by Chant, Zoe
“Come on. You’re the trash-picking-up hero, I’m just your sidekick.”
He caught her arm when she stumbled over a piece of driftwood. His reaction time was bewilderingly fast, lightning-fast.
He said, “So are you... with Sanitation or something? Public Works?”
“City planner’s office,” Lindsay said. “But this is, depressingly enough, off-the-clock.”
“You just don’t like a messy beach.” He made it sound completely reasonable.
“What about you? Why are you out in the rain?”
“I was sketching.” There was an odd tinge of embarrassment in his voice. He didn’t follow up with more details, either.
Men were so weird sometimes. Hadn’t they seen Titanic? Didn’t they know how much women tended to swoon over dreamy artists?
Technically, she guessed she didn’t know for sure that Boone Keller was dreamy. Whenever she turned her head to get a peek at him, she was still mostly seeing a rain-colored blur. But even if the sun came out and revealed him to have two heads, he’d still have those steady, capable hands and the kind of sweetness that made him help a stranger carry an enormous bag of beach trash. She doubted he had anything to be ashamed of.
She was about to say that it must be a lot easier for him to work without all the background hubbub of the typical beach crowd, but then she saw a gossamer shimmer out of the corner of her eye. She pulled up short.
Boone stopped immediately. “What is it?”
“There’s somebody there,” Lindsay said. She pointed. “Under the boardwalk.”
San Marco’s boardwalk was usually as crowded as its beaches, bustling with food trucks, carnival-style games, and couples strolling along hand-in-hand. Today, of course, it was deserted.
But the underside of it wasn’t. Huddled beneath the wooden planks, down in the mess of slimy seaweed and cigarette butts, was a young woman. She was curled up with her arms wrapped around her knees. She looked out-of-place—and maybe scared.
“She shouldn’t be out in this,” Boone said. “She doesn’t even have a raincoat.”
Lindsay hoisted up her umbrella. “I can loan her this. Let’s get her somewhere dry.”
They made their way closer. There was something Lindsay didn’t like about all this. All of a sudden, she felt like she was in the beginning of a horror movie. Everything seemed ominous: the jagged purple-white scars the lightning made on the sky, the torrential rain that filled up their footsteps the moment they left them, the total isolation. The storm was so loud. She and Boone had almost had to shout to hear each other, and they were less than a foot apart. No one farther away than that would hear a thing. They wouldn’t even hear a scream.
And here was this woman, alone and shivering, hiding out in the one part of San Marco even Lindsay thought was gross.
She didn’t like it. Didn’t like any of it.
She was just glad Boone was there so she didn’t have to go through it all alone.
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