Kinsey loved the idea and when Mr. Bark put his arm out to her she put hers through his and they made for the gate and the beach beyond.
Kinsey held her high heeled shoes in her hand as she and Mr. Bark made their way across the beach to the water’s edge. The sand was still warm between her toes but with each few steps she could feel its temperature dropping as the sun lowered in the sky and was no longer able to pound its heat into the depths of the sand.
“It looks like your sailboat has changed course and is heading this way.” Mr. Barksley said, pointing up the beach.
Kinsey had been looking the other way, down the beach, toward the lifeguard stand and the two young lifeguards, one male and one female, admiring the dark bronzed tan of their bodies. They looked so good in the light of the setting sun, golden, shining like young gods and Kinsey felt a desire in her heart to start working a canvas with her brushes and paint. But Mr. Bark had ended those thoughts quickly with his last pronouncement.
“Where?” she asked as she turned and looked to where he was pointing.
“Right out there amongst the waves; he looks to be having a whale of a time, eh?”
Kinsey nodded as she found the sailboat, surprisingly close to them, and studied it and the man at its helm. Her heart did a double beat, she had been right, he was gorgeous – absolutely gorgeous.
“Quite a sailor,” she heard Mr. Barksley saying, his words sounding to Kinsey like they were coming from a million miles away. “It looks like he’s heading straight for us. Is he coming to shore?” he asked.
Kinsey felt the beat of her heart quickening and her breathing began to feel almost labored. Why was she so excited? It was a guy in a sailboat. What was the big deal? She noticed the palms of her hands were moist and keeping a grip on the shoes in her hand became something that almost required her concentration.
“I think my dear, Kinsey, that I shall leave you to meet this fellow on your own. I can see that as he approaches that he has made a dead-eye aim for where you are standing. He aims for your heart I do believe,” Mr. Barks said this to Kinsey with the bright and laughing eyes of an older man that wished to be once more young, like Kinsey, with all of life and love before him and not behind him.
Kinsey smiled at the jealous and benign twinkle in her mentor’s eye but her smile quickly changed to a frown of worry. The thought of meeting this new man that was sailing into her life made Kinsey feel both excited and fearful at once. “No please, Mr. Bark, stay,” Kinsey put her hand to his shoulder, then she asked, “Do you really think he is coming for us?”
“Not us, Sweetie, but you and you alone. I shall return post-haste to the party. If things work out bring him up to the party and let me meet him. I do say, I don’t know why I am so excited for you. Nothing has yet to happen.” He turned to leave.
“Yes, Mr. Bark. Why am I so excited? You’re right, nothing has yet to happen. It’s just a guy coming ashore in a sailboat.”
Mr. Barksley turned back to Kinsey, “Yes, why indeed?” he paused in his thoughts, he turned to the sun as it lay just over the trees, looked down the beach, then up the beach, and then finally to the catamaran as it approached the backs of the first waves coming to shore. “My dear, Kinsey, perhaps it is because it is a beautiful evening to fall in love. Is it not?”
Kinsey gasped and looked from Mr. Barksley back to the catamaran as the young man at its tiller began to surf the boat to shore on the shoulders of a small wave, one pontoon tipped high in the air, as he kept the sail tight and filled with air. When Kinsey turned again to Mr. Barksley he had left her and was making his way through the sand back to the hotel and the party by the pool.
The sailboat came ashore with one pontoon still pulled high in the air by the tight sail and the warm evening breeze. The young man piloting the boat was standing on the edge of the high in the air pontoon. He was strapped in and hanging by a harness that was connected to the mast. He deftly lowered the high pontoon as the lower pontoon, which was still in the water, hit the shore and ground to a halt. He stepped down to the ground and slackened the lines to the boat’s two sails so that they would let go of the wind and hang loose and free.
He turned to Kinsey and for the first time Kinsey could see all of him up close and clearly in the evening light. He stepped toward Kinsey then realized his boat was vulnerable to the tide and waves and so turned his attention back to his boat and pulled the boat higher on the beach.
