Beach Dreams That Sort of Come True

The bar wasn't crowded for a Thursday in June. It was a week before the students flocked to the coast, and the Memorial Day tourists had all gone home.

I'd walked into the Castaways for an early evening drink after a round of golf and before taking a long ocean drive in my convertible. That was the plan anyway. Halfway through my first sip, I looked across the bar and saw a vision.

Blonde and tanned, tall and smiling back at me, not just any smile but one that sent chills up my spine. I knew her, but it was impossible. There was no way that bitch would show up here. Not after all we'd been through.

Let me tell you a story.

I'm in my mid-40s now. My best days are long gone. My life is mostly a memory. It was a good memory for the most part. But then everything changed. I'm working on a book about it all. I'm just not sure how it ends.

We grew up in small town on the South Carolina shore. It was an idyllic time in a world all our own. Cassie Edwards and I were buddies, but that was about it. She was two years younger than me, and though we sort of dated a time or two in high school we were never more than friends.

Close friends though.

Her dad was the local detective. He was also my Little League coach, so he trusted me. Just not with his daughter.

We hung out a lot. Well, all the time really. I never had a real girlfriend, and she was so sheltered by her dad that she never even went on a date. Not a real date. I would take her for ice cream once I got my license and we'd go to the beach a lot, just to hold hands and walk and talk about, well, everything.

We had no secrets. But we also had no lives to speak of other than school and cheerleading for her, baseball for me. Our best times together were walking down pathways toward the sound, or the Marsh as it was known in our world. I assumed that one day everything would change. But it never did. Not in the way I dreamed anyway.

She told me once that we would never be apart, even if it meant only in our memories. That certainly came true. By the time I left for college, having barely laying a hand on her, it was like she vanished from my life.

I played baseball in college and actually made it to the minors before blowing out my elbow at Double-A and ending up as a pitching coach in Winston-Salem for a year. I completely lost track of Cassie.

Through some friends, I heard she'd married a lawyer from back home, had a kid and lived a miserable life in a big house on the ocean. I knew the house. It was near where we grew up, and sometimes I would walk past it on the beach when I went home for holidays.

After college I'd bounced around baseball until it became apparent that I needed something more, so I went back to school, got my MFA in creative writing and set out to forge a career. I got a job as a graduate assistant at UNC-Wilmington (UNC By the Sea) and eventually got a real job teaching Freshman Writing.

It was a living. My summers were my own, and I took the time to start writing short stories, magazine pieces and the ocassional story in a literary magazine. I was doing OK when I found myself back home one summer waiting for fall semester when out of the blue I ran into Cassie.

It was one of those scenes out of a Pat Conroy novel. I was floating through the marsh creeks out behind the barrier island where our little town was located. It was like I was back in my childhood, just quietly going with the current, letting the small waves lap against the old boat, drinking a cold Bud and thinking about nothing at all.

Then rounding a corner, there she was.

When you're from the Lowcountry, you have an entire ecosystem to yourself, a world away from everything and everybody. A walk down a trail can lead to any adventure you can imagine. Or it can end on a sandy beach surrounded by wiregrass and brackish water, an oasis in the middle of the marsh where you can do almost anything you want.

This is the place where dreams come true, though this dream was beyond my wildest fantasies.

She was lying on a towel in the sand, face down, her top undone as she soaked in the South Carolina sun, bathing in the hot rays that created a sheen on her skin that shone in the summer rays. I stopped the boat several yards away and considered paddling back the other way when she suddenly turned toward me, one hand covering her bare tits and the other shielding the sun in her eyes as she tried to make out where the soft splashing noise was coming from.

Immediately, she stood and covered herself with the towel, stepping backward slowly as she looked at the stranger standing in the wooden rowboat.

I was in old khaki shorts, an open white Oxford flapping in the breeze, showing my dark tan and the lean former pitcher's body that she recognized but couldn't place right away.

I looked at her through my Ray-Bans and let it wash over me. Could it be her?

The water slowly led my boat to the edge of the sand and I leaned down and picked up another Bud.

