“Hey,” he said and began making his way toward me. He tried for a smile and got three-quarters of the way there. “Dan, right? I tried to catch up with you last night.”
“Dash.”
His expression veered toward sheepish. “Almost.”
I laughed in spite of myself. I have a weak spot for men who are human disasters, mostly because I’m one myself. “I’m surprised you remember any of it. Looks like you had quite the night.”
“Oh my God,” he groaned, and rubbed his eyes. I caught a whiff of rum, sweet on his breath. “Kids these days. I’m telling you, they have no respect for their elders. A bunch of eighteen-year-olds lining up shots and telling me I’m an old man if I can’t keep up.”
I took a closer look at him. He’d been clean shaven the night before, but now he had a hint of stubble, and I was surprised to see gray in it. “Old man, huh? Let me guess: you’ve reached the venerable age of twenty-five.”
“Thirty.” That sheepish grin again. “I tell them twenty-eight.”
“Bull plop.”
(I did not say bull plop.)
That made him laugh.
“I’m almost thirty,” I said. “Nobody who’s thirty has abs like you do.”
“Hard work, my guy.” The smile definitely wasn’t sheepish now, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to meet the look in his eyes. “And good genes.”
The wind shrieked down the path at us. Damian shivered. The empty garbage bag flapped madly.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m really glad you came back. I’ve got a couple of those little gremlins in my cabin, but what do you say we grab some bottles, and we’ll find somewhere quiet to…chill?”
It was simultaneously sweet, confusing, laughable, and flattering (if I’m being totally honest) that Damian thought I’d come back to, uh, chill. Before I had to let him down, though, a familiar voice rang out across the clearing.
“Damian.” In the bleached half-light, Jen looked older too: her movements stiff, her face lined, that long (almost distended) jaw set hard. Some of that, I thought, was anger, not age. “Where have you been?”
Damian folded his arms, and he didn’t quite look at Jen. “Could you keep your voice down—”
“I’ve been looking for you all morning.”
Instead of answering, Damian shot me a look—an appeal for sympathy, like he and I were in this together, and wasn’t she being so unreasonable. The kind of look that stops being cute around age twelve.
“Grab some gloves and get to work,” Jen said.
“Yeah,” Damian said. “We’re talking. I’ll do it in a minute—”
“Not in a minute. Right now. That’s the deal—you crash here, you work.” A beat later, she shouted, “Go!”
Damian sent me one last, long-suffering look—this one tinged with a sulk—and said, “Hit me up before you leave.” He brushed past Jen and headed toward the row of cabins. It wasn’t quite a challenge, and it wasn’t quite aggression, but it came close, and for a moment, rage lit up Jen’s face.
Then she shut it down, and when she turned to me, her expression was neutral again. “You’re Bobby’s friend.”
I nodded.
“Not to be rude, but I’ve got a lot going on this morning. Do you need something?”
“What happened?”
Jen pushed a hand through her boyishly short hair. She let out a breath slowly. “That nut job got in here last night. Ali Rivas—heard of her? Broke every window she could reach. And the cameras weren’t working, of course, the one night I need them to work.”
“The cameras weren’t working?”
She started to shake her head, and then she looked at me more closely. “Is there something I can help you with?”
“Maybe. This is kind of weird, but—well, I’m the one who found, uh, Gerry last night.” And then inspiration struck. “I’m kind of having a hard time, you know, processing.”
“Oh. God. I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, he made a pass at me, and then, well, you know what happened with Bobby, and—I’m just feeling really messed up, I guess.”
“I’m sorry,” Jen said again. “He could get like that sometimes. I told the guys who were staying here not to let him get them alone.”
“I thought the camp wasn’t open. Actually, I don’t really understand what’s going on—why have the surf competition if the camp won’t be ready until the spring?”
Jen flashed a smile. “Well, surfers don’t really need much of an excuse to catch a wave and throw a party. The real answer, though, is that we’ve been hosting the camp—and the challenge—for years. But we’ve always run the camp out of a resort down the coast. Next year, we’ll have our own place.” She put her hands on her hips. “We would have, anyway. I don’t know what’s going on now that Gerry’s…”
“From what you said, he seems kind of, I don’t know, problematic as a business partner.”
“You mean letting him walk around and prey on eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds? Yeah, I didn’t exactly know what I was getting myself into. It’s not like that’s the kind of person I’d have picked.”
“How’d you guys end up working together?”
“I’d been trying to get the camp going for a long time. I was eyeing this property, trying to work out the loan, and the next thing I knew, he swooped in and bought it out from under me. Part of that stupid planned community. I was so mad I showed up at his office and gave him a piece of my mind.”
