Chapter 25
The taxi dropped them at the edge of the main strip around four in the afternoon, and the energy hit them before they’d even closed the car door: music from three directions, the smell of sunscreen and fried food, and people everywhere.
“It’s less insane than Saturday,” Becca said, looking around, and she was right. It was still packed but didn’t quite have the same sense that everyone was on the verge of properly cutting loose.
“Maybe that was just our stretch of beach? But it’s Thursday. Give it a few hours.”
They headed for the beach first, kicking off their sandals and walking down close to the waterline.
It was busy but not the wall-to-wall madness of Saturday.
Ellie figured that by this stage of the week you’d have some people who went far too hard at the start and were struggling by now.
If her hypothesis was right it probably meant a different vibe, those still going a mix of the more sensible and the true party animals.
They found a spot, laid out their towels, and within ten minutes had been adopted by a mixed group of guys and girls from Florida State who seemed to have colonised that part of the beach since early.
They offered them beers from one of several coolers, refusing any offer of payment, claiming they’d bought far too much and couldn’t possibly drink them all before they went home.
“Where are y’all from?” asked the guy who seemed to be in charge of the cooler, a sunburned kid in board shorts who could only have been barely nineteen.
“Austin,” Becca said.
“Nice. You in school there?”
“We graduated a couple of years ago.”
“Oh, cool.” He nodded sagely, as if a couple of years was a vast and incomprehensible distance. “So you’re like… out here just for fun?”
“Just for fun,” Ellie confirmed, sipping the free beer and trying not to laugh.
In all fairness they were good company, curious about adult life which presumably felt a long way off still and genuinely interested to meet two women who were a little different to the crowd they’d been hanging with all week.
They stayed on the beach for an hour, soaking up the sun and the atmosphere, watching the parade of spring break go past them while they chatted.
A few of the Florida State guys were throwing a football between them in a game that seemed to have serious consequences for anyone who committed the heinous crime of dropping it.
“I love this,” Becca said, lying on her stomach, chin on her hands. “It’s so stupid and I love it. We should have done this when we were younger.
“It is extremely stupid.” Ellie laughed. “But yeah. Though I’m not sure college us would have appreciated it like now us do. If that makes sense?”
“You’re right. We weren’t exactly party central, were we? Still… better late than never. We should make the most of this.” She turned her head to look at Ellie. “Bar?”
“Bar.”
***
They found a place that was busy without being unhinged like the place from Saturday had been.
It still had the obligatory bar open to the outside, a DJ despite it not even being dark yet, and a crowd all in the uniform of board shorts and vests for the boys, bikinis and shorts for the girls, but with the atmosphere of a group who’d paced themselves.
Yes, they’d probably had a few beers already but the evening was still young.
The music was loud but not so loud you had to shout unless you were on the dance floor, which was busy but not insane.
They got drinks and found a high table on the terrace, settling in to watch the crowd.
It was a good slot, they could see the bar and the dance floor while still in the middle of things, and they chatted while the watched all of the little micro-dramas play out: a group of girls arriving in matching outfits, guys trying to make a move on the dance floor and mostly crashing and burning, a couple making out in the corner where Ellie was pretty sure they reckoned nobody could see them.
“I’d love to know their back story,” Ellie said, indicating them with her head.
“Ooohh… let me. Right.” Becca thought for a moment. “They don’t want anyone to see them. She keeps glancing towards the door but she’s into him. He’s trying to make the most of it… look at his hands.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I’ve got it. She’s got a boyfriend but he’s not here this week. Her friends are. The guy knows she’s got a boyfriend and wants to make the most of it. And she wants to too, maybe going home tomorrow, make the most of it. I’d say fifty-fifty whether they sleep together.”
“You’re good,” Ellie admitted. “Too good.”
Becca beamed. “Professional therapist. Basically makes me a mind reader.”
“Though we’re assuming you’re right. To prove the hypothesis we need to go and ask them…”
“Be my guest.” Becca looked over at a mixed group sat a few tables over. “Your turn. How about them?”
It was twenty minutes later that two women approached their table, both carrying drinks, both looking over their shoulders at a group of guys near the bar who were watching them with the hopeful expressions of golden retrievers who'd spotted a treat.
