He looks at me, tracking the awe on my face. His voice is soft. “Frankie Gardiner, overwhelmed by nature. So people do change.”
• • •
When we getback to the resort, I send my mom photos that I took at Tonquin Beach, and she writes back immediately.
Mom:Oh, how marvelous. The green ones are surf anemones. The pink are aggregating anemones. Did you touch one?
Me:No! Don’t they sting?
Mom:They can, but the ones out of the water are safe. Touching an anemone is a rite of passage.
I laugh, because it’s the sort of thing only my mother would say.
Mom:Are you having a good time? How’s George?
Me:I’m having the best time. And George is…
I think about how George is.
Perfect, I write.
I take a nap in the late afternoon, and when I wake, George is gone. He’s left me a note saying he’s out for a walk along the point and if I’m awake before he’s back to come meet him for dinner.
I find him out on the stretch of land that darts into the ocean. He hasn’t seen me yet, so I watch him, silhouetted by the golden evening sun. The wind is so strong I have to hold down my lilac cotton dress so I don’t flash the entire beach. It’s the prettiest thing I own—there’s a ruffle across the top of the one-shouldered bodice and a big flouncy hemline that falls to the middle of my calves.
George turns as I approach. We have a reservation at the resort’s restaurant in thirty minutes, and he’s already dressed. He’s wearing jeans, a well-loved Roots T-shirt, and a cream suit jacket with wide lapels. A little bit seventies. A lot hot.
“Hi,” I say, raising my hand, nervous.
“Hi,” George says. “That dress is—”
I’ve never worried this much about George’s opinion of my outfit, but he’s looking at me in a way that makes me think he prefers the regular jeans-and-a-tee Frankie.
“I’m going to go change,” I say as the ruffle at my neck flutters in the wind.
“Hey.” George swoops around me to block my path. “You have to give me a chance to form a sentence.”
“It shouldn’t be so hard to tell me I look nice.”
“You’re right—it shouldn’t be.” He clasps the back of his neck with a self-deprecating laugh. “But whenever I see you dressed up like this, my brain goes blank. It just empties out.”
“In a good way?”
A smile flits along his lips. “Yeah, Frankie. In a good way.”
“I didn’t know,” I say, drawing closer.
“There are a lot of things you don’t know.”
A shiver of anticipation rolls through me. I used to be preoccupied with discovering what George kept inside his small wooden chest. This is so much bigger. There’s a side of him I’ve never had access to—an entire ecosystem beneath the sea. The thought of crossing the threshold of that last, most intimate place is exhilarating. I want to unlock George, but I want to unlock myself, too.
“I know what I want,” I say, holding my hair out of my face as the wind whips through it. My heart has never beat so fast. “I don’t need any more time.”
George goes still, his eyes piercing mine. He hasn’t moved, but I feel his energy coursing under the surface. “What do you want, Frankie?”
It’s a challenge not to break eye contact when he’s looking at me with such focus. I’ve never let myself stare so deeply into George’s eyes as I have this week. When he looks at me like this, I feel stripped of all of my clothes. I am bare.
“I want you to have dinner with me tonight. I mean, I know we’re already going for dinner, but I want it to be different.”
