“Late night?” he asked.
Ellie felt herself go red.What to tell him?“It was… you’ll need to ask Kelly for the details.”
He nodded. “I will. All ok?”
“Very. How was your night?”
Colt chuckled. “Got a little crazy. How about I make us some coffee and I’ll tell you all about it while we let our two sleeping beauties get some more shuteye?”
Ellie smiled and nodded. Colt was just about the unlikeliest friend she could have made, the boyfriend of the woman her wife was sleeping with, but sitting out on their porch and putting the world to rights over coffee on a warm Texas morning sounded pretty much perfect.
Chapter 23
Three weeks later Ellie and Becca were in Florida, and the day-to-day felt a million miles away.
The drive from the airport took them along the coast road, Highway 30A, and Ellie's first thought was that it looked nothing like Texas, nothing like California, and certainly nothing whatsoever like Portland. The glimpses of the shore revealed sand that was white, not cream or yellow, genuinely white. The water was a kind of sparkling blue-green that almost looked like it was a computer generated vision of what the seaside should look like. And alongside the shore they could see a mix of upmarket developments and clusters of beach houses, separated by low dunes and the occasional bar, or shop, or restaurant.
Their rental was in Rosemary Beach, a community that had the aesthetic of a very wealthy person's idea of a charming coastal village… white clapboard, tin roofs, cobbled lanes, bougainvillea everywhere. It was beautiful in a surreal way, as if someone haddesigned the town to film a romantic comedy then decided that afterwards they may as well keep going.
“Holy shit,” Becca said when they got to their house, standing at the door with her bag over her shoulder. “Ellie.”
“I know.”
“The pool.”
“I know.”
“The view.”
“I know.”
“The house.”
Ellie laughed. “I know. You chose well.”
They looked at each other and both started smiling. Becca dropped her bag, walked to the pool's edge, and looked down at the water, then back at Ellie.
The house was more than they needed and exactly what they wanted. Two stories, pale wood floors, an open-plan kitchen that opened onto a back terrace, and beyond the terrace a pool. The pool made it. Rectangular, lit from beneath, screened on all sides by a dense tropical hedge that guaranteed privacy, with a gate through to the beach beyond. They could pick and choose how sociable or how private they wanted to be.
"We're going to have fun here," Becca said.
"That's the plan."
***
They spent the first two days going nowhere near their rental car, staying local, and those days were wonderful. They were the sort of vacation days that exist outside of normal time, where the only decisions that matter are where to eat and whether to swim in the ocean or the pool. They walked the white sand beach, ate shrimp tacos, rode bikes, and swam naked in the pool after dark under stars that didn’t seem quite as bright after Kelly and Colt’s ranch but were still beautiful.
On the third morning, over coffee on the terrace that had the usual effect on Becca that a shot of adrenaline would have on most humans, Becca said, "What would you think about us going to Panama City Beach today?”
Ellie stopped mid-sip, looking out at their very grown up and very sensible view. “The whole day?"
"Why not? It's spring break. We've never done spring break. Let's be idiots for a day."
Ellie thought about it. It was going to be full of exactly the sort of people that Becca and her had steered well clear of back when they were at college, but… they were twenty-five now, they were old enough to know what to avoid and handle the idiots. They’d never experienced the great American spring break tradition, and they were twenty minutes down the road from it. What was one day to head down there and see what the fuss was about?
"Let's be idiots," Ellie agreed. “Adorably, ever so slightly geekily hot, older idiots.”
***
