Sitting still has never been one of my talents. If I went and found Dad and Uncle Owen, they’d be lounging by the pool debating which tropical drink to try next, or hanging out at a restaurant arguing over the quality of the taxidermy tropical fish on the walls.
Love them both, but no thanks.
Not today.
Today, I’d rather push myself, get my head back on straight, and work up a sweat in the salty ocean water protected from the bigger swells by a sea wall.
Eventually, I wade back out and find a good spot on the beach for making a sandcastle, which is more of a sand mountain. Great place for building a sand mountain range. The golden sand is interrupted with black lava rocks of all shapes and sizes, which means the terrain’s already there. I’m just helping it along.
Three kids wander over to help me—all of them under seven, I’d guess, with the youngest wearing inflatables on his arms—while their parents keep a close eye on us.
One mom’s staring too close.
Wouldn’t bother me back home.
But back home, I don’t have a lot of reason to strip down and run around in just swim trunks.
Most of the time.
And even then, they’re used to me. And they trust me with their kids because they all know me.
I actively ignore the curious mom while we all keep playing in the sand and more and more kids join us.
This? Playing with a bunch of kids and helping them work together to build something with their imaginations, where we’re all on even ground and no one’s bad and no one’s perfect and everyone’s having fun?
This is my freaking heaven.
Our sand mountains are rapidly turning into sand volcanoes which are threatening to destroy our pretend dinosaurs, which are all of the kids’ beach toys. Even the beach toys that aren’t dinosaurs get repurposed as dinosaurs. So do a few lava rocks. Snorkels. Shovels. If we can call it a dinosaur, we call it a dinosaur.
And that’s where Delaney finds me. Helping what’s grown to be a group of a dozen kids defend the dinosaurs against blow-up flamingo floaties of death and imminently erupting sand volcanoes.
Ifeelher the minute she steps on the beach. It’s this mix of judgment, irritation, and curiosity that invades my senses and has me casting covert looks around to spot her while I dash around the beach flying the floatie of death.
And there she is.
Wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, sunglasses, a tank top that shows zero cleavage, and a long tropical skirt. Settling down on a flat lava rock where the resort grass meets the sand beach. Pulling her phone out of that annoying alligator purse like she has nothing better to do than work while she’s in paradise.
She annoys the fuck out of me.
“Ahh!”
Oh, hell.
I just ran over a kid and knocked her down because I was paying attention to mybabysitterinstead of watching where I was going.
“Oh, no,” I cry. “The Flamingo of Death got Briley!”
“Death to the flamingo!” a little boy named Xavier yells. He lets out a Tarzan cry—seriously, you’d think he’d goBraveheart, but this kid is all in with the Tarzan impression instead—and then he leaps onto the flamingo floatie and pours lava—aka water—on it. “Take that, Flamingo of Death!”
And while he’s taking on the floatie, I squat down to the poor girl who got caught in my distraction. “Sorry about that. Forget I’m not a little kid too some days. You okay?”
Her nose twitches and she blinks fast before she nods. But I still feel like an ass until she follows it with a grin. “Death to the Flamingo of Death!” she cries.
The kids all rally around her and Xavier, celebrating them as heroes.
But it kills the mood.
At least for the parents.
