When she saw a lifeguard carrying a limp woman in his arms, she thought someone must have had too much sun or gotten into trouble in the water. Then she noticed the lifeguard was heading toward the water instead of away from it. Her breath caught when she saw Aurora’s hot pink Mohawk sticking up over his shoulder.
“Is she—She can’t be.”
But she was.
The lifeguard placed Aurora on a plastic lounge chair and, with the help of another lifeguard and several SOS staffers, carried the chair over a sand dune. Then they gently transferred Aurora, wearing a leopard print life vest, from the chair to the water.
Aurora floated on the waves with a beatific smile on her face as the lifeguards and staffers made sure her head remained above the water.
Tears welled in Finn’s eyes as she watched the tenderness with which Aurora’s handlers treated her, and she saw the trust—and peace—in Aurora’s expression.
“Would you like something to drink?” a passing waiter asked, pen pad at the ready.
Finn had brought a bottle of water from her room, and it was too early for her to order something stronger. “Nothing for me, thanks.” She pointed toward Aurora. “But give that woman a champagne cocktail when she’s done. Give her a message for me, too. Tell her Finn said she gets it now.”
The waiter looked confused as he recorded both her drink order and her message on his pen pad. “Anything you say,
señorita
.”
Finn shook her head in wonder as she wiped her eyes. “One day in, and I’m already drinking the Kool-Aid.”
Being around so many people always put her on edge. She was more comfortable in crowds of five or six, not five hundred. Noise-canceling headphones did the trick during long airplane flights or even longer train rides, but she couldn’t wear them all week without appearing rude or standoffish. Last night’s comedy show had helped her relax a bit, but talking to Luisa was what had truly put her mind at ease. Why couldn’t she meet someone who made her feel like this every day? Or did knowing she and Luisa most likely didn’t have a future make it so easy for her to enjoy the present?
She reinvented herself on each trip, becoming the person she needed to be to suit the task at hand. With Luisa, it was different. She didn’t need to be someone else. She only needed to be herself. Was that enough for Luisa, or would her interest in Finn end as soon as they began their next respective assignments?
“Speaking of assignments.”
Finn pulled out her phone and texted Brett to let her know she had arrived safely.
Better late than never
, Brett texted back.
Have you started working the story? If so, what approach have you decided to take? Should I expect to receive a regular column or a straightforward review?
Finn hadn’t made up her mind yet. She had taken copious notes since she had arrived, but she hadn’t started trying to figure out how to cobble them into a cohesive story yet.
My narrative changes by the day
, she wrote.
I think I’ll wait until the end of the week and type up something during my flight back to the States or while I’m sitting in an airport bar during a layover.
Unless, of course, a hot Mexican woman who worked for the Federal Police plopped on the bar stool next to hers and distracted her from the task at hand. No, that was too much to ask. Something that good could happen only once in a lifetime.
“You look way too serious for someone who’s supposed to be on vacation.”
Finn looked up to find one of her dinner companions from last night standing in front of her cabana.
Indies had designated tables set aside for them in all the resort’s restaurants so they wouldn’t have to eat alone. Last night, Finn had been sandwiched between Jill Elliott and Ryan Norris, best friends from Toronto who were making their third SOS trip.
She tried to recall their biographical details. If she remembered correctly, Jill was a paramedic and Ryan was a firefighter. Or was it the other way around? Whatever her profession happened to be, Jill was standing in front of her wearing a black sports bra and a pair of maple leaf-accented board shorts, but Ryan was MIA.
“Where’s your partner in crime?” Finn asked as she put her phone in her backpack for safekeeping.
“Chatting up someone she met at the omelet station during breakfast service.”
“You don’t sound too happy about that,” Finn said before remembering Jill had a rather large unrequited crush on her friend and roommate.
Jill shrugged with studied nonchalance. “I’m happy if she’s happy. She still comes home to me at the end of the night, so I guess that’s the most I can hope for. Do you mind if I invade your space for a few minutes while I wait for the water aerobics to finish?”
