Instantly, Rae was full and soaring. Of course! Now she understood—this was what Ryan wanted all along; he was just too shy to ask Rae, and only Rae, to accompany him.

She feigned a few seconds of indecision before agreeing, then she stood and brushed sand from her elbows. Her binoculars were strung over the back of her chair, and she picked them up and put them around her neck. She was hopeful that Ryan might ask to borrow the binoculars when they got close to their destination, that he would lift them to his face and his warm, tanned eye sockets would press against the black eyepieces. It would be something she could offer him, something they could share.

“Let’s go,” Ryan said.

“Which way?” Kimmy asked, and once Ryan had pointed, she darted down the beach to pop into the water for a cool-down before the walk.

This left Ryan and Rae to walk side by side at a leisurely pace. Their hands were so close that with the slightest extension of the fingertips or shift of a wrist, they could have been touching. Watching Kimmy peripherally and smiling knowingly to each other, they seemed like a couple and Kimmy a sidekick, the third wheel, their annoying but necessary companion.

Rae’s heart belted out a symphony as they walked together this way, dizzy with lust and possibility. A little engine of desire inside her revved and screamed, Yes! She imagined that a little engine inside of Ryan was feeling and screaming the same thing.

Kimmy was the first to spot the glut of beached moon jellyfish, since she was in front of Ryan and Rae.

She waved her hands over her head and called, “They’re like see-through donuts! Can I touch them?”

Ryan did not ask to borrow the binoculars, but broke pace with Rae to jog out ahead and reach the enormous expanse of jellyfish, which were suddenly everywhere, such thick coverage in places that they overlapped one another. The sight was impressive and also mildly unsettling—a reminder that the world was actually quite strange if you bothered to notice, like glancing up to see a full moon in broad daylight.

“Yeah, you can touch them,” Ryan called to Kimmy. “These ones don’t sting.”

Rae jogged the short distance to catch up to Ryan and Kimmy, though she was disgusted by the sudden carpet of jellyfish at her feet, a massive, squishy slew of them.

Kimmy held a jellyfish near her face, sniffing it.

Ryan observed that a couple dozen yards up the beach, the abundance of jellyfish ended as abruptly as it had appeared. Must have been a huge bloom of them traveling together, he thought.

Rae poked at one with a toe, hoping she did not appear uninterested in Ryan’s great passion. She could learn to tolerate this stuff, she supposed.

Ryan said, “There are thirteen different species of moon jellies. Some scientists say they’re the oldest multiorgan species on the entire earth. Meaning, like, seven hundred million years.”