Chapter 33
Thirty-Three
This information hits especially hard since I woke up to an email with the school supply list for next year, which includes a new laptop.
I don’t need to be a historian to know this isn’t good.
Nor is the fact that Nash is wearing swim trunks, sunglasses, and carrying enough beach equipment to live here for eleven years.
“We aren’t finding anything here, are we?”
“Of course we are,” Nash says with an easy smile, stabbing an umbrella in the sand. “Fun.”
Naturally.
Cap grunts as he throws a beach bag of towels at my feet. “Hot as a steamy pile of dog shit out here.”
He’s not wrong.
Using a hand to shade my eyes, I study the length of the beach. “How old’s that pier?”
“Built in ’95,” Nash says, unbuttoning his shirt—today’s pick covered in watermelons.
My eyes drop to his exposed chest, and I gift myself three seconds of appreciating the view before going back to my poverty-provoked pity party.
I’ve been able to push my financial situation out of my mind for the last few days because I thought today would be our big break. Because treasure and beaches go hand in hand. X marks the spot. This was it—I could feel it.
Now, seeing a normal beach with modern surf shops, taco stands, and bars with neon signs, my harsh reality slaps me across the face. This is nothing like it.
Nash and Cap settle in beach chairs with Nash doling out beers and Cap taking a hit off Penny.
“What kind of music you like, Cap?” Nash asks with zero urgency.
Like I didn’t just tell him two days ago that all my money is gone and I need this gold.
“Love classic rock,” Cap says, his words coming with a smoke-like puff. “CCR, Steve Miller, Doobie Brothers.”
Nash nods in approval. “Good call.” He scrolls his phone until music plays through a little speaker. He offers me a beer I swat away.
“You have bocce?” Cap asks.
“I do. In the truck.” Nash stands from his beach chair. “I’ll ge—”
“Are you two kidding me right now?” I demand, hands on my hips. “You’re just here to be at the beach?”
Nash takes in said beach. “Looks like it.”
“Good day for it,” Cap agrees. “Hot as a—”
“A steamy pile of dog shit, I heard you the first time.” I’m fuming. “I don’t have time for a day at the beach. We have work to do.”
“Sure you do,” Nash says. “You agreed to it. You have two weeks, this was one of Anson’s stops, here we are. Day seven. You have a whole week left.”
I press my palms into my eyes until I see stars. Nash may be winning me over with his romantic retellings of history and my fingers in his mouth, but he still takes nothing seriously, including my dire circumstances.
“We’re supposed to be looking for clues,” I remind him. “Figuring out where the money is. Paying for my backstabbing mother’s brain surgery. Ring a bell?”
He makes a contemplative face. “Vaguely.”
I hope a rogue wave crashes onto this shore and carries him out to sea. “I’m serious, Nash,” I whine. “What are we doing?”
“Take your dress off.”
I frown.
He shrugs his shirt off and tosses it on his chair, brows raised. “I’m assuming you wore a swimsuit under it?”
Cap chuckles, and I glare at him. Jutting my lower jaw out, I peel off my dress. The way Nash looks at me makes me think the fabric shrunk.
I put my hands on my hips—again. “Now what?”
Before I can react, Nash charges at me, throws me over his shoulder, and marches toward the ocean, me screaming his name and smacking his back like a hostage as we go.
He says, “Hold your breath,” and it barely registers before he drags me underwater.
When we emerge, he’s smiling, and the saltwater burns my nose like acid.
“I hate you,” I say without heat, smoothing my hair.
“My bullshit detector says you’re lying.”
“Oh really?” I splash him with both hands. “What else is it saying?”
He disappears underwater then pops up closer to me.
“That you’ve been keeping secrets from me.”
Wading toward the shore, I pause, caught. He can’t be talking about Bennie, but it feels like he is. Like he knows.
I swallow. “Like?”
“Like . . .” He smiles innocently, wobbling his head side-to-side. “You having a finger-sucking fetish.”
“Ha!” If I wasn’t so relieved he didn’t just say You had my child, I’d be embarrassed. “Maybe you just never knew what I liked.”
He wades next to me, running his hands through his wet hair, water racing down the tattoos of his sinewy arm like sin-lined highways. “Well, now I do, and you’d never believe all the things I’ve been imagining.”
I’m surprised the water lapping my skin doesn’t sizzle and start boiling around me. I’m even more surprised I don’t take my swimsuit off.
I’m also engaged and married.
“That sounds like a personal problem.”
My attempt at sounding dismissive fails miserably because he’s all smiley and perfect.
