Page 7 of Surfer Girl

She fixed him with a quiet glare and played her trump card. “Did you know that Beach Break corporate has a separate division in HR for gender bias?”

Brett’s face blushed a beet red. “Come again?”

“And that this branch handles complaints of gender discrimination?” she pressed.

“How…why would you know that, Jess?”

“Because it’s become painfully clear to me that the management team here, all-male, by the way, is a real sausage fest and after numerous years of repeated requests to join said staff, with no reason to do so otherwise, I, the lone female on the team, have been denied not just quarter after quarter, but year after year. I haven’t had to talk to corporate about anything other than health insurance since I’ve started here, but if we keep doing this little dance each performance review? I just might, Brett. I just might…”

“Where is all this coming from, Jess?” Brett wasn’t necessarily compassionate, though his fake manager’s voice sounded that way. “This outburst is very unlike you.”

“I’d hardly call pointing out the gender disparity at our particular branch an outburst, Brett. And if you do? I think that says more about you than it does me at this point.” Jessie struggled to hold her tongue. She’d already said a mouthful, she didn’t want to get fired the same day she offered to get Sophie a job.

Brett stood his ground, weathering her diatribe in his usual stoic fashion. When she was done, red-faced and flushed, he simply nodded. “I never realized you took management so seriously, Jess. Maybe if your actual performance matched your passion for, uh…gender bias, was it? You might have been promoted sooner.”

She gave him a stiff, threatening smile. “I’ll match my performance against any of my male peers, Brett. And I’m sure corporate would agree.”

“You’ve already contacted them?” His voice cracked.

She sensed the simmering panic underneath Brett’s cool, calm, calculated surface. He was a company man, after all, and there was nothing a company man hated more than trouble from above. “Of course not, Brett.” She offered him a slithering, sly smile. “My performance is outmatched only by my loyalty to this branch. However, if this pattern continues, they’re only a 1-800 number away, right?”

She met his eyes one last time, fixing him with a defiant gaze until he finally blinked and murmured something bland but unintelligible. As if the moment had been scripted that way, he sulked away, glancing at something on his cell phone as he pressed solemnly through the swinging kitchen door facing the host stand.

She nodded, self-satisfied, and turned back to her work, grateful Brett couldn’t see her hands trembling as she sorted through the next pile of shirts.

She certainly hadn’t meant to clap back at her manager, nor so passionately, but something about her run-in with Sophie after the beach, so sultry and warm and soothing and kind and generous and loving, made Jessie realize that she was, finally, passionate about something other than her work.

If that passion happened to be directed at someone other than a man, that was her business and her business alone. And it certainly shouldn’t hold her back at her workplace, where her performance, objectively speaking, was never less than stellar.

Still, Brett was right about one thing: her defiant act of subtle insubordination wasn’t like her. At all. Perhaps it was the half-can of iced espresso making her react off the cuff like that. Or, more likely, her impatience to rush back to Sophie’s beach house where she could bask in her presence yet again.

Or, maybe, it was just simply time to wake up and smell the coffee beans. If she wasn’t appreciated at Beach Break, where she’d worked since her senior year in high school nearly five years earlier, there were plenty of other tourist traps up and down Siesta Beach that would snatch her up in a heartbeat.

Chapter Five

SOPHIE

“You sure you’ve never surfed before?”

Sophie rolled her eyes, admiring Jessie’s second bikini of the day. This one was powder blue, with orange and red racing stripes across the waistband and her stiff, pointy nipples. She grinned to herself, thinking of her earlier run-in with Colton at Foam and how he’d said nobody bought matching bikinis anymore.

She wondered if Jessie had simply never gotten the memo, or if her ex was just full of shit. Either way, what Sophie wouldn’t give to have Colton shuffle along the shoreline at that very moment, watching her stand in the shadow of the towering, sexy shimmering ginger, so close she could smell the exact brand of sunscreen Jessie wore. (Sun ’N Fun it was called, if she wasn’t mistaken.)

“I think I’d remember something like surfing,” Sophie teased as they stood on the shore, bare feet dusted with soft white sand.

It was midafternoon, the sun warm on her skin as she tried not to sweat the fact that she was wearing a bikini for the first time all season. What’s more, she’d been so flustered running into Colton and the way he bum-rushed her into picking out the two bikinis he thought would look best on her, she hadn’t even tried them on in the store. She’d had a mild panic attack once she finally got home after racing around town picking up sundries and groceries, beer, wine, soda, and as many cans of Joltz as her beat-up old pickup truck could carry.

Trying on the first bikini, she knew right away it was going to be snug. So snug she didn’t even bother slipping it all the way on. The second one was a bit more forgiving, but even so, as she stood wincing at herself in the guest room mirror, pale tan lines whispering around the edges of her new swimsuit, she wished she’d chosen a one-piece the way she’d wanted to.

With time running out before Jessie was supposed to come back for their lesson together, thus kicked off a great search for a backup bikini, with Sophie rifling through every nook and cranny, drawer and closet to find a suitable replacement for Colton’s teeny-weenie bikini choices. (Secretly, she’d felt Colton was sabotaging her, knowing the bikinis were no longer for his eyes only.)

Sophie always left a few suits in the guestroom drawers of the cottage every summer, but the ones she managed to find that morning were all faded, misshapen, or out of fashion, strictly for lying out in one of the twin Adirondack chairs on the back deck, anonymous and carefree. Now, she struggled to contain her insecurities in front of her sexy surf instructor, worried she’d burst open the sexy striped bikini top the first time she had to breathe heavily.

To make matters worse, Jessie seemed to be studying the new bikini from top to bottom and back again, admiring the orange bottom first before moving up to the green and yellow stripes of the top before giving Sophie an odd, disconcerting look.

Sophie caught her once too often and quickly blurted, “It’s too small, I know, I just…”

“Who told you that?” Jessie challenged her playfully before Sophie could embarrass herself any further.

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