"Beer?" I asked, smiling wanly, my heart racing as I tried not to let my mind convince myself this was my long lost love from high school. There was silence in the heavy air, nothing moving but the waves slapping the boat as our eyes focused and the blood rushed to our heads.

"Michael?"

She asked almost apologetically. And then...

"MIKEY?!"

The next thing I knew, we were in each other's arms, waist deep in the water, kissing and groping and laughing so hard neither of us could talk. I kissed her too hard and we lost our balance, falling into the black water, our lips pressed together, our bodies clinging to something more than each other.

We were suddenly holding onto the one thing we never thought we'd ever touch again - our memories, our dreams, our fantasies, our wildest hopes against all hope. When we surfaced, our eyes were still wide open, her tits pressed hard against my bare chest, our lips glued together but no longer kissing.

We were smiling.

It was happiest moment of our lives.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Cassandra was quite a catch for the lawyer who wrested her away from her ageing father and moved her to the big city. She'd always been beautiful and smart, but hers was more of a street-smarts kind of education, borne of the island and the waters around it.

She was tough and wise in ways Marcus Brand, attorney at law, could never understand and certainly didn't appreciate. Cassie was his trophy, and he treated her as such.

He lavished her in credit cards and cars, country club memberships and golf lessons, cruises to the Caribbean and invitations to exclusive parties in Charleston and Savannah.

And after two years of all that and little more, they had a child.

Sex was the one thing Marcus Brand wasn't good at. It was common knowledge among the law students and interns he dated, more for show than anything else. He wasn't looking for a good time. He was looking for a wife he could drape from his arm like a Rolex.

Cassandra Edwards was the big grand prize. In a year she wanted out, but somehow a night of alcohol and her impatience produced an orgasm and nine months later, Kaylee Ann Brand was born.

Thus began another trial for Cassie. She hired a day nurse, a night nurse, a weekend nanny and a rotation of babysitters that basically raised Kaylee Ann while she pretended to be a mother and a wife.

She wasn't any good at either.

So it was that five years later, she ran away. Sort of. Life in North Charleston, where her husband's firm is located, can be stifling for a young wife and mother. There's a social structure there, a kind of heirarchy of power and influence, and Cassie hated it.

She convinced Marcus to let her go see her Mom, who was alone now that her father had passed. That, too had changed Cassie in ways she didn't fully understand. She needed a strong man in her life, one she respected. Little did her husband know that she had one foot out the door even before she went back home.

After two days in her parents' big house, she decided to go for a walk after she'd had a few gin and tonics on the veranda. She put on a white bikini, grabbed a beach towel and walked down an old familiar trail that led along the creek behind the houses.

It was grown over but still in tact, used only by animals now. After a half mile or so, it led into a thicket of vines and branches before opening onto a large sand beach on the banks of the marsh creek, surrounded by high grass, the Calibogue Sound in the distance.

She stood and peered across the water, letting it all wash over her, the memories of days spent alone here and with a boy she sometimes still had dreams about. She thought of Marcus and Kaylee Ann and her life she'd never dreamed of as a tear fell down one cheek.

She brushed it away angrily, ashamed of herself for feeling sad. The towel was spread onto the sand and she undid the top of her bikini, letting her tits free to feel the warmth.

Alone and feeling emotions she hadn't experienced in years, Cassie sat down and slid her hand down her bottoms, feeling her lazer smooth lips in a way she hadn't in a long time.

Closing her eyes and letting her mind wander, she came in less than a minute, gushing all over the bikini bottoms, cum running down her legs into her ass crack and she bucked and screamed before crying for real this time.

Then she rolled over and slept for hours, the first complete sleep in as long as she could remember. She woke from the sound of water, still in a dream she'd had so many times before.

She was still dreaming as I carried her out of the water and dropping her onto the towel, ravaging her body right there under our South Carolina sun, fucking her like she'd never been fucked before as she screamed and cried for more.

Then I carried her to the boat, naked, where she sat on the small bow deck, her legs wide open, playing with her freshly fucked cunt and smiling at me with a grin that made me want to row her into the sea and die together right then.

