Page 8 of Touchdown
The song of the surf. A sandpiper's high, sad cry.
His hair tickled my face as I pressed my mouth to his ear. “Can't see from here, but we need to go slow. Don't make a sound.”
He nodded. The hair tickled my face some more. It felt wrong to notice, but how could I not?
We inched forward a bit at a time. My dick kept merrily jabbing into his buttocks. I should stop doing that, but I couldn't risk releasing my grip on him.
If he ran ahead again...
If he made too much noise...
If he got hurt rushing in when I was the bigger guy who should have been the one taking point...
I refused to lose him again. That wasn't going to be allowed to happen.
As soil became sand, the trees thinned out. The beach was getting more visible.
And so were we.
There wasn't any help for it. Not if we intended to find out what was out there.
We hadn't abandoned our luxurious bed and hiked down a mountain to turn back now.
Noah's toga shifted under my grasp as I clutched him even tighter. We were blind for a moment in the blare of beachy sunlight. Blinking, we were forced to pause to let our eyes adjust.
And then the beauty of the place hit hard. It was too much beauty. Too untouched.
A beach like this anywhere near civilization would already be lined with condos. Only a bad location could explain so much nothing.
No signs. No lights. No marina. No wooden fishing pier or any pier. No boats on a far horizon.
No beer stands.
Just an achingly beautiful crescent-shaped beach that cupped a turquoise bay—a natural harbor so perfect it took your breath away. The sand was the pure white kind most beaches truck in every year.
The trouble was if you had no roads, you had no trucks. So the sugar sand was natural too.
Noah trembled against me and not from cold.
A sandpiper that no doubt considered itself all very picturesque ran along the shoreline. Its cry was as achingly lonely as anything I'd ever heard.
“Creepy as fuck.” I wasn't sure I needed to whisper into Noah's ear. There was nobody here. “If the developers can't find this place, who can?”
“That guy, I guess.” Noah lifted his gaze beyond a broken line of stones that acted like a natural breakwater.
Unbelievable. And the sense of unreality only grew stronger as the shirtless man in the straw hat paddled around a large rock to come fully into view.
What was that? Seriously?
“Is that a freaking dugout?” I asked.
Noah nodded against me. His toga shifted again. It was loosening on his body with every small gesture. I might have tugged at it too roughly too many times. I made a mental note to help him re-tie the knots before I accidentally pulled it off.
Not that it would be a tragedy if...
Incoming was a fast, graceful canoeist. Had I ever seen a dugout canoe anywhere outside the movies? They seemed like primitive relics of a long-lost era. Modern materials like fiberglass and Kevlar seemed like better, lighter choices for the modern man.
On the other hand, the price of a fallen log was right. They'd probably pay you to take it away.