A too-loud holler from the shore cuts through the crashing of the waves. “We at the beach, fam!”
Sunny.
Oh, dear God.
“This is the real fun.” Nash waves at her. “Sunny at the beach is a show you don’t want to miss.”
He goes ahead of me, three boys tackling him into the water. Sunny’s kids, I piece together by their dark skin and the way she shouts something at them about drowning.
Instead of joining, I hang back to watch—I’ve never seen Nash with a child.
Above water, his arms spread as he roars then dunks them under, one by one. He slings the youngest of the three on his shoulders before walking to Sunny and Cap. The sand is overtaken by another umbrella and more beach toys than I can count.
Sunny’s laugh carries across the water. When my eyes land on her, it’s hard not to smile. She’s wearing a humongous hat and a hot-pink one-piece bathing suit under a crocheted jumpsuit. A sunflower standing out in a field of daisies. Despite being part demon, Sunny suits her.
Down the beach, the song of an ice cream wagon blasts and Nash doesn’t hesitate to walk with the boys toward it, my dad hobbling alongside. Walking in the sand looks like an effort for him, so he must like ice cream. A new piece of my father is revealed in an everyday act.
Next to Sunny, I sit on a spread-out beach towel.
“You like a cockroach,” she says to me. “Showin’ up everywhere you don’t belong.”
I snort a laugh. “You don’t like me.”
“I don’t like nobody.”
“You like Nash,” I challenge. “And Cap.”
“Well.” She puts her hands on her curvy hips. “They ain’t blind as damn bats.”
“You were right what you said the other night,” I tell her.
“About?”
“Probably all of it.”
“Uh-huh,” she says with high brows as she drops into a beach chair. “Go on.”
This woman is a pain in the ass, but she cares about Nash in her own weird, aggressive way, and he cares for her. That truth keeps me talking.
“I’m a bit . . . irrational when it comes to Nash,” I admit, tracking him as he walks down the beach. “Eight years ago, I told him to leave because he was chasing things I wasn’t.”
She adjusts her wide-brimmed hat, and out of nowhere, I want to come clean. Like maybe telling her will get me one step closer to telling him. I’m running out of time, and I’m stuck.
“And eight months later, I had a baby.”
Her face goes on a roller-coaster ride of understanding. “Oh no you didn’t just tell me that.” She curses through gritted teeth, once again an angry ventriloquist. “Tell me you just didn’t tell me that.”
I wince.
“Why you tellin’ me this?” She pulls her handheld fan out of a beach bag and blasts it toward her face. “I don’t want your secrets. I don’t even like you.”
With an odd sense of relief, I laugh. “I don’t know.”
“You still love him?”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“That ain’t even the same damn question.”
“I’m scared,” I admit. “That he’ll hate me when he finds out.
That he won’t show up for her. That he’ll want to be with us out of obligation and not because it’s what he wants.
” A wave explodes into foam at the shoreline, and a little boy runs by with a kite.
“That I’ll do the wrong thing. My mom needs surgery and spends her free time trying to put me in an early grave.
We’re broke. I—” I blow out a long exhale. “I don’t know what to do.”
She grabs Cap’s flask from his chair and takes a hefty slug. “You drive me to drink before lunchtime, honey child.”
She offers it to me and I take it. The rum slides down my throat with a burn.
“Nash tell you about my husband?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“Marine,” she says. “James was his name. Man loved being a Marine. Oorah’d every chance he’d get. Damn fool.” She smiles a real smile. “Three tours of duty, but he died in training at Camp Lejeune. Motherfucker drowned.”
For the first time since meeting her, she isn’t angry with me, she’s not an attack dog. Sunny is a woman who lost the man she loved.
She continues. “I was pregnant with JJ—James Junior, my youngest. Thought I’d surprise him when he got back.
Made a cake. Bought some lingerie. I was gonna say, ‘James, you about to be a baby daddy again. Come take care of Mama ’fore I’m too big to get to gettin’.
’” She snaps her fingers, sassy. We both laugh at this.
“Bastard went and died ’fore I could even look sexy for him. ”
She may use aggressive humor like a shield, but the sad smile on my face is a mirror image of hers. She misses her husband.
“The point of me draggin’ myself back through hell with this story is—” Her attitude is back in place as she mists herself with her fan.
“We ain’t got nobody to tell us how many days we get.
God don’t give a rat’s ass about our timeline or plans of bein’ sexy.
We all here walkin’ each other home for as long as that walk gets to last. We wake up thinkin’ we have all the time in the damn world and gon’ have ourselves a special Wednesday, then life stops and ends as we know it. ”