Sandcastle Beach--Includes a Bonus Novella

by Jenny Holiday

  Well, at least she wouldn’t have to live to see the demise of her theater. Her dad could make the floral arrangements for her funeral.

  Hands materialized on her body, one large palm splayed over her midback and another, mortifyingly, wrapped around one hip so while Benjamin’s thumb was pressed against her hip bone, he basically had a handful of butt cheek. The little staircase had no railings, so she wobbled back and forth, his hands still on her, while she regained her equilibrium. His hands were warm and strong. Which was exactly what she’d been thinking during their awkwardly long handshake at his place a few weeks ago. Except that had been one hand. This was two hands. And her butt.

  “You’re okay,” he said in her ear.

  That was the strange thing about Benjamin. He was her sworn enemy. But she knew somehow that he would never let her fall—physically, anyway. There was that movie An Officer and a Gentleman, but was there such a thing as a jerk and a gentleman?

  Once she’d righted herself, he let her go, but for a moment his hands hovered an inch above her skin, as if he wanted to make sure she was okay before he fully retreated. She could have sworn she still felt them on her, though, still felt the heat of them.

  “Actually,” said Pearl, who had registered neither the butt grabbing nor Maya’s near-death experience, “Jake Ramsey built that dunk tank for Joe Wilkerson, may he rest in peace, to sit in years ago, and if you recall, Joe was a larger gentleman. So if you squeeze in, I suspect there’s room on that seat for both of you!” She sounded delighted with this plan. “I wonder if we can charge double if you’re both sitting in there.”

  Could they share the seat? Maya eyed Benjamin. He raised his eyebrows. A challenge.

  She sat.

  He did, too, and hooboy. Maybe she should have given up and let him have this gig. The seat was technically big enough for both of them, but only when they were smushed together, her right side plastered to his left. Way more than the contact between them that had occurred on the roof of the newspaper building. She tried to do the thing you do on public transport next to a manspreader, to curl inward and make yourself as small as possible, but there simply was not enough room. This was going to be full-contact dunk-tank victimhood.

  She steeled herself.

  It took a while for Pearl to get the booth officially open—she had to hunt down Karl, who was the one scheduled to operate it, and find him some cash with which to make change. A line formed.

  She and Benjamin didn’t speak. It was a gorgeous day. Blue sky, warm sun, slight breeze off the lake, the scent of honeysuckle on the air.

  Torture.

  The line got longer.

  The silence grew heavier.

  Finally Karl appeared, rubbing his palms together as he conferred with Pearl. “All right!” he shouted to the crowd. “Here we go! Dunk Maya and Law! A buck a ball or five balls for three. Step right up!”

  Their first would-be assailant was someone she didn’t recognize. “Do you know who that is?” she asked Benjamin.

  “Eric Handler. He’s from south of town a ways. He’s the—”

  Splat.

  She was plunged into freezing water.

  And shrieking again. She needed to quit the shrieking. It was unbecoming. It did not communicate any of the things she wanted to communicate—to the town or to Benjamin.

  She just hadn’t expected the water to be so cold. It was colder than the lake in May.

  “—captain of the Grand View softball team,” Benjamin finished as he resurfaced.

  “Clearly.” Eric Handler had perfect aim.

  When she stood, the water was only up to her boobs, but she’d fallen with such force that her head had briefly gone under. She wiped her eyes and pushed her hair out of her face. She’d twisted it up even higher on her head than usual to try to keep it dry, but it was coming loose.

  “Jesus Christ, this is cold.” Benjamin shook himself like a dog and got water all over her. She snarled at him and rewiped her face.

  They scrambled back onto the seat and sat through a failed attempt by CJ from the hair salon.

  While CJ dug in her purse for more money, Maya glanced around trying to suss out who else was coming for them. Certainly nobody was going to have the lethal aim the captain of the Grand View softball team had. There wasn’t—

  Oh. Oh no. “That’s Holden Hampshire!”

  Benjamin followed her gaze. “The guy in the sweater?”

