and commit her features to memory.
She is a heart-shaped mouth.
She is slick caramel hair.
She is bottomless brown eyes.
Even in anger, she is dazzling.
elise
I throw my sweatshirt over my wet tank top (my white, see-through, no-wonder-he’s-staring, thank-God-I’m-wearing-a-sports-bra tank top), clip Bambi’s leash to her collar, shoulder my camera, and literally pound sand.
He never says a word.
At home, I give Bambi a once-over with an old beach towel, then stand in the shower under a blast of hot water until my skin’s no longer gooseflesh. I throw on jeans and a T-shirt that bears a growling tiger, my old high school’s mascot, then twist my hair into a knot at the crown of my head. Racked by a lingering chill, I shuffle into the kitchen for coffee. My mom’s made a pot, a vanilla blend that’s still steaming. I retrieve my favorite mug from the cupboard, a lumpy, oversize atrocity my brother spun in his high school pottery class. I pour coffee and sweeten it before wrapping my cold hands around the warm ceramic.
“Elise?” Mom, from down the hall.
I make my way to the tiny space that branches off her bedroom, the one she insists on referring to as herlibrarybecause she’spretentious that way. She’s not a writer or even an author—she’s anovelist. Our dog is acompanion. The many multicolored book spines that line her shelves are amélange.
She’s sitting at her desk, a refinished secretary littered with file folders and pens and research materials. She writes pantie-melting romances set on the western frontier and, bizarre as it sounds, she’s a household name within her literary niche. Over her desk there’s a wall-spanning collage of her book jackets, matted and framed, images of ladies with barrel-curled hair and bustled dresses posing with rugged men who’ve lost their shirts but managed to retain their cowboy hats. She hung those jackets the night we moved in, inspiration for her latest manuscript, one she sold on proposal, the first in more than three years.
“How was your walk?” she asks, swiveling around to face me.
“Eventful.” I sink into the overstuffed reading chair that occupies one corner of the room and smile at the sight of Bambi, passed out on her flannel doggy pillow.
“How so?”
I sip coffee, gauging how much I can divulge without instigating an anxiety attack. “There was this guy at the beach. He went into the water.”
Mom’s brow crinkles. “He was swimming?”
“I guess? He was wearing his clothes, which was weird. The surf was crazy. He might’ve gotten into trouble if I hadn’t…”
Her eyes have gone Frisbee wide. “If you hadn’twhat?”
I fidget. I swallow more coffee. In a minuscule voice I say, “If I hadn’t helped him.”
“Elise Parker, tell me you didn’t go into the ocean.”
“I didn’t go into the ocean,” I say obediently.
She glances at Bambi, who raises her head as if to counter with,Oh, she did.
Mom looks back at me. “You’re a terrible liar.”
“But I’m a good swimmer.” It’s true. The summer before I went intothird grade, Nick and I spent hours at the pool in our neighborhood, where he taught me the crawl stroke, how to dive, and how to tread water. I’m practically a mermaid.
“Doesn’t matter. Nobody’s a good swimmer in those currents. Who was this guy?”
“No idea. I didn’t stay to chat. He was… odd.”
She pushes her reading glasses up her nose. “Maybe I should walk Bambi with you from now on.”
“I’m fine, Mom. Besides, mornings are your writing time.” It was the move to Cypress Beach that reignited her fire. She’s not only writing in the mornings; she’s been working all day, well into the night, sometimes. Now that she’s under contract again, she seems almost happy. “And anyway, you’ve been bugging me to get out and meet new people. That’s what I did.”
“Still, you shouldn’t be wandering around on your own.”
