Re: AHS: Sam A & Cris M
People slept on the beach in the city. Before Sandy, anyway. Street people, most of the time, but come summer, and plenty of people in the denser neighborhoods climbed outside and laid among the trash and garbage bag tents. It was free air conditioning, even if it smelled like rancid fish and gasoline scrapped into a styrofoam cup. Cris used to tug his blankets onto the fire escape in June and camp out there, after the sun went down and the flaking metal cooled, but la playa? Nah.—He flashed Sam a grin as she gestured to him with the clove, the scent of it immediate again.
"Sand's not real comfortable," was all he said, sidestepping her warning the way he'd plucked his tie from her earlier and tossed it over his shoulder. He'd never slept on a beach, but he'd been young once, thinking it a romantic place to take a girl. Turned out sand ended up just getting everywhere and it chafed. Ninguna diversión.
Cris was briefly snared by nostalgia; Orchard Beach dimmed by an evening overcast, gritty, gray New York sand in long, black hair, between thighs and stuck to lips until they laughed and pushed themselves to their feet to see if someone had left a concession stand unlocked they could slip into (only to find none and have to hike back to the bus stop with her tanktop straps slipping and him— ¡ejem!— ...incómodo).—But Sam's voice, raw with sweet-smelling smoke and white girl Spanish, brought him back. The car lurched along the road and the sea spilled in through the open windows. The present came with sparkling light and the pressure of a foot.
The girl got a look at the cryptic response, bookended with her blushing lips stretched into a grin and the rake of her toes along his thigh—Cris wasn't sure if those were meant to inform him of or hint at the sorts of other things she'd learned or not. He shook his head, eyes back on the road, breaking away only once to flick again at the bottom of her foot.