Summer Encounter

by

George Francis

For the past week now Gil had been spending almost all his daylight hours on Manly Beach the ocean beach, that is relieving the oppressive January

heat until the new school year began.

He rolled over on to his front again, and raising himself on his elbows, pretended to be looking at the clock on the bathing shed to the left. Yes, HE was still there. The whole group was still there seven young men and women having a good time. Who were they? University students, probably; but maybe just friends on a vacation.

"Jeez, you're beautiful," Gil sighed to himself, adjusting his sun-glasses with his thumb and forefinger.

HE stood up, removed his sun-glasses for better vision, narrowed his eyes, and gazed out to sea. Gil was close enough to see the yellow grains of sand falling through the platinum hairs that stood out so clearly and thickly against the nut-brown skin of his chest, a burnished, salt-flecked skin that undulated like the surf-waves themselves with the movement of the powerful muscles underneath.

Gil had seen him gaze at the Pacific in just this way when he had first arrived exactly seven days ago. Saturday it was. Gil had arrived in town only the night before, and was determined to get as much sun as he could before he began work again. He'd come early, to get a good place before the crowds arrived, and stretched out on the still-cool sand at the end of The Corso with his back to the morning sun. And within half an hour HE had arrived. Gil had looked up, cupping his chin in his hands, to survey the new ferry-load streaming onto the beach in front of him.

"My god! Look what just turned up!" he'd thought to himself, and never took his eyes off the new arrival, as he stared over the ocean, while his friends moved down the beach and started scattering their belongings on the largest clear space they could find a clearing with Gil at the edge of it.

"Hey, Mike!" called one of the girls, as she knelt on the sand. "Come on! The sand feels beaut! This place'll do, won't it?"

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