“Just smell it.” Tad put the berry under Jamal’s nose and winked at me. “You know how they say the way to man’s heart is through his belly?”
“That’s no belly,” I pointed out.
“You know it,” Jamal said. “I don’t spend all that time in the gym for nothing.”
Jamal was wearing denim shorts that looked like they’d been sewn right on to him, and a sinfully tight white tank top. Like many black men, he didn’t have much body hair to obscure the view. The white cotton made his skin gleam. His chest was a map of every workout he’d ever done. He was long and lean to Tad’s short, rotund muscularity. Ah, so what? I bet my arms were bigger than his. I bet I could take him. I felt the warm pulse come and go in my clit and smiled. That was the thing with me and some guys: this balled-up heat, this combination of competitiveness and good, hard wanting. A lot would satisfy it. Wrestling, maybe. Or … no. Shut it, girl. I didn’t know if I could flip these boys. Even if I could make them, just for a little while, hard for someone with girl bits, would it be someone like me? Every fag I knew was fascinated with breasts, and I was a little deficient in that department.
Jamal got a good whiff of the blackberry, and his face changed. He practically sucked it out of Tad’s fingers. Tad laughed.
Two lanky white guys in surfer shorts and skateboarding T-shirts scrambled around us on the narrow verge, trying not to stare at the tableau of three black folks together in the same space. Not a sight you saw a lot in Vancouver. They headed on towards the entrance to Wreck Beach, the smell of weed tailing them.
I slurped down the rest of the berries. “C’mon,” I said. “Let’s go.” We continued along the roadside.
Jamal and Tad were up visiting me from Seattle. Tad and I had been buddies when I lived there. We’d known each other since school days. Sometime near the end of high school, Tad had come out to me, like I hadn’t guessed! With his example to follow, I’d come out to myself — a good obedient black girl from a fine Christian family, engaged to a minister in training — and fled into the arms of outcast women like myself with no plan of ever looking back. Tad and I had stayed fast friends, but we’d stopped the outrageous flirting with each other that we used to do. No need, right? Now that we’d each shown our true colours and didn’t need the other as a shield any more. Except, when Tad contacted me a few weeks ago, we’d fallen right back into the sexual innuendo, the teasing. It felt familiar. Tad was my home. I’d invited him and Jamal to visit me and Sula, and I was thrilled when they accepted. The guys had landed at Vancouver airport a scant two hours ago. I’d whisked them off immediately to show them Wreck Beach.
We were at Trail Number Six, the path that led to the beach. “Nearly there,” I told them. I took the first few steps down. Tad and Jamal followed me, then stopped to look around. We were in a forest, dark, damp and cool. Lean old maples stretched forever to reach the sky. The footpath angled sharply down in steps hewn out of the earth and shored up with planks. A deep ravine dipped down beside the footpath. It was overgrown with saplings, tangled blackberries and undergrowth. Here and there, a few giant rotted tree trunks jutted up out of it, looking like a giants’ caber toss.
“This leads to a beach?” said Jamal.
“Yup,” I replied. “It’s about twenty minutes straight down; ten if you’re fit.”
“Lawd ’a mercy,” muttered Tad. “The child still has a taste for hard labour.”
I smirked at him. “Ready to hike?” I said to them.
Shot through with bars of precious sunlight from above, a yellowed maple leaf drifted slowly down into the ravine. The leaf was the size of a turkey platter.
Jamal looked at me, a gleam in his eye. “Ten minutes?”
“For me, anyway,” I said. The gauntlet had been laid down. Would he pick it up?
“Betcha I can do it in seven.”
“You’re on!” I burst past him. He yelled and ran to catch up. I knew this path well; could do it in the dark. I had, one night, with my girlfriend Sula. And when we’d made it to the beach; well, mosquitoes bit me that night in places no mosquito had any right being.
I grabbed a sapling for purchase, slid around that little dogleg you get to about a third of the way down. I shouted for the joy of it.
“Please be careful, both of you!” yelled Tad.
I stopped, looked up at Tad a few yards above me. He was skating and slipping on the pebbles. He skidded to one knee, grimaced as he skinned it. He’d stopped about an inch from the edge. Jamal looked down. It was a steep drop over the side.
“He’s right,” I said. “I’ll race you, but let’s not do anything stupid, OK?”
Jamal measured me with his eyes. I let him look. My sawn-off jeans showed the bulges in my thighs, and my arms strained at the sleeves of my T-shirt. I was a fair match for him and we both knew it.
“All right,” he replied. “Nothing stupid. We take it easy. But I bet you I’ll be the one to make it down there without breaking a sweat.”
“In your dreams.” I turned and kept climbing down, Jamal neck and neck beside me.
“Tad, you OK up there?” called Jamal.
“You bitches better slow down!” he shouted back.
“Yeah?” I said to him. “You gonna come down here and make us?”
Tad chuckled. “I bet you’d like that.”
I could hear him puffing, his feet landing heavily on the steep stairs, but Tad didn’t ruffle easily. Like when he’d come and pulled me out of my parents’ house, where my dad had me under house arrest for the crime of being a bulldagger. Dad had reached for the baseball bat he kept behind the couch, but Tad had just grabbed it away from him and calmly told me to pack a bag, he’d wait for me. Been too long since Tad and I hung out.
“I can smell the sea,” Jamal said.
“Yeah,” I told him. “I love this part. The forest belongs to the land, but as you come further and further down, the sea starts to peek through. You smell it first, then you begin to see it. A few more steps, and … ah. There she is.”
We were at the landing, just a few yards above the beach. The sand stretched out on either side, with the water just beyond it, its gentle waves licking at the beach. The sea smelled like sex. Off in the distance, the Coast Mountains marched away from us, range upon range, disappearing into the mist.
Jamal stood tall, but he was breathing hard, and I could see the beads of sweat on his face. I bet they tasted like the sea. “Little winded, there, Jamal?” I teased him.
He sucked his teeth. “Don’t give me that, girl child. Look at you.”
He was right. I was puffing a bit myself, and my T-shirt was soaked. I pulled it over my head. I never wore a bra. Jamal literally jumped. I calmly tucked the end of the T-shirt into my belt. “What?” I asked him. “I told you it was a nude beach.” You weren’t supposed to get naked until you were actually on the beach, but I was feeling the devil rising in me. Wanted to see how Jamal and Tad would deal.
Tad had caught up with us. He burst out laughing when he saw me. “Susanna Paulette Avery, you’re still flat as an ironing board!”
“Don’t talk shit, Tad. This a thirty-eight inch chest. I work out hard to get this chest.”
“Chest, yes. But where are the titties, girl?”
“On your momma.”
Now Jamal was laughing too. He looked relieved. Probably cause he didn’t have to look at bouncing boobies on me. Even with my shirt off, lots of people still mistake me for a man. Nipples a little thicker than on most guys, is all.
I pointed to the Johnny-on-the-spot off to one side on the landing. “You guys want to use the facilities before we go down?”
“Nah,” said Jamal. “We can piss in the bushes if we have to … oh. Excuse me, Susanna. Unless you want to?” He gestured towards the toilet. Damn. Show a little bit of girl parts, and he goes all gentleman on me.
“No.” I moved past him and headed for the stairs. “And shut it with the ‘Susanna’ crap. Everybody calls me Shuck.”