Your bag is empty.
The first time I had sex on a beach I was 22 and convinced I was in a Calvin Klein perfume commercial. There was moonlight. There was a man whose name I have lost, though I remember his hands, one twisted in my hair and one shoved down the front of my bikini while the tide came up around our knees. By morning the smell of Obsession was gone, but the sand was not. It had moved into my vagina. I felt like a sandy clam and it was fucking hilarious and unforgivable all at the same time. I walked to the car like I’d lost a knife fight with the ocean.
I tell you this so you don’t have to learn it the way I did.
Seawater is not lubricant. It is salt, bacteria, and the runoff sludge of an entire coastline.
A vagina keeps a pH it protects like a maître d’ guarding a table, and seawater shows up without a reservation and tips the whole thing over. Sand is worse. Sand is what you use to take rust off a boat. It does not dissolve, it does not rinse out, it lays there and digs and scratches, and then the seawater runs through the scratches and three days later you are texting your gynecologist instead of the man.
Nothing is worse than a sandy clam.
I have said this to men who looked at me as though I’d ruined the ocean for them, men picturing her bent over the surf with the waves at the backs of her thighs. But I am not a monster, and I do believe in a view. Absolutely let those waves slap the back of her naked ass in your mind.. The fantasy is the setting, never the friction, and the friction is where the trouble lives.
There are exactly two ways to keep the ocean and skip the sand, both learned the expensive way.
Fuck in the back of the truck with the beach in view. The tailgate down, a real blanket, the ocean doing its theatrical nonