The Rushes

About the Book

We’d sail by the White Island hotel. Its bony pier reached like a long, wooden finger, anchored to the sandy floor of the Gulf with crooked green pilings. Tourist girls from Miami would tantalize two loners from Wisconsin and Philadelphia, by lifting bikini tops, as the wind carried us on a conveyer of aquamarine.

I met a new server at The Riverside. Millie Cuantreau. From Arkansas; a buxom girl with red lips and dark brown eyes, she moved as if she meant it. She was a fire barely in control. She was nineteen years old. Millie made love like she was forty. She touched me in places I never knew were my favorite. On my twenty-fourth birthday, she bought me a bottle of Moet Chandon champagne.

We broke into a screened lanai containing a heated swimming pool attached to a large home on a canal. We drank from the bottle, naked, under the moonlight, our legs dangled in warm water. We laughed at nothing and everything. Millie made me take large reckless bites out of my days. We did crazy things together, fast delicious things.

From tiny White Island in southwest Florida, to the streets of New York City, discover what you are capable of when you decide to take a chance. Moreover, when all seems lost, feel what it’s like to lose even more.

About the Author

Graham Hayward lives in northern New Jersey. The Rushes is his first novel.