A Summer to Remember(6)
“Hey, how are you?” I inquired feeling quite girly and insecure for the first time in forever.
I didn’t usually act like this and the way I behaved was not in the natural order of my life. Men bowed down to me and I treated them like a never-ending supply of Ken dolls. They bathed in the attention I gave them as well as my beauty, plied me with compliments and I had my fun and left them when I felt like it.
This was my life since Kevin had left me and it was only now I realized he had done me a favor. Without the complications of a relationship, I could have a lot of fun and not feel guilty afterwards.
I was a woman of the new generation who didn’t necessarily act like a man but definitely treated sex the way men did and it was completely liberating. Sex was a great past time and a fun activity but it didn’t necessarily lead to love and I wasn’t expecting it to either. I was twenty-four and my whole life was in front of me. I had plenty of time to settle down and find the right guy. Right at that very moment, all I was interested in was this Friday night coming up in less than a full day.
My best friends would be in Southampton with me and we would join the young and beautiful crowd on the beach and have fun, drink too much and have an absolutely wonderful time. This summer was all about spending time with Talia, Savannah and Autumn. Men were definitely an after thought and that is the way it was always going to be as far as I was concerned.
“I’m doing great to be honest. I just came up for a long weekend. The parents are in Italy so it’s all good.” Paul turned toward me and stared at me with those impossibly blue eyes. “What about you? According to Jude, you’re thinking of spending the whole summer here. Isn’t that a bit unrealistic? I mean with the art gallery and your job?”
“It is and it isn’t,” I responded in an evasive manner. “I haven’t made up my mind yet but I want to spend time with my girlfriends. Perhaps I won’t get the whole summer and just June but I will definitely make the trip on Friday afternoons just to get away from the City. I’ve had it with Manhattan.”
He snickered out loud. “You haven’t been there long enough.”
“It claustrophobic and I am used to trees and the open air. Jude and I have a great loft but I still get anxiety attacks sometimes. I just don’t think it’s for me and now I have screwed it up by building my whole life there.”
Paul said nothing as he watched me spray on the sunscreen and gently rub it into my soft skin. “Do you need help with your back?”
“Yes, please,” I replied in my best helpless voice.
He leaned over and untied the back of my bikini top. I don’t know why but his touch was sensual and warm. I felt myself grow damp between my legs and silently cursed myself. What a freakin’ cliché! A man who I had deep and intense feelings for as long as I could remember touched me and all the sudden I was a pile of goo who couldn’t string two words together? I was a pathetic excuse for the modern woman!
The spray hit my back like a dose of cold water before his warm hands massaged the liquid into my skin. “You have to give the City a chance. I grew up in Connecticut too and when I first moved to Manhattan, I hated it. I cursed Jude for getting me a job at the investment firm and all I wanted was the safe and comforting surroundings I grew up with but…little by little, the City that never sleeps has grown on me.”
I turned towards him though all he could see was my profile. “You’re serious? You actually like New York?”
He sprayed my lower back and slowly massaged the liquid into my skin. “I don’t like it—I love it now. Plus, I think about what if I had never taken the chance then what are the odds I would have met Ashley?”
Not only did I feel wordless but I felt clueless.
Fucking perfect Ashley Cartwright with her perfect name and her perfect WASP background.
Me? Well, my family was the average American family—a regular Heinz 57. My mother was a quarter Creole, a quarter Scottish, a quarter Irish and a quarter Welsh. My father had been adopted by a very wealthy couple who were actually Scandinavian but my father was actually half German, a quarter Finnish and a quarter Norwegian. His father had been an exchange student and thus the reason why his very Midwestern mother from Minnesota had given him up in the first place. She was about to enter graduate school and found out her ex-beau had left her with more than just a surprise goodbye before he’d moved back to Frankfurt.
Paul and Ashley were so different and shared nothing but our society crowd, I wondered how they managed to get together at all.