LITMIR.BIZ

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fuming at me over a badly cooked burger at one of the two restaurants in Kismet, was anyone’s guess.

      “Um, thanks,” I said, taking the onion from the kid with a grateful smile, though what I had to be grateful for at the moment was beyond me.

      “Where’re you going?” he said, making me realize that this kid was not some eager do-gooder but none other than an employee of the Fire Island Ferry Company. At least that’s what his T-shirt said.

      “Kismet. Roundtrip.” I hadn’t even arrived yet and I couldn’t wait to get home. He handed me a ticket and I forked over the $12.50 fare. That was another thing I hadn’t remembered when I’d signed on for this share. Between the train, the ferry and the taxi between the two, the commute alone cost nearly thirty bucks. After I handed over my cash and watched the boy amble over to the few remaining passengers, I knew why I didn’t remember how much this trip cost. Myles had paid that first time we’d come out.

      I would despise Myles for walking away from me after I had suffered through law school with him if I didn’t understand why he felt it necessary to walk away. He had recently turned thirty. His father had just died. I knew these were the kind of mind-altering events that might make a person do irrational things. I should know. My father hadn’t died, but he’d left when I was ten and was as good as dead to me, because I hadn’t seen him since. And I had rounded the corner on thirty a full two months before Myles did. Yes, I’d felt the chill of age coming on, the clutch of anxiety that comes from not having lived up to my own expectations. Not that I felt a need to dump him.

      Okay, so now I was angry. And even more nauseous as the ferry jumped over a wave that would have surely sent a spray on my face if I had been sitting on the top of the ferry in the setting sun like I had that time with Myles. But there was no sun—not even a star—and there was, of course, no Myles. I wasn’t even sure there would be Sage, since my cell phone battery died on the train and I couldn’t let her know I was on my way. Sage, who acted as if her whole happiness this weekend was dependent on my arrival, if those messages she’d left were any indication. Sage, who had likely hooked up with the bartender, or the guy she’d been flirting with who worked the docks, or any one of the other myriad men she had at her fingertips, and forgotten all about me. Sage, whose biggest worry in life was whether or not there was fresh lime for her tequila.

      “Kismet,” the scrawny fare collector bellowed, practically in my ear, now that he was done collecting fares from the few other idiots braving this late night ferry ride. “The first stop on this ferry will be Kismet!” I looked out the window, trying to figure out just how far from the dock we were, but all I could see was the darkness and what seemed liked endless water.

      Yeah, Kismet.

      Everyone gets what they deserve, I guess.

      Including me.

      2

      Sage

       Beach Blanket Boomerang

      “It’s not that I don’t want to…”

      I paused as I pulled on my jeans, giving Chad’s hard-on a meaningful look. “Well, that’s clear at least.”

      “C’mon, Sage, you know what I mean.”

      “I’m not sure I do,” I replied, bending to search the floor for the tank I had tossed off in a frenzy of passion. Passion? That was a laugh. This kid wouldn’t know real passion if it bit him in the ass. Maybe that was the problem, I thought, locating my tank top and yanking it over my head. He was a kid. Twenty-two, I think he said. I turned to the bed again, my eye roaming over his sulking yet adorable face, his well-muscled chest and perfect abs.

      Had twenty-two looked that good when I was twenty-two? Clearly, I hadn’t appreciated it enough back then.

      It was a damn shame. I wasn’t sure what was more of a shame—that he was so hot or that I had spent the past two weekends at the beach trying to seduce him only to get nowhere. At least I hadn’t had to spring for dinner tonight—which was usually what happened when you went out with these young guys. Chad had gotten off work at seven, but the minute I saw him waiting for me at the dock, I was hungry for something else. So we had a couple of drinks at The Inn, a local bar, then headed back to the beach house he shared with his friends. His friends had conveniently not been around when we came through the door, practically tumbling over one another to get to the bedroom. And I was just three minutes away from getting that gorgeous piece of equipment of his inside me when suddenly he brings up the girlfriend. The girlfriend. He might have mentioned the girlfriend before he had me naked and panting on his bed.

      “At least you had an orgasm,” he offered.

      I stared at him. This was obviously some strange side effect of living your formative years during the Clinton presidency. Apparently his little girlfriend wasn’t an issue when he had his head between my legs. But the minute I maneuvered for more than oral sex, suddenly it’s, “I can’t. I have a girlfriend.”

      Blah, blah, blah.

      Sliding my feet into my flip-flops, I said, “Sorry, Chad, but I’m more of a penetration kind of girl.”

      And because I didn’t want to hear another word about it, or because the sight of that beautiful body was starting to make me feel wistful, I left.

      Once I was outside, blanketed by the heat, I felt better, though I couldn’t remember a hotter June night in my short history of Fire Island summers. Not that I was complaining. At least we were getting the most out of this summer share. Or I was anyway. I was betting that Zoe hadn’t made the last ferry out tonight and was forfeiting yet another weekend at the beach in the name of work. I wondered why I had even bothered browbeating her into a share. Or Nick, for that matter. I guess I had some stupid idea that a summer out at the beach with my two best friends would be fun, though I was starting to think Zoe and Nick were like my little friend Chad. They didn’t know a good thing when they had it. Zoe was probably still filming poodles, and Nick…if I knew Nick, he was probably down at The Inn or The Out, the only two bars in town, chatting up anyone who would listen about his latest get-rich-and-maintain-his-integrity scheme, a record label he was developing. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he found investors here. Nick could be pretty charming. In high school he had convinced the football coach he could create software that might predict the most successful plays based on the stats of the players. Of course, he got caught smoking pot in the woods behind the school a week later, losing any support he had gained for the project. But that was classic Nick. He was brilliant enough to be the next Bill Gates, except he tended to use that B.S. in Business Administration of his for b.s. more than anything else.

      It was starting to get on my nerves.

      But then, I was on my last nerve tonight, even more so when I saw the lights of our beach house twinkling in the distance. God, it was a beautiful house. An oceanfront, sprawling three-bedroom ranch hovering high above the beach.

      “Maggie’s Dream.” My boss, Tom, had named it for his wife. Though now that I thought about it, Maggie’s Dream would have been a lot better sans Maggie.

      There was a price to pay for an ocean view. And my price, I had discovered, was Maggie.

      I had met them both at the beginning of last summer, at the beach, of course. Maggie seemed fine then—from a distance anyway. She was simply the smiling, semi-Stepford wife of Tom Landon. I adored Tom immediately. Maybe because we had so much in common—we both worked in the garment industry, though I was in retail at the time. Our acquaintance turned quickly into a business relationship when I bought some products from Tom’s ladies’ wear line, Luxe, to put in the store I managed. But The Bomb Boutique was a bit too downtown hip for me to carry more than a few well-styled pieces from Tom’s line, and then it was mostly accessories—handbags and the odd belt. We became friends, though, so much so that I used to tease him about how he needed to add a little hipness to his line if he hoped to win over customers like The Bomb. As it turned out, I won Tom over. By the end of the summer, he approached me about a new venture he was working on, an urban leather outerwear line. And with the promise of a fat salary as

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