Black Wave

by Devon Glenn

  “It’s my fault that my back hurts,” Hannah muttered. “Before the accident, I’d only done circles in the little lagoon near my house. I wasn’t ready for the open ocean. The water was too choppy. I crashed right into a rock and hit my sister on the way down.”

  Elerick could hear the regret in her voice, and he felt a pang of recognition. He thought about the messaging tool on Orbies. If the ghost responses were pulled from private messages, it meant that it was probably his aunt—or worse, his mother—who had shared the article with her sister long ago, before his mother had died. Someone in his family had said all along that he hadn’t been there for her, but no one had said it to him directly until it was too late.

  One by one, Elerick placed the stones along Hannah’s spine and counted the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The stones didn’t weigh much, but they were solid and warm, and Hannah soon settled into the table with a sigh of contentment.

  “You’re the best masseur I’ve ever had,” Hannah said while Elerick was working on her calves. “How’d you end up in Cape May? Did you move here for your girlfriend?”

  “What makes you think I have a girlfriend?”

  “I don’t see too many tourists your age in Cape May at this time of year,” Hannah said knowingly. “If there’s a girl here, she’s your girlfriend. Or maybe a boyfriend? I don’t want to assume.”

  “You got me,” Elerick admitted. “There is a girl here that I like.”

  “So what are you waiting for?” Hannah lowered her voice. “Oh no. Is she married?”

  Elerick had to laugh. “It’s not like that,” he said. “It was just bad timing that I ran into her here. She’s ready to move somewhere else.”

  “No such thing as bad timing,” Hannah persisted. “You want her, you’ve got to make it happen.”

  Elerick moved on to Hannah’s feet. Her conversation skills were about as polite as those of a dog barking from behind a fence, but at least she was more cheerful now that she wasn’t in pain. “What about you?” he asked her. “Do you have someone?”

  “No one special. My sister was my best friend,” Hannah replied. “I know that’s not the same thing as having a partner, but we were close. We used to come to Cape May together every year. Now I come by myself.”

  “How do feel about that?” he asked. Normally he didn’t like getting into heavy discussions about love or death with his clients, but it felt good to talk to someone who had some idea of what he was going through. And unlike his aunt, Hannah didn’t seem like the hugging and crying type.

  Hannah paused before she answered. “I like the solitude. The tide washes in and out, the sun rises and sets, the birds fly away and come back. If I get bored, I can read a book or take a walk. I don’t need much company. And I certainly don’t need help polishing off a bottle of wine. Maybe I’ll meet someone special one day. Until then, Cape May is the love of my life.”

  Elerick took Hannah’s hand and worked his thumb along her palm. He took his time, mulling over what she had just said. He supposed that if Emily ever went away to college, she might forget him or even make him forget her. She would move into the dorms, make new friends, and meet a guy her own age who didn’t have a job yet and would happily blow off class to take her out on a date. He would take her to his frat party and teach her to drink beer from a funnel. Elerick already hated that guy.

  “I think this hand is done,” Hannah complained.

  “Oh, sorry.” Elerick moved around the table to start working on Hannah’s other hand. “I was just thinking about what you said.”

  “Well, don’t overthink it. Trust your gut when it feels like you’ve met someone you can fall in love with. It doesn’t matter if you find her when you’re nineteen or when you’re ninety. If the connection is real, you can always come back to her as if no time had passed.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I will.”

  When the timer finally signaled the end of Hannah’s session, Elerick jumped up to wash his hands, quickly checking his reflection on the shiny surface of the paper towel dispenser to make sure he wasn’t sweating too much. He knew exactly what he should do next.

  Elerick made his way to the front desk, where Sadie was staring at her smartphone and texting furiously. The lobby was empty.

  “Are you working the front desk today, Sadie?”

  “Yes,” she said without looking up from her phone.

  “Have any new appointments come in this afternoon since I started my last one?” he asked her.

  “Nope.”

  “Great. Will you call a guest for me and tell her to come down for her massage at three o’clock?”

  “What’s the name and room number?”

  “Room three-thirty-three. Put the reservation under the name George Washington.”

  Sadie rolled her eyes. “Right.”

  Between Elerick’s dream, Emily’s nightmare, and the Orbies invasion, Elerick knew he had to get closer to Emily. Putting her on his massage table was about as close as he could possibly get.

  CHAPTER 29

  A bed of flowers

  “I’d like to speak to George Washington, please,” Sadie deadpanned. She had the best telephone operator voice.

  Emily stifled a laugh. “I cannot tell a lie,” she said. “Speaking.”

  “You have an appointment for a massage with Elerick at three o’clock this afternoon.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes. I hate you. Let us never speak of this again.”

  Emily felt the heat rise in her cheeks as she imagined the feel of Elerick’s hands on her back.

  Seconds later, there was a quick knock at the door. Before she could turn the handle, an envelope slipped through the crack near her feet.

  Emily grabbed the card and tore it open. Inside was a square piece of cardstock with the Black Wave logo and the location of the spa with the time 3:00 p.m. stamped on the blank line. The card was made of thick cardstock and smelled, oddly, like peppermint. There was no signature, but Emily knew immediately who had sent the card.

