Free The Video Watcher by Shawn Curtis Stibbards

the strap of her turquoise bikini, and I closed my eyes again and tried to recall Maria’s face. I saw Cam’s face instead. I imagined him standing behind her. Her head fallen against his broad shoulder. His hand sliding down her front. Her breasts in his large hands. Her brown nipples between his fingers. Her mouth half open.
    I sat up quickly, and covered my crotch with my left arm.
    Â 
    Cam had left my jeans and T-shirt lying on my towel unattended. I checked to see if my wallet was still in my jeans, and scanned the beach for Cam. When I found him he was standing near the footpath, talking to two guys, and I picked up my things and headed to join them.
    One of the guys I suppose was good-looking, with a kind of James-Dean haircut, but he was very short. Cam introduced him as Stephan and said he was from Switzerland. The other guy, Lance, was tall and lanky and from some country I’d never heard of before.
    The conversation they were having was about how to pick up women, how to bang women, how to get rid of women after you bang them.
    Bored, I said that I was going to go take a piss.
    The washroom was cool, and I blinked a number of times as my eyes adjusted to the dimness. The urinal, an old-style one, was a raised step before a tiled wall with a trough at its base. The standing area was gritty with sand I imagined to be soaked with urine, so I stood on the sides of my feet—afraid that I would contract AIDS through some microscopic cuts on my soles.
    When I went to the sink to wash my hands, I noticed that the doors to the toilet stalls only went halfway up, and wondered if this was to prevent people from having sex or from doing drugs.
    You delve in there yourself. Try heterosexuality for a change.
    I washed my hands.
    When I came out, Cam had disappeared again, my clothes and towel lying on the grass beside where he and the two men had stood. Thinking perhaps he’d gone to the washroom or to the concession stand, I sat on the log beside the path to wait. A rollerblader passed me with his dog and then a woman with very long hair. The hair moved suddenly and I saw that she wasn’t wearing a top.
    It took another twenty minutes to figure it out, but Cam had left without me.
    Â 
    Maria looked slightly sunburned. She leaned forward and kissed my left cheek.
    â€œâ€™ola,” she said.
    â€œHola.”
    We were standing at the corner of Denman and Robson. Maria’s white jeans and T-shirt looked purple in the twilight.
    â€œLet’s go,” I said.
    Crowds swarmed past us. One of the drunken teens walking in front of Maria shouted, “She’s a skank.” He wasn’t talking about her, but I wondered if she understood the term.
    The light was fading. An uneasiness was in the air. Again I felt that feeling I’d felt that day on Robson Street, the feeling that people were watching us, that someone would come out of nowhere and punch me in the face.
    At the bottom of Denman, something was happening. I knew it was a fight from the loud boos and gasps, and saw over the shoulders and between the backs of heads, a blood-covered face; I pushed closer.
    But Maria tugged my sleeve. We untangled ourselves from the group and headed toward the beach. Whiffs of marijuana came on the breeze. The dusk sky was rippled with grey and scarlet, the water of English Bay luminous.
    I glanced back at Maria and breathed in deeply, making a face. She laughed.
    Â 
    As soon as the fireworks were over, people surged back toward the city. It was too crowded for me to think and I reached for Maria’s hand and made my way through them. I’d grabbed the hand so that she wouldn’t lose me, but wondered if she thought it meant something, and if it did mean something.
    Downtown, we headed north on Granville, jostling through beggars and street protestors, past lines of night-clubbers, street kids with their pet dogs and “Hungry” signs, past sidewalk merchants’