by Emily King
Justin rolled up Sarah’s driveway on his bike with a broad smile and then hopped off and scanned her outfit. “Oooh, decided to show some leg today, huh?” he asked by way of greeting.
“Well…” Sarah shuffled around self-consciously.
“No, no, you look hot in those shorts. You’ll have the women at the beach drooling. I wanted to wear my short shorts too today for the guys, but they weren’t a length suitable for biking, if you know what I mean.”
Sarah laughed. “Well, you made the right decision. We can’t have you arrested for indecent exposure when we have all of this training to do.”
“Definitely not,” he said with a shake of his head.
“Let’s put your bike in the garage, and we’ll go.”
They started their run at a slow pace, using the few city blocks to the beach to get their jogging legs. “Which way do you want to go?” he asked when they stopped at a traffic signal.
“If the Fun Run is going to be on the beach, maybe we should do some jogging on the sand,” Sarah said. Besides, she wanted to talk to that hot lifeguard.
“Want to jog down to the pier and get onto the beach there?”
“Okay, let’s do that.” Sarah tried a faster pace now that they were warmed up. It was tough to maintain all the way to the pier, but she wanted this training to be productive. Arriving at the pier, she stopped, breathing hard.
“Whew,” Justin panted, stopping alongside her. “Maybe I shouldn’t have ridden my bike over. I think I’m worn out already.”
She worked at catching her breath, too. “Yeah, I thought I was in decent shape from cycling, but I think jogging is a different animal.”
“Dodging all the people on the sidewalk wasn’t making it easy.”
“Maybe running on the beach will be better.”
“Yeah, let’s try it.”
They took the stairs down to the beach, making their way through the loose sand to the more compact sand of the shoreline, where they resumed their run.
Amy scanned her zone from within her lifeguard tower, her gaze stopping on a boy stumbling through the sand. He looked to be about three or four years old and was clearly intent on making his way to the water. She searched the area around him, looking for an adult who might be accompanying him. Not seeing one, she grabbed her red rescue can from its hanger, hastened down the tower’s ramp, and jogged in his direction.
When the boy reached firmer sand at the shoreline and got his footing, he immediately ran after a receding wave, heedless of the incoming ones. Amy sprinted to the boy and snatched him up in her free arm just as a wave came rolling in.
“Whoa there, little guy.” She turned her body to shield them both from the oncoming wave. The wave was thigh-high on her but was head-high on him. It would have easily knocked him off his feet and pulled him under. The crashing wave jolted her a bit, but she maintained her footing. The boy started crying, no doubt at the surprise of being snatched up and then at the jarring from the wave.
“It’s okay. I’ve got you.” Amy carried him up to shore against the pull of the receding surf. Upon reaching dry sand, she set him down and knelt beside him, keeping hold of him while she looked him over to make sure he was all right. “Are you hurt?” she asked, suspecting he was crying only from surprise and fear, not injury.
“No,” he sniffled.
“Good,” she said. “My name’s Amy. What’s yours?”
“Bobby.” He sniffled again.
“Bobby, it’s not safe for you to run out into the water alone. Are you here with someone today, maybe your mommy or daddy?”
“Daddy. Daddy’s sleeping.”
Amy assumed that meant his father was dozing somewhere nearby on the crowded beach on a towel or in a chair in the afternoon sun. “Do you—”
“Bobby! There you are!” A sunburned middle-aged man said as he hurried over to Bobby. He looked at Amy. “Did something happen?”
Amy stood and explained what had transpired and he thanked her for her help. She advised him not to leave his child unattended near the water, even if lifeguards were present. It was obvious from his compressed lips and crossed arms that he didn’t like being told this, but he needed to hear it. She watched him walk away with Bobby, then turned and walked back to the tower.
As Sarah and Justin jogged, Sarah kept an eye on the towers they passed, trying to see which one belonged to the lifeguard she wanted to talk to. The towers looked a lot alike, so it was difficult to tell exactly which one they had been near on Earth Day, but she thought it might be the one coming up. With the beach so crowded today, though, it was hard to know for sure.
