His boss asked him to rub sunscreen on her back. That's it. That's how it started. A single dad trying to keep his head down at a company beach day. Just doing what any decent person would do, making sure someone didn't burn.
30 seconds. Efficient. Unremarkable. Done. Then she turned her head, looked right at him, and smiled.
That's not what I meant. He thought she was correcting his technique. He had no idea she'd been watching him for six months, and he had absolutely no idea what she was about to ask him to do next. The invitation had said, "Team Beach Day," which was HR speak for your VP, has rented a private stretch of Malibu, and attendance is encouraged, but let's be real, it's mandatory. Marcus Webb showed up anyway because that's what you did when you needed the job.
And Marcus needed this job the way a man drowning needs something solid to grab onto. He had a seven-year-old at home, a sister who watched her three afternoons a week for $60 cash, and a mortgage that didn't care about his feelings. He parked the truck at the end of the lot, found a spot near the coolers where nobody important was sitting yet, and started pulling out the department's folding chairs. That was the thing about being the only admin coordinator in the coastal properties division. You showed up first.
You set up chairs. You made sure the coolers were stocked. That was just the job. You don't have to do that. He turned around.
Diane Callaway was walking toward him in a white coverup that billowed around her in the salt wind. She was his boss. His boss's boss technically since the VP slot she occupied was two levels above his grade. She had the kind of poise that old money grew in people the way trees grew bark. It just happened over years without anyone noticing the process.
Marcus straightened. Morning Miss Callaway. Diane, she said the way she'd been saying it for the 6 months he'd worked for her. Not aggressively, just steady, like a correction she was willing to repeat indefinitely. And I mean it.
The catering company handles the setup. You're off the clock, old habit, he said. She looked at him a second longer than strictly necessary, then nodded and moved toward the main canopy where the rest of the team was starting to arrive. Marcus watched her go, then went back to the coolers anyway because old habits were the only ones he could afford to keep. The team filled in over the next 40 minutes.
Priya from acquisitions, who always brought the good guac, Todd from legal, who wore a rash guard to every beach event because of a sunburn story he told at least four times. And Gail, Marcus' direct supervisor, who managed to look simultaneously glad it was Friday and suspicious that someone was having more fun than she was. Marcus had positioned himself at the edge of things the way he usually did at company events. Close enough to be helpful, far enough to avoid the kind of small talk that required you to discuss your ex-wife, your custody arrangement, or why someone who used to manage a resort development team in Phoenix was now coordinating calendars for a coastal real estate group in Los Angeles. He had his reasons.
He kept them to himself. Web Gail materialized beside him with a plate of fruit and a look that suggested the fruit was for her, not for him. Diane wants someone to set up the volleyball net on the north end. The catering guys don't know where it goes. Sure, he said.
He spent the next 20 minutes on the net, then helped drag a kayak down to the water line for Todd, then fixed the canopy corner that kept catching wind. By the time he sat down in the chair he'd set aside for himself, it was past 11 and the sun had gone mean. That was when he noticed her. Diane was on her towel about 30 ft away, lying on her stomach. The cover up was gone.
She'd been reading something on her phone, but now the phone was face down in the sand, and she was just lying there. And even from 30 ft, Marcus could see the problem. She had sunscreen. The white bottle was right there beside her, next to a small orange clip she'd used to put her hair up. The issue was the angle.
You couldn't reach your own upper back, not cleanly. Not the part between the shoulder blades that would burn first. Nobody else was paying attention. Pria was in the water. Todd was organizing a competitive game of botche that nobody had asked for.
Gail had found a chair under the canopy and was on her phone. Marcus sat with this information for a moment. Then he got up because he had a 7-year-old who wore SPF 50 everyday, and the idea of someone burning while a solution stood 20 ft away was something he couldn't unknow. He picked up his own sunscreen from his bag, walked over. "Hey," he said.
"You're going to burn between your shoulders." "Diane turned her head. She looked up at him from behind sunglasses with the very particular expression of someone who was deciding whether to be irritated." "I noticed," she said. "You want?" He held up his bottle, which was more of a question than a sentence, a beat. Then she said, "Go ahead." And turned her head back forward. He crouched beside the towel and applied the sunscreen the way he'd learned to do it.
Efficient, systematic, no lingering, the way you had to be when you were both the parent and the one who forgot the sunscreen and you had a sandy, impatient kid waiting. He worked across her shoulders and down to the middle of her back and then stopped because that was where the suit started. That should cover it, he said. She didn't answer right away. Then she turned her head to look at him again.
And there was something different in her expression. Not quite a smile. Somewhere in the neighborhood of one. That's not where I meant, she said. Marcus went very still.
I meant the shoulders, she said. And her voice was completely level. You covered the middle first. He looked at his hands. She was right.
He'd started at the middle and worked outward. Muscle memory from doing his daughter's back. She always complained if he started at the top because the drips were cold. Old habit," he said. This time, Diane Callaway did smile.
It was small, and she turned her face away before it finished forming. But Marcus saw it. He stood up, went back to his chair, sat down, and stared at the ocean for a while. He did not think about her smile. He thought about it extensively.
Now, pay attention to this part because everything that came after that morning started in that particular 30 seconds. Not in the sunscreen, not in the smile, and the fact that she'd been watching him work for six months, and he hadn't known it, and she had. Diane Callaway called in all hands on Tuesday. The coastal properties division was being restructured. Three positions were being consolidated, two roles were being elevated, and there was a new project, a resort acquisition on the central coast that would run 18 months and required a dedicated on-site coordination league.