But at this moment, Luke was feeling anything but an arbiter of cool, even among posers. It was an accepted fact of life on this rarefied outer tip of Long Island that many of the local families’ incomes were reliant on wealthy Manhattanites with their clan-like customs and infantile impatience. Every summer, these invaders crashed into town on Memorial Day weekend and vanished at the stroke of 6:00 p.m. on Labor Day.
“C’mon, man,” yelled Kona, shaking his stringy blond hair that graced the lower part of his shoulders—a perfect length to attract the lady folk, while still thrusting a middle finger at any semblance of a desk job. “Julia Chase is waiting for me upstairs; I just feel it.” Julia Chase, the buxom hostess of tonight’s Memorial Day weekend cocktail affair, had pushed the guys hard to show, insisting her glamorous friends wanted to meet real surfers.
Luke, thirty-one, and Kona, thirty-four, had both grown up in the same Southampton school district. Their local friends and relatives were electricians, land surveyors, restaurateurs, AV technicians, shop owners—normal American folks who actually lived in one residence all year round. Though Kona had spent many school years in Hawaii on an Air Force base with his parents, both men had grown closer than brothers. They knew middle-class childhoods, nothing more—and a lot less when times were tough.
The gray slate steps were illuminated with a subtle line of lights flooding the stairs as if they were leading to the entrance of a royal Egyptian tomb. Kona didn’t appreciate that the entry was conveniently lit for his bare toes in black rubber flip-flops, nor did he know that a few steps cost more than he and Luke made all summer.
As he strode up to the event, Kona couldn’t decide if Julia Chase’s supersized wealth and married status were an inconvenient reality, or one of those thrilling challenges that tended to smack him in the face.
“The beach was empty, my towel was like a goddamn postage stamp in the sand,” Kona declared, with boorish confidence. “And Julia chooses to do a down-dog yoga move like five feet in front of me? She’s dying for it.”
“She may have not even noticed you were there,” counseled Luke. “She’d just dropped her kid off at camp and maybe wanted to stretch a little. Don’t get us in hot water with Jake Chase. The season is just starting and that kook is sharper than he looks.”
Entering her territory and this grandiose house, Kona began to question everything he’d felt on his territory: the water sports camp on his beach. Whether he could properly evaluate Julia’s stretching needs or not, he resorted to his fail-safe stance and walked up those illuminated steps like he owned the entire forty-million-dollar beachfront property.
The guests inside reveled on this Memorial Day Saturday, drunk with the sweet aphrodisiac of summer’s arrival. Kona reminded himself that life was all about making moves—on bored, horny housewives, on job connections with the city people, on any opportunity that befell him. He rubbed the stubborn sand out of his eyebrows and shook his head a bit to cast off these rare schoolboy inhibitions.
Chapter Three
Shoreline Sideshow
Near the twelve-foot-high privet to the side of the estate, a young woman escaped the party and raced behind the pool shed, her heart beating violently. She tried to create moisture in her dry mouth by sucking on the insides of her cheeks. Pulling her glorious, curly mane off her bare back, she knotted it up into a bun so as to better perform the business she had in mind.
Waiting for her, he lay like a starfish in the dark, tangled brush. His blazer flapped open against the sandy earth beneath him, exposing the Lilly Pulitzer pink-and-yellow gardenia lining he found so festive and reassuring all at once. He passed the time deciphering the sparkling constellations above, his eyes eventually settling on the hunter, Orion.
The shoulder straps of her orange silk romper got caught in the branches as she dashed along. An undulating field of high sea grass shielded the spot they’d agreed on. She knew sneaking here was not the best idea, but it was funny that he’d suggested that they should do it now. An Instagram of the spot would be awesome. No one would ever recognize the patch of grassy sand where he waited, but she would make clear what transpired there. And she would never tell anyone with whom.
He checked his vintage Rolex Daytona. Indeed, she was eighteen minutes late. Off in the distance, the waves of the Atlantic pounded the shoreline, making the ground beneath him reverberate with a gentle rumbling. He had all night to mingle, and he knew all the arrivistes sipping their colorful cocktails on the other side of the hedge wouldn’t discover them. His reasoning, honed on the debate team at Exeter, usually did not fail him. But tonight, with his mind consumed in the sparkling sky and his loins captivated by her sheer roundness, his thinking was not sound. After all, ensuring a young woman’s discretion was far more difficult than pinpointing the archer’s bow above.