In the pool, a buff instructor in a bright orange string bikini was leading about thirty women through moves that looked alternately silly and taxing. The water provided both resistance and a cushion as the women bounced, splashed, and laughed their way through an hour-long workout. The up-tempo dance music blaring from the PA system gradually gave way to more relaxing sounds, alerting onlookers that the strenuous part of the session had ended and the post-workout cooldown had begun.
“Have a seat.”
Jill climbed into the cabana and made herself at home on the far end. Her freckled face already bore the telltale pink hue of a budding case of sunburn. Under a plethora of tattoos, the skin of her broad shoulders was the same color as her strawberry blond hair.
“You’re a writer, aren’t you?” Jill asked, resting her hands on her knees.
During dinner the night before, conversation had inevitably turned from what everyone had selected from the buffet to what they did for a living. Finn had said she was a writer, but she hadn’t specified what kind. Big mistake. For the rest of the night, she had been cornered by a slew of women eager to tell her their life stories so she could use the details as fodder for a future book. Too bad she wasn’t a romance novelist. If she were, she had enough story ideas to craft at least a dozen books. And today was only the second day.
“How do you do that?” Jill asked. “How do you put your thoughts on paper and have them make sense? I can talk to anyone—the phrase ‘never met a stranger’ was probably invented for me—but I can’t write for shit.”
“For me, the opposite is true. Writing has always come easy. It’s talking that’s hard. On paper, I can be witty, challenging, and thoughtful. In person, I’m a tongue-tied doofus who can’t string two words together without stammering and thinks of the best response to a comment five minutes after it’s too late to use it.”
“Sounds like we could help each other out.”
“I can be the Cyrano to your Christian?”
Jill knitted her eyebrows in confusion as she scratched her reddened shoulder. “Who?”
“Never mind,” Finn said, deciding that unlimited free drinks and references to classic literature didn’t mix.
“Do you want to be on my team during the pool games?”
“What are they, anyway?” Finn remembered seeing a listing for them at noon on the daily schedule, but no description had been provided to give her an idea of what they might entail.
“They could be anything. Sometimes it’s a relay race where team members have to pass a water balloon from one end of the line to the other without using their hands. Sometimes you play water polo or paddle kayaks for a lap of the pool. My favorite, though, is Gladiator. In that one, you stand on a surfboard armed with a padded baton that looks like a Q-tip on steroids and try to knock your opponent off her board and into the water.”
“Sounds interesting.” If a bit painful.
“So is that a yes?” Jill asked hopefully.
Finn weighed the merits of potentially going home with a black eye against the thousands of words of copy the experience might provide.
“Count me in.”
“Awesome,” Jill said with a broad grin that quickly faded into another frown. “I wish telling Ryan how I feel about her was that easy.”
“What have you tried so far?”
“Everything short of a lap dance.”
“Specifically.”
“She isn’t a hearts and flowers kind of girl, as you can probably tell. I took her to a Leafs game last year and told her I loved her at halftime, but she either didn’t hear what I said or didn’t take me seriously. She ended up going home with some chick she met in the bathroom line.”
“I’m sensing a theme here. Note to self: don’t stand in a line with Ryan unless you’re looking to get picked up.”
Jill laughed and crossed her legs at the ankles like she was trying to assume a complicated yoga pose. “See? You can be funny in person, too, not just in print.”
“Good to know.”
“You’re a cool girl,” Jill said, eying Finn’s Indie necklace. “Why are you single?”
“I’m on the road a lot.”
“Researching your books?”
“Something like that. It’s not easy to sustain a relationship when you’re never home.”
“Maybe you’ll meet someone here and you could have a vacationship. Isn’t that what they call it when two people are dating but they live in different cities and only see each other when they’re on vacation?”
“Vacationship.” Finn swirled the word around her mouth like she was sampling a glass of wine. “That’s a new one for the memory bank. I’ll have to work it into a column.” She caught her error and quickly corrected it. “I mean novel.”
Jill beamed. “Remember you heard it here first. Don’t forget to give me a shout-out in the acknowledgments. It might be the only way my name ever winds up in a book.”
“You got it.”
“Sisters of Sappho,” Rusty Connors said into a cordless microphone as she approached the pool, “are you ready to get wet and wild?”
“That’s our cue. Let’s go.” Jill grabbed Finn’s hand and pulled her out of the cabana.
