The Red Bikini

by Lauren Christopher

  Giselle eventually talked herself into starting over. She didn’t have any answers about what went wrong in her marriage, but she couldn’t stay stagnant forever. Her own mother had divorced twice, and Giselle had always promised herself her life would be different. Her daughter would never suffer through a broken home—separate Christmases, competitive birthday gifts, shuffling of weekends. She’d never fail her daughter.

  But then she did.

  And now she had to live with the fact that she’d failed in the only thing she ever wanted to be: a good mother, with a strong family.

  “That wasn’t what he wanted to tell you,” Fin said, leaning across the aqua Formica and running the receipt through his fingers.

  “What?” Giselle cleared her throat and forced herself out of her reverie.

  “I know it was devastating enough, but it wasn’t what he wanted to tell you. He wanted to tell you something else, but he didn’t want me there to hear it.”

  His eyes darted toward the counter, waiting for their food. As if on cue, the T-shirt-clad server appeared with two porcelain plates piled high with white rice, black beans, and fish tacos, all covered in bright red salsa.

  “Can you autograph this?” she asked shyly, handing him her cap. “To Tilly?”

  “I thought I autographed everything in this place already,” Fin said, smiling up at her.

  “I’m new.” She handed him a pen.

  He scrawled his name across the brim.

  “Thank you,” she said breathlessly, flinging her ponytail over her shoulder and sliding away.

  Giselle gaped at him as he loosened his tie and began moving the salsa bowls closer to each of their plates. “Do you always get asked for autographs like that?”

  “Oh.” He waved his hand back. “Not here. They’ve known me for years. The new girl threw me.”

  Giselle nodded. She thought her life was held up to scrutiny and judgment, but this put things into perspective. The snowboards and surfboards that hung at odd angles around the room did, indeed, have autographs all over them. She let her gaze roam over them until she gasped to see a huge graphic on a wall with Fin’s image, along with two other men, in colorful, Andy Warhol–style negative.

  He followed her eyes. “I was trying to position you so you didn’t see that. Crazy, huh? Those others are Kelly Slater and Taj Burrow. Kelly Slater is a modern legend. Taj Burrow beats me every year. And that’s Laird Hamilton.” He nodded with his head in another direction. “He’s a big-wave surfer.”

  “Kelly, Taj, Laird, and Fin? Do all surfers have to have ultracool names to compete?”

  “Yeah, Coco will fit right in. You need to get her on the Women’s Tour ASAP.”

  She smiled and tried to ignore the fact that she was sitting with a guy whose picture was a designer graphic on a restaurant wall and had girls named Tilly following him for an autograph. And that she happened to know he was the most amazing kisser.

  She watched him divest himself of his tie and fling it on the back of his chair, unbuttoning his shirt at the collar. His thick, tan knuckles undid the buttons deftly as she wondered what else his hands could do, what his fingers could trigger, who else’s zipper or dress he could unravel. . . . Embarrassed, she redirected her attention toward her meal.

  “This looks delicious,” she said.

  “It is—the three brothers who started this place have a Chinese-Brazilian heritage, so you have the white rice and black beans, but they learned the fish taco thing from their surf days in Mexico. I come here all the time.” Fin spooned extra salsa across his rice and held the bowl out to her.

  That was about as many words as he’d strung together the whole day. She felt a slight sense of accomplishment.

  “So how do you know?” she asked.

  “Know what?”

  “About Roy and that he wanted to say something else.”

  He attended his plate for a few seconds. “He just had that look about him.”

  Back to the short, choppy sentences.

  Giselle nodded. She’d noticed much the same thing—it did seem like Roy had begun with one agenda and switched to another. She was just surprised that Fin could read it.

  “So what did you think of him?” she asked.

  He gave her a wary look and didn’t answer.

  She watched him dig into his meal, then studied her own plate for a moment. The sex wax sticker poked out from under her plate and now said “ex ax.”

