For a man who made his living seducing women, Fork wasn’t particularly good in bed. Susan and her friends, Lindy and Mai-Lin — women she’d known for a decade, known since high school, and who met up together somewhere foreign for a week of fruity drinks and catching up every year — had started calling him Fork the first afternoon at the beachside bar when, after a few hours of flirty chatting turned into heavy petting with Susan, he’d pulled back from her and said, abruptly and loudly, “And now we fork?” He’d meant “fuck,” of course. Back home, which was Victoria for Susan, Toronto for Lindy, and Guelph for Mai-Lin, this would have been the moment the glistening cobwebs of alcohol stretched and broke. With the jet lag and the sun, which had worked its way through the women’s dutiful layers of SPF, Fork’s thick accent and directness seemed somehow charming, however. Susan had promptly paid the bar bill — at Fork’s direction — and left Lindy and Mai-Lin behind, her friends paired off with two of Fork’s buddies, men who spoke no English whatsoever and who, despite plenty of encouragement from the women, seemed firmly camped in the pre- stage of pre-coital interaction when Susan left.

Fork didn’t ask Susan for money directly, but he made it clear to her that night that he’d be pleased to spend the week at her service if she’d take care of the minor inconvenience of paying for meals and drinks, perhaps a little shopping. At breakfast the next morning, Mai-Lin chose a table without an umbrella so the women could sit in the full sunshine and see the men and boys who were already out on the waves. “At least he was subtle about it,” Mai-Lin said.

Susan picked up her water and took a sip. “What is it with these countries that don’t believe in ice cubes?” She put the glass down and then stretched her arms out above her head. “And subtle? Really?”

“I think she meant about the being a gigolo thing,” Lindy said. “I mean, comparatively speaking.” She’d already told Mai-Lin and Susan how, when Fork’s friend finished getting dressed, before he left Lindy’s room, he’d gone over to the dresser, picked up her purse, and casually liberated a few bills: “Not too much, nothing that seemed dreadfully unfair or anything, and probably less than I would have given him if he had asked —”

“He’d have to speak English to ask,” Susan said.

“— but the nakedness of it, the sheer presumption, was kind of stunning,” Lindy continued.

The waiter came over with a full smirk and their breakfasts, making no attempt to hide the way he looked down Lindy’s top as he leaned over her shoulder to deliver her plate. Lindy, who took lovers in the same way that she took streetcars, ignored the waiter. All three of them were attractive and confident, but Lindy in particular was particularly both, and finding men who were interested in having sex had never been a problem for any of them. It hadn’t been a problem in high school, when they all had serious boyfriends, or at university, when it was a little more swift and vicious, or afterwards, when they went their separate ways and it was something different for each of them. The past few vacations, with her new marriage, turned an ex-marriage as of four months ago, Mai-Lin had sat things out on the sidelines with Susan, and it had been Lindy alone coming to breakfast late, telling them of how this man had made growling sounds like a tiger, or how that man had started to cry after he finished.

“Well,” Mai-Lin said, “at least you got your money’s worth, Lindy.”

Lindy took a bite from the pastry. It was filled with some sort of fruit that was so red it was almost purple, and it smeared obscenely on her lips and then, when she wiped her lips, across the white cloth of her napkin. “I never get my money’s worth, sweetie.”

Susan laughed and then blushed and turned to look out over the water. She watched a man walking on the beach with a small girl by his side. The girl couldn’t have been more than three or four, and she lagged a step behind the man, her hand pulled tight by his. “He’s coming by later this morning. Fork.”

“Perhaps he’ll bring his knife and spoon with him,” Lindy said.

“God. That’s what I miss the most, you know, about Trent,” Mai-Lin said. “Spooning. Just cuddling with him. I mean, last night was fun” — she’d already told Lindy and Susan how she’d only figured out what her man, who kept repeating “dive,” over and over again, that one word apparently the limit of his English, had meant, when he had disappeared under the covers almost as soon as they got in bed — “but he rolled over with his back to me and was snoring almost the second he was finished.”

“Just don’t fall in love with him,” Lindy said. That was one of her five rules for engaging in promiscuous behavior while on vacation. She broke the rules whenever she felt like it.