Then, for what seemed like the hundredth time, Nick surprised me, because as he carried me down to the beach I saw a little gazebo sitting right in the middle of the sand, complete with white lights and a table in the middle. There were two seats at the table and it held covered dishes as well as candles.
“Oh. My. God, Nick!” I said, as we got closer. “Is that for us?”
He smirked at me. “It is, and you can start apologizing whenever you’re up to it.”
When we were a few feet away I saw Gabe stand up from the steps leading up to the gazebo.
Nick set me down on the bottom stair, but kept one arm around my waist. “Dude, thanks for the help,” he said high-fiving Gabe.
“No problem, man.” He smiled at me. “You’re looking lovely, Miss Lyndsey.” He leaned in and kissed me on the cheek.
“Back off, asshole,” Nick said, giving Gabe a small shove.
Gabe laughed and then hopped off the stairs to the sand. He walked backwards as he said, “Remember, dude, curfew’s at twelve, but Uncle Gabe won’t be home until really late, like tomorrow morning sometime, so you’re on your own.”
“Peace, out, man,” Nick responded, making a shooing motion with his hand. I couldn’t help but laugh.
Once Gabe had disappeared into the darkening evening, Nick took my hand and led me up to the table. “May I show you to your seat, madam?” he said pulling my chair out like a waiter.
“Why yes, thank you.” He took the seat opposite of me.
“Now, I’ve got wine, in case you wanted the full-on romantic dinner experience.” He reached down under the table and pulled out a six-pack of Kite Tail Ale, then waggled his eyebrows at me. “Or, you can have one of these with me, because I’ve got to tell you, the whole wine thing? Kind of sucks.”
I laughed. He always knew just what I was thinking. “I am so with you. Give me one of those bottles.”
Once I had a nice cold beer in my hand I took a moment to look around. The table was small and covered with a white tablecloth. There were five covered dishes, candles, and nice plates. It was obvious he’d gotten a restaurant to cater the food. “Okay, so I guess I do owe you a pretty big apology.” I was embarrassed. “I mean, where did this gazebo come from? I know it’s never been here before. I come to this beach a lot. You didn’t build this just for tonight did you?” The thought of Nick doing all of this was sort of horrifying. I couldn’t see how a date with me would be worth all that work.
“No, Gabe and I just borrowed it for the night.”
“Borrowed it?” I squinted at him and took a sip of the cold, bitter beer, becoming more curious by the minute.
He laughed. “So, you know how Home Depot always has those examples of projects sitting outside the store? Sample decks and playsets and stuff?” I nodded, still not understanding. “Well, this is one of the samples, and we arranged to borrow it for the night.”
“No way. How in the world did you ever get it out here?”
“My truck and a flatbed trailer. It wasn’t that big of a deal.” He shrugged as he took a drink of his beer.
“You guys carried this thing from the parking lot?”
“Yeah, Kelly’s fiancé, Ian, helped, and Ian’s brother who’s visiting from Texas. Between the four of us it wasn’t that bad.”
“But, Nick, you did all of this for our date?”
He sat forward and looked at me seriously. “I told you I wanted this to be the best date you’ve ever had,” he said softly.
“Yeah, but why? You hardly know me.”
I saw his face fall, and I knew I’d hurt him. I also knew, deep down, how wrong I was. He did know me. I didn’t want him to, but he did. That was the problem.
He recovered quickly though, covering up by taking another swig of beer. “Well, that’s what the date is for, to remedy me not hardly knowing you I guess.” He smiled, but it was forced, the skin around his mouth tight.
“Hey, I’ve got all this food. Let’s eat, huh?” He lifted the lid of one of the dishes and there were mussels in a white wine sauce.
“Wow, you know what? This is now, without a doubt, the best date I’ve ever been on. How did you know that mussels were my favorites?” I shook my head in amazement as he spooned some of them onto my plate, and passed me a basket full of thick, fluffy bread that looked homemade.