  “Yep. Arg!” She’d known he was arriving today, but they were supposed to meet later. Much later, at seven, after she’d had a chance to un-drowned-rat-ify herself. “Maybe he won’t recognize me.”

  “You don’t want him to recognize you?”

  “Not like this.”

  “Why not?”

  “Uh, let’s see. The part where I look like a waterlogged rat? The part where my arm fat is showing? The part where I’m supposed to be his boss and therefore projecting authority and competence and not dishevelment and chaos? All of the above?”

  He twisted his upper body so he was fully facing her and regarded her with a quizzical expression.

  Splat.

  They were plunged again into the freezing water.

  Whereas she emerged coughing and sputtering, he stood from the dunk and calmly hopped back onto the platform. “You look fine.”

  “I do not look fine.” She squirmed her way back up with considerably less grace and surveyed what she could see of the festival, trying to locate Holden again. Thankfully, he’d made a turn and was in line at the outdoor bar Benjamin had set up that was being manned by his dad.

  “You do, though,” Benjamin said peevishly, and how was it they were arguing about her appearance and he was the one taking the position that she looked good? “You’re just wet. It’s a thing that happens when you’re in a dunk tank.”

  “I can feel my mascara running.” She’d worn waterproof, but clearly it wasn’t up to the task.

  Splat.

  Ugh! She struggled to her feet again and wiped her eyes. Jordan Riley, her mer-king from last year, had been the thrower of that direct hit. So much for royal solidarity.

  “I’m not sure how smart it was to wear mascara for dunk-tank duty,” Benjamin said mildly, unaffected by the fact that their conversation kept getting interrupted by their being plunged into icy water. He turned to Karl. “Give us a minute to get our bearings, will you?”

  He didn’t need to get his bearings. He was just standing there with his skin glistening in the sun, completely unruffled. Apparently Benjamin Lawson was effortlessly good at being dunked. Everything came easily to him. Blinding good looks and bank loans. He collected them like they were his right. It irritated her. But…maybe that wasn’t entirely fair. He had more going on than met the eye, she’d recently learned.

  “Sure,” Karl said. “Take five. I’m gonna go check on the pie walk.” He turned to the line. “We’re taking a little break. Back in a few.”

  Maya eyed the line—and beyond. Holden Hampshire was strolling in this direction. “Crap. He’s coming over here.” She grabbed Benjamin’s arms and maneuvered him so he was in front of her. He was broad-chested enough to obscure her. Naturally.

  “What are you doing?” he said peevishly, resisting her attempts to manipulate him.

  She decided to go with the truth. “I’m hiding.”

  Law blinked. Maya’s admission that she was hiding from Band Boy unnerved him.

  It also annoyed him. He hadn’t been lying before: she looked fine. Honestly, she looked more than fine. She was wearing a swimsuit that looked like it came from the pinup era. It was like a sailor’s uniform in swimsuit format. The top was navy and white stripes, but under her breasts it changed to solid navy. There were two rows of red buttons—actual buttons—running up her middle. The physicality of those buttons on otherwise smooth swimsuit fabric was a little jarring. You had to hold yourself back from touching them. The overall effect was really…something.

  He allowed himself to be used as a
human shield, even though there was no reason she should be hiding. She was holding his arms out to the sides, her fingers wrapped around his biceps, like he really was a shield she was brandishing.

  “What’s Holden doing?” she whispered.

  He searched the crowd for the overgrown emo boy they’d seen before. “I have to say, I expected him to look different.”

  “Different how?”

  Ah crap. This was not the part where he would admit to having googled Holden Hampshire. He’d read the dude’s Wikipedia entry but apparently hadn’t paid attention to his photo. “I don’t know. Older.” Less like a thirty-five-year-old douchebag. It was hard to believe that Holden was a couple years older than Law was.

  This guy was wearing jeans, which, fine. It was hot, though. Normal people came to the Raspberry Festival in shorts. But the kicker was that on top, he was wearing a sweater. A black one. In July. It wasn’t a regular sweater, though. It was loosely woven, like a giant had knit a sweater out of rope using oversize needles.

  So it wouldn’t have worked as a sweater in actual sweater weather, either. It was a completely-inappropriate-for-any-season sweater.