  “I’d like your opinion,” she prompted.

  “It’s none of my business, Giselle.”

  “I’d like it anyway.”

  He raised his eyebrow as if he didn’t quite believe her, then shrugged. “He has a kind of shiftiness, if you don’t mind my saying.”

  “I said I wouldn’t mind.”

  “I don’t want to insult you.”

  “Why would I be insulted?”

  “You married him.”

  Giselle’s spine stiffened as she pretended to move her rice around.

  Fin bit into his taco and watched her for a minute. “See? This is none of my business. I’m sorry. Go ahead and eat—you look like you’re going to fall over.”

  “Are you wondering why I married him?”

  He glanced at her between bites of his taco. “Doctor, good living, secure, probably smart. I can figure that out.”

  Giselle tried not to react. She did not marry Roy because he was a doctor. Or because he had money. That had been the furthest thing from her mind. In fact, when they were first married, he was a med student. They barely made ends meet. “Are you saying I married for materialistic reasons?”

  His mouth quirked up at the corner. “Giselle—I didn’t say that. You’re beautiful. And smart. And sophisticated as hell. So I figure he must have some redeeming qualities. But right now, he just seems like an asshole. That’s all I’m saying.” He took another bite.

  Giselle started to respond, but then closed her mouth. Fin was right. Roy did seem like a jerk. But he did have some redeeming qualities when she met him. And what did a twenty-eight-year-old who played in the ocean for a living know about what you searched for in a good marriage, anyway? She wanted a good father, of course. Someone who was solid . . . secure . . . certain of his future . . . Of course, Roy had turned out not to be any of those things. . . .

  And did Fin just say she was beautiful?

  She dragged her napkin back across her lap.

  “So tell me why he didn’t like Lia,” Fin said.

  Giselle shook her head.

  Fin finished one of his tacos and took another long sip of his drink. He pushed his plate back. “I want to know,” he said.

  Giselle paused, but then shook her head again. “It’ll only make him seem like more of a jerk.”

  “Try me,” he said tightly.

  “It’s not wise.”

  He busied himself with the salsa on his plate. “So was I right about why you married him?”

  “For money?”

  He smirked. “I didn’t say that, Giselle. I said he was probably smart. Secure.”

  Giselle sat straighter in her chair. She didn’t know, now, whether she’d made the right decisions. Maybe she had married Roy for the wrong reasons. Maybe she should have waited for those goose bumps, not pinned her sights on what seemed like security. Or fatherly material.

  “Maybe these questions are too personal, after all,” she said.

  “Well, I figure—being the new lover and all—I should know some of these things.”

  Giselle’s face flushed. She rearranged her napkin again. She didn’t want Fin to make fun of her. She didn’t want his pity, or anyone else’s.

  “Giselle,” he said, putting his taco down. “I’m sorry. I’m trying to lighten the mood here, but—”

  “I married him because I thought he’d be a go
od father,” she blurted.

  His expression registered surprise—clearly, he’d thought that line of questioning was over. But now he searched her face. “And is he?”

  Giselle managed to maintain eye contact for five full seconds before the tears stung her eyes. She shook her head. She’d been wrong on so many levels. She’d never been able to admit it to her mother, or her sisters, or her friends, or even herself: She’d made a terrible decision. Roy was a terrible husband. And a terrible father. And rather than facing that truth, or even admitting it, she’d kept living in denial. As the ugly honesty of the situation hit her, she tried to avert her eyes as a couple of tears escaped.

  “Wait,” Fin said. “No, don’t cry. . . . I’m sorry.” His hand moved across the table, but before he touched her, he seemed to think better of it. “Please.” He found a napkin to hand her. “I brought you here so you could get your thoughts together and . . . Damn, don’t cry.”