  She thought about the night she had spent side by side with Elerick. They hadn’t kissed before she passed out—they had barely touched—but the moment Elerick had rescued her from the sitters was the most intimate moment she had ever shared with anyone. Elerick wasn’t the first person to witness her having a night terror, but he was the first person who hadn’t left her side when it happened. He stayed and brought her aspirin. He gave her tips for stalling astral projection. He held her. He even joined her for breakfast. Sadie referred to Emily’s one-night stands as three-to-noon relationships—the summer tourists would check in at three o’clock, check out the next day at noon, and after one hotel stay, Emily would never see them again. What Sadie didn’t know was that Emily always slipped back into her own room before she fell asleep to avoid waking up the poor guy with her screams. At three o’clock, this one-night stand would officially become a romantic weekend.

  With thirty minutes to spare, Emily raced to the shower and turned the hot water on full blast.

  Normally, Elerick would go straight into the hallway and introduce himself to the guest, but he didn’t want anyone to see his reaction to the sight of Emily, who was nearly enveloped in an enormous white robe. Instead, he watched her from the doorway. She was sipping tea with one bare leg draped over the other, bobbing her sandaled foot impatiently. She must have felt him staring at her, because she turned around and smiled when she saw his face.

  “You look like a little polar bear,” he told her as she entered the massage room.

  “Global warming has forced us all south,” she said. “So what am I supposed to do now?”

  “Why don’t you start by picking an oil?” he told her. “Then I’ll need you to disrobe and lie facedown on the table.” Elerick gestured vaguely toward Emily. “Just drape the sheet ov
er the lower half of your body.” He had said those very words a million times, but saying them to Emily made him feel like a socially awkward gynecologist. “Scoot down a little farther,” he might as well add. “You might feel a pinch.” He had hoped when he invited her over that she felt the same way about him that he did about her, but he didn’t realize until she was practically nude in his massage room that trying to get to know her taste in music or her backup plans for college while touching her all over her body would be the worst kind of torture. It’s not that he couldn’t control himself—he was a professional, after all—he just wished he didn’t have to.

  Emily stared at the row of bottles surrounding her, each containing oils with the scent of roses, daffodils, and other blooms. I’m lying on a bed of flowers, she thought, happiness bubbling inside her. She scanned the row of bottles for the most unusual scent she could find—larkspur—and silently hoped it would take Elerick’s mind off who knows how many other clients he’d had that day.

  Emily turned the bottle in her hands so she could read the label. It showed stalks of brilliant pink, purple, and blue flowers and the tagline “Beautiful soul.” After unscrewing the cap, she held her nose gingerly over the opening. She wasn’t prepared for the resulting assault on her senses. The aroma brought back a long-buried sense of longing, of crashing waves, of hushed voices, of things she couldn’t remember but somehow loved.

  Elerick raised an eyebrow when he saw the bottle Emily had chosen. “Why larkspur?” he asked.

  “It reminds me of you,” she said.

  “I remind you of pink and purple flowers?” Elerick laughed. “Not what a guy wants to hear, Emily.” She always said the strangest things, he noted, but at least she wasn’t boring.

  Undeterred, Emily took off the cap and held it under his nose. “Just sniff it,” she said. “You’ll see.”

  Elerick took a big inhale. Immediately, he knew why Emily had chosen it. “This does smell familiar.”

  “I know, right?” Emily said. “It brings up the feeling that I’m remembering something, only I don’t have a memory to attach the feeling to. Is that weird?”

  Elerick shook his head. Unlike Emily, he did have a memory to attach the feelings to. He thought of the dream he had on his first night at the Black Wave, when he was storming the hotel to free some beautiful, wonderful girl whom he loved.

  Emily turned to look at Elerick, her eyes shining with tears. Elerick brushed them away with his fingers, and as he did, he noticed how impossibly long her lashes were; he marveled at the softness of her skin. He took her chin in his hand, leaned forward, and kissed her gently on the lips. And he knew, quite literally, that he had found the girl of his dreams.

  “Go ahead and get ready,” he said quickly. “I’ll be back.”

  Emily’s heart was pounding as she slipped out of her robe. Stretching out on the table, she covered her backside with the sheet, as instructed.

  Emily couldn’t believe her luck. Elerick was the kind of guy she thought she would meet in college, if she had gotten to go away for school, and here he was, delivered right to her door. Now she was about to spend a full hour with him, completely vulnerable. The last thing she wanted was to find out too much about him too soon. As she straightened her sheet, she supposed Elerick might be thinking the same thing.

  “Are you ready, Emily?” Elerick said from the other side of the door.

  Emily took a deep breath. “Yes, come in.”

  Elerick rubbed a small amount of larkspur oil between his fingers and gently stroked Emily’s spine, from the top of her neck to the top of her tailbone. Her back was exquisitely straight, with skin so smooth that his hands felt rough in comparison, even with the oil. He started with the safest part he could think of—her shoulders—and worked his way up the back of her neck. He tilted her head forward from the base of her skull to elongate and relax her neck—just how much time was Emily spending online?