Her legs burning from running on the sand, which was even harder than running on pavement, Sarah slowed her stride. “Let’s take a break,” she said, breathing hard.
“You read my mind,” Justin said, breathing just as hard and slowing to a walk beside her.
“Why don’t we go up to the dry sand and sit down for a moment or two?” She led him up away from the shoreline. Winding their way through the other beachgoers, they found a slightly less crowded area not far from the tower she thought was the right one.
Justin plopped himself onto the sand, and Sarah sat down next to him. “It’s a good thing the Fun Run isn’t really a race.”
“Yeah, we’d be toast.”
They sat quietly as they caught their breath. “You know,” Justin said, “I didn’t know so many of my students were going to try out for the junior lifeguard program. That flyer I put up in my classroom was a real conversation starter in all of my classes.”
“I had the same experience in mine. I’ve got at least six students that I know of besides Hannah who are doing the tryouts.”
“Good, then you won’t mind going with me.” Justin smiled at her.
“To the tryouts?” she asked.
“Yeah. I might have let slip in class the fact that I live near the high school where the tryouts are being held. That made the students ask if I would help cheer them on. They were so excited that I agreed to stop by and watch.”
“That was nice of you.”
“So, you’ll go with me this Saturday?”
“Sure, why not? We can cheer on all of our students.”
They rested quietly for a while longer. No one was outside on the small deck of the lifeguard tower, so if the brunette was the one staffing this tower, she was either inside behind the tinted windows or out on the beach. Sarah couldn’t very well go up the ramp and try to peer in the windows. That would just make the lifeguard mad again, and she certainly didn’t want to do that. What she wanted to do was get an answer to the question her student had about lifeguards and math. Well that, and hopefully summon the courage to flirt a little and possibly ask her out.
Her attention was drawn to someone emerging from a crowd by the shoreline. The woman, who was carrying a small, red, buoy-like object in her hand, wore a red one-piece racing-style swimsuit that revealed a sleek, athletic physique. Without a doubt, it was the lifeguard from Earth Day. Sarah stared, transfixed by the curves and lines of her very fit and attractive body. She continued to watch as the woman’s toned thighs and calves took her up the ramp of the lifeguard tower, admiring the definition in her arm and shoulder as she reached one arm up to hang the buoy on the eaves of the tower.
Justin was watching now, too. “Hey, isn’t that the lifeguard from Earth Day?” He had mostly forgiven the lifeguard for snapping at him during the stingray find. Sarah had recounted some of her conversation with her to him, explaining that she had seemed a little stressed out and simply hadn’t wanted anyone to get hurt.
Sarah nodded and felt herself blush.
Justin tilted his head and regarded her with interest, a smile growing on his face. “Oh, you wanted to see her again.”
“Maybe.” She smiled back.
“You know,” he said in a chatty tone, “now that it’s May, there’s only one more month before classes let out for summer. I think now could be as good a time as any
if someone wanted to—I don’t know—do something like start a summer fling with a lifeguard.”
Sarah turned to face him. “You know flings aren’t my thing—even if that lifeguard is seriously hot.” She watched as she opened the tower door and went inside.
“I know, I know. You want a nice relationship.” He shook his head.
“Is that so bad?” Sarah asked. Her attention was drawn to the tower again as the woman emerged with a chair, placed it in a sunny area on the deck, and took a seat.
“No, but I’ll tell you from experience that a summer fling can be refreshing.” He bumped her shoulder playfully. “Like a nice rosé wine,” he added in a flippant tone.
“What? Like a nice rosé?” Sarah let out a laugh and visualized the pink wine. “Do tell—how so?”
“Oh, you know,” he said with studied casualness. “Pretty to look at, a little something light and friendly to stimulate the senses, nothing too serious.”
Sarah laughed again, hoping that he was mostly kidding. “Oh, boy, that’s quite a comparison. With wine talk like that, next you’ll be telling me about flavors and mouth feel.”