  She dabbed at her eyes with the paper napkin. He was right. This was no time to fall apart. She lifted her eyelashes to one of the surfboards hanging from the ceiling to let the tears well back down. Criminy, what was the matter with her? She didn’t even know this guy. And here she was, crying all over her tacos.

  “Let’s talk about something else.” His voice was laced with desperation.

  She nodded again.

  “You steer—what do you feel comfortable talking about right now?”

  She kept her focus on the board—Fin’s autograph was on that one, too, along with Laird Hamilton’s. She took a deep breath. “Surfing.”

  An expression of surprise crossed his face.

  She poked at her taco with her fork and pushed some lettuce around. “Tell me how you learned,” she added, her voice still wobbly. “Where, when, why.”

  She figured this conversation would give her enough time to let the pressure in her head die down.

  Fin surveyed the room for a few moments, then took a deep breath and wiped his mouth with his napkin. She couldn’t help but stare at his lips when he did so—that full bottom lip, and the strong upper one, and what soul-stirring feeling they’d ignited when he’d stepped into that kiss. . . .

  “Well, the ‘where’ would be San Onofre,” he said.

  Giselle cleared her throat and tried to focus on what he was saying.

  Fin paused, as if that were all he planned to say, then looked at her nervously as if he were worried another tear might escape if he stopped talking. “That’s about fifteen miles south of here,” he added quickly. “The ‘when’ would be age four. And the ‘why’ would be because my parents were both surfers at the time. I suppose I had salt water in my blood.”

  “Really? Your parents were surfers? What was that like? Wow, Fin, these tacos are amazing.”

  “Aren’t they? Here, have some more salsa.”

  “So is that why you’re named ‘Fin’? Is it your real name?”

  “Finnegan. But I’ve been ‘Fin’ for as long as I can remember.”

  “So tell me about growing up with surfer parents.”

  He studied the room for a minute, as if trying to decide where to start. Or whether he wanted to. “It was a nomad existence. We were traveling all the time, which wasn’t so bad—I got to see a lot of beautiful coastline from Indonesia to Hawaii—but we weren’t exactly staying in luxury hotels. It was a lot of camping in vans, sleeping in the sand, eating what fish we could catch, that kind of thing. My parents weren’t pro surfers like nowadays—with sponsors and magazine ads. They were amateurs who were the real deal. They surfed for love.”

  The long swig he took of his drink hinted at some finality to this story. But Giselle imagined there was a lot more to it.

  “That must have been hard, not knowing where your real home was,” she prompted.

  He shrugged.

  She waited for him to go on, but he focused on his food. Fin didn’t exactly seem like the type to tell his whole life story in the first hour or so. In fact, he didn’t seem like the type to tell his life story at all. So she decided she’d have to either pry or stick to the basics. Her sense of upbringing, though, held her to basics.

  “Where did you go to school?”

  “Didn’t.”

  “You didn’t go to school?”

  “School of life: Tahiti, Bali, Costa Rica. We traveled with a group of my parents’ friends, all surfers.”

  “You never got a formal education?”

  He shrugged. “I’m sure my parents thought they were teaching me more important things than algebra and cursive, so not until about the sixth grade.”

  “That must have been hard.”

  “Not really.”

  She waited for him to go on.

  He ate another chip and finally gave her a crooked smile. “I was a weird kid. I had been traveling with all these Zen surfers who were reading Jack Kerouac and Robert Aitken and who could talk all kinds of circles around Rick Griffin’s transcendental art. They taught me meditation and self-realization techniques at nine.”

  “You sound like you were an interesting kid.”

  He shook his head and laughed. “Definitely weird.”

  “So where did you finally go to school? Here?”

  “A little farther north: Central California, where the surf is good. We moved there in the eighties. But, you know—I never had the right sneakers, never had sack lunches with fruit cups in them. I had long hair, and ‘nomad’ written all over me. I saw what the other kids had—normal lives, new clothes for school, new folders with Knight Rider on them, or whatever, and they’d play together after school, or play in Little League. I just wanted that. I thought that would be the ideal life.”