"Hi, this is going to sound weird," said the first one, "but can we sit with you? Those guys have been trying to buy us drinks since the beach and if we have to hear one more time about how they're going to be investment bankers we're going to commit a crime."
"Please, sit," Becca said, gesturing to the empty chairs. "We've been there."
“Thank you. Oh my God, thank you.” The second woman dropped into her chair like she’d just escaped a hostage situation. “I’m Alexa, this is Mia.”
"Becca. And this is Ellie."
Ellie took a moment to look at their new companions.
Mia was beautiful. Shoulder-length dark hair, brown eyes, the kind of face that didn’t need makeup to look good.
She was wearing the obligatory bikini top and denim shorts, and she had the build of someone who did something athletic seriously…
strong shoulders, defined arms, she looked sporty.
"You are lifesavers,” Alexa said. She was a little taller than Mia, with long bleach-blonde hair, blue eyes, and a tan that looked like it had been her main goal since day one of spring break.
Same athletic build, same effortless beauty, same air of being entirely aware of how good she looked.
"I swear the guys get younger every year.
I'm twenty-two, not forty. I shouldn't feel like a cougar. "
"Senior year?" Ellie asked.
"That obvious?" Mia laughed. "Yeah, last spring break. We thought it would be this amazing victory lap and honestly? We peaked on like day two. Now we're just tired and sunburned and over it."
"We hooked up with some guys earlier in the week," Alexa added, not remotely shy about it at all. "That was fun for about five minutes. Literally five minutes in one case." She and Mia exchanged a look and dissolved into laughter.
"Five minutes is generous," Mia added.
"I was being kind. It was barely one."
They were fun. Ellie liked them immediately despite, or maybe because of, the slight arrogance that came off them both.
These were two women who knew that they were the prettiest people in most rooms they walked into.
It wasn't obnoxious, just something that was a given for them. They were used to being wanted, used to choosing rather than being chosen, and the spring break environment, where they were clearly at the top of whatever hierarchy existed among the college crowd in terms of both looks and seniority, seemed on the surface to have amplified that self-assurance even further. On the surface, but as they talked, deep down, Ellie recognised it as something else… a realisation that they’d outgrown this all.
“Where are you from?” Becca asked.
“I’m Atlanta,” Mia said. “She’s Mississippi. We’re at Georgia, both seniors. Volleyball.”
“That explains the arms,” Ellie said, grinning.
“These?” Mia flexed, grinning back. “Years of suffering. Totally worth it. Where are you at school?”
“We graduated a few years ago.”
Mia’s eyebrows went up. “Wait, really? How old are you?”
“Twenty-five.”
Mia looked at Alexa. “Twenty-five. Actual adults.”
“Wow.” Alexa looked at them with renewed interest. “You’re the oldest people we’ve talked to all week who aren’t trying to sell us something or sleep with us.”
“The night is young,” Ellie said, and Becca kicked her under the table.
“Seriously though,” Mia said, leaning forward, “can we hang out with you guys tonight? I know that’s a weird thing to ask but we are so over spring break.
We’ve been here since Saturday and I’m tired of being the oldest people in every room.
Everyone else is nineteen or twenty and it’s like babysitting. ”
“And now it’s Thursday,” Alexa added, “and the guys have got worse, the music’s got louder and we’re at the top of the social pile because everyone else is a sophomore, which sounds fun until you realise it just means they all want to be able to go home saying they fucked a volleyball playing senior.
” Alexa shook her head. “We came out tonight hoping to find some actual conversation and instead we got them.” She jerked her thumb toward the bar where the group of guys were already attempting to engage a new target.
“So yeah. Can we hang with you? We’re fun, I promise. We’ll buy rounds.”
“You can absolutely hang with us,” Becca said. “But you’re not buying rounds.”
“We’re not?”
“You’re college students. We have jobs.”
Mia looked at Alexa. “I love them already.”
“Same,” Alexa said.
They fell into a fun and easy conversation, swerving the easy option of giving career advice and instead comparing and contrasting Georgia and Stanford, finding common ground despite how different their respective college experiences had been.