“You mean you don’t want to hear about subtle—”
She elbowed him to cut off his words.
He laughed. “Okay, okay.”
Near the tower, a group of guys started what looked like an impromptu game of soccer in the sand. “Mmm, some eye candy for me, too,” he said.
With idle interest, Sarah watched the guys kick the soccer ball around. The guys glanced frequently toward the lifeguard tower, as did Sarah. It became obvious that they were mostly playing to impress, with each of them trying to judge the effects his moves might be having on the female in the chair on the deck. She turned to Justin. “Don’t get too excited about your eye candy. I think every one of them is straight.”
“Even the one in the pink shorts?”
“Definitely straight. He’s only playing for the lifeguard. Watch.”
Pink Shorts intercepted the ball. He made a show of bouncing the ball from knee to knee, then bounced it to the top of his head to balance it there for a second, and then let it fall so he could kick it mid-drop. He grinned in the direction of the lifeguard tower. The lifeguard was looking in a different direction, and Pink Shorts’ shoulders slumped as he realized that she hadn’t watched his display.
“Ugh, you’re right,” Justin said. “Unfortunately for them, she doesn’t seem the least bit interested.”
“No,” Sarah agreed. She watched the others vie for attention, but the lifeguard scarcely gave them a glance.
“So, there you have it: she’s gay,” Justin said.
Sarah frowned. “Just because she’s not into a bunch of guys playing soccer in front of her tower doesn’t mean she’s gay.” She tried not to sound too irritated at her friend.
“Okay, sorry, maybe that was sexist,” Justin admitted. “They do seem a little desperate. I wouldn’t be into that, either.”
“Yeah,” she said. “And she is at work.”
“There is also that.”
“Speaking of which,” she said as she got up from the sand, “I wonder if she can tell me something.”
“Tell you something? Tell you what?”
“Just wait here. I’ll be right back,” she said.
Amy was tired of the soccer players who were doing more posturing than soccer playing in front of her tower. People who viewed her as nothing more than a sex object because she was in a swimsuit at the beach was one of the few things that irked her about the job, almost as much as people who left toddlers unattended to wander into the ocean. As soon as her swimsuit dried from her partial dip in the ocean, she planned to go back inside the tower, hoping that doing so would encourage the group to move to another location.
The guys paused their play and turned to look at something. Amy followed their collective gaze and immediately saw what had drawn their attention: a blond woman in running attire. A very pretty blond woman in very little running attire. One who looked a lot like the woman from the Earth Day cleanup.
So…she had come to the beach again as Amy had hoped. Amy let her gaze linger on her as she walked through the sand, thankful that the sunglasses she had put on before coming out to the deck allowed her to be discreet in her admiration of the woman’s lustrous golden hair, lovely face, and luscious body—which was as deliciously curvy as she remembered it to be.
“Hi,” one of the guys called to the woman.
“Hi,” she called back.
The group had to be happy that their peacocking had finally succeeded in attracting some female attention.
“Did you want to watch us play?” the guy in pink shorts asked.
“No thanks. I just have a question for the lifeguard.”
Amy sat up in surprise. The woman was here for her, not them? It wasn’t unusual to get questions from the public, but she had thought the woman had been drawn by the guys’ little exhibition. Apparently not. Maybe the woman recognized her from Earth Day and had a question about the stingray? Then again, maybe it had nothing to do with Earth Day and she had a question along the usual lines of where it was best to swim or if there were sharks in the water.
The blonde stopped before the front railing of the tower and looked up at her.
“Hi. I remember you,” Amy said with a smile as she stood up and walked over. “Can I help you?” She rested her elbows on the railing and looked down at Sarah, thankful again that her roaming gaze was hidden behind sunglasses.
“Hi,” the woman answered.
Amy waited for her to say more, but she was just kind of staring at her. As she continued to wait, she felt her smile slipping. From their conversation on Earth Day, she had thought the woman was an intelligent person, but maybe she was as much of an airhead as some of the soccer players seemed to be.