He was tanned a golden brown, not a blemish on his skin anywhere. He was light framed but strong looking, no body fat anywhere on him, and Kinsey found herself mesmerized – her eyes staring as his abs coiled and uncoiled as he pulled on the boat away from the reach of the ocean’s waves. His hair was surfer-long, windblown, thick and wavy – a blond mess of sun, salt and seawater.
He finished pulling on the boat and turned to Kinsey, catching her eyes with his at the same time that the light of the setting sun flooded the inside of his eyes, striking them full up with blue sparks that shined out like the brightest of diamonds. He held her gaze for a moment, the longest and best moment, and Kinsey felt her knees go weak as he moved toward her, his hand extended.
He spoke, “From out on the water you look like a soaring and beautiful lighthouse as you stand here on this beach. You shine out your light, and, as a sailor, I felt compelled to come ashore and meet you. To stand in your light as it were,” and then he stopped himself from taking another step – just one more step and he would have been touching her.
Kinsey realized she wasn’t breathing and took a breath. To Kinsey it felt like this must feel like what a new born baby’s breath, the first of its life, would feel as it came into the world. Looking at this man, whoever he was, Kinsey felt overwhelmed and alive – completely alive.
She saw him take her hand. He kissed it and said, “My name is Tanner and I’ve been waiting a lifetime to meet you. What took you so long to come into my life?”
Kinsey smiled, her heart felt like it would beat out of her chest, “My name is Kinsey and I could ask you the same question.”
6
Tanner Bodie
Tanner Bodie was a gentle and good man. He was a man with many friends and a great family to support him in whatever he did in life.
He’d grown up in various cities on the coast of Florida as his father’s work moved his family about over the years of Tanner’s childhood.
“He lives on beaches, literally in the sand,” is how his mother had described him to her friends, and, in a way, he did live on beaches – he spent all of his time there. He grew up surfing, sailing, skim boarding, diving, swimming, and, as his father always said, “Trying to be the first human to grow gills.”
When he wasn’t on the beach he was reading. He loved to read. He liked reading about life, about far away countries and all the different kinds of people that populated the earth. He wanted to experience everything and he wanted to meet everyone. He loved people, all people, and when he turned twelve he found himself particularly drawn to the female kind of people. He loved girls and they loved him. He always had girls for friends and he made sure to keep his guy friends stocked up with girl friends as well. He had many guy friends who were surfers and as they grew into their teenage years he was the center of his friends’ social life. He was always starting a bonfire on the beach, as the sun was setting, and getting a party started. He was who everyone wanted to be seen with, to hang around and to become close to. He was everybody’s friend and they were his as well.
In his high school years his typical summer day started early with a morning surf, then work as a clerk at a surf shop, followed by sailing or more surfing during the long, lighted evening. Then, as the sun set and the night cooled, he’d hang with friends on the beach or go on a date with one of his girlfriends.
Having many friends, Tanner was never one to consider himself lonely, but, as the years went by and high school led to college, he found himself to be a hopeless romantic. He felt, deep in his DNA, a call to be wit
h one special person, to get married and live life to the fullest with that wonderful soulmate.
He dated many girls over the years, liked them all, but he hurt many as he never felt the spark, the rush of love, that he’d read so much about in the books he’d devoured late in the night before going to bed. He felt in his bones, in his very soul, a call to be with only one special girl. He went through his years searching for and never finding her.
He asked his mom and dad about it and they said to pray for guidance. So when they went to church he prayed for help. And then he waited.
Nothing.
He prayed more. And then he waited.
He dated, he kept his life going, he went through college, had a tough time there. He tried to be a business major as his father said it was a practical degree with which he could do many things with in his life. It would give him a good base is how his father put it, but Tanner sucked at accounting and he hated all of his business classes. Then one day of his sophomore year his father and mother came to visit him at school. They took him to dinner and showed him his mid-terms. They were awful; he was barely passing and his father said to him, “Son, what is it that you do well here?”
