I scan the beach as I continue my jog, checking the people as I pass by the row of purple cloth beach chairs positioned under umbrellas. There are no empty chairs, and it’s hard to tell one person from the next, but I have no doubt I’ll be able to recognize Abby if she’s here.
I’m just looking for a pair of legs that?—
I nearly trip over my own feet when I find them.
She’s in the same bikini she wore on her first day here, a bright red thing with a thick band that covers her ribs and chunky straps that tie behind her neck. Her hair is up in a wildbun, her legs propped up on the beach chair, holding a notebook of some kind that she’s—is she drawing?
I beeline to her as casually as possible, taking out my earbuds as I approach her chair. Beside her on a small table is an empty drink cup and an almost empty bottle of water. She picks her head up as I approach, and I don’t miss the way her lips tug into a smile.
“What is the statistical probability of running into you by chance as many times as I have?” Abby asks, squinting, then lifting her hand to shield her eyes from the sun.
“What if I told you that this time I was looking for you?”
Her lips twitch as she tries not to smile any wider. “I’d say you’re messing with the math.”
“Well, it was never my strong suit.”
“Mine either,” she says and gestures to her notebook, which I can see now is a sketchbook, a black pencil in her hand.
“That looks familiar,” I say, nodding to the sketchbook.
“Oh, this…well, it might be the one I had in college. I only really ever bought one brand, and I did have to unearth this from the back of my closet.”
She starts flipping through the pages, and one must catch her eye, because she presses her lips together, even as they twitch to keep from smiling more. Her cheeks pink and she closes the pages, keeping her eyes averted.
“What? What did you find?” I ask. I sit on the edge of her beach chair and try to get a look at her sketchbook.
“It’s—oh my god, it’s so embarrassing.” She covers her face with the hand holding the pencil, or tries to cover her face, but the way her fingers lie across the drawing utensil leaves plenty of her face still visible.
“Please, Abby. Let me see,” I beg.
She groans, flipping open the notebook to the page she was on, and holds it up for me to see.
It’s obvious immediately what I’m looking at. It’s me. It’s my profile, crooked nose and all. I broke it my freshman year of college during a game and it never really looked the same since. She also got the scar on my chin just right from where I took a stick to the face when my dad and I were trying to teach Gray to play hockey as kids.
I didn’t have stubble in college—I was clean-shaven then—but my hair was longer, messier, and she got all that too. Even if I wasn’t biased to believe that anything Abby created was beautiful, I would still find this impressive.
“It’s so shoddy, I really—I mean, technically just not great. Even if you can’t tell, it’s still embarrassing.” She turns the notebook around again and cradles it to her chest. “Plus, it’s…well…”
She gestures toward me.
“Yeah, so embarrassing—you had a crush on me, didn’t you?”
She playfully swats my arm and pinches her lips together in fake annoyance. “Oh my god, shut up,” she says.
“Is that what you were drawing today? My face? From memory?”
She rolls her eyes at me, but there’s jest in it. She silently flips to another page in her sketchbook and angles it toward me.
This time, it’s a perfect depiction of the beach, specifically the view from her chair. There’s a large palm tree planted between her and the ocean, and she must have been working on shading the bark of it when I approached because it’s only half-done. She somehow manages to capture the movement of the water, and I imagine that if I stared for long enough, I’d hear the back-and-forth swoosh of the waves.
It’s obvious that her technique has improved over time, even though I don’t know shit about art. But I can recognize the growth of a skill. As an athlete, I know what it looks like to improve over time.
“This is stunning, Abby. Do you draw a lot?”
She shakes her head, stretching her legs out long behind me on the shared beach chair. “I haven’t found the time for it. The spoons for it. Even when I was with Todd, it felt silly to use my free time to draw when I could have just been hanging out with him.”
“Did he make you feel like that?”