“If I tell you that, then it won’t seem so impressive anymore. You’ve got to leave me a little mystery.” He laughed and then raised his beer bottle up. “How about a toast?” I raised my bottle as well, smiling at him. “To the world’s best date and the town’s hottest girl. Cheers.”
My heart wrenched inside my chest, and I knew that agreeing to this night had been a very bad decision. Very bad.
Nick
While the conversation wasn’t going as smoothly as I might have hoped, Lyndsey was impressed with the beach setup and the food, so at least all that effort hadn’t been for nothing. I couldn’t figure out why the rest was so tough. We usually didn’t have any trouble talking to each other, but she seemed determined to be prickly and I couldn’t figure out how to get her to mellow out.
After dinner I hit on the secret, and who knew that all those jokes about women and chocolate would end up being true? I’d gotten chocolate mousse and when I took the cover off of the tray, Lyndsey’s eyes glazed over like she’d just had an orgasm.
“Chocolate mousse? No way. Ohhh, I love chocolate mousse.”
I loved it right about then too. Anything that could make her look and sound like that was a winner in my book.
“Well then, Goldilocks, dig in,” I said handing her a dish.
“Mmm,” she moaned as she took the first bite, her pink tongue sliding over the spoon then slipping back in between those plump red lips. Fuck, I might not make it through dessert. Who could imagine that watching someone eat could get you so hard?
“Ohh, Nick,” she breathed. “This is sooo good.” She closed her eyes and I saw the slim column of her throat working as she swallowed.
I adjusted myself as discreetly as possible. “Well, I’m . . .” I had to clear my throat. “I’m glad you like it.”
When she scraped the bottom of her dish she looked up at me. “Nick? Are you Okay?”
I blinked a couple of times to clear my lust-filled head, wishing there was something similar I could do for the problem lower down. “Yeah, I’m great, you want mine too? I’m not a big sugar fan.”
She shrugged. “I probably shouldn’t, but it’s a special occasion, so sure.” She smiled as I handed it over and resumed my silent observations of her, chocolate, and my hard-on.
Once the porn with pudding show was over I knew I needed to find a way to calm my frayed nerves. The switch from cranky Lyndsey to orgasmic Lyndsey was a little jarring.
“So, are you willing to take a walk down the beach in your bare feet?” I asked.
She smiled. “Totally. I’m sorry about earlier. I was being a bitch.”
“You, young lady,” I said, as I stood up and took her hand in mine. “Aren’t capable of being a bitch. But, I’ll take the less cranky version. Let’s go see how that sand feels.”
We walked along the shoreline, cool water splashing over our feet, sand squishing in between our toes. The sun was all the way down now, but the moon was already pretty bright so it wasn’t hard to see where we were going. We were both quiet for a few minutes, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. Finally, Lyndsey stopped and looked out at the water.
“When I first moved here, I would come to the beach in the evenings like this and sit and look out at all that water for hours. Everything seems so far away when there’s an ocean in between. It was like any place else I’d ever been was in a totally different world.”
I nodded and turned to face her, putting my arms around her waist. “You’ve never told me anything about yourself before you came here. It was just you and your mom most of the time?”
“Yeah, she was a waitress, you know,” she huffed out a sarcastic laugh. “
Like mother like daughter.”
“Nothing wrong with being a waitress,” I rubbed my hand up her arm. “And, you’re in college, so I assume you’re not going to be a waitress for the rest of your life.”
“I used to think not. I’m not so sure anymore. It’s taking me so long to get the degree and I can’t afford to do stuff like internships for me to get a better job when I’m done. Plus now, with Raoul . . . I’m not sure what Leesa’s going to do, but I won’t leave her, she’s going to need me.”
I put my finger under her chin and lifted her face to look at me. “You’re a really good person, you know that? And whatever you want to do in life, you’ll figure it out. You’ve got to believe that though.” She nodded. “You’re also really good at deflecting. You were going to tell me about growing up and your mom.”
