Tickle waves, my mom calls them.
I grin as I let them tickle my feet, feeling centered - feeling at home.
Of course, I’m also grinning because these tickle waves are about to become a $5,000 Instagram picture.
I push the little bottle of skin cream down into the soft brown sand and black pebbles of the shore, pushing it just enough in, right next to my toes, so that the water just splashes gently across it.
Perfect.
This week’s skin cream product placement apparently specializes in minimizing high-heel-related calluses. Or, something. This one I’m not actually that familiar with, but my management team made sure it was part of the “to shoot” product bag - along with the sandals up on the beach, the sports bra I’m currently wearing, and of course the yoga pants that carry my brand - that I was supposed to come home with and photograph
“Make sure you really get enough of that quaint Cape Cod charm, okay, Ivy?”
I frown at Lori, my immediate manager. “Shelter Harbor isn’t actually on Cape Co-”
“Hon?” She looks down over the top of her tortoise-shell glasses at me from behind her wide, glass desk. “It doesn’t really matter, okay?”
Here in decidedly not Cape-Cod-located Shelter Harbor, I bring the phone up and point it down at my feet, framing it just right. Some people who do this kind of work hire a team, but polls have shown that people really dig my “home shot” aesthetic. They like that I’m “au naturale” and don’t use pro photographers. They like that I’m “so genuine” in my selfless quest to highlight-reel my life of endless yoga retreats, active wear, and goji-berry cleanses.
Right.
I mean, I’m going to Photoshop the shit out of these pictures later on my laptop, but sure - “au naturale” it is.
The sun’s perfect right then too, the light great for that mid-afternoon summer dazzle. I swap to a video, shooting a quick one with sound that I’m sure will get 300,000 likes by dinner time if I can get it up in time.
The skin cream along with my toes captured in about fifty shots, I make my way back up to the beach, slipping back into my sandals and climbing the wooden stairs back to the piers. My eyes dart across the harbor scene I could probably still navigate with my damn eyes closed. The smell of Halstead’s lobster-roll take-out window, the sounds of mechanical winches down on the docks loading empty nets onto trawlers or full ones off.
The cool wind of the Atlantic blowing through my hair.
I snap a few more random shots, getting that “New England charm” aesthetic I know the management team is looking for. I might’ve run away from this place a long time ago, but I will hand it to this town, charm it’s got by the damn bucketful. There’s a reason ferries and tour buses bring tourists by the truckload to this place between May and September. It’s charming, and quaint - picturesque enough that they’ve even shot movies here over the years.
I head down to the lower piers, following them almost aimlessly.
Of course what the movies don’t show and what the tour buses skip is the darker side - the part of town that behind the veneer of it’s adorable little main street. Beyond the charm and the little shops selling plush whale stuffed animals and keychains with founding fathers’ names stenciled on them, there’s the other side of Shelter Harbor.
Silas’s side.
The edgier side, home to the boy from across the tracks.
The one I wanted to save.
The one I thought I could save.
The one I married, before he proved how silly and wrong I could be.
The one who-
“You lost, Slimy?”
I jerk my head up, right into his grinning, cocky face.
Silas.
I’ve walked further down the piers than I thought, lost in my own head. I’m down by the resident slips, and he’s standing a foot above me, perched on the edge of a dilapidated looking tug-boat of some kind.
Yeah, the years have been good to him - ridiculously, unfairly good to him.
He looks older of course, but in that staggeringly handsome way. The lines by his eyes are a little deeper, but only in a way that makes him look better somehow.
Dick.
But there’s the same shadow across his eyes, the same dark hollows in his cheeks. That same perfect nose, and those deep, Atlantic-ocean-blue eyes.
I shake those thoughts away as I hold a hand up and squint through the afternoon sun at him.
“I told you not to call me that.”
Silas grins. “Aww, but I like it.”
I scowl.
“C’mon, you used to like it.”
“When we were ten.”
He chuckles as he shakes his head.
“Enlighten me how I keep running into you like this?”
Silas straightens, raking his nails across the stumble of his chin. “Could ask you the same thing, Hammond.” He winks. “And anyways, you’re trespassing.”