Tanner came jogging up the sand behind me, shirtless—of course—and not even slightly out of breath despite the fact that he’d clearly just sprinted a quarter mile. He clapped me on the back hard enough to move me forward an inch and beamed at Selena.
He looked her up and down just as shamelessly as I had, but when he did it, it was gross and misogynistic.
“Hey, gorgeous.”
“Friend of yours?” she asked me, glancing between us with the calm, assessing expression of someone used to working with rowdy customers.
Then, only looking at me, “Is that your name? Tibby?”
Tanner opened his mouth.
“Sure,” I said.
She didn’t know who I was, and that was something I didn’t experience often, especially in beach towns. I wanted to cling to it just a bit longer. Maybe I didn’t have to be El Tiburón for her—not yet, at least.
A knot in my chest relaxed at that.
Tanner closed his mouth. Looked at me. Looked at her.
Had the self-preservation instinct—for once in his life—to say nothing.
“Huh.” She decided it wasn’t worth it, then looked back at Tanner. “I’m Selena.”
“Tanner,” he replied, already leaning on the counter with a smile I recognized as his going-to-try-something smile, which pissed me off way more than it normally would.
I flashed my teeth at him, but he was too distracted to notice.
“This your place? It’s great. Really great. You make those açaí bowls? Because I would come back every single day for a good açaí bowl, and I mean that as both a compliment and a genuine inquiry?—”
“I make them,” Selena cut in, suppressing a laugh.
“Amazing. You’re amazing. Tibby, she’s amazing.”
He was bouncing on his toes, all the energy he couldn’t spendon the waves having nowhere to go. I understood that feeling, but I knew Tanner always felt it ten times more.
He spotted a pull-up bar mounted to the outside of the shack, between one wall and what looked like an old watchtower post. Part of me wondered if it had been installed to keep the shack from tipping over.
His face lit up.
“Oh, rad. Hey, what’s your count? Because I’ve been doing these ring pull-ups lately, and I feel like I could go all day. I really think I could just?—”
“Tanner,” I interrupted.
“Yeah?”
“Shut the fuck up, please.”
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
His face fell, and Imighthave felt bad about if he hadn’t woken me up at the ass crack of dawn this morning just to watch some useless waves.
He helped himself to a pen from the counter and spun it between his fingers, which was just what Tanner did when he was being forcibly prevented from talking.
I turned back to Selena, who had watched this entire exchange with the expression of someone being mildly entertained at no cost to herself.
“So, how many?” I nodded at the bar.
