Summer Loving Read Online Free PDF

I didn’t sleep very well last night. Kept having weird dreams. Perhaps it was the Champagne.’
    ‘Hm. I’m surprised Tybalt isn’t here yet. Maybe he overslept.’
    ‘Yes. That might be it.’
    Maybe Estelle’s boobs exploded. Sorry – that was unkind. Funny, but unkind.
    Franklin sips at his coffee and looks rather miffed that his buddy hasn’t turned up for breakfast. He stares out of the window.
    ‘What’s going on over there?’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘Down on the beach. About half a mile away. Looks like a big yellow flower or something. Lots of people.’
    I can tell what it is immediately. There’s a surfing lesson in progress. There are about eight or nine yellow surfboards placed in a circle around a wet suited individual who’s undoubtedly the instructor. The learners sit next to their boards with their legs crossed.
    He or she will be giving them a pep talk about the dangers and risks of surfing before they all go in the water and spend an hour or so falling off and hitting themselves in the head with their own boards. They’ll practice jumping up onto the board on the sand first, and then get used to attempting the same thing in the shallows, usually with hilarious consequences.
    Still, the water’s very warm here, so I’m sure they’ll all have a fun time. Most of the hotels here run little surf schools since it became more of a tourist sport in the early nineties. Next to golf, it’s one of the most popular activities, which is really weird. It used to be such a cool thing and now look.
    Here, there are great, regular waves, warm water and there are even competitions, sponsored by the big surfboard manufacturers. I can make out the instructor more clearly now. It’s a girl. Blonde, curvy – I’ll bet anything she’s Scandinavian.
    Franklin peers down at the beach and snorts. ‘Some kids thing, probably.’
    ‘It’s a surfing lesson. Those yellow things are surfboards. It’s hard to see from here.’
    ‘Bloody stupid waste of time.’
    Unlike golf, of course.
    I know a lot about surfing, but I never learnt. When I met Kirstan, I couldn’t even swim, which he thought was both hilarious and baffling. It was just one of those skills that seemed to pass me by when I was in school. Later, in university, a girlfriend, Julie, wanted me to go on holiday with her to France.              
    Julie planned to spend most of the time on the beach, sunning herself or splashing around in the sea. When she found out I couldn’t swim, she was astounded, and made me go and have lessons at a local pool. I got it by the second lesson. I couldn’t believe it. It was so damned easy and I felt really foolish for not getting it sorted out sooner.
    ‘Well,’ says Franklin, pouring himself another coffee, ‘What are you going to do today?’
    ‘I don’t know. I may wait for my breakfast to go down and then have a swim.’
    ‘Good idea. I’ll sit by the pool and watch you. Will you be wearing that black get up?’
    ‘The bikini? Yes, if you want me to.’
    ‘I do.’
    I’ll always be grateful to Lucille for not going down to the beach for breakfast on that third day. She pretended to have a hangover and said she’d get something in one of the surfer cafés later on that morning. One thing that I knew about Lucille was that she could drink like a fish and never, ever get a hangover.
    Of course, her deception may have been a waste of time if Kirstan hadn’t turned up. I found out later that that stretch of beach had been having a really good (if dangerous) couple of days surf, and had attracted a lot of the risk takers among the surfing fraternity. The incredible thing was that it stopped on the fourth day. As flat as Frankenstein’s forehead, as I heard one of the pissed-off surfers say. Talk about luck. I could have been sitting there with a bag of coffee icing doughnuts with no one to give them to.
    Kirstan helped run a surf shop with another guy. The other guy (I did know his name at one