She sighed and turned away, pulling me by the hand so we started walking again. “I’m not going to lie. It wasn’t all that great. My mom, she tried, but she was always at work. She was a waitress in a diner, so she didn’t make hardly any money, and for as long as I can remember she worked all night, and a lot of times pulled a second shift during the day. When I was really little my dad was around, but by the time I was eight or so he was gone so she’d put me to bed and then just leave me there alone all night.”
“Wow, Lynds, that’s pretty rough.” I was pissed at someone who would do that to their tiny, vulnerable kid, but also at a world that put a mom in the situation where it was the only choice she had. “And she passed away?”
“Um, yeah. My senior year in high school, it was a car accident.”
“So what did you do then? Where did you live?” My heart burned at the thought of a seventeen-year-old Lyndsey left all alone in the world.
“Well, I got my GED so I could work more hours, and I didn’t tell anyone. I mean there wasn’t anyone to tell. I turned eighteen a few months later so it didn’t really matter.”
The waves came up further than they had been, and soaked Lyndsey mid-way up her calves. She shrieked and I laughed at the girly sound of it.
We both jogged up the sand away from the water a few yards. “I suppose we can’t sit down without ruining your dress, huh?” I asked.
“Oh what the hell, you only live once.” She smiled at me.
We sat down side-by-side facing the water, hands still linked. I bumped her shoulder with mine. “I like hearing about your life. What else you got for me?”
She laughed quietly, and took a deep breath. “You’re dying to know, aren’t you?”
“Dying to know what?”
“One of my secrets.”
I shrugged. “Only if you want to tell.”
“Well, if that were the case I’d never tell anyone. It’s not something that’s fun to talk about, or nice or pretty. It’s horrible and people don’t have much respect for me after they hear it.”
“Hey.” I stroked her hair as she laid her head on my shoulder. “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to, but, damn girl, there is nothing you could ever say that would make me lose respect for you, please believe that.”
“I’d like to. I’d really like to.”
I was quiet, waiting to see what she’d decide. Finally, she sat up straighter and put her arms around her bent knees. Pulling herself into a tight ball as if that would protect her from whatever she was about to say.
“So, like I said, my mom and me were poor, and I was alone—a lot. Even when she was home, my mom didn’t really do much with me. I think she was so tired-out from the money worries that she didn’t have anything left for me. It was like she gave me shelter and food, and that was all she had in her.”
I nodded, hating the strain that wove its way through her voice.
“I started working virtually the day I turned old enough. She didn’t even have to tell me to go get a job. I knew I had to. I worked at the Dairy Queen, earning minimum wage. I had a couple of friends who worked with me, but that was about it. I was too poor to be one of the ‘it’ girls at school.
“Spring of my junior year, this guy, one of the football players from school, started hanging around the DQ all the time.”
I felt my stomach twist at the mention of another guy. As many years ago as it was, I still didn’t want to hear about her with someone else—anyone else.
She put her chin down on her knees, her silver earrings falling forward alongside her cheeks.
“He started paying a lot of attention to me.” She continued. “Chris—his name was Chris—was this really popular guy, and he was a senior. I didn’t believe for a second that he was interested in me, even though my girlfriends kept saying he was. When he started really flirting with me I figured he was bored, or it was some kind of joke. He was one of those guys, and I was nobody, it was beyond a fantasy, it wasn’t possible. ”
She lifted her eyes to me. I nodded, and ran a finger along her ankle, tucked up tight against her body.
“I’m guessing this Chris dude became your boyfriend?”
“Yeah, he did. And before I knew it, we were a matched set. We never went anywhere without each other. The only places I was ever without him were work and home, and even then he was around a lot.”
“Wow.” I shook my head. “I don’t think I’ve ever been that tight with a girlfriend.”
