Different, I wrote.
Because if there was anything I could be certain of, it was that Harmony was unlike anyone I’d ever met before.
It feels like a cruel joke, reading these words.
But also, it’s no wonder that the entire world fell in love with Beckett Nash. What man describes a woman asincandescent?
And then ghosts her?
Chapter 7
“So, what do you do?” I asked from my seat high above the clouds. We’d been in the sky long enough to allow me to conveniently forget the endlessly vast ocean beneath us that could swallow our plane whole without even creating so much as a ripple effect. “Like, besides write?”
He considered the question for longer than I expected he would. “I’m an environmental sentry for the state,” he said.
I narrowed my eyes. “Sounds fancy, but I don’t really understand what that means,” I admitted.
He laughed. “Yeah, I tried to make it seem important. I’m a park ranger.”
“Oh,” I replied. “Well, why didn’t you just say that?”
“Because most people think it’s boring.”
“No way. I love parks. Where do you work?”
“Long Island. Jones Beach.”
“That’s a park?”
“Mm hmm,” he nodded.
“It’s not what I would have thought of. I thought parks were all, like, trees and grass and walking trails and stuff like that.”
“Yeah. Jones Beach is a state park. But instead of protecting the forest, we’re protecting the coastline.”
“So, what does a job like that entail?”
“Depends on the day. In the winter, I do a lot of paperwork. Processing permits for business for the spring and summer, budgets, hiring for the busy season, that sort of behind-the-scenes stuff. But I also do some environmental workshops for kids and families, community presentations about various wildlife, climate change, protecting the dunes, that type of thing. Oh! And seal walks.”
“I’ve never seen a seal out in the wild. I mean, maybe once at the aquarium? But not locally. There are seals on Long Island?”
He nodded. “Absolutely. You just have to know where to look.”
“Well, that sounds much more interesting than you’re giving it credit for,” I said. “Did you study this in college?”
“Yeah. Well, kind of. I majored in earth science originally. But then I began to study climatology and decided to switch over to atmospheric sciences.”
“So, you’re a science nerd?”
“I guess.”
“And also a writer?”
He smiled. “Uh huh.”
“Wow.”
I’m not a hundred percent sure if I was struck more by Beckett’s obvious intelligence or by his facial features. Watching him talk, some mental camera inside my brain began snapping bursts of photos of him, analyzing the angles of his jaw, noticing the deep dimple on just his right cheek, wanting to touch my fingertips to the scar that traversed the bridge of his nose. His hairline was crooked, rising a little higher on the left side than on the right. One earlobe was also dimpled, as if in some other life it might have been pierced but the hole closed up long ago. When he swallowed, his Adam’s apple rose and fell, and watching it elicited a response in my body that I had never before experienced when looking at a man’s neck.