We made it back to the little pier behind her parents' house, where I lay her on her back and sucked my cum out of her raw pussy, fingering her asshole as she bucked and begged me to fuck her ass.

Instead, I turned her over on her knees and spanked her until she collapsed into a heap of sweat, cum and tears. Then I sent her home.

Two days later, I got a text from her.

"Marry me, Michael."

-----------------------------------------------------------

Funny how life can play tricks on you. I finally found what I'd been missing for all those years, and it turned out to be nothing like I imagined. It was somehow better and worse than I ever expected.

Cassie had changed. That much was obvious. She was no longer the prim and proper Southern girl I'd grown up with. She'd become cold and calloused, still capable of charming but with a rough interior that wasn't there when I thought I might be in love with her.

Not that I wasn't in love with her, but it had become more of a fascination, a physical yearning for a woman unleashed. We fucked regualrly after that. Even after she'd gone back to Marcus and Kaylee Ann. We met in clandestine settings, out of the way hotels and, yes, on our little beach in the marsh when she visited her mother.

We traded texts, carelessly and recklessly as we carried on a secret affair based on sex and years and years of being apart. The sex was primal and animalistic. I was careful not to leave many marks, at least not on places where her husband might see them in public.

She promised me I owned her forever, and that he would never lay a hand on her again, not that he was inclined to anyway. Cassandra Brand became a worse wife than she'd ever been, but somehow she became a worse person too.

I saw the kid a time or two, She was a little tow-headed brat who obviously got everything she wanted. She was also a carbon copy of the girl I grew up with, a tomboy with blonde hair and freckles, always with skinned knees and a sly smile on her face.

I liked her, and she liked me. She called me Mister Mike. No one else ever called me that.

Of course, that was how we got caught. Kaylee Ann apparently mentioned me before a weekend trip to somewhere. She asked her mom if they were going to see Mister Mike, and though her father acted as if he didn't hear, he did.

He eventually got into Cassie's phone and found the texts. Or the text. She'd carefully scrubbed everything after all of our chats, everything except the first one.

"Marry me, Michael."

Thus began the longest year of my life.

There's a 19th Century law that is almost obsolete in the United States known as "alienation of affection." It means basically, that if a man has relations with another man's wife that leads to the break up of that marriage, the husband can sue the other man.

Only eight states have it on the books all these years later, and South Carolina is not one of them. NORTH Carolina, where I live, is however. Marcus Brand. attorney at law, knew that when he traveled to Wilmington one morning and filed the papers with the New Hanover County clerk of courts.

He claimed he wanted to save his marriage but still wanted to sue me for a million dollars. He was a crafty son of a bitch. And somehow, that act of defiance sparked something in Cassandra Edwards Brand of North Charleston. For the first time she'd known him, she saw something in him she liked other than his money. He really did have something of a spine. She even agreed to testify against me.

I settled with the shit heads, paying them $10,000 and signing a paper that stated I would never fuck her again or something like that. She had to sign it too, and I received a copy of it in an official envelope one day.

There was another paper in the envelope that said I would never speak of the affair as long as I lived. I didn't sign that, and he didn't seem to notice.

Big mistake.

I went on with my life, and they went on with theirs. I finally sold a book or two, little love novels about nothing, sort of like Nicholas Sparks, who I actually met on a book tour once. He didn't seem to like me all that much. But I digress.

I bought a little house near the state line, in a little village called Calabash where I watched the boats come in and out every day, bringing in hauls of fish for the restaurants there and attracting tourists from North and South Carolina who loved the fried fish the village was known for.

My house was on the water across the Intracoastal Waterway near a place called Bird Island that was known for having a mailbox on the beach with a little red flag that was always up. People would come from miles around to leave notes to loved ones, living and deceased, walking more than a mile to get to the isolated beach where the little mailbox sits with its door open and a notebook inside.

Of course Sparks wrote about it.