  “So was it?”

  He took a deep breath. His tanned fingers touched the rim of his plate.

  “My parents were still competing. My mom—she’s an amazing surfer. So they made another tour, but I had a friend named Ronny Romano—he lived inland a little—but he had a nice, normal family. And I wanted to live there. So my parents let me.”

  “They left you there?” Giselle gasped.

  His jaw muscle began to dance. “They’re good people, Giselle. I was fine.”

  “Where are your parents now?”

  “Bali.”

  “Brothers, sisters?”

  “Just me.”

  Giselle couldn’t imagine not having any family, not having her sisters. Even though they didn’t all stay close all the time, she knew they were there. Fin, however, seemed terribly alone. She thought back over his house, his car, his suits. He’d accomplished a lot for a twenty-eight-year-old, all by himself. There was much more to this man than she realized.

  He shifted in his seat. “So where did you grow up? I can’t remember what Lia told me.”

  “Mostly Indiana.”

  “What was it like there?”

  She wanted to turn the conversation back on him—wanted to know more about his family, when he moved to Sandy Cove, when he last saw his parents—but she had the sense he’d hit his limit.

  “Typical,” she answered. “We had a very normal lifestyle. We were those kids with the Knight Rider folders and new shoes.”

  “Nah, those kids I’m talking about were jerks. You were probably very sweet. You and your sister. Or sisters. Isn’t there another one?”

  “Yes, Noelle. She’s the youngest.”

  “Is she as pretty as you and Lia?”

  Giselle felt herself flush. Fin was awfully free with the compliments—she wasn’t used to it, having had pretty much a dry spell for the last ten years.

  “Thank you,” she said, remembering that was what you were supposed to say. “I always thought Noelle was the prettiest, actually. She has this long, auburn hair I always admired. Lia and I got stuck as the blondes.”

  “You seem to hold your own.” He sm
iled. “Tell me you weren’t the homecoming queen, or Miss Indiana.”

  Giselle sucked in her breath. “Did Lia tell you that?” she whispered.

  He raised his eyebrows, then chuckled. “Uh—Lia told me nothing. But I just impressed the hell out of myself. You’ve got ‘beauty queen’ written all over you.”

  “I was Miss Strawberry,” she said with mock indignation.

  “I have to hear this.”

  Giselle laughed. She hadn’t thought about this in a long time. “Dane County has a strawberry festival every year in June, and they crown one of the girls from the local high schools as Miss Strawberry. There’s a parade, and you ride in this red convertible and wave your hand. But you get a scholarship, so that was nice.”

  “Did you wear a crown?”

  She nodded.

  “Sash?”

  She nodded again.

  The corners of his mouth quirked up. “Did you have to cut a huge slice of strawberry shortcake?”

  Giselle’s eyes widened. “How did you know?”

  “We have something like that here. I can picture you sitting on the back of some red convertible.” Fin chuckled down at his plate, cleaning up the last few remnants of fish and rice.

  A smile escaped Giselle’s lips.

  After the table was cleared, Fin leaned toward Giselle, his muscular arms on the table so he could be heard at low volume.

  “One more thing, before we go back . . .” The merriment was gone from his eyes. The navy rim was thicker now, making his eyes darker. He took her in for a while before shifting his gaze to tell her the one more thing.

  “That kiss—” he finally said.

  Oh, no. Giselle closed her eyes. She didn’t want to talk about this. She knew he was going to say it was off-limits, that she had no right to ask that of him. She’d been way out of line. But goodness, that kiss was amazing. She wondered whether he’d felt the heat rising in her when he kissed her like that. He could probably feel her ready to ignite, for criminy’s sake. And he was probably putting a stop to that right now. Twenty-eight-year-old surfer dudes did not need to make out with thirty-five-year-old soccer moms.

  “I know,” she started to say, shaking her head.