That Blue Gibson

CH 41

"If it were any warmer, this would be Malibu," Dave bent to pick up a shell at his feet before looking it over and handing it to Liz.

"What a fresh hell that would be," she scrunched up her nose and looked down the beach, counting just a few other people with their dogs on the mile long stretch of sand. They were completely alone at the far sound end of the cape and a mild breeze came in off the waves, but it was warm enough to walk barefoot in the sand. Her phone buzzed in her back pocket and she pulled it free.

I'm so sorry. I didn't know he would go straight to the bar.

She sighed and tapped out a reply to Travis.

It's fine. I just wasn't expecting him. We're cool.

Liz put her phone in her sweatshirt pocket when Dave bumped his shoulder into hers. "Travis says he's sorry," she said.

Dave shrugged and looked over her head to the rock sea wall behind her. "If you weren't in any danger then he has nothing to be sorry for, right? Isn't that all he signed up for?"

Liz was surprised he understood the situation so well when she barely grasped it herself, "Are you my voice of reason now?"

"I'm just saying that if you have that reaction every time you're around the guy you're supposed to be co-parenting with, I'm going to die an early death. A very happy early death, but early all the same."

She flipped the shell he had given her around her fingers, smiling at his words. "I just wasn't prepared for it," she muttered. It wasn't the sight of Kyle that freaked her out as much as it was him seeing her with Dave. She wasn't ready to have the 'who is he to you' conversation with someone she had been devoted to for an entire decade and she wasn't even sure what Dave was to her. After the night before, she felt like they had evolved into something more than whatever it was they had in LA, but it had been so long since she had dated that she wasn't sure what exactly it was. On top of all that, she didn't know how Kyle would react to her moving on. It had always been Kyle leaving her for someone else that inevitably lasted a couple weeks, maybe a month before he came back and she stupidly let him back in. And Kyle had a bit of a temper when he felt threatened which Liz was really trying to avoid.

"Is that a shipwreck?"

Dave's question pulled Liz from her thoughts and she looked up as they approached a point in the cape that reached out into the sea making a natural seawall between two beaches. The tide was receding, revealing several blackened tree stumps in the water.

"That's the ghost forest. We only get to see it when a bad storm comes through," she turned back to the rock point and looked for any signs of storm damage.

"A shipwreck would have been cooler," Dave replied, turning away from the waves to put his arms around Liz.

She leaned into him, resting her head on his shoulder, "Those tree stumps are 4,000 years old! There's a wreck just north of here, but a storm is coming."

Dave looked out to the clear, bright horizon, "I think whoever predicts the weather smokes far too much weed."

"Give me his number so I can send him some product," Liz mumbled into his sweatshirt before looking up at him, "For real, we should head back."

*

"How the hell did you know a storm was coming?" Dave yelled over the wind as they ran up the steps to her house.

She unlocked the door and hurried inside, rain dripping from her clothes as she flipped on the gas fireplace. "My collarbone was screaming at me," she grimaced, rubbing her shoulder a bit. "Doesn't your leg hurt when the weather is about to change?"