Beach Blondes: June Dreams, July's Promise, August Magic (Summer) (23 page)

“No, I like it. It’s so…you know, so
real.
It’s a
guy
word, like
transmission
or
yo
or, I don’t know, like
dude.
”

“So if I go around saying ‘Yo, dude, let’s grout that transmission,’ you’ll know I’m a guy?” He made a face. “Of course, I’d have to be a stupid guy, to grout a transmission.”

Summer laughed. “I guess I’d know you were a guy even if you didn’t say that.”

“I was beginning to wonder,” he said.

“What?”

“If you knew I was a guy.”

Summer shrugged, feeling embarrassed again. “I may have noticed. I mean, of course, duh.” She pointed at his bare chest. “You’re really flat chested. That was my first clue.”

Now he was embarrassed, too.

“So, um, have you had breakfast or anything?” Summer said, heading briskly toward the kitchen.

“I had cereal when I got up, but that was hours ago,” he said.

“I have some eggs and some bread, so I was going to maybe fry the eggs and make toast,” Summer said. “Do you want some?”

Sure,” Seth said gratefully. “You know how to cook?”

“Not really, but I’m trying to learn,” Summer said. “I have to go to work in an hour, so I need to eat something first. Oh, by the way,” she said with careful nonchalance, “Diana asked me to give you this envelope. I have no idea what it is.”

Seth looked in the envelope and smiled. “She didn’t have to do that,” he said. “I’m extremely relieved that she did, but she didn’t have to.”

“I guess it was kind of embarrassing having that picture around,” Summer agreed.

“Hah. You said you had no idea what was in the envelope,” Seth said, smirking a little.

“I guessed,” Summer said.

“You looked.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Seth, I’m
trying
to cook. Could you not start arguments with me when I’m trying to cook?” Summer said severely.

Seth leaned against the wall while Summer began cooking. He winced a couple of times, at the way she cracked the eggs and the way she didn’t butter the toast all the way to the edges, and again at the way she tried to turn the eggs over too early and broke the yolks, but he stayed where he was.

“I broke only three out of the four eggs,” Summer said wryly. “I’m improving.”

They sat at the simple round table. Summer gave Seth the unbroken egg.

“Thanks. I was starving,” he said, attacking the food.

“Well, all that hard work,” Summer said. “Hammering, grouting, and so on.”

“Yeah. Plus it was a long night.”

“Yes, it was,” Summer agreed. He had a smear of butter on his lower lip. It was hard not to stare at it.

“Thanks,” Seth said. “You seem like you’re okay. You know, about last night.”

Summer shrugged. “I
was
pretty upset.”

“I wish I could have, I don’t know, helped somehow.”

“It wasn’t your problem,” Summer said.

“But maybe I could have helped you, you know?” Seth looked embarrassed now, as if he’d said too much.

Summer picked up the paper towel she was using as a napkin and reached over to wipe the butter from his lip.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” she said.

He got up from the table, piled her dish together with his, and carried them to the kitchen. She followed him, intending to give the plates a quick rinse.

They collided. The collision lasted longer than it should have.

He put his arms around her. She pushed him, her palms flat against his lean, bare chest.

“I want to kiss you,” Seth said.

“Well, you can’t,” Summer said. “This is just like in the airport. You think you can just go around kissing people when they don’t even want you to?”

“I thought you wanted me to,” he said. He was still very close. “Are you sure you don’t?”

Summer hesitated. Seth took her in his arms again, and this time she didn’t resist. He kissed her.

After several very pleasurable seconds, she pushed him away. “I’m sorry,” she gasped. “I shouldn’t have let you do that.”

“You shouldn’t have? Why?”

“Why? Why? How about because last night I was kissing Adam? I’m not some slut! That’s why. Jeez, Seth, you of all people should know. You’re the one who’s always telling me how people come down here to the Keys and start acting strange and losing control of themselves and doing things they would never do in the
real
world.”

“I said all that?” He looked disgruntled. “When am I going to learn to shut up?”

Summer twisted away from him and put some distance between them. What was it about Seth that he could get her to want to kiss him when she didn’t really want to? “I have to get ready for work.”

“Ready for work? La dee da?” He came close and took her hands in his. “Look, Summer, you can pretend you don’t care,” he said. “I don’t know why you want to pretend you don’t care, but that’s okay. I
do
care. I’m in love with you. I keep thinking maybe I’ve lost you, first over Lianne, then over Adam. But you know what? I won’t ever give up.”