Anyway, my life is filled with meaningless sex with tourists, married and otherwise. Something about the salt air that brings something out in a woman she never knew of. Girls-only beach trips and divorcee-week trips are popular, and an unmarried former baseball player with a former baseball player's tan and lean body can get lucky if he plays his cards right.

Which I do.

It's funny, but when I was still in the game and we would go out at night to the bars in the litttle minor-league towns across America, we learned to read the signs of girls who wanted to fuck: eye contact that lingered a second too long, a furtive smile, the touch of a finger on your forearm, the tossle of her hair or twirling a lock with the tip of her tongue on her lips.

They all said the same thing: Take me back to your house and fuck me. Of course, sometimes the next morning there was a different look, one that said "Marry me, Michael."

Luckily, I learned that one the hard way.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't think about her virtually every day. Our affair had lasted a year, and we fucked constantly. She loved it. She loved the sex far more than she ever loved me, it turned out.

We role-played and made fun of Marcus the attorney, pretending he was watching us as I fucked her ass and she laughed in his face a few feet away. We were such fools. She loved being spanked and wanted to be slapped around, though I never would, which would lead to screaming matches that sounded like sheer terror and always led to even more intense fucking, sometimes with objects we found around the house.

She was insatiable. It was as if I'd uncaged a wild beast and had to tame it night after night.

When I think of it now, I sometimes laugh outloud imagining what she's putting that poor lawyer through night after night. I know he's scared to death of her. I sent him a monster insead of a tarnished trophy.

Most of my nights now are spent walking the beaches or hanging out at the Castaways bar where some of the locals and all the tourists come at night. Now in my 40s, I've found a rythym to life I always wanted. I sleep as long as I like. I wake up and drink coffee, maybe write for an hour or maybe go for a drive with the top down or maybe drop my boat into the river to fish for Spanish mackerel or striped bass or speckled trout.

Sometimes I play golf at Oyster Bay, where I've finished second in the club championship for three straight years, always to the district attorney who knows my place in a now-famous ruling involving a man and a woman from South Carolina.

I hate him.

--------------------------------------------------

It was a warm night in June with a breeze blowing from the west when I put the top down on my convertible and drove home from the golf course. I'd played well, won some money off my friends and was in the mood to get drunk.

I showered at the club and changed into a pair of khakis and a white Oxford button down that I didn't bother buttoning down. Driving into the village drinking a vodka tonic, I felt something in the west wind. It was ominous and for a mile or so I kept my eye in the rear-view mirror for cops.

That was a weird feeling since there was only a sheriff in Calabash and he never left his office. Still, something had me spooked.

I made it to Castaways and found a parking space too easily. It was a Thursday, but still. The lot should've been packed.

I walked into the bar and ordered another vodka tonic, looking around the half-empty place for familiar faces. Seeing none, I turned around to ask the bartender where everyone was when I glanced at the other side of the bar where a woman stood smiling.

Smiling right at me. It was a little odd. She was in a white sundress with gold sparkling around her neck, hanging down into her ample cleavage. There was something about her that I couldn't shake. I moved to get out of the light a little to see her more clearly and my heart almost stopped beating.

It was Cassie. Her smile was radiant as she walked around the bar, coming into focus, that familiar sway of her hips, the confident air about her, the perfect skin.

And then she spoke.

"Hey Mister Mike!"

My God, it wasn't Cassie at all. It was Kaylee Ann.

She was walking toward me, her eyebrows raised, her gleaming teeth shining as her walk became a run, flinging herself into my arms.

"It's you, it's really you!"

I shook my head and held her tight, a little anxious, no, a lot anxious as this clone of Cassie wiggled against me. She looked up into my eyes and planted a kiss on my lips and cackled.

"I heard you were up here. I wondered when we would run into each other."

She was babbling on about a boy she was seeing, an assistant golf pro at Oyster Bay.

I was speechless.

"I saw your name on the membership plaque and asked about you. Everybody knows you!"

I was watching her mouth move, but I could barely hear the words. My ears were ringing. There was a loud hum in my head. I was close to passing out. I finally managed to push her away far enough to look at her from head to toes.