Tales from The Tide — My Relationship with (and by) the Sea

…and my fantasy of an older man on a California beach.

Inspired by March’s Week-Two Prompt from Reciprocal

I was fifteen years old, shy, and infatuated. He was a dark-skinned man, five years older than me, who lived in the apartments across from ours. He was my friend’s cousin and the coolest dude I’d ever met — full of bravado and self-confidence — and he had a lowered truck with the loudest-sounding bass around. So cool.

When summer started, and he had weekends off, he regularly drove to the beach just to sleep on the sand, soak in the humid salt breeze, get lulled by the in-and-out roar of the waves, and brown in the sun. He drove to Long Beach, Seal Beach, Huntington Beach, Laguna Beach... Ah, Laguna Beach.

The first time I learned of his outings, I asked if I could join him. My young-girl hormones swelled at the secret thought of a stolen kiss from him. He agreed to let me tag along. The drive was a thirty-mile, winding trek with the windows rolled down, the music booming, my hair whipping in the wind, and me, leaning my elbow out the door sill, too shy to know what to say, until he’d find a place on the side of the road to park.

With his radio, our towels, and a small cooler in hand, we climbed down from the cliffs to the sand, to a spot that seemed luxuriously exotic and secluded. The ocean-cooled breeze gave my white-girl skin some relief.

For weeks I’d prepared my “base tan” by rubbing myself in baby oil and lying on a towel in the small, fenced-in, concrete breezeway on the other side of my kitchen’s sliding-glass door. I listened to the Mighty 690 on my AM radio, and patiently waited for the needle-pricks of sun to penetrate my derma. Fifteen minutes: turn. Fifteen minutes: turn again. I was ready for that day he finally took me to the ocean.

We found a wide-open spot of sand, flattened out our towels, and turned on the music. He popped open a beer, took a sip, pushed it into the sand, and said, “Come on, let’s cool off.” I followed as he trotted to the water. The roar of the Laguna waves filled my ears; my head was full of nothing. The closer we got to the waves, the more gravelly the sand became. And the water — the water was cold!

I wasn’t a strong swimmer, so I waded in carefully, being lifted by each cold swell, and hoping my feet still touched the bottom when I landed. He jumped into the water head and arms first, and swam out to the deep. I watched with admiration.

Just a few minutes later, he returned and walked out of the ocean, dripping from head to toe with his trunks holding onto every bit of his wet skin. I didn’t yet know how to swoon, or even give a compliment, so I acted as if I didn’t notice his abs, his dark legs with hairy patterns where the water had retreated, or his slightly curled head of hair as he shook the water out of it.

I followed him back to our towels. He grabbed his open beer and drank it down, plopped down on his back, turned on the radio, and closed his eyes. The remaining droplets on his eyelashes dried quickly, blown by the wind. His mouth — oh, those lips — slowly opened as he fell asleep. I watched him sleep. I watched his stomach, with its dark trail of hair slinking from his belly button to underneath his shorts, peacefully rise and fall.

And that was what I did for the next six weekends. I tagged along. I watched and acted as if I liked the burning sand on my feet (I’d dig my toes deep into the sand to find some relief), the deafening roar of the wind or the ocean (sometimes I couldn’t tell which), and the unkind sun picking at my skin — feeling, I imagine, like the sound that radio static makes in one’s ears. I sometimes waded into the waters to cool off, but I never wandered too far from his sleeping beauty.

I often burned as he darkened, but by the end of the summer, I was the brownest I’d ever been, and my relationship with the sea was solidified. It had witnessed my first real crush. It was the backdrop to my attempts at being something — anything—that might interest this man. It wrapped around me, sometimes a bit too forcefully, when I retreated from the heat. It was something I could not control. And it taunted me for not knowing what to do on its shores.

When summer was over, I went back to school and fondly recalled the fanciful torture that was my summer obsession. Nothing notable had happened in all of that time (except sunburns and continued admiration), and I’m still dumbfounded at — and thankful for — the plentiful opportunities that he never took.

Respect, tan sir. Respect.

This story was inspired by Sahil Patel’s second-week prompt about Sea Stories. Here’s the link if you want to add your own seaside experience:

This next article makes me think that what I’ve just written is also not quite about nature (but that’s okay!).

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