Hoax in One

| 07 |

Back on the beach, lying on my stomach, I pulled out a celebrity crossword from my bag.

When I was halfway through, Tate crouched down and shoved a blue spiked cup holder into the sand in front of me and placed a vodka seltzer in it.

"Where'd you get that?" I asked happily.

"The cup holder or the drink?"

"Both," I smiled.

"The drink came from the grocery." Tate gasped jokingly. "I noticed there weren't any in the ice chest when we got here. Is that not your favorite anymore?"

"No, it is." It just wasn't anyone else's favorite.

"No more whiskey," he remarked with a twitch of his lip. "And I made Taylor stop at one of those beach stores because I knew you'd need a cute place to put it down."

"You weren't wrong. Thank you!"

"Don't mention it. There's eleven more where that one came from." Tate pointed toward my magazine. "Wilson."

"What?"

"Voice of Lightning McQueen. Owen Wilson."

"Oh." I looked down through my sunglasses at my crossword. I only had the 'O,' so I wrote out the remaining letters for forty-six across before I patted the towel next to me. "Don't hold back now."

Tate lay down on his side next to me and scooted in close. We hit each other's leg with our foot every time we'd figure one out, leaving me relieved that I'd just shaved my legs.

"What else do you have in this bag?" Tate asked when we were finished. He pulled it toward him and peered inside. He pulled out Emily Henry's Beach Read and waved it in front of my face. "How fitting. Fake dating?"

"Nope, more like rivals to lovers," I laughed.

"Is there a term for every scenario?"

"Of course. And it's called a trope."

"Trope. Got it." He slipped the book back in my bag. "Magazine. Magazine. Sunscreen. A fan."

"You're not supposed to go through a girl's purse," I deadpanned as Tate ran the fan over his face. "Rules, Tate. Rules."

He turned the fan on me, the rush of air picking up locks of my blonde hair over my shoulder. His eyes did a double-take as he watched them. "How many times have you yelled at me for telling you I wasn't going through your purse when you asked me to grab something?"

"Twenty?" I guessed.

It was probably more like one hundred. Tate would ask me for something and I'd tell him it was in my bag, or I'd ask him to grab something from my bag; every time he'd refuse, telling me that his mom raised him not to go through a woman's purse. Then I'd yell at him for the hundredth time that I didn't care, and he didn't even have to ask me because I didn't have anything to hide. If I did, he would've known about it.

"Did you change the rules, or do you have something to hide from me now?"

"No," I laughed and placed my chin in my palm. "You know how much I like it when you break the rules, and you didn't even think twice just now. Progress."

Tate paused before he slid his eyes into a sidelong glance with humor behind them. "Why do you have markers?"

"They're paint pens for everyone's drinks so we don't get them confused."

He grabbed my cup holder out of the sand and wrote my name on the side in alternating colors and polka dots.

"That's terrible," I laughed. His handwriting looked like a ten-year-old's I used to babysit—weird angles and uneven lines—but watching him write my name was weirdly satisfying. "Some things boys never grow out of."