I rolled onto my side, away from Tasha, and turned off the lamp. I imagined Steph in bed behind me, her mouth on my neck. Steph wore a sports bra, as far as I could tell. I’d never really touched her breasts.

“We’re going to the beach tomorrow?” Tasha said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Hope it’ll be warm enough. I want to swim.”

“Tasha, I’m sleepy. Sorry, can we talk tomorrow?”

She sighed. “Yeah, yeah. I’m gonna read on my phone. Good night, dork.”

I smiled. “Good night.”

But now I couldn’t fall asleep. I was remembering Steph’s hand cupping my breast through my T-shirt in the darkness of the truck cab. The memory of it alone made a charge go through my body.

—

Joan suggested we go to Bolinas Beach, although she warned us it wouldn’t be that warm. “I doubt you’ll want to swim,” she said. She showed me the route on Google Maps. “Drive carefully. The road is pretty winding.”

Tasha was a little subdued, and I wasn’t sure if it was due to jet lag or something else. She put on her swimsuit under shorts and a T-shirt even though it was still only in the mid-sixties and cloudy. We stopped at Lagunitas Grocery & Deli to buy lunch, and while Tasha was ordering her sandwich, I checked my phone to make sure I hadn’t missed any texts from Steph. Nothing. I fought the urge to text her anyway.

In the car, Tasha played DJ, skipping from “Call Me Maybe” to “We Are Young” and “Come and Get It.” The pop songs felt fake to me, as if we were pretending to be happier than we were. When Rihanna came on, I asked Tasha to forward to the next track, and she didn’t ask why.

Bolinas was a small, hippie beach town that I’d visited before with Dad, but I barely remembered it beyond a vague memory of surfers in wetsuits outside a café. The access to the beach was down a residential street lined with cedar-shingled houses. I parked a couple of blocks from the water, and when we got out, we could see it as a shivering gray light at the end of the street.

The beach was mostly empty, although one family was making a day of it with a bunch of beach chairs and a big red cooler. Tasha and I walked about five minutes down the sand and spread out our blanket. I began to open the lunch bags. “We should take a picture and send it to Haley,” I suggested.

“Maybe,” Tasha said.

“But we always do that.” I sat down cross-legged and unwrapped my ham-and-cheese sandwich.