The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(15)

He stopped up ahead of her, crouching down to look at something in the sand. She slowed too, but he didn’t stay crouched for too long. He got up and kept walking. She reached the place where he’d crouched. It was hard to see at first but there were the bleached bones of a gull, and a few feathers. She placed her feet in his footprints and crouched, as well, studying the exposed spine of the bird, the way it curved to its head, picked of flesh, but with its beak half covered with sand.

“Oh, hey,” came the voice, and she looked up at Richard. “Were you following me?” he said.

If anyone else in the world had asked her that question she’d have denied it, but somehow, because it was Richard, she said, “I was swimming, then saw you walk by. Wanted to know what you were up to.”

“I’m just walking. Want to come with me?”

They walked down to the end of the beach, to where a pile of black, seaweed-fringed rocks jutted out into the ocean. “Do you like tide pools?” Richard said, peering down into a pool of water, half obscured by one of the black rocks.

“I can’t honestly say I’ve given them that much thought.”

He smiled at her. “I only like them because they’re filled with things.” He crouched down, and Joan stood over him. With Richard crouched, and her standing, they were practically the same size. She looked at his dark neck, one of the few parts of him that was truly tanned. He wore a black T-shirt today, and not one of his striped polo shirts. She watched, fascinated, as he submerged his arm into the water, putting it in the dark crevice formed by the rock. When he pulled his hand out it was cupped and he showed her a small green crab he was holding delicately between his fingers. “See?” he said.

“I don’t know how you stick your hand in there.”

The crab’s small pincers waved angrily, and Richard slid it back into the tide pool, where it darted away. He stood back up, and Joan saw a thin ribbon of blood was coming off his hand.

He looked at it, surprised. “Oh, it got me,” he said, washing his hand in the tide pool. Then he looked more closely at the ragged cut between his thumb and index finger. “Do you want to go swimming?”

Joan wasn’t particularly interested in getting back in the water, but said, “Yes,” anyway, and watched as Richard, after pulling off his T-shirt and leaving it on the sand, bounded out into the waves, spun so that he was facing her, then fell backward into the water. She joined him, the water still shockingly cold, and together they floated for a while.

“I’ve been thinking about what we talked about last night,” she said.

“About Duane?”

“Yeah.”

“He told me last night that he fucked you on the beach.” Richard made air quotes when saying the word fucked.

“What?” Joan said, although it was more like a scream.

“He didn’t say your name or anything, but he mentioned you were a gymnast so I figured he was talking about you.”

“What did he say?”

“Not much. First he was talking about the girl who works behind the desk, and what he wants to do to her, and then he said he’d already fucked the only other hot girl at the hotel, and how you were a gymnast and everything.”

“Why’d he even mention that?”

“What? Being a gymnast? He said gross stuff about it.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t want to say.”

“Just tell me.”

“He said you were totally horny, and you did a split on his cock. Something like that.”

Joan let out a guttural scream between her clenched teeth. “That’s a total lie. He’s disgusting.”

“Yeah, what did I tell you. I knew he was lying, though. Don’t worry.”

“Did you tell him you knew me?” Joan said.

“I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know exactly. I figured he’d be weird about it.”

Joan, trying to relax, had tipped back and was floating again. The sky was a hard, cloudless blue.

“It’s good you didn’t tell him we know one another.”

“Okay,” Richard said.

“I mean, no one knows we know each other,” she said. “Maybe we should keep it that way. We could be secret friends, and no one would know about it except for us.”

“Sure,” Richard said.

A wave lifted them, and they slid down its back side. “You probably think I’m just saying that because I don’t want people at school to know we became friends or something,” Joan said. “I hope you don’t think that.”

“Oh,” Richard said. “I didn’t really think that, at all. But it would be cool to be secret friends and have no one else know.”

“Okay,” Joan said. “And now that we are friends, I need to tell you that I’m getting out of the water because I’m too cold.”

“You should go ahead,” he said. “I’m going to swim a little bit longer.”

Before leaving him, Joan said, “I hate your fucking cousin.”

“Yeah, me too. Join the club.”

She took a few strokes toward shore then rode up and over a crashing wave that deposited her hard onto her hip in the shallow water. It hurt a little but she was a gymnast and used to being hurt.