Two Weeks With Chelsea

Chapter 21

Chelsea followed up a lite lunch at a small restaurant with a stop at an ice cream shop. They returned to the beach and spread out the towel again. She enjoyed the multiple flavours of her dessert while Trevor waded into the sea. After finishing off the cone she pulled her camera out of the pack and snapped several photos.

Her camera focused on Trevor, and she zoomed in to watch him from a distance. For a while he seemed lost in thought and stared off across the sea. She lowered the camera and wondered what had happened during lunch that had turned him cold.

The beach was alive with people. Trevor took in the sights. His eyes continuously scanned the crowd for beautiful girls in skimpy bathing suits. Everywhere he turned he found exactly what he was looking for. One girl, in a particularly revealing red bikini, caught his eye and warranted a closer look. He slowly moved out of the water and closer to where she had set out a towel to sit.

Several young men stopped to talk to the girl in red and moved on after a few seconds. He smiled as he approached and noticed her smiling back as he continued past and back to his spot on the beach with Chelsea.

"Holly crap! That water is cold," he said as he neared the towel.

Chelsea looked at him briefly and responded while she pulled her journal from her pack, "I wondered why you didn't go in past your knees."

"My legs wondered why we stepped into it at all!" he responded as he watched Chelsea flip through pages of her journal.

He didn't sit as he dried off with the towel that had served to insulate the cold beers. He stood and kept his eye on the girl and noticed when she occasionally glanced his way. As he sipped a beer from the Coke can, he kept track of the girl through the corner of his eye. She looked his way again and he turned to return her gaze. Another young man stopped to chat with her and soon left. She turned to look back at Trevor and held eye contact for a moment before lying face down on her towel.

Trevor approached cautiously. The red bottoms of her bikini covered only the upper half of her buttocks and left the lower lobes completely exposed. She reached across her back and awkwardly attempted to untie the string of the bikini top. The bow slipped into a knot she couldn't work free on her own. She seemed embarrassed by the graceless struggle and rolled over to sit up, then blindly fought with the stings again.

Trevor wasn't a spiritual guy, but this opportunity made him consider the possibility that there was a higher being, crafting situations like this, just for him. While not the standard stuff of scripture, he looked to the sky and uttered a thank you for the perfection in the timing. He moved in to offer assistance and she thanked him in English with a decidedly French accent. While he exaggerated the complexity of the task, to prolong the time he would spend working the bikini strings loose, the girl's right hand remained at the ready near the center of her back. He laid the strings across her palm then folded her fingers closed to grip them. Then, he stood up to walk away.

"Excuse me, would you mind? Please," the girl asked. "One last... assistance?"

With her left arm across her breasts, holding the bikini top in place, she fished a bottle of sunblock from her bag with her right hand then held it towards Trevor and smiled.

"Certainly," he replied as he took the bottle and began applying the lotion slowly. Very slowly.

Chelsea's heart sank as she watched Trevor settle in behind the girl in red, his hands caressing her skin while applying the sunblock. She felt no remaining traces of the blissful confidence she experienced earlier in the day. She wanted to leave, but she couldn't even bring herself to take her eyes off of him. The more she watched, the further into hopelessness she fell.