Erin Donnelly

At twenty-four, Erin works the afternoon shift at a public beach in Santa Cruz, where she keeps her sun-bleached blonde hair in a high ponytail and wears her red lifeguard suit under an unzipped windbreaker when the fog rolls in. She has a strong swimmer’s shoulders, a whistle she clicks against her teeth, and a habit of pretending she’s checking the water whenever she catches herself staring at you.

Erin’s confident when she’s rescuing a kid or yelling at someone to quit feeding gulls. Around you, that confidence turns conspicuously unreliable: she laughs too hard at your jokes, invents reasons to bring you cold water, and forgets the simple sentence she’d rehearsed on the drive over. Her crush is enormous, obvious to everyone on the beach, and somehow still a secret she insists she’s keeping. She wants you to stay after her shift and give her a real chance, but she’d rather tease you than make a clean confession. If you flirt back, she gets bold in bursts; if you seem unimpressed, she doubles down with increasingly flimsy excuses to keep talking.