  Elerick studied every inch of skin, muscle, and bone on his way down her back, memorizing the details of her body with his hands. Emily wasn’t sad like Hannah; she was frustrated. The deepest of deep-tissue massages wouldn’t be able to knead away life experiences that didn’t exist, but the least Elerick could do was clear away any residual disappointment.

  As he moved along her sides, Elerick’s fingers ever so slightly grazed her curves. She sighed into the gesture, and he grew bolder. He ran his hands down her hips, lifting her towel from the bottom to reveal the tops of her thighs. He thought about that day in Emily’s bedroom when he had touched her lightly behind the knees.

  Elerick swallowed hard. “Do you want me to massage your glutes?” he said, wishing that he didn’t have to sound so clinical, but not really knowing a better way to ask Emily if he could just—politely and professionally—grab her ass.

  “Yes,” Emily said, without hesitation.

  Elerick moved his hands under Emily’s sheet to gently rub her cheeks. He bit his lip and tried to direct his thoughts away from the fact that there was nothing between the terrain of her bare skin and his wandering eyes but one strategically placed cloth.

  Meanwhile, Elerick’s natural healing ability was affecting Emily’s energy levels, but not in the way he expected. The moment his palms hit her skin, she moaned through the open hole in the massage table so loudly that Elerick had to go over to the speakers on the wall and crank up the music to cover her noises with the sounds of pan flutes, waves, and humpback whales. While he was at it, he straightened her towel, which was in danger of falling off.

  “Is this still OK, Emily?” he asked nervously.

  “Oh, just take the sheet off,” she blurted.

  Elerick did as he was told. “You know, this isn’t part of the Soothing Waves package,” he deadpanned.

  Emily was a little more straightforward than he was. “I don’t think that’s why I’m here, do you?” No longer content with just being massaged, Emily rolled over on her back and sat up, her body exposed. She locked eyes with Elerick, daring him to continue.

  He ripped off his clothes like they were on fire and climbed onto the table with Emily, covering her body to smother the flames.

  When the timer went off, Elerick and Emily were still curled up on the table, whispering their plans to meet up again later. Elerick kissed Emily one last time on the lips before untangling himself and putting his clothes back on. “I’ll meet you outside in a bit,” he said. “Take your time.”

  They had the whole season to get to know each other, and today was just the beginning. As she showered off in the women’s locker room, Emily noticed that the knots in her back had disappeared, and with them all her bitterness and longing at being left behind in Cape May while everyone else her age was out in the world, starting their adult lives.

  “Do you have your gift card?” Sadie asked when Emily sauntered into the lobby.

  Emily checked her pockets for the gift card that Elerick had sent to the room, but came up empty. “It must have fallen out of my pocket,” she said.

  “The gift cards are numbered, and we just installed the new register,” Sadie warned her. “Your dad will freak out if we do this off the books.”

  Burt was an easygoing guy, but he ran a tight ship when it came to accounting. It took some convincing on Joan’s part to get him to switch to a new POS system that ran on tablets, but now he was obsessed. Emily had no doubt that he was at his desktop right now, watching the transactions roll in. “I’ll just give you cash now, and you can pay me back later when I find the card.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. It’s fine.” Emily fished a few bills out of her wallet. “Tell him I’ll be in my room.”

  When Elerick peered into the lobby ten minutes later, he was surprised to find it empty. “Did Emily leave already?” he asked Sadie. “She left her gift certificate in the room.”

  “It’s taken care of,” she said.
“She paid in cash.”

  “Can you give her a refund then?” Elerick handed Sadie his gift certificate. “I’ll take it back to her room for her.”

  “Sure thing.” Sadie opened the drawer of the cash register and counted the bills, stuffing them into an envelope. “The whales were oversinging this afternoon, don’t you think?”

  “No,” Elerick said slowly, “I thought they blended perfectly with the pan flutes.”

  Sadie snorted. “If you say so.”

  Elerick felt a lump of panic rise in his throat.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Sadie said with a wink, but something about her tone made him do just the opposite.

  He wanted to kick himself. He never should have let things go that far—well, he was glad that they had, but he definitely should have waited until he was off the clock and away from the spa. Somewhere normal, like a bed. It’s not like there aren’t any beds nearby, he scolded himself. I’m in a freaking hotel.

  “If there are no more customers lined up, I think I’m going to clock out a little early,” Elerick told Sadie, his voice rising in embarrassment. “I have to give Emily her money back.”

  He took the steps leading back to his room two and three at a time, feeling less and less like Romeo approaching Juliet’s balcony and increasingly more like King Kong climbing the Empire State Building. His attempts to be stealthy were, in fact, not as stealthy as he had imagined. Inside his room, he scrambled up the bricks of the fireplace and pushed open the trapdoor—perhaps a little too hard. The ceiling shuddered so much he had to wait a few seconds, counting down from ten and slowly releasing his breath until he—and the ceiling—had stopped shaking enough for him to move forward.

  Emily was sitting at her desk, working on her tablet when Elerick came barreling through the small door in the ceiling and landed, cursing, on the floor. “You weren’t supposed to pay for the massage,” he blurted, trying to shake off the pain of his crash landing.