“You need to take off the shoes too, and the socks. This is a beach, not a country club.”
“I’m sensing judgment.”
“I’m sensing someone who has never actually relaxed a day in his life.”
He removes the shoes and socks, placing them neatly beside his chair like they might escape if left unattended. His toes dig into the sand with hesitance like he’s encountering a foreign substance.
“When’s the last time you went to the beach?” I ask.
“I live at the beach.”
“When’s the last time you actually sat on it all day, doing nothing?”
He’s quiet for a moment. “Vera used to bring me when I was young. We’d build sandcastles and look for shells and she’d tell me stories.”
“That’s sweet.”
“It was. Then I grew up and forgot how to do things that weren’t productive.” He looks out at the water. “I’m trying to remember.”
I hand him the bag of grapes because the moment feels too tender for words.
We sit in companionable silence for a while, the waves providing a soundtrack. I go back to my book. He stares at the ocean like it might have answers.
“You’re reading my first novel,” he says eventually.
“I’m rereading it. For research.”
“Research into what?”
“Your early work versus your later work. I’m gathering evidence.”
“Of my decline?”
“More like your evolution.” I flip the book so he can see my margin notes. “See? Page forty-seven: ‘Good use of metaphor. Why did you stop doing this?’ Page eighty-two: ‘The emotional honesty here is devastating. More of this, please.’”
He takes the book, flipping through my annotations with an expression I can’t quite read. “You wrote notes in my book.”
“I do that with all my books.”
“You wrote ‘the velvet darkness problem has not yet emerged’ on page twelve.”
“You had a velvet darkness phase. It’s well documented.”
“I was going through some things.”
“Clearly.”
He hands the book back, and when our fingers brush, neither of us pulls away immediately.
A kid with a metal detector chooses this exact moment to wander directly between our chairs.
“Excuse me,” the kid says, not looking up from his detector. “I’m looking for treasure.”
“Aren’t we all?” I mutter.
The kid beeps his way past us and continues down the beach, completely oblivious to the moment he just interrupted.
Scott shifts his chair closer to mine. “Where were we?”
