The House At Sunset (Sunset SEALs #5) - Sharon Hamilton Page 0,2
he wasn’t. It just seemed a lot easier to go along with the program she’d devised, albeit expensive. There were wars you could win and wars you never would win. This one was a war he would never be able to win. He’d take a chance that when the girls became young adults, began to raise families of their own, they would appreciate him more.
Hank shed his pajamas and donned a T-shirt and a pair of swimming trunks, along with a pair of zoris. He put on a red beach hat that he had found at the grocery store one year, flattened and floppy. He’d packed it in his suitcase every year he came to Sunset Beach, and although he never used it, did look well-worn. Just from the packing.
Like my writing career, he thought.
At the doorway, he stepped out as if he had complete snorkel gear, flippers and a mouthpiece stuck in his piehole. He felt ridiculous in this get up, but he proceeded to the beach anyway.
He was headed for a little slice of sugary white sand beach between a group of young men and a little group of pretty twenty-something girls working the sand on their knees. In their bikinis and ponytails, they were obviously college age girls, down for a weekend or a week during the holidays, shedding their family and traditions as well, just like Hank was.
It was a cliche just like so much of what he’d written this morning and tossed away, but the girls wore ice cream colors and all with different coloring. One girl was a brunette, with an equally bronzed light coffee mocha skin and complexion to go with it. One girl was red haired, another was a very light blonde. The young lady furthest away was a mahogany-colored young woman with pale peach skin with a long ponytail that extended all the way down her backside to her waist.
“Ladies,” he said as he passed them.
They were constructing a sandcastle, all four of them pouring buckets of sandy water to smooth over surfaces. They had built turrets and windows and a ramp as well as an archway entrance, that would all dissolve in the oncoming surf later on in the evening.
He removed his zoris and walked toward the ocean. The water was lukewarm, not freezing cold as it would have been up north, and not like how he remembered the water in Santa Cruz that disastrous summer when he brought the wife and girls. Maybe it was the close proximity to the three females in his little clan, but Santa Cruz didn’t do anything for his psyche. The wind was too cold and so was the water. The smell of cotton candy from the Boardwalk made him want to vomit and remnants of it stuck to his pages, to the fingers, to the keys and the bottoms of his shoes. Using the bathroom was problematic so he frequently had to water the ice plant with his own urine. He decided right then and there that Florida would be the only place in the universe he’d be able to write. And he needed to be alone. Complete peace and quiet. Just he and Captain Sampson and Mega Blue.
Except for this time. For a whole month, he’d been unable to write, to even get more than ten pages typed up that he didn’t toss as reading like one of his students.
The first week he was here, he felt this creeping sense of dread overtaking him, like the black plague infecting his fingers and his face and his brain, making him scramble his ideas and unable to put one word in front of the other without making no sense whatsoever. Everything he wrote was awful. It was third grade style. It was what he would tease his other author friends having read someone else’s manuscript. Amateurish. Not at all like Hank Borges, the famous science fiction author, would do.
But the ocean didn’t see this. The ocean treated him just like any other person who stood up to his white knees in the surf. The sun was right smack in the middle of his forehead, his sunglasses barely able to keep out the glare, the floppy hat not helping. He turned to the side so he wouldn’t damage his eyes. Apparently, he would need a different pair. These he’d picked up at the beach store. And it was obvious they were only worth the dollar that he paid for them.