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- 08/28/2021
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Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
Coquina Hotel - 10. Chapter 10
I would watch from the garden behind the hotel as Jon, and the boys cleared the beach of rubble and driftwood. They started to layout the area for the cabanas. I wondered about a pool.
Over the next few weeks, I watched as the beach to the right of the cave began to take shape. They built a boardwalk from the cave to the area where the cabanas were being erected. Then I saw several of the boys digging out the sand in front of the cabanas. When I asked Jon, he said they were building a saltwater pool.
“Jon, where did you get the idea of building the cabanas and saltwater pool?”
“In one of your magazines, there was an advertisement for a resort. They had a picture of chairs and cabanas around a pool. We could do that here as an added attraction.”
Smiling, I kissed him. I watched as the pool became a reality. But Jon wasn’t finished, he had his chairs and beach umbrellas, but he also had a fountain in the form of a fish blowing water into the air in the middle of his pool. His pool had a unique feature. When the tide came in, it filled the pool to a predetermine high watermark, and when the tide when out, the pool drained back to its original height. I thought that was quite clever. What surprised me was the number of local people who came to see his beach resort. I did have a sign stating, Jon’s Beach, posted at the entrance to the road leading to the beach.
I’m finding that Jon is more than just a good-looking man. He’s got a brain and is committed to the Coquina Hotel enterprise and me. Now with his beach resort, we had to hire more help, a bartender and pool boys. I was becoming a significant employer in the area, and fortunately, I was hiring a lot of young people who were not University material. Working young people don’t have time to loiter or get in trouble. No matter where I went in Town with Jon, we would be surrounded by teens. If he saw a young person who looked hungry or needed new clothes, he would feed them and then hire them to work on his beach.
From my roost in the back of the hotel, He had boys crabbing, washing and cleaning client boats, raking the sand at his resort. I noticed that the boys worked 4-hour shifts. This meant that for the 12 hours the resort operates, he had three boys employed per 12-hour cycle. No boy worked more than five days in a week.
Our lives became routine. I was busy with the hotel and motel. Jon was busy with the beach and supporting me. Life was good, I was happy, Jon was happy, and our employees were happy. What could go wrong?
Six months later, that question was answered. Jon received a letter from his brother telling him that his mother was ill and would like to see him. There was only one solution, Jon had to go home. There is an old saying that bad news comes in threes. It wasn’t long after Jon left that I got a note from Andy that Joseph was seriously ill and in the hospital. The prognosis was not good doctors are saying he only has a few weeks left. Joseph’s recklessness has caught up with him. I phoned Andy to find out about Joseph’s status. Unfortunately, within the time his letter reached me, Joseph had died. I felt that death. Joseph wasn’t a bad person, and he had only one thing going for him, his looks. He lived off his looks and sex. I felt his death as if he was a part of my family. I arranged for Andy to handle the funeral and send the bill to me. Joseph was a young man. It didn’t matter what he did or didn’t do. Joseph was Joseph, and who knew the devils he had to live with. He was at rest now, free of whatever drove him to do what he did.
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Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
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