“Um,” the woman finally said, “…do lifeguards need to know math?”
Amy straightened. What kind of question was that? Was it some kind of lifeguard joke? She eyed the woman, trying to decide how to answer.
“Uh, I mean algebra?”
Amy frowned. She couldn’t imagine what the woman was playing at with her strange question, but she hadn’t missed the woman’s perusal of her cleavage moments ago. Maybe she was a lesbian like herself. If so, that was nice, but unfortunately it seemed she was just another person who thought it would be cute to flirt with a lifeguard. She had already put up with more than her share of that today from the guys. At least they weren’t asking her questions about math, of all things. “Miss, if you don’t need assistance, I’m working here.” Amy pointedly looked away to resume scanning her zone.
“Well, I’m working too,” the woman said in an affronted tone.
What? Amy looked down at her again. She was glaring at her with her hands on her hips. Okay, maybe she wasn’t making lifeguard jokes and maybe she wasn’t flirting. But then what did she want?
“I’m a math teacher,” the woman said, offering a coherent explanation, thankfully. “Some of my students plan to do the junior lifeguard program this summer, and the question of whether lifeguards happen to use algebra came up in class.”
“Oh,” Amy said, blinking in surprise behind her sunglasses.
“I thought that as long as I was at the beach, I would come by and ask you, but I can see that it was a bad idea.” She turned to go.
“No, wait,” Amy said, chagrined by her assumptions that the teacher was there to play games. “I misunderstood. I’m sorry.”
The woman hesitated, slowly turning back around.
Amy was relieved. “Let me answer your question. Please.”
The woman waited.
Amy rested her arms on the railing once more as she contemplated the woman’s question. She had had training in higher math and statistics during her business degree coursework, but she knew that wasn’t what the woman wanted to know, so she didn’t mention it.
“The amount of math we use depends on our duties, but most of i
t is going to be basic math. The lifeguards who use the most math would be the ones who are paramedics, because they have to figure doses of emergency medications. But algebra isn’t used that I know of.”
The teacher gave a little nod of her head, seemingly satisfied. “Okay, that’s all I needed to know. Thanks.”
Amy nodded back with a smile. “You’re welcome. And again, I’m sorry about before.”
“No problem.” She gave a little wave before walking off. Amy didn’t know whether it was a wave of dismissal or a wave goodbye or both, but she knew she deserved any indifference the woman might have shown her.
Sarah tromped back to where she had left Justin waiting, still irritated by the initial brush-off she had received from the lifeguard. She didn’t know why it had been so hard to get her to answer a simple question. Granted, she had taken long enough to ask it. But her breath had caught and she had become tongue-tied at seeing the lifeguard up close and clad only in a swimsuit this time. The smooth, tanned, golden skin of her toned body…the short, soft-looking, sable brown hair…the pretty planes and curves of her sunglasses-shielded face…and the way her swimsuit brought out her cleavage as she leaned on the railing of her tower… It had all made Sarah’s clearly formulated question disappear from her brain and she’d ended up blurting something else instead. Her eventual question had been clear enough, though, and the lifeguard seeming to misunderstand it seemed like just an excuse for not taking Sarah seriously, like so many others had done.
As a woman in the field of math, and not just any woman, but a blond one, she often encountered sexism. If she had a dollar for every blonde joke she had heard from people over the years, she wouldn’t have to live with two roommates to pay the rent. It was always more disappointing to encounter it from another woman, though. At least when the lifeguard had finally answered, it had been an answer that she could take back to her students.
Justin stood up at her approach. “Well? What was that all about? Was she able to tell you what you wanted to know?”
“Yes, but it wasn’t easy,” Sarah said. “And I think you were right, after all—I think she is gay.” The lifeguard had been wearing sunglasses, but she had felt her gaze travel over her body, almost like a physical caress, as she had approached the tower. She had felt it again as she’d leaned on the railing to say hello to her. It had felt incredibly tantalizing. She wondered why the warmth had stopped so abruptly when she’d asked her simple question.