“What about my stuff?” Finn pointed to her backpack and beach towel. “Where should I store my things?”
Jill waved her hand dismissively.
“Leave everything where it is. No one’s going to touch anything that doesn’t belong to them. Everyone respects each other’s property on these trips. On my last one, I saw a woman digging through the trash in the bathroom because she’d lost a six-carat diamond ring. She thought she’d never see it again, but someone turned it in to Lost and Found the same day.”
Finn felt like she had wandered onto the set of a Frank Capra movie. When she saw the pair of five-woman teams forming in the shallow end of the pool, she knew she was living a wonderful life indeed. The contestants weren’t universally young, supermodel thin, or classically beautiful, but they were all comfortable with themselves, at ease with each other, and eager to compete.
“Huddle up, my little dykelings.” Rusty’s molasses-thick Oklahoma drawl grew even more syrupy the longer she spent baking under the midday sun. “You have five minutes to put your heads together and come up with your team names.”
Finn’s teammates turned toward her. “You’re the writer,” one said. “Think of something creative.”
Naturally, Finn’s mind went blank. “When I was in college, my roommate played on an intramural softball team called the ’69ers.”
“Who hasn’t?” someone said with a snicker.
“If it gets me laid tonight, I’m okay with it,” said a woman with considerably more salt than pepper in her close-cropped hair. “There may be snow on the roof, but there’s still fire in the furnace, girls. Now let’s kick some ass.”
Rusty briefly conferred with both teams to gather their team names. “All right, my sisters. Today’s game is Gladiator. Or, as I like to call it, Battling Babes on Boards. Today’s matchup will feature the ’69ers taking on the Fabulous Femmes.” She lifted a carefully sculpted eyebrow toward her platinum blond hair. “Sounds like an average Saturday night in my house.”
“We got this in the bag,” Jill said.
“I don’t know.” Finn took a long look at the members of the opposing team. “Some of those femmes look like they’ve been hitting the gym pretty hard.”
Two SOS Tours staffers swam to the middle of the pool and demonstrated the game while four resort employees held on to the surfboards to keep them steady. The SOS staffers swatted at each other at half-speed until one took a shot to the midsection and fell into the water with a melodramatic flourish.
“Who wants to go first?” Rusty asked after the demonstration ended.
“You have the most experience, Jill,” Finn said. “Why don’t you lead off?”
“I said Gladiator was my favorite game. I never said I was any good at it. But I’ll try to put us on the board.”
Jill and one of the Fabulous Femmes swam to the middle of the pool.
“No blows to the head or face,” Rusty said after Jill and her opponent climbed on their respective surfboards and struggled to maintain their balance. “Aside from that, it’s anything goes. But remember it’s all in fun. Ready, ladies? On three. One. Two. Three.”
Both competitors began to swing. Finn flinched as heavy blows thudded against shoulders, arms, and legs. Perhaps the extra words of copy weren’t worth the bruises after all. But the competition had already started. It was too late to back out now.
In for a penny, in for a pound
.
Jill won her bout in about five seconds flat, but the ’69ers lost the next two. By the time it was Finn’s turn, the score was tied at four and her match would prove to be the deciding one.
“No pressure,” she said under her breath as she tried to find her balance on the surfboard.
“Stay low and spread your feet,” she heard Jill say. “Make her come to you.”
“Stay low? Make her come?” Rusty fanned herself with a copy of the day’s program. “Is it just me or is it getting hot out here? Sorry. I was having a personal moment for a second there. In the final match of the day, we have Finn from the ’69ers taking on Amy from the Fabulous Femmes. Let’s hear it for them!”
Amy was at least six inches taller than Finn and her arms were so long Finn didn’t think she’d be able to penetrate her defenses. Thankfully, though, Amy wasn’t much of a strategist. With her girlfriend cheering her on from the sidelines, she went for the win right away. But her wild swing and subsequent miss threw her off balance. When Finn recovered her bearings, she pressed the tip of her padded baton into Amy’s ribs and pushed as hard as she could. Amy dropped one end of her baton and pinwheeled her free arm as she tried to keep from falling in the water.