At that moment Summer wanted very much for him to kiss her again. And that realization made her queasy. How could she want Seth to kiss her? Hadn’t she learned her lesson about leaping into relationships? She’d wanted Adam to kiss her, too, and look how that had turned out.

“You barely even know me,” she said. “How can you say you’re in love with me?”

“I don’t know. I guess I can say it because it’s the way I feel.”

“Seth, what if it turns out that I don’t feel the same way about you?”

He looked somber. “I don’t know. That would be bad.”

“Exactly. See? I don’t want that,” Summer said. “I mean, can’t we just take everything slower until we’re really, really sure?”

“Slower.” He thought that over. “Yes, I guess I can do slower.”

“That would be good,” Summer said. She was glad he understood. She was not going to jump instantly from Adam to him. That would be wrong, even on Crab Claw Key.

He looked thoughtful, then brightened at some idea.

“So, how about tomorrow afternoon?”

“We could think about starting then,” Summer said, actually a little disappointed that he was accepting it all so well. “We’ll take everything slow, see if we get along, see if we have anything in common and all of that.”

“After tomorrow we
will
have something in common,” he said, grinning wolfishly. “Masks, rubber clothes, and great big feet.”

Thanks, Summer had said. Thanks. The word seemed not to mean anything to Diana. Why had Summer said it? It wasn’t as if Diana had done much. On the contrary, she’d frozen up and babbled like an idiot, unable, without Marquez’s goading, even to explain why she was there at the Merrick mansion in the middle of the night.

You didn’t thank people for making asses of themselves. You didn’t thank people for being weak and contemptible. That made no sense at all.

She climbed the stairs to her room. From far off she could hear the sound of hammering. Seth, out working on the stilt house.

Thanks. Like Diana had done something.

She stopped halfway up the stairs, descended, and went instead to her mother’s vast bedroom suite. Mallory would be coming home soon. Any day now. Diana had to do what she’d been thinking of doing before then. Perhaps this afternoon, after she got back from volunteering at the institute.

She went into her mother’s bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. The bottle was there, as it had been on the countless occasions she’d looked. She twisted off the cap, feeling a strange satisfaction in the familiar feel of it. She spilled the pills out onto her palm and counted them carefully.

Yes, they were all still there. More than enough to do the job.

They would find her at the bottom of the circular stairs. She didn’t know why she’d chosen that spot. Perhaps it was supposed to be symbolic—Diana, dead at the bottom of the twin staircases, unable to decide whether she should go left or right. It struck her as funny in an awful way.

It would be a small item in the local paper—daughter of famous romance novelist dies from a drug overdose. Dead from an overdose. It would be so common it wouldn’t even make the big newspapers.

Although the Merrick family would certainly be relieved.

Relieved. Yes, that was the word. Relieved. Because…because they were afraid. Of her.

It was a new thought. A
new
thought, insinuated into the horribly familiar ritual thoughts of depression and self-loathing.

Was it true?

She replaced the pills in the bottle and put the bottle back precisely in its place on the shelf. She went upstairs to her own room.

She showered and was drying off when the thought poked up again into her brain.

The Merricks were afraid.

“So what?” she asked herself wearily. “So what?”

She shook her head impatiently and returned to more familiar thoughts. She wondered when her mother would come home. She wondered whether Adam had laughed at the way she’d stood there, trembling and incoherent. Probably. Why wouldn’t he? It was funny, after all, the way she’d stood there unable to do or say anything. Funny.

And yet…Again the thought teased her. The Merricks were afraid of her.

“It’s not like it matters,” Diana said to her steamy reflection in the mirror. She began to dry her hair with a blow-dryer, fluffing it with her fingers. It wasn’t as if she could actually do anything to change what had happened. She was who she was, and that was the important fact.

And yet…they feared her. Adam feared her. Ross. The senator, even…

But what could she do? What was she going to do? Get some kind of revenge on them?

She started to laugh.

Then she froze. She directed the blow-dryer at the mirror, burning a hole through the steam.

Revenge? Was that the point?

How would that change anything? No, wait, the word wasn’t
revenge.

“Justice,” she said. That was the word.

