Girls in Love

by Hailey Abbott

  Lara, to whom this meant nothing—she’d never seen a baseball game in her life, not even on TV—just nodded and smiled. Which was fine; Richard could talk RBIs and shortstops and fastballs all day long, but he didn’t really need anyone to pay attention to him.

  She poured herself some coffee, even though she’d had four cups already and was practically shaking from the effects of the caffeine. Pretty soon she’d be so jacked up she’d be writing down orders in what looked like chicken scratches.

  “Ramírez and Youkilis, too,” Richard went on, glaring at the paper as if it had insulted him. “They practically killed each other last week, and they’re on the same damn team!”

  Lara pretended to listen, but her attention was suddenly drawn on the door, which had just opened to reveal a very, very cute guy. He was wearing a pair of worn-in jean shorts, a faded Bob Dylan T-shirt, and flip-flops. The sand that clung to his feet suggested he’d come straight from the beach. In one hand he held a battered and rather dirty doll, and with the other he was grasping the shoulder of a very pouty girl who looked about seven.

  Lara hurried over to them. “Table for two?” she asked, offering him her warmest smile.

  He had dark, glossy hair and deep brown eyes. He reminded Lara of Gael García Bernal in Y tu mamá tam-bién, a movie that she had seen at least five times because Gael was so incredibly cute.

  The Gael look-alike nodded emphatically. “My sister here needs a bowl of something sweet before she throws another hissy fit.” He rolled his eyes and smiled back.

  Lara led them to a booth in the corner, feeling his eyes on the nape of her neck. Her cheeks began to flush. The immediate attraction she felt for this dark-haired boy surprised her, since she had just been thinking about how much she missed Drew.

  But since Drew had taken himself out of the Pebble Beach picture by deciding to be a camp counselor for a bunch of snot-nosed third-graders somewhere in the Vermont woods, she was free to look, right?

  Or maybe do more than look?

  She put a little swing in her hips as she walked, and then felt silly.

  Stop it, she chided herself. He’s just here for some ice cream. He’s not here to order up a date with you.

  Brother and sister clambered into the booth, and the girl reached for her spoon and pointed it at Lara aggressively. “I want a banana split,” she demanded.

  Her brother snatched the spoon away. “Marcela,” he warned, “if you can’t be polite, you can’t have any ice cream.” He looked up apologetically at Lara. “She’s been impossible today because our parents drove to the art museum without her.” He paused and looked back at his sister. “Even though she said she didn’t want to go,” he added pointedly. “Even though she says art is stupid.”

  Marcela stuck her tongue out at him.

  “So a banana split?” Lara asked, admiring the guy’s patience, as well as his muscled, athletic body, which was so different from Drew’s lanky leanness.

  “Yes, please,” he said, handing Marcela a stack of napkins in preparation for the inevitable mess.

  Lara turned to the little girl. “You know what our cook calls a banana split? A houseboat! It’s his special word for it.”

  Marcela raised her eyebrows, and her black eyes opened wider. “That’s silly,” she pronounced.

  “I know!” Lara was encouraged by the girl’s change in attitude. “So I’ll bring you one houseboat right away.” She turned to Marcela’s brother. “What can I get for you?”

  He glanced at the menu and then up at her. “Coffee, I guess. That’s all for now.”

  “It’s good here,” she assured him. “I should know; I’ve already had about a gallon of it. My name is Lara. If you need anything else, just yell.”

  “Thanks,” he replied. “I’m Marco.”

  Lara smiled at him. She always told customers her name, but they never offered theirs in return. Perhaps, she thought as she walked away, Marco was just a tiny bit interested in her, beyond her ability to bring him a cup of Ahoy Grill’s strong, black coffee.

  It was 11:15, the beginning of the lull between breakfast and lunch. Normally Lara would be occupying herself with prep work for the lunch rush, but she’d come in early that morning and gotten everything ready, which meant that now she was free to linger by Marco’s table after she brought Marcela her banana split.

  “My sailboat!” Marcela had squealed upon seeing the sundae, piled high with fresh whipped cream and topped with three glistening maraschino cherries.