  “Don’t let him see me!” Maya tightened her grip on him.

  She looked fine. If you were partial to the sun glinting off wet skin and smudgy eye makeup that called to mind a night spent—

  He shook his head. All this hiding was unnecessary, was the point.

  But actually, when he thought of Holden seeing those red buttons, those tactile, shiny little discs running from beneath her breasts to the bones of her hips…

  He puffed out his chest to try to make it bigger, more of a shield.

  His attention was drawn by the approach of someone else. It was Maya’s brother. He hadn’t realized Rohan was in town. “Hey,” he said.

  “Get rid of him,” Maya whisper-implored. Law tried to pull away, but she was still clinging to him, which caused a little tussle. Her breasts brushed his back. He sucked in a breath. It felt like she was sparking. Or he was. Someone was sparking.

  “Nice to see you,” he said to Rohan, pulling harder so as to make the sparks stop. Interestingly, they did not, even as he successfully broke contact. “I didn’t know you were in town.”

  “Oh my God, no!” she whimpered, still under the impression that he was talking to Holden. It pained him that she thought he would sell her out like that. Yes, they disliked each other—sort of…not really—but he would never set her up for actual humiliation.

  The fact that she could so easily think he would lit a spark of irritation in his chest.

  Which was actually fine, because that kind of spark he was familiar with.

  “It’s your brother,” he said, stepping aside and not even bothering to temper the annoyance in his tone. “Your precious pop star has gone into Pearl’s.”

  “Wait. What?”

  “Hey, kid,” Rohan said to his sister.

  “Rohan? Oh my God, Rohan!” Maya clapped her hands and jumped up and down, spraying Law in the process. He sputtered. She didn’t notice. “What are you doing here?”

  “I had a sudden yen for a vacation. Thought I’d hit the Raspberry Festival, stay on for your play.”

  “But that’s in like a month!”

  Ro just shrugged.

  “What?” Maya exclaimed. “What about voluntarily running twenty-six miles through the forest? What about Kara? What about your job?”

  Rohan shrugged. “Change of plans on the marathon, Kara and I broke up, and as for the job, I just…felt like a break.”

  “Rohan!” Maya sloshed over to the edge of the tank. “You broke up with another one? I didn’t even get to meet her!”

  He shrugged. Maya shook her head and threw her arms around him, drenching him in the process.

  Unbothered, he hugged her back. “Good to see you, kid.”

  Chapter Ten

  Maya used Ro’s appearance as an excuse to get out of the rest of her dunk-tank shift without making it look like she was shirking her community-mindedness duties—or letting Benjamin win something. She pulled on a cover-up, and they walked down to the lake.

  “What’s going on?” she asked when they reached the pier. When he shrugged, she slugged him in the arm. “What. Is. Going. On?” Something was. Rohan made plans and executed them. He didn’t show up unannounced.

  “Ow! Okay. If I tell you, you have to swear you won’t tell Mom or Dad. Or anyone.”

  “All right.” Crap. She was starting to get scared. Was he dying?

  He turned to her. “I quit my job. And broke up with Kara, but I told you that part.”

  “What? Why?” Kara she wasn’t surprised about. Rohan was a serial dater. But the job? She’d always wondered if part of the reason girlfriends never stuck was that he was married to his job.

  “I think I’m having a third-life crisis. Is that a thing?”

  She laughed, but only from relief—only because she was happy he wasn’t dying. “I don’t know. I’ve heard of midlife crises and quarter-life crises. So you’re either ahead of the curve or behind?” She was teasing, or trying to. She didn’t know what to say. Her brother was normally easygoing. This kind of drama was not his style.

  “I just…I don’t know.” He rested his elbows on the railing and stared out at the lake. “I turn thirty in the fall and I started thinking, what am I doing? What have I done with my life?”

  “Um, you have a BA from U of T and an MBA from Wharton and you’re a VP at Boeing—or I guess you were a VP at Boeing—and you have an awesome condo in Chicago? And you serially date amazing ladies that you break up with after a few months?”