Diana felt a chill that shivered her flesh and thrilled her mind.

Justice. Revenge. Call it whatever. They were afraid.

Her reflection became clear in the mirror, a face floating in a small circle made in the haze. Her dark, sad eyes stared back at her.

How many times had she looked into her own eyes, hoping to find something there? Something other than weakness and self-hatred. How many times had she looked and seen the eyes of a victim staring back at her, a contemptible, weak, disgusting…

They. Were. Afraid.

Her hand was clutching the handle of the dryer so tightly the plastic began to snap.

And then Diana did see something new in the eyes that looked back at her. She had already done something to hurt Adam, hadn’t she? She’d told Summer the truth, and look what had happened.

Diana laughed out loud, a strange, wild sound. Yes, she had already hurt one of the Merricks with a simple statement of truth.

That’s what they were afraid of. They were afraid of the truth.

Maybe they should be.

“Marquez! Pick up! Now!”

J.T.’s voice could be heard clear from the kitchen, through the swinging doors, over the chattering sound of the precheck computer and above the clatter of the bartender rapidly restocking his glasses.

Marquez gritted her teeth. Oh, J.T. was in rare form today. She hefted a tray of dirty dishes and hitched it in one swift move high up over her head. She barreled toward the swinging doors, stuck out her foot and kicked it open. She slammed the dirty dishes down at the dish station.

“I heard you the first four times you screamed my name!” Marquez yelled.

“I shouldn’t have to call you more than once, Marquez. If you weren’t off flirting for tips, you’d be here to pick up your food.”

J.T. was tall, a handsome, nineteen-year-old blond with calm, mellow-looking blue eyes. Usually. The mellow look was not in evidence right now. His white cook’s apron was stained green, red, and other colors that defied identification. He was sweating heavily and looked as if he might at any moment use the fourteen-inch chef’s knife in his hand for some evil purpose.

Despite everything, Marquez felt a twinge of attraction to him. There was something cute about J.T. when he was in one of his towering cook’s rages.

“You don’t need to worry about my flirting.” She glanced at her pad and at the dinner plates sitting up on the line. “Hah! The fries go on the pompano, the bake goes with the lobster. Hah. And you’re screaming at me?” She added several words in Spanish that made the Guatemalan dishwasher grin. Then she added several more.

Summer, who was nearby ladling chowder into bowls, looked over discreetly. J.T. scared Summer, Marquez knew. At least a little. Summer didn’t know him the way Marquez did.

“Don’t curse at me in languages I don’t understand,” J.T. grumbled. He quickly shifted the potatoes.

“Hey, you must not even understand English or you would have gotten the order right in the first place.”

“If you’d have picked up your order on time, you’d have spotted the problem earlier,” J.T. said, shaking his finger at her.

“Don’t you shake that at me,” Marquez warned. She tried to look fierce, but darn it, now he was smiling. “Jerk,” she said, loading the plates onto her tray.

“Lianne, pick up!” J.T. yelled.

Naturally, Lianne appeared instantly, bustling her tiny, eternally thin, never-even-have-to-think-about-a-diet shape through the swinging door.

“It’s so nice working with a real professional wait-ron,” J.T. said, directing the sarcastic comment over Lianne’s head at Marquez.

Marquez cursed at him under her breath. As she headed out to the dining room she heard a mock-angry J.T. say, “Lianne, did you hear that? I wish you’d have a talk with her about her attitude.”

Suddenly, Marquez heard J.T. yelp in pain. She glanced back just in time to see that he had burned the palm of his left hand as he reached for a spatula and pressed the side of the oven instead.

At the same instant, Summer recoiled from the bowl she was handling. She raised her left hand and looked at the palm. “Ouch,” she said. “I didn’t think it was that hot.”

Marquez shook her head. No. It was a simple coincidence. J.T. burned himself at least twice per shift, and Summer had been handling hot soup bowls.

But it had happened at the same instant. The same parts of the same hands.

Later, when the rush was over and Marquez could take a break, she hooked up with Summer, who was looking a bit frazzled, leaning against the counter in the waitress station as she swallowed an aspirin with a big glass of water.

“Give me one of those,” Marquez said wearily. “Is it your feet or your back that hurts?”