  Lara and Marco shared a smile, not bothering to correct her as she dove into the sugary treat.

  “So are you in town for the summer?” Lara asked casually.

  Marco nodded. “My dad grew up just south of here, and he likes to come back when he can. My mom loves it, too, even though she says the water’s too cold. But she’s from Chile—have you ever gone into the ocean in Chile? It’s freezing. You ought to spell the country ‘Chilly.’ You know, like C-H-I-L—”

  “I get it,” Lara laughed. “Very funny.”

  “Oh, it’s not funny at all; it’s deadly serious,” Marco said with mock sternness. “That ocean will freeze your Chuck Taylors off.” He raised an eyebrow.

  Involuntarily, Lara glanced down at her shoes, one of which had a big splotch of ketchup on it already. She wished she could waitress in cute sandals. How was she supposed to flirt wearing dirty sneakers, a red-checked apron, and a T-shirt that said, “Get Your Grill On at Ahoy”?

  “Well, I’ll be very careful the next time I’m in Chile,” she answered, smiling and feeling a blush sting her cheeks.

  Marco turned to his sister, who had a large dollop of whipped cream on her nose. “Hey, kiddo, you’re supposed to eat that stuff, not inhale it. Snorting whipped cream is dangerous. It can be addictive, too. You don’t want to end up on the streets, begging for a can of Reddi-wip, do you?”

  Lara laughed. “Whipped cream is a gateway drug,” she added. “Next thing you know you’ll be shooting up Red Hots and Lemonheads, and let me tell you, that is not a path you want to go down.”

  Marco grinned. “Listen to Lara! She’s seen it all, working here at Ahoy. Kids strung out on Pop-Tarts and root beer floats…”

  Marcela, who was very happily eating her sundae, ignored them both. Lara wondered how long they could keep this joke up. Personally, she had a tendency to beat a joke into the ground, but she was trying to learn to quit when she was still ahead. Which was why, instead of talking about twelve-step programs for licorice addicts, she cleared her throat and asked Marco where his family was staying.

  It turned out that their house was just half a mile from the Tuttles’ trio of cabins.

  “I’ve walked by your houses,” Marco said, after Lara told him where the Tuttle family was staying. “They used to be beach shacks, and now they’re more like Mies van der Rohe.”

  Lara raised her eyebrows. Mies van der Rohe? How many tall, to-die-for, cute guys had ever heard of the famous German architect, let alone could drop his name into casual conversation? Her interest in Marco ticked up a notch.

  “They’re pretty great,” Lara allowed. “This is only my second summer in them. My mom married into the Tuttle family, and they’ve rented those houses forever. I mean, they rented the shacks, and then after those burned down and the new ones got built, they started renting them…” She felt herself babbling a little, and so she stopped and bit her lip.

  “Lucky you,” he said. “With all those people around, it must be like an endless party.”

  Lara thought of the big cookouts, the family picnics, and the nights she and Jessica and Greer had stayed up giggling until three in the morning. “Yeah, it sort of is.”

  Marco’s dark eyes met hers. “Maybe you could invite me sometime,” he said softly.

  Lara felt her heart skip a beat. “S-sure,” she stammered. Then she recovered herself and ran a hand through her hair. “I mean, if you think you can handle the crowd. I have cousins you can’t win over with a single banana
split, you know.”

  Marco took a sip of his coffee and then leaned back in the booth. “I think I can handle that,” he said. “Why don’t you give me your number?”

  Before she could regret it—before she could think again of Drew—Lara scribbled her cell phone number on a blank ticket.

  Marco took it with a smile and tucked it into his pocket. “I’ll use this, you know,” he warned.

  The bell over the front door jangled, and Lara saw a party of five come tramping into the waiting area. The lunch rush was about to begin.

  She started toward the hostess stand, and then turned back to Marco. “I dare you to,” she said playfully, and then she walked away, feeling her spirits lift.

  Operation Move On was under way.

