But then the sand and the sun got to me, and I realized rather quickly that the beach wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be.
Especially when the more we went, the busier it got until it took us four fuckin’ hours to travel twenty miles.
By that point in my teenage life, I’d been over going to the beach. And when I’d gotten the choice on going or not as I’d come of age, I’d chosen not.
But I had to admit, the gulf really was beautiful. Especially when the waters were turbulent from an incoming hurricane.
A flash of white caught my eye, and I squinted down the length of the beach.
It was moving from a house toward the water, and after close observation, when it stopped just before the water’s edge, I realized that it was a person pulling something across the sand.
I frowned, trying to make more out, but I was too far away.
That, and the wind was picking up, causing sand to swirl.
Eventually, the rain started up, too, and I decided to walk back toward my house.
Which brought me closer to the person that was now sitting on the beach.
It took me a good ten minutes to get close enough that I could make out the figure, and once I did, the red hair caught my eye.
The same color as the woman’s in the parking lot of the hospital that I couldn’t stop thinking about.
Goddamn, I hadn’t stopped thinking about her to the point where I’d gone back to the hospital every fuckin’ day since—even today on the way to the damn beach—and hadn’t seen her. Which had been a good thing and a bad thing.
A good thing, because I didn’t like the thought of her back at that hospital crying.
And a bad thing, because I hadn’t found her again. Because had she been there one of the times I’d driven by, I would’ve stopped and talked to her.
The closer I got to where the woman was, the more the wind and the lightning started to pick up.
By the time I was close enough to see that there wasn’t just one person, but two, the lightning was hitting so close that it was making even me nervous.
At first, I thought the woman in the raft shaped like a boat was drunk—I mean, why else would she have lain so fuckin’ weird with her toes in the sand and her head tilted backward toward the now light rain?
But the closer I got, the more I realized that that woman inside the raft was deathly still.
And the woman with the red hair was crying hard.
So hard, in fact, that she reminded me of someone over a thousand miles away… someone that’d been crying like that when…
Oh, holy fuck.
It was her.
A bolt of lightning shot through the sky what felt like only inches from my face and hit so hard in the sand about fifty feet away that my ears popped.
The woman looked up, and those violet eyes hit me down deep in my soul.
Her breath was coming in hiccups, and her eyes were so swollen from her tears that she looked as if she could barely hold them open.
“You need to get inside,” I said, my eyes going from the crying woman to the body next to her.
A woman who looked gaunt and worn out.
A woman that was obviously dead and had been for a while.
Her lips were blue, and her eyes were still wide open with a fuckin’ smile on her lips.
“I-I can’t get her i-inside,” she whispered. “She… she wanted her toes in the sand.”
“Fuck, baby,” I said softly. “I’ll help.”
I didn’t know how the hell the woman I couldn’t stop thinking about was not only here with me, but at the same beach, but I was going to take what I could get.
It was sad as fuck, though, that her friend had to die for me to see her here.
“You want the raft?” I asked. “Or can I carry her?”
“C-carry,” she rasped. “Carry.”
I nodded once, then bent down and picked up the woman.
She was skin and bones and weighed nothing more than a feather.
The redhead scrambled to her hands and knees, then stood up, revealing that she was in a black tank top and blue jean shorts. She had sand covering every inch of her body, likely from the wind that was now going crazy.
“Which house is yours?” I asked.
The redhead pointed to the one right beside ours, and I started carrying my burden in the direction she’d pointed.
She kept up with me, scrambling to move ahead of me and help.
Only, she was slipping and sliding on the sand, her breathing choppy, and her steps were definitely clumsy.
“I didn’t even go inside yet,” she admitted, her breath hitching as she spoke. “I don’t know what to do now.”