“Feet, back, and all parts in between,” Summer muttered. She handed the bottle to Marquez. “And your boyfriend! I hate to say anything bad about anyone…”

Marquez smiled affectionately. Summer actually did hate to say anything bad about anyone. “He’s my
ex
-boyfriend,” Marquez said. “And yeah, he was raggin’ big time today. It’s because Skeet called in sick, so he’s doing extra work.”

“Oh. I didn’t realize that. Now I feel bad. I shouldn’t have gotten so mad.”

“You got mad? What did you do, tell him to go to
heck
?” Marquez laughed.

Even Summer laughed. “You know, I have a lot of hostility down deep inside.”

“Well, J.T. keeps his hostility right up front where he can reach it easily. It’s funny, you two being so different.” Marquez didn’t realize what she was saying until she’d said it. She gulped hard. Probably Summer wouldn’t even notice.

No, Summer might be a sweet blonde, but she was not a dumb one.

“What do you mean by that?” Summer asked.

“What?”

“Why would it be funny if J.T. and I were different?”

“Did I say that?” Marquez took a long swallow of iced tea.

“I thought you did,” Summer said, tilting her head and giving Marquez a quizzical look.

“Why would I have said that? It wouldn’t make any sense,” Marquez pointed out.

“Oh.”

“Exactly,” Marquez said. Man, that had been close. Close and stupid, she realized as she poured three pitchers of iced tea. It was all a ridiculous idea, anyway. What were the odds that somehow J.T. was Summer’s long-lost brother, Jonathan? About a million to one?

Of course, the age was right, so that lowered the odds a little, some relentlessly logical corner of Marquez’s mind pointed out. And they were both white. Both blond. And in some ways they looked at least a little bit alike.

Marquez shook her head. This was nuts. It was beyond nuts.

“Guess what I’m doing tomorrow morning?” Summer said. “Scuba diving.”

“Scuba diving?” Marquez said. “Cool. Everybody says the Keys are the place to scuba dive. Me, I like air. What are you doing, taking lessons?”

“Yes. From Seth.”

Marquez’s jaw dropped. “You sleazebag.” She laughed. “Boom, out with the old, in with the new. That’s my girl, Summer—don’t waste any time. I mean,
any
time.”

Summer made a face. “It’s not what you think.”

“No, of course not,” Marquez said. “So, what’s the deal? You talked to Seth this morning and he did an airport on you?” She leered. Then she realized Summer wasn’t denying it. “You
slut
! You let him kiss you?”

“Shhh.” Summer glanced around nervously. “He’s broken up with Lianne, but there’s no point in making her feel bad.”

“Speaking of broken up…” Marquez grabbed the handles of two pitchers of iced tea in one hand. “The kitchen animals need their liquids.” She shook her head. “Little Summer Smith from Horsepuckey, Iowa, can
move.
”

“Bloomington, Minnesota,” Summer yelled as Marquez headed for the kitchen. “And it’s not like I just met Seth.”

Cooks were not allowed out of the kitchen, so waitresses generally brought them something cold to drink at the end of a shift. Generally, when J.T. was working everyone understood that Marquez took care of the duty. That, at least, had not changed since their breakup.

As she neared the kitchen she could hear the sound of rock music. The Ramones were pounding out “Teenage Lobotomy” from the CD player. It was one of the throwbacks the cooks liked to play at the end of a tough shift, a sort of goof on the intensity of work, shouting out “lo-bo-to-my” with the chorus.

Marquez was dancing before she reached the door, using the iced tea pitchers as a partner.

She backed through the swinging doors, executed a neat spin, and set the teas on the counter. She had both hands over her head and was rocking out fairly fiercely before she spotted J.T drinking a large glass of tea.

A glass that had apparently been handed to him by Lianne, who was standing nearby, smiling up at him.

J.T. looked at Marquez. Marquez looked at Lianne. Lianne spared a brief glance at Marquez, then returned her full attention to J.T.

“Oh, hey, thanks, Marquez,” J.T. said, seeming embarrassed.

“Yeah,” Marquez said. “No problem.”

She walked back out to the dining room. Lianne caught up with her.

“Hey, Marquez, I didn’t know you were pouring drinks, too.”

“I do that sometimes,” Marquez said. She was steaming, but since she had no good reason to be angry she couldn’t let Lianne see it. Let it go, Marquez told herself.

Lianne put her arm on Marquez’s shoulder to stop her.