew it had been different with Bea than with the others. Bea had cared for him, and he didn’t know what to do with that at the time. It may have been the reason that, when the opportunity arose, he’d slept with her sister. It wasn’t a hard thing to do. Sleeping with Veronica Silver was a common notch on many a lifeguard’s belt. It was both easy, and the easy way out.
Bea was heading back to her fancy liberal arts school to read big books and philosophize about the state of humanity, as Chase imagined. She had already snagged his best lifeguard sweatshirt and mentioned him visiting during something called the Fall Harvest Festival. She’d talked on and on about the football game and hayride and hard cider and some harvest moon dance he would need to bring a sports jacket for. He didn’t have a sports jacket. Chase liked Bea but knew that, without his surfboard and the lifeguard status, he wouldn’t survive such things—let alone a lifetime of them. He needed to break it off. He wasn’t much of a communicator, so he slept with her sister instead of having the tough talk.
Now, the hair on the back of his neck stood on end as he watched the young woman at the bar cock her head to the side like a puppy, which came rushing back to him as an expression of Bea’s that summer. Not to mention the freckled olive skin and dark curls. Between those and her eyes, it felt like a sure thing, though he wished he had hard proof.