“You’re staying in PCB too?” Mia asked.
Ellie shook her head. “About twenty minutes down the coast. We got a rental.”
“We drove along there on the way from the airport, it’s so much nicer than here. Wish we could afford that.”
“We’re married,” Becca added. “That helps.” Ellie saw a twitch of a smile, knowing that Becca enjoyed making the big reveal, we’re lesbians, we’re married, what do you think of that, and watched the other two for their reaction.
Alexa's face lit up. "That's so sweet! How long?” She turned to Mia. “Those are the kind of husbands I want, honestly, ones who are happy for their wives to go to spring break without them."
Ellie stifled a laugh and saw Becca force herself to keep a straight face. Maybe they could have a little fun with this.
“It’s great that you’re still close. My cousin got married and she barely sees her friends anymore,” Mia said. “You live near each other?”
“Yeah, Austin,” Ellie replied. “Been there for a year.”
“Before that we were in the Bay Area,” Becca added, her eyes twinkling with concealed amusement.
Alexa shook her head. “And you moved with your husbands at the same time? That’s commitment.”
“We’ve always been close.” Becca tilted her head. “Ellie’s worth it.”
Ellie kept her face perfectly straight. They’d done this before, the slow reveal, and the pleasure of it never wore off… the gentle comedy of letting people fill in the wrong blanks while the truth sat there plain to see.
“You two must be really close to uproot your whole life, your husbands uproot their whole lives too, like that,” Alexa said.
“We’re very close,” Ellie agreed. “Inseparable, you might say.” She paused. “We live together.”
Becca let out a little laugh and Mia’s drink stopped halfway to her mouth. Alexa sat up straighter. There was a moment of silence as the two of them recalibrated. “You’re married but you live together…” Mia said slowly.
Alexa pursed her lips but a grin was pushing through underneath. “There aren’t any husbands, are there?”
Mia gasped in realisation. “You absolute… how long were you going to let us think you were just friends?”
“As long as it took,” Becca said, laughing.
“We were doing so well until Becca cracked,” Ellie said. “She always cracks.”
“I do. I’m sorry. I have no poker face.”
“We’ve been together seven years,” Ellie said. “Married for two. Since freshman year at Stanford.”
“Stanford,” Mia repeated. “Married at twenty-three. While we’re out here peaking on day two of spring break.” She looked at Alexa, shaking her head. “We are catastrophically underachieving.”
“Speak for yourself,” Alexa said. “I have a five-year plan.”
“Her five-year plan involves marrying a rich man,” Mia told Ellie and Becca. “It’s not the most sophisticated.”
“It absolutely is sophisticated. It’s a plan and it takes five years.”
“And you’ve had it for three years already with no success.”
Alexa scoffed and waved her hand. “Details,” she added, starting to laugh.
They all laughed, and it was interesting to see how the energy changed after the big reveal.
It usually went one of two ways… either a kind of ‘does not compute’ reaction, where whoever they were talking to wasn’t comfortable with it, or a ‘that’s cool, now what were we saying’ reaction.
Alexa and Mia seemed to be firmly the latter, the two of them looking at Ellie and Becca now not just as a convenient escape from bad chat-up lines but as genuinely interesting people living a life that was several steps ahead of where they were, and that just happened to involve them being two women married to each other.
They stayed for another round, talking mainly about spring break.
Their new friends were incredulous to hear that Ellie and Becca had never done spring break when they were at college, and told how they’d done it every year (“That first year was most of our team… that got wild”).
It sounded like they had some stories to tell, and Ellie and Becca gladly listened.
“So look… I know you did spring break on Saturday,” Mia said at one point. “Or at least you think you did. But it would be negligent of us not to take our new hot, lesbian friends under our wing and show you how the pros do it.” She paused and smiled. “You down?”
“I am,” Becca replied without hesitation. “El?”
Ellie shrugged. “You only live once. Yeah, I am too.”
“Excellent. This calls for shots, our shout this time,” Alexa said, standing and already on her way to the bar.
“What have we let ourselves in for?” Ellie asked.
“Fun,” Mia laughed. “You two are the most exciting thing to happen to us all week.”