  “Yeah, but what does all of that mean?” He was still resting on his elbows on the railing, but he turned to her with a strange, almost pained look on his face. “I have money. I have fancy degrees. But I work for a company that makes airplanes that are destroying the climate. And in my free time, I spend hours running, like, literally running. What’s it all for?”

  “Oh my God, you are having a third-life crisis!”

  “Yeah.” His straightforward agreement alarmed her.

  She went in for a hug, forcing him to peel his arms off the railing. “Well, I’m glad you came home, then. How can I help?”

  He gave her a short, hard squeeze before letting her go, and when he pulled away he looked more like his usual self. “Number one, by not telling Mom and Dad. I need to get my head on straight before I tell them I quit my job.” She nodded. “When Dad said he was going to sell the store, it sort of tipped me over the edge.”

  “Oh my God! You want the store!”

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Holy shit, Rohan!”

  “I just…When he said he was going to sell the store, it was a little bit…”

  “I know.” It was a little bit…fill in the blank. Shocking. Confusing. Sad. Scary—for her, anyway, because it made her realize how much she’d come to rely on the store as her backup career.

  “It’s not like I want it,” he went on. “So I don’t know why it threw me for such a loop.”

  “I know. It did me, too.” He put his elbows back on the railing, but instead of looking out on the lake he dropped his head in his hands and started massaging his forehead. “I just need some space. A break from my life.” He was silent for a long time, and she thought he was done talking, so she laid a hand on his back. He lifted his head and looked out over the lake. “I was running along the lake at home with Kara. We were toward the end of a long training session, and my building was in sight. I just suddenly didn’t want any of it. Including Kara, which is terrible, I know. She was sweet and fun. What is wrong with me?”

  “That part I can’t help you with, because I ask myself that about you all the time.”

  “It was just that she was so agreeable.”

  “You dumped your girlfriend because she was too agreeable?”

  He huffed a laugh. “I think I did. I meet these women that on paper I’m compatible with
, and then it’s so…boring. Kara was into the same stuff I was. She worked in the same industry. She was…”

  “Perfect. Perfectly boring.” Maya saw his point. It was hard to imagine getting excited about someone who always agreed with you.

  “Yeah,” he said. “So the day after this run, I was getting a massage. My usual therapist was on vacation, so I was seeing someone new. She wasn’t using enough pressure. I could barely feel it. For a massage to work, you need some pressure, you know? Some friction.” He shrugged. “I started to think maybe that’s true in life, too?”

  Maya could not help but laugh. “So you had a massage-as-metaphor epiphany and bailed on your whole life.”

  “Pretty much.” The corners of his mouth turned up as he looked at her. But he grew serious again as he pushed off the railing. “But you can’t tell Mom and Dad any of this. Not till I figure out what I’m going to do.”

  “Of course. What have you told them so far?”

  “Just that I had a bunch of use-it-or-lose-it vacation so I’m here for a month. I couched it like I was going to help them get ready to sell.”

  “I’m glad you came home. You don’t have to figure everything out immediately.”

  He smiled fondly at her. “I actually feel relieved having told you. But yeah, I thought I’d hang out, help Dad. Maybe you, too, if there’s any theater stuff I can do.”

  “Yes! There is so much theater stuff you can do.” She surprised herself by telling him everything. About how close to the edge the theater was, about her big gamble on Holden.

  “I can help you with money,” he said when she was done.

  “I appreciate it, but I don’t think that’s the answer. I was going to ask Mom and Dad for a loan, but then they dropped their bomb and started talking about how retiring early was going to be tight financially but doable. It wasn’t a great idea anyway. Turning to family to bail me out isn’t a long-term strategy. If Much Ado does well, and I can get this grant, I think I’ll be able to turn a corner. I want to use the grant money to set up a fundraising program that will help the theater be more self-sustaining. I think.” She was a little worried about how “community-minded” it was to use the grant money for fundraising. Maybe she should be expanding her camp and education offerings. She wasn’t even running any camps this August, having decided to focus entirely on Holden and Much Ado. She winced, thinking back to that A wise man once said do not put all eggs in a single basket fortune.