“Are you my boyfriend?” I ask softly. I don’t know why this word feels so freighted, since we’ve spent the past few hours reliving our youthful romance, kissing, and discussing trips we can take together while we feel out being a couple.
But it does.
“I want to be,” he says.
I feel a slow grin overtake my face. “I think I want that too.”
He reaches out and draws me to his chest.
I burrow there.
I feel eyes on us, and look over Seth’s shoulder at a pair of burly, tanned men openly ogling us as they wait for bites on their lines.
“They’re staring at us like we’re the catch,” I whisper.
“Yeah. We better get down to business,” Seth says, drawing away. Apparently public displays of affection on a pier where people routinely gut fish are a bit too sappy even for him.
Snapper are biting, and we catch a few small ones we throw back. And then Seth gets a giant tug on his line and has to really fight to bring it in—so much that the fishermen guys crowd around us to give him advice.
“Step back and brace your shoulders,” says an old man with a tobacco-stained beard.
“Don’t tug so hard, you’ll snap the line,” commands a younger guy with a deep sunburn.
Seth struggles for what feels like forty-five minutes until the creature breaks above the water. We all cry out encouragement as he reels in … a very small, very mad, hammerhead shark.
“You caught a fucking shark?” I squeal, taking one million pictures with my phone.
I don’t fuck with sharks, as stated, but I’m still impressed that my dude caught one with a fishing pole.
Seth shoots me a smug grin, holding the writhing, furious creature up for a portrait. The fishermen help him remove the hook from the shark to throw it back, though not before a few of them pose for pictures with it too. We give away the rest of our bait and walk back to the car.
We drive five minutes to an outdoor oyster bar so old that my grandparents took my mom here when she was growing up. Seth orders two dozen oysters on the half shell, which come with a bucket of saltine crackers and cocktail sauce so full of horseradish it nearly burns my face off.
The sun has moved behind the clouds and a big gust of wind blows over the stack of napkins in front of us. All of a sudden, I smell petrichor.
“Uh-oh,” Seth says. He peers out at the horizon, where you can already see rain pounding the ocean in the distance.
“It’s going to pour,” I say.
We ask for our check, but every other person at the bar has the same idea. By the time we pay there’s a crack of thunder, and then the sky erupts.
“Should we make a run for it?” Seth asks.
I grab his hand. “Come on.”
We sprint out from under the cover of the bar to his car, getting utterly soaked in the process. Water is dripping down my arms, my hair, my nose. His shirt is clinging to his chest. We dive in and slam the doors behind us.
Seth reaches in the backseat for some towels and hands me one.
“You’ve thought of everything.”
“I’m trying to impress you. And I was hoping we could make out on the beach later. I guess we’ll have to scratch that one.”
I pull him close, and kiss him. “We can make out in the car.”
Necking in a steamy car, with the windows fogged up and rain slamming down, gives us an air of privacy. Were it not for the console between us I would be in his lap. And were it not for the presence of children at the oyster bar, my mouth might be there instead.
But keeping things PG-13 has its own erotic appeal. By the time the storm stops I am dying, actually dying, to have sex.
“Let’s go to a seedy motel,” I pant. “There’s that place that charges by the hour off the highway. I’m slutty enough to find it hot.”
“Hold that thought,” Seth says.
His phone has been lighting up with notifications. He checks his messages and turns to me, looking sly.
“My family is going out to Heron Key for dinner. They’ll be gone for a few hours. Do you know what that means?”
I shake my head.
“My childhood home has no parents.”
His childhood home was the locale of many of our horniest nights.
“You really want to bone me in a twin bed?”
He nods gravely. “I really want to bone you in a twin bed.”
I can’t deny that this holds a certain nostalgic appeal. Plus, as much as I fancy myself charmed by roadside motels, Barb Rubenstein’s sheets are far less likely to have bed bugs.