  7

  The Pebble Beach Athletic Club was certainly no fancy New York health club, Greer mused as she slipped out of her eggplant-colored sheath in the no-frills locker room. CLAY, the gym Greer belonged to back in Manhattan, boasted cool, minimalist Zen decor and eucalyptus-and-mint-scented towels, not to mention a roof deck where one could get rubbed down, post-workout, by a very hot masseuse. The PBAC, on the other hand, reminded Greer of a high school gym. Its towels smelled like bleach, and there wasn’t a masseuse in sight, unless that large, grumpy woman who’d checked her in was also certified in shiatsu.

  Greer sighed as she shrugged on her tennis dress and pulled her shiny, dark hair into a ponytail. She was so not the athletic type, but her mother had begged her to join her for a quick tennis game.

  Normally Greer would have refused (and perhaps suggested her mother ask Jessica the Jock to play in her stead) but this summer she had two reasons for agreeing to this plan: (1) She was trying to be nicer to her mother, because she knew, deep down, that Cassandra was just trying to have a good vacation, and (2) She wanted to keep an eye on her mother, because she was pretty sure that Cassandra—in true, Desperate Housewives style—had been flirting with every pool boy, tennis coach, and golf pro in the greater Pebble Beach area.

  Greer checked herself in the mirror, making sure her Ralph Lauren tennis dress clung to her in all the right places, and then dabbed a little sunscreen on her face before heading out to the court to meet her mother.

  She saw her sitting on one of the benches by the courts, talking to another woman. By the stiff way her mother held her shoulders back and clutched at her racquet, Greer could tell she was not a fan of her bench companion. As Greer approached, she noticed that the other woman was about her mother’s age and was similarly cosmetically enhanced: Greer could spot a boob job and a Botox addiction from a mile away.

  “Oh, I just love Aspen,” the woman was saying, waving her red talonlike nails through the air. “We stay in this absolutely wonderful inn—”

  “Oh, Aspen, really?” Greer’s mother said coolly. “I always preferred Gstaad myself.”

  The woman smiled a thin, disingenuous smile. “Well, I suppose if you’re not at all concerned about the size of your carbon footprint, you could fly all the way to Switzerland,” she responded.

  Cassandra was unfazed. “Carbon footprint? Of course we care about our carbon footprint, Monica. That’s why we charter a small, fuel-efficient jet.” She fingered the diamond pendant she wore so that the three-carat stone flashed in the light. “And the Jacuzzis in our hotel are solar-heated, of course.”

  Monica narrowed her eyes as she prepared her rejoinder. “Oh, you Jacuzzi? All that chlorine can really age the skin.” She leaned in closer. “Have you moisturized recently?”

  Greer suppressed a chuckle. When men tried to show each other up like this, she thought, it was called a pissing contest. But what was the term for two fortysomething women in short tennis skirts exchanging delicate barbs under the guise of polite conversation? Greer smiled to herself. Two cougars flexing their claws, she thought.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” she said sweetly, tapping her Tretorns on the pavement, “but don’t we have a tennis game to play, Mom?”

  Cassandra glanced up at her daughter and smiled. “Oh, darling, you weren’t interrupting. You weren’t interrupting anything at all.”

  Monica stood up, revealing a toned, tan body and plenty of diamonds of her own. “Yes, I think we were quite done,” she huffed, and stalked off toward the locker room.

  Greer poked her mother in the arm. “You don’t have to be so awful, you know.”

  Cassandra laughed. “That provincial hausfrau thinks she’s God’s gift to the tennis pros. You should have seen her slobbering all over the manager. It was absolutely disgusting.”

  What Greer did not point out was that this was a pot-calling-the-kettle-black sort of situation, considering that her mother had been handing out her “business card” (Cassandra called herself an interior decorator, but the only homes she’d ever decorated were her own) to every male with a nice smile and a heartbeat.

  “Well, Mom, maybe you can show her up in tennis,” Greer suggested, leading her mother to their court.

  Cassandra clapped her hands together gleefully. “That’s exactly what I plan to do. Which is why I signed us up for lessons together, three times a week, until the end of summer, when we destroy that bleached blonde and her slutty daughter in the Pebble Beach Athletic Club Mother-Daughter Tennis Tournament.”

  Greer’s mouth fell open. “Excuse me? Tennis lessons? I agreed to a game, Mom, a single, solitary game.”

