Chapter 4: The Beach

The excursion desk called it a hidden cove — half a page in the shore-day book, white sand and nobody on it, extra money because they didn’t bus the herd to it. I booked it for the two of us. Told myself it was to get her clear of Josh and the pool crowd for a day, and Alexis too, and that was even part true.

She’d been quiet all morning, up and dressed before I’d so much as rolled over, keeping to her own side of everything. But a kid can’t hold a mood against a real adventure, and by the time the water taxi ran us around the headland she’d come partway back — up in the bow with her face in the wind, a striped bikini under one of my old work shirts. Only partway. She still went still whenever I leaned in, and she hadn’t forgotten a word of what I’d told her in the dark. I hadn’t meant her to.

Then the boat came around the rock into the cove, and I watched her go still all over again. A couple hundred yards of white sand, palms behind it, clear green water — and a few dozen people spread across it, not one of them wearing a thing. Old couples baked brown as saddle leather. A knot of sunburned twenty-somethings. A family down at the waterline, mother and father and two little kids, all of them bare and paying it no mind. Nobody her age. She was about to be the youngest person on that sand by ten years and the only one in clothes. The book had said naturist, in a word I’d skimmed past on purpose and hadn’t read out to her.

“Oh my god.” The shirt clutched shut at her throat, her voice a mortified hiss. “Dad, everyone’s naked. There are little kids. Take us back — I’m not getting off.”

“Boat doesn’t come back till four, sweetheart,” the taxi man said, patient, a man who’d said it a thousand times. “Nobody’s going to pay you any mind. It’s just a beach.”

There was no version of staying on the boat. She came up onto the sand in my shirt and her bikini, arms wrapped around herself, the one covered person in the cove. I carried the bag up toward the tree line and picked us a spot off on our own — twenty yards from the nearest group, well back from the family, close to the cut in the rocks where the taxi would come at four. Far enough that a careful man could do a good deal and not have it seen, if he minded his angles. I shook out our two towels side by side and watched the beach start to notice her, because that was the thing she hadn’t seen coming: out here, clothes were what got you looked at.

“Why is everyone staring at me,” she hissed, arms crushed around herself. “I’m the only one who’s — I hate it, I want to leave.”

“Because you’ve got clothes on.” I pulled my shirt off, then the rest, easy as I sleep, because out here it cost me nothing. “Only way to stop getting looked at on a beach like this is to look like everyone else on it. Nobody knows us. It’s just skin, Val.”

It took her the better part of half an hour, and I didn’t push — the longer she sat covered, the more the whole cove drifted its eyes to the one clothed girl on the sand, and I let that do my arguing. The shirt came off first, folded small in her lap. Then the bikini top, untied fast and clumsy, one arm flying up across herself in the same motion — but not before the cups fell away and there they were, half a second of them: my daughter’s bare tits in the full sun, milky white where the suit had kept the sun off all week, startling against her sunburnt shoulders, the pink tips drawing up tight in the sea air. Then her arm crushed flat over them and she folded down red to the hairline. I’d had my mouth on those in the dark and she’d slept through it. This was different — her uncovering them herself, an arm’s length off me, knowing I was watching. So I watched, not long enough for anyone to catch a father at it, and took my look.

The bottoms took longer. Then she shoved them down under her drawn-up knees and pulled in tight, wound down small — but I caught the half-second first: the dark hair, the bare split of her, the skin down there the same untouched white as her breasts. And there she was, my daughter naked on a public beach in the daylight, no dark this time to lay it off on. She had nowhere to put her eyes — not on the strangers, not on herself, least of all on me, stripped down easy beside her — and a towel would only have made it worse, so all she had was her own two arms, folded down small behind them.

I dug out the sunscreen and cracked the cap. “Sit up. Half this skin’s never had a minute of sun on it — you’ll blister where it hurts worst.” Every word true, which was the beauty of it.

She uncurled, because a sunburn was real and a fight would only turn every eye back onto her. I knelt behind her and did her back, her shoulders, down over the cheeks of her ass — that much any father does — and she let me, saying nothing, because she’d decided somewhere on the walk up that saying nothing was how she’d get through this. “Front too. Turn around.”

“I can do the front.”

“You’ll burn in stripes. Turn around.” She came around on her knees, red to the ears, arms crossed hard over herself, and I peeled them down by the wrists and put my hands on her. I took my time — the cream worked down over her collarbones and then both hands closing over her bare tits right out in the sun, cupping them, hefting the weight of each one the way you would to get the lotion underneath, my thumbs dragging slow across her nipples every pass. She held dead still and stared at the water, jaw set, taking it, because a girl who slapped her father’s hands away on a beach like this was a girl the whole cove would turn to watch. But her breath came short through her nose and her nipples pulled up tight and hard under my thumbs whether she wanted them to or not, and she felt them do it, the red running all the way down her chest. “Dad—” Barely out, not a real objection. “I know,” I said, and kept working it in. That was the gift of the place: covering up was the one thing that got you stared at, so putting my hands all over her in the open was the safest spot on earth to do it, everybody watching and every one of them calling it care.

I did her belly, then her legs, up the soft inside where the sun never reaches, my thumbs sliding right up to the crease of her before I moved off — close enough that she flinched. And somewhere in all that skin under my hands it had happened to me, the way it was always going to: I was hard, laid out thick against my own belly with nothing to put over it.

She saw it the second she looked, and snatched her eyes back to the water. “It’s just a body doing what a body does,” I said, easy, lying back like it cost me nothing. But I didn’t leave it there. I reached around behind her and dragged two fingers up the crease of her ass, where the cream had pooled thick when I’d done her, came away with a full handful, and took hold of myself — a slow fist up the length of me and back down, coating it root to head, the most reasonable thing in the world on a beach like that, a man seeing to the last of himself where the sun would reach. Except I didn’t let go at the bottom. I did it again, slower. And her eyes came down off the water and found my fist working my own cock a foot from her face, and stuck there, and couldn’t pull free. She made a small sick sound and scrambled back onto her own towel. I let go and lay back, and it stood up off me harder than before, redder, past hiding and past helping.

And a naked beach is the one place on earth a man can’t hide that. Everywhere else it’s behind a zipper. Here I lay in the sun with it standing straight up for the whole cove to see — the one hard cock on a beach full of soft ones — and it got seen fast. The saddle-leather wife took one look and turned her whole face away. Two of the twenty-somethings clocked it and quit smiling. And the mother down the waterline went still, then got up without letting on she was hurrying and moved her two kids off toward the surf, keeping her own body between them and me the whole way — the way a woman moves when she’s decided a man is dangerous.

That was what put the cold through me. Not the stares. Her. A hard-on at a family beach is just a creep they steer their kids around — but a hard-on next to a fifteen-year-old, if any one of them stopped and did the sum, was a man they’d pin down on the sand and make a phone call about. Foreign ground, no ship, no lawyer, my whole department one shout away. All it would take was a single one of them looking a beat too long and putting it together.