She laughed and, as beautiful as she was, the sound was bitter and angry.
“I sure hope you’ve never been that tight with a girlfriend, because working at SOaDA I’ve learned that it’s one of the signs of an abusive relationship.”
My mind raced back to our conversation several weeks earlier in the back of Gabe’s car. Back to my sense that there was more to her work with SOaDA than she let on, back to the look she’d had on her face that first night I met her when the football player grabbed her and wouldn’t let her go.
“No,” I whispered, horrified and angry and sick all at once.
“Don’t, Nick, don’t make it worse than it is already.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then looked out at the ocean where the waters had calmed and the waves were slowly rolling in and out of shore.
“After Chris graduated he got a scholarship to play ball at the university there in town. He got an apartment with another guy on the team, and we kept spending all of our time together. With my mom at work all night I started just staying at Chris’s place most of the time. Even if she’d been home I don’t think she would have cared.”
I don’t know if she realized she was doing it, but as Lyndsey talked she scooted further and further away from me. It was so subtle that I didn’t notice at first, but eventually I realized that when she started talking she’d been sitting so close our bodies touched, and now she was several inches away from me.
“We’d probably been dating six or seven months the first time it happened.” She lifted her head, gazing at the water, then finally turned to face me. Her skin was like liquid silver in the moonlight, and her eyes were dark and so sad it broke my heart. I reached out and placed my hand on her cheek.
“You don’t have to keep going,” I rasped out.
“Yes, I do.” She rested her cheek in my palm for a moment, and I relished the feel of her silky skin.
“I wasn’t scheduled to work at DQ on most Saturday mornings. But that day, someone else had called in sick, so my manager needed me to take the shift. I told Chris that I wouldn’t be able to come to his game and he was really pissed. I tried explaining that it wasn’t up to me. He kept getting more and more angry. Eventually he told me to call my boss and tell her I wouldn’t be there, and if she had a problem with it I had to quit.
“I couldn’t understand why he was so upset, but there was no way I could quit my job. I didn’t love it, but somehow deep down inside I knew I needed it. Without a job, I had absolutely no way to take care of myself.
“Everything after that was so fast I didn’t understand what had happened for a few minutes. I told him I wouldn’t call my boss, and the next thing I knew I was on
the floor, and he was screaming at me, and my head hurt so bad.”
By this time, there was a good twelve inches between Lyndsey and me. I reached over, put my arm around her and pulled her toward me. She stiffened up for a moment, but scooted closer and put her head down on my shoulder before she went on.
“He had backhanded me across the side of my head. While I was on the floor he kicked me in the hip a couple of times. I was so shocked I didn’t do anything to protect myself or to fight back. I laid there and just let him.” She gritted out the last part, self-recrimination oozing out of her.
“Goddammit, Lyndsey.” I sounded harsher than I meant to. “You were seventeen-years-old, all alone, no one to look out for you or give you advice. Don’t you ever blame yourself for what that fucker did.”
I turned and took her shoulders, holding her away from me so I could look in her eyes. “Do you hear me? You were the victim, absolutely and completely. No man should ever hit a woman. It doesn’t matter what she does or doesn’t do. Promise me you’ll never forget that.” My voice lost some of its vehemence as the sorrow for what she’d survived replaced my anger.
She nodded her head, and I pulled her back close to me. Her arms came around me and I buried my head in her neck, smelling her soft, warm skin and the ocean air around us. My stomach roiled, and my head was spinning with the images of Lyndsey on a cold floor, dazed, being beaten. Lyndsey so young and so alone. It was sickening and infuriating and I couldn’t decide whether to go hunt the bastard down or keep her wrapped in my arms forever so no one would ever hurt her again.
She looked up at me. “You went through so much trouble for this date, and I’ve ruined it all. I was a pain in the ass when we got here and now I’ve dumped my disgusting past on you. You’re such a nice guy, Nick. You don’t deserve this.”
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