  Cassandra pulled a visor down over her carefully coiffed hair. “Oh, please, Greer, what else do you have to do? You can’t lie on the beach all the time.”

  “Oh, yes I can,” Greer insisted. “Just watch me.”

  “I’ve already paid for the whole season,” Cassandra went on. She turned back toward the clubhouse, adjusting her bracelets and then glancing at her watch. “The pro will be here any minute. In fact, I think I see him coming now.”

  Greer squinted in the bright sunlight, then remembered her Chanel shades and slid them down over her eyes. A tall, tanned figure wearing a PBAC polo loped toward them.

  Wait.

  It couldn’t be—was it? She felt her stomach do a little flip.

  Greer was glad that her sunglasses hid most of her face, because that meant they also hid most of her surprise. The instructor her mother had hired for them was none other than Hunter. As in, the extremely hot player Greer had made out with at the party.

  “Mrs. Hallsey,” Hunter declared, holding out his hand. “So wonderful to see you again.”

  Cassandra twittered and blushed, clearly awed by Hunter’s charm. “This is my daughter, Greer,” she informed him. “Greer, this is Hunter Brown.”

  Greer folded her arms across her chest and gazed stonily at them both through her shades. “We’ve met.”

  “Really?” Cassandra looked surprised. “Well, isn’t that nice. You two are already friends.”

  Friends, Greer thought drily. Is that what you call it when you jump each other five minutes after you’ve met?

  Hunter grinned at her, and Greer was struck again by how handsome he was. She could tell he saw right through her aloof act with those blue eyes of his. He was practically daring her not to smile back.

  Then he turned to her mother. “I had the opportunity to make the acquaintance of your beautiful daughter at a party a week or two ago,” he informed her, and Cassandra practically cooed with pleasure.

  Greer stifled a snort. Yeah, he’d been able to “make her acquaintance.” Was that what he called nibbling on her neck? But she had to hand it to Hunter: He sure knew how to charm the ladies.

  “You didn’t mention you worked here,” she said, still not smiling at him.

  Hunter shrugged. “There wasn’t time, I guess.” Then he winked. Really, he was ridiculously good-looking.

  Greer sighed. She so wanted to be a good girl this summer, and Hunter was not going to make it easy, was he?

  As they made their way onto the court for their first lesson, Hunter fell into step beside her. “See?” he whispered. “I’m the kind o
f guy you can bring home to your mother.”

  “All I need you to be now is the kind of guy who can improve my backhand,” Greer hissed.

  Hunter laughed. “Still a spitfire, I see. Well, listen, Ms. Heartbreaker, I like you, and I’m not going to let you slip away again.”

  Greer was trying to think of what to say when a beautiful, red-haired girl in a practically see-through beach cover-up passed by on the other side of the chain-link fence.

  And Hunter, who had just been swearing his sincerest affection for Greer, stopped and stared.

  I knew he was a player, Greer thought icily. Normally she liked being right about people, but she found little pleasure in it this time.

  8

  Jessica pulled the bedsheet up tightly over her body, and then, thirty seconds later, kicked it off again, flopping over onto her stomach and burying her face in her down pillow. After lying like that for a while, she realized that she was getting light-headed from lack of oxygen, and so she turned back onto her side.

  Out the window she could see the moon dancing on the water. The reassuring sound of the surf filled the quiet room. But she was not reassured. She was awake and rest-less, thinking about Connor.

  She sighed loudly and flopped over onto her other side.

  “Good God,” cried Lara from the bunk bed below her. “What’s your problem, Jess? It’s like trying to sleep underneath a wrestling match or something.”

  From the double bed on the other side of the room (of course Greer had scored the double bed) came a snort of laughter. “It’s true,” Greer said, sounding sleepy herself. “You’ve been tossing and turning for an hour. What gives?”

  Jessica stopped flopping around and lay still, staring up at the ceiling. She wasn’t sure how to talk to her cousins about what was going on—or, rather, what wasn’t going on—between her and Connor. Greer and Lara were so much more experienced with the physical stuff that Jessica felt embarrassed. She sighed again.