Chapter 4: Lime and Tequila Betrayal
The walk from the dock to the taco stand was a parade of new agonies. Sand. I hadn’t considered sand. It got everywhere. It was a fine, grating powder between my toes, caught in the strap of my flip-flops, working its way up the cleft of my ass with every step. The slight, constant abrasion was maddening. My body, this body, felt porous, invaded.
The neon sign buzzed and sputtered, washing everyone in a sickly green light. The air was thick with frying oil, chili, and the sour tang of spilled beer. We claimed a sticky booth, the vinyl sighing under our weight. My thighs, slick with sunscreen, adhered to the seat instantly, making a soft tearing sound when I shifted.
“Tequila shots first. Medicinal,” declared Maria, already waving at the server. “For the sea legs.”
I didn’t have sea legs. I had Sabrina-legs, which felt disconnected from the hazy, tequila-warm center of me. The shot glass was tiny and cold in my hand. The liquid went down like a brushfire, carving a path to my stomach and then radiating outwards, a false, glowing courage. The edges of the world softened. The sensation of the sand, the cling of the bikini, the weight on my chest—all of it dialed down from a scream to a persistent, throbbing hum.
Andrea was next to me, her arm pressed along mine from shoulder to elbow. The contact was a line of live voltage. She was reading the menu aloud, her finger tracing the laminated plastic.
“Okay, for you,” she said, turning to me. Her eyes were bright in the neon. “You’re getting the camarones diabla. Spicy. You need to sweat out whatever weirdness you brought ashore.”
The food came on cracked plastic plates. My tacos were messy, glistening with red sauce and piled with fat shrimp. I fumbled with the too-large lime wedge, my fingers clumsy.
“Here, you spaz,” Andrea laughed, and took it from me.
She squeezed the lime over my taco with a practiced twist. A drop, bright and acidic, landed not on the food, but on the swell of my collarbone, just above the neon green bikini top. The shock of it was electric—cold and pinpoint sharp on the sun-warmed skin.
“Oops,” she said, not sounding sorry at all.
Before I could move, she reached out. Her thumb, damp and cool from her own drink, swiped the juice from my skin. The motion was slow, deliberate. It started at the base of my throat and swept outwards, following the curve of my clavicle. My breath hitched, trapped somewhere high in my borrowed chest.
Her thumb didn’t stop there. It came up, grazing the line of my jaw, and brushed purposefully across my bottom lip. Her touch was sticky with lime and salt. It was intimate. Proprietary. A gesture she might have made a thousand times with her friend Sabrina. It felt like a brand.
Every nerve ending in that lip ignited. The tequila in my system magnified the signal, sent it echoing through me, a shockwave that pooled low and hot in my belly. I froze, my mouth slightly open. The noise of the stand—the clatter, the laughter, the blaring music—fell away into a roaring silence. There was only the abrasive grit of the vinyl, the sweet-decay smell of overripe fruit, and the lingering, phantom pressure of her thumb.
“Got it,” she said softly, her eyes holding mine for a beat too long before she popped her thumb in her own mouth, sucking off the juice. She winked.
My face burned. The body betrayed me again, a flush spreading from my chest up my neck. I was a live wire of conflicting impulses: to lean into the touch, to vomit, to confess everything in a sobbing heap on the sticky floor.
“Holy shit, Sabrina, don’t look now.” Chloe kicked my shin under the table.
I flinched, the spell broken. “What?”
“Guy. At the bar. Blond hair, gray tank top. He has not stopped staring at you since we sat down.”
A cold dread seeped through the tequila warmth. I didn’t want to look. I focused on my taco, taking a huge, messy bite. The sauce was volcanic. It burned my tongue, made my eyes water. Real tears. A welcome distraction.
“Oh, I see him,” Maria sang. “He’s cute. Kinda surfy. Definitely your type.”
“I don’t have a type,” I mumbled through the food, the words muffled. My type was Andrea. My type was the woman who had just touched me like that and was now sipping her margarita, watching the exchange with an amused smile.
“Bullshit,” Jess said. “Your type is ‘breathing and under forty.’ Go talk to him.”
“I’m eating.”
“So take him a taco. A peace offering.” Andrea nudged me with her elbow. Her expression was fond, encouraging. It was the look she used to give me when I’d hesitate to talk to a potential client at a work function. “Come on, live a little. It’s a vacation.”
The encouragement was a knife twist. She was pushing me, Sabrina, toward another man. She was completely, blissfully unaware that the person inside this body was her husband, screaming. The disconnect was so vast it induced a kind of mental vertigo.
“Just go say hi,” Chloe insisted. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
The worst? The worst was a catastrophic unraveling. The worst was him seeing the thirty-five-year-old man panicking behind my eyes. The worst was Andrea witnessing her best friend have a complete psychotic break at a beach taco stand.
But the pressure was a physical thing. Four pairs of eyes on me. Andrea’s expectant, smiling face. The tequila hummed, blurring the sharp edges of my terror into a dull, actionable buzz. To refuse would be more suspicious. Sabrina would go. Sabrina would flirt.
“Fine,” I heard myself say, the word alien. “But if he’s a dud, I’m blaming all of you for my ruined night.”
I slid out of the booth. The sensation of peeling my thighs from the vinyl was distinctly, hideously visceral. I felt exposed, launched into the open. The walk to the bar was maybe fifteen feet. It felt like crossing a desert.
Every step was a negotiation. The swing of my hips was unavoidable, a pendulum of flesh and bone. The weight on my chest shifted, swayed. The narrow strip of the bikini bottom dug deeper. I was a collection of moving parts, all of them foreign, all of them on display. I could feel the blond man’s gaze like a physical touch, a warm spot between my shoulder blades.
I stopped at the bar, not next to him, but one stool over. I ordered a water, my voice too high. I could see him in my peripheral vision. He was turned toward me, an easy smile on his face.
“Hey,” he said. His voice was deeper than I expected.
I turned my head. Looked at him. He was objectively attractive, tanned, with sun-bleached stubble. His eyes traveled down my neck, over my shoulder, a quick, appreciative scan. A look I’d given women a thousand times. Seeing it from this side was like being stripped bare.
“Hi,” I said. The word dried up in my throat.
He gestured to my full-body blush, which hadn’t subsided. “Sunburn or spice?”
“Both,” I managed, clutching my water glass. The condensation wet my palm.
“The diabla tacos’ll do that.” He took a sip of his beer. “You here with friends?”
I nodded, glancing back at the booth. Andrea gave me a thumbs-up. My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic bird in a cage of someone else’s making.
“Yeah,” I said. “Just a girls’ trip.”
“Nice.” He leaned an elbow on the bar, closing the distance between us by a fraction. “You from around here?”
This was it. The inane, terrifying script of human connection. I had to speak it in a voice that wasn’t mine, through a face I couldn’t control. His eyes were blue, focused, waiting for my answer. Behind him, the ocean was a black void swallowing the last of the dusk, and all I could think was that I was drowning on dry land, smiling at a stranger while my wife looked on, pleased.