Then his mother said, “I see you made an A in English.”
Tanner told them English was easy. All he had to do was read and write papers.
“Can you do that for the next three years?” his father asked.
“Do what?” he asked back.
“Make A’s in English classes, son.”
“Of course, but what can I do with an English degree?”
“Well Tanner, it gets you a college degree. Sometimes you have to do what is easiest. I don’t know what you can do with an English degree but it’s something you’re good at, it’s something that you understand, and your mother and I think you should give it a shot.”
So Tanner gave English his best shot. He made straight A’s the next three years and graduated with honors and a degree in English from Flagler College. Flagler, of course, was a college by the beach and Tanner continued to surf in the mornings, take classes in the afternoons, search for his true love in the evenings and read books by night.
He continued going to church and he prayed also for a chance to meet the girl he was meant to marry. He waited for his prayers to be answered.
And he waited.
After college he took to working on boats – to being a deckhand and he learned how to be a seaman. He was a crewmember on many fine yachts – going to ports up and down the east coast of the United States and throughout the Caribbean. He learned about the high seas, met many incredible people, some of enormous wealth, and he began to keep a journal of his adventures. He wrote down everything and he found that he had a way with words. He wrote stories, stories of the sea, about surfing and sailing and loving girls and living life, and he wrote poetry, and, when he had time, he went to church and he prayed he’d meet his soulmate. He prayed for a girl he could show his life to and shower with his love and affections.
He wanted to love his wife hard and tenderly, slowly and passionately; he wanted to make love to her under the palm trees and the moon on the sands of the small intimate beaches he’d discovered in his sailing adventures and he wanted to find the undiscovered country with her – a place like heaven they could call their own.
He met a girl. Her name was Lilia. She was a rich girl – a rich, rich girl that loved him. Her father and mother loved him as well and all he had to do was marry her and he’d never worry about money again. He could live a life of ridiculous wealth with never another thought to working. All he had to do was marry her.
He liked her, she was beautiful and she loved him, made love to him, made him feel like a real man. She adored him and he found himself almost loving her. Then he broke her heart. He didn’t leave her at the altar – but he almost did – he left her as she was picking out the cake for their wedding.
Her family had to get her help she was so devastated, but then he made it right. He came back, not as her future husband, but as a friend and he found himself one day being a matchmaker and setting her up with his own best friend.
His best friend had always loved her and Tanner had remembered one night, before he’d called off the wedding, as they were partying on her families’ yacht, that he had stepped away to get a beer. Tanner had to go into the main cabin as the refrigerator on deck was empty – they’d drank all the beer and he wanted one more. As he came back to them they weren’t aware of him and he watched them. He could see the love in his friend’s eyes for his fiancée, that was obvious, but what surprised him was the gleam in her eye as she spoke to him. There was something there. He remembered thinking that they both had what he was still searching for, even if it was just for a moment, and he knew he couldn’t marry Lilia. So two days later he told her as much as she was looking through a giant book with pictures of wedding cakes.
His best friend’s name was Clinton and he was, indeed, a good friend. Tanner knew Clinton would never come between him and Lilia. Clinton had too much affection for Tanner and honor in his heart to ever crash their friendship. Tanner pictured Clinton always having to swallow hard every time he saw Tanner and Lilia after they were to get married. Clinton would love her from afar and suffer all his life. Clinton was a good friend to have and Tanner saw a way to help Lilia with her crushed heart and gift his friend with a chance at the girl of his deepest desires.
Tanner set them up on a blind date. Lilia was from Savanna, Georgia and they kept their yacht there most of the year. That was how Tanner had met Lilia. He didn’t work on their boat but he was first mate on the yacht that was berthed next to theirs at the marina.
