“I have the afternoon off,” Coco says. “Finally.”
Lamont gives her a thumbs-up. Oh, come on, Coco thinks. Don’t make me beg. Coco has learned that Lamont gets paid regardless of whether the Richardsons use the boats. Lamont keeps them clean and maintained and performs safety and equipment checks. When all that is finished, he’s allowed to do whatever he wants.
He disappears below deck. She must have misread what happened when they were skinny-dipping; he’d been drinking, it was just horsing around. She heads back up to the house thinking she’ll drive Baby out to one of the ocean beaches, Cisco or Surfside. But then she hears the putter of a motor and she turns to see Lamont coming to shore in the dinghy.
Coco squints at him. “Do you want to hang?”
He moves his Wayfarers to the top of his head so Coco can see his eyes—brown with flashes of copper. “Didn’t Leslee tell you the rule? We aren’t allowed to date.”
“But we’re allowed to be friends,” she says.
Lamont eyes the house. “Where are…”
“Leslee went to play pickleball and Bull is in his office, working. Bull gave me the rest of the day off. He said they’re going for dinner at the Field and Oar tonight.”
“Leslee will be home between pickleball and dinner?”
“I mean, yeah, but I doubt they’ll need the boats.”
Lamont checks his phone. “I’ll take you out,” he says. “But this has to stay under the radar. I have a very sweet situation here and I don’t want to jeopardize it.”
“I feel exactly the same way.”
He still seems hesitant, and Coco thinks about how she’s never been with anyone she would describe as principled. It’s sexy.
She crosses her heart, locks her lips, tosses an invisible key over her shoulder. Finally, he smiles. “Do you want to sail or speed?” he asks.
“Speed,” she says.
Blond Sharon waits on the town dock, smoothing her blue eyelet cover-up from Cartolina and adjusting her straw hat. She checks her phone: 12:28. Her heart is bouncing around in her chest like a hyper child on a trampoline. She ended up dashing off a quick email to Lucky Zambrano: I’m sorry I have to miss class this week. Unexpected plot twist.
I have a date! she thinks.
At that second, she sees a boat approaching. Yes, it’s a Grady-White with a cute bimini top over the back. Romeo is behind the wheel, shirtless, in a pair of striped board shorts. Gah!
He pulls up to the dock, and one of the kids working catches his line and wraps it around a cleat. The name of the boat is written in script on the side in glittering letters: Golden Girl.
Sharon removes her flip-flops and accepts Romeo’s hand as she steps down into the boat. She sees an open cooler filled with ice, seltzers, and a bottle of Domaines Ott rosé, which happens to be Sharon’s favorite. There’s a bag of sandwiches from Provisions. Did Romeo read her mind and order her a Turkey Terrific?
“Who’s Golden Girl?” Sharon asks teasingly.
Romeo doesn’t miss a beat. “You are,” he says.
Coco has been on her share of boats, from flat-bottomed pontoons on the Lake of the Ozarks to catamarans in the Virgin Islands, but none of these compare to Decadence, the Aquariva 33. Coco has googled it—the deck is grain-matched maple with twenty layers of varnishing, sanding, polishing. It’s floating elegance.
Coco sets her disintegrating straw bag on the leather banquette in the stern and picks at the strings of her cutoffs. She probably should have taken the afternoon and gone shopping for new clothes. On Monday, Leslee had handed Coco her week’s pay in an envelope: thirty-six crisp hundred-dollar bills.
“Come on up here,” Lamont says, patting the seat next to him. Coco moves up. She’s officially a Bond girl.
“Hold on,” he says. They navigate out of Pocomo Harbor and then he pulls back the throttle and they go flying. There are twin 380 Yanmars hiding beneath the aft; it’s a Lamborghini on the water.
“Woo-hoo!” Coco says, raising her hands over her head. But then they hit the crest of a wave and she’s jolted clear out of her seat. Okay, okay, she thinks. She’ll hold on. She doesn’t want to end up overboard.
Lamont slows down. Coco bumps her thigh against his and he presses back and she thinks, Forget the rule, this is on. This is happening.
They cruise along the north coast of the island. Lamont names each beach and adds some color commentary: Steps is where his mother taught him to swim, 40th Pole is where he went to bonfires in high school. They reach the western tip of the island and Lamont shows Coco Esther’s Island and Smith’s Point. Their thighs are still touching.
People on the beaches wave at them but Coco looks away. She doesn’t want to call attention to herself.
“Where are we going?” she asks. “Do you have a plan?”
“I always have a plan,” he says.
A second later, they’ve left Nantucket behind, but there’s land ahead.
“Another island?” Coco asks.
“Tuckernuck,” Lamont says. It’s privately owned, he says; there are thirty-two houses run by generator. Lamont used to spend one weekend every August at a place called the Tate House—his mother babysat for the children of the caretaker, Barrett Lee, and they worked out a barter. Those Tuckernuck weekends were all about riding a rusty no-speed Schwinn around the sandy roads, surf-casting, grilling striped bass over a fire on the beach, taking rainwater showers.
“I would like that,” Coco says, although who is she kidding? She’s gotten used to six-hundred-thread-count sheets, central air, and four kinds of sparkling water ice cold in the fridge.
Looking at the stars on Tuckernuck, Lamont says, was how he became interested in celestial navigation. “Yes, I know the names of all the constellations. Yes, I can figure out where I am on planet Earth just by looking at the night sky. I am that nerd boy.”
“Well, Nerd Boy, I am Nerd Girl. I can survive in the wilderness for a week with just a workman’s tool and a canvas tarp.”
“Were you a Girl Scout?” he asks.
“No,” she says. “I had parental figures with a weird sense of fun.”
