Love's Little Instruction Book by Mary Gorman Read Free Book Online Page B

need to find out where I’m supposed to put it.”
    Presley looked around, setting her beach ball earrings bobbing gaily. “It looks like there’s some sort of pavilion over there,” she said, pointing. “Come on, I’m supposed to be dropping off the boom box. I’ll walk with you.” She called back to Denise and Todd, “Hey guys, I’m going to go help Dave find the barbeque. I’ll be back in a minute, okay?”
    Denise was kneeling on Todd’s blanket, pulling things out of her beach bag. She looked up at Presley and smiled. “No problem.”
    Presley wrapped her red-polished fingers around Dave’s bicep and began to steer him toward a shingle-roofed building a few dozen yards up the beach, her free hand holding the boom box by the handle. “I wanted to talk to you,” she began, talking in a sotto voice. “I am so pissed at Manny and Pat for that video! Care to join me in a heaping helping of payback?”
    He looked at her speculatively. “What did you have in mind?”
    “I’m not sure yet, but whatever it is, I need you to be in on it with me.”
    “Why me?” he asked suspiciously.
    “You have an innocent face. Me, they’d suspect, but you … ”
    “I don’t know, Presley … ”
    “They have their cameras here again this year.” He winced, just a little. “You don’t want to be the feature again on next year’s video, do you? They’ll probably put in more pictures of you eating with a caption like, ‘Wide mouth shark spotted at Oceanside.’”
    “But why do you care?” he asked. “I thought you kind of liked attention.”
    “Attention, yes. Stalking, no. Do you realize that Manny’s already filmed me on the bus, hugging Todd, and has his camera pointed at us this very minute?”
    Startled, Dave looked around. Sure enough, he spotted the station engineer standing in the surf, his camera trained invasively on them as they made their way across the sand. He supposed that Presley had a point. He had only been filmed while he was eating, but they had clearly followed Presley throughout the day to get their footage, even to the point of following her into the ladies’ room. She was right, he decided. She did have a right to enjoy her day in peace. “Okay, I see your point about not wanting to be filmed, but revenge? Isn’t that going a bit far?”
    “No. I want payback. It’s the only way that they’ll get the message that it has to stop.”
    “Couldn’t you go to Paul Lund, or if he’s no help, go over his head to Howard Kartstein?” he asked.
    “Oh yeah,” she retorted. “And why don’t I tell the teacher while I’m at it? Come on, Dave. We don’t need to drag management into this, we just need to handle it ourselves. Those two have managed to annoy someone from every department with their stupid video.”
    “Except engineering,” he pointed out.
    She blinked. He was right. “Except engineering,” she agreed. “They look out for their own. So what do you say?”
    He was saved from having to answer by their arrival at the pavilion. Presley let go of his arm to drop off the boom box, then followed him as he found out where he was supposed to leave the cooler.
    Presley grabbed a diet soda from an ice-packed tub of drinks and said, “Let’s bring something back for Denise and Todd. She drinks iced tea and he’ll probably want a bottled water.”
    “Not a beer or Coke?”
    “No, he’s really into health and fitness. He’d probably just want water.”
    They started back across the sand toward the place where Denise and O’Connor now sat in rapt conversation, apparently making up for lost time in their pen pal-like relationship. Even from this distance, Dave could make out that they were both smiling at each other, and he began to think that maybe coming to the beach had been a waste of time after all.
    “Will you sit with us?” Presley asked, oblivious to the turmoil that was going on inside of him.
    “What?” Dave asked, blinking at her.
    “Sit with us,” she