Tanner told Lilia that he wanted to meet her for dinner at Elizabeth’s on 37th restaurant. He told Clinton the same thing, adding that he had a girl he wanted Clinton to meet. “How about a double date?” He remembered saying to Clinton.
Then Tanner watched from the tree lined road as, first, his former fiancée, and then his friend, each went into the restaurant – both thinking Tanner would be inside waiting.
Tanner never went in the restaurant. He waited outside. He sat on a bench across the street and he waited. He knew they would either both step right back outside and his plan had failed or they would stay together forever.
He sat in the spring night, being eaten on by bugs, and he watched the door to Elizabeth’s on 37th for almost three hours. Finally, they stepped out through the front door. They were holding hands and Tanner knew his best friend and his former fiancée were both made right. No hard swallowing for Clinton every time he saw Lilia and no more crushed heart for Lilia. Theirs was a future together and Tanner felt good about that.
He stood from his bench and left after he watched them get in her car, a little BMW convertible, and take off into the Georgia night, both laughing, and each touching the other with their eyes and their hands.
Tanner still had a key to Lilia’s family yacht and he went there to sleep. He ended up not sleeping, but instead, sitting on the deck and watching the stars circle the night sky and wondering when he’d meet the girl that would light his own heart on fire. He prayed as he was falling asleep and the sun was rising. When he awoke he found work as a deck hand, just a lowly deck hand, on a boat, a massive yacht, leaving the marina and making its way down the coast. Its destination – Miami, and dockage at a small marina in South Beach.
Tanner Bodie was a gentle and good man – he was also a lonely man.
One of the boat owner’s toys that was always kept on the yacht that Tanner found himself working on, as they motored down the coast to Miami, was a Hobie Cat 16. The owner of the boat called himself a sailor first, an old salt second, and a world-class business man third and last. Knowing that the man had over three billion dollars in the bank Tanner might have reversed the order, but that didn’t mean the man wasn’t a fine sailor.
Tanner was heard to be an excellent small-boat sailor and the owner, William Warner, befriended Tanner, and, to the c
aptain’s and crew’s dismay, he began to have Tanner spend the evenings with him dining and talking about sailing. To everyone on the crew he was Mr. Warner; for Tanner, he insisted he call him Bill. When they had docked in South Beach, Bill asked Tanner to drop the sailboat into the water and prepare it for sailing. Then, when Bill wasn’t in business meetings in downtown Miami, the two of them began sailing the Hobie up and down the coast. They struck up a friendship and what was supposed to be only a weeklong visit for Bill to Miami turned into a month. Bill had his wife and kids fly down during spring break and on weekends when they were out of school and Tanner began teaching the youngest child, actually Bill’s first grandchild, how to sail and before long Tanner was no longer a deckhand, but instead, he was given the title of aquatic instructor and teaching kids sailing became Tanner’s new day job.
Sailing was good for Tanner. It surprised him how much breaking up with Lilia had hurt his heart. He wanted, in the worst of ways, to get married and while Lilia wasn’t the one for him he still cared for her deeply. He missed her and his friend, Clinton, but deep down he knew that putting the two of them together was the best thing for all involved. Still, he was the odd man out and he was left wondering if he’d ever meet the girl that would explode his world in all the best of ways. Sailing was good therapy and teaching sailing to children was better for him still. With each passing day, the sun, the blue sky, the clouds, the seawater and the warm breezes made the smile on Tanner’s face grow just a bit bigger, until Tanner, while still lonely for the girl of his dreams, considered himself a blessed man.
Depending on the weather and the winds in particular, Tanner usually found himself teaching the children to sail in the mornings and having the afternoons to himself. It was a great schedule and Tanner was getting used to the rhythm of the days in South Beach. On his afternoons off he sailed up and down the seashore, stopping when he felt like meeting people (pulling to the beach in a Hobie was a great way to start a conversation) and letting his skin tan dark and his hair turn light in the rays of the sun.
Lights on the Far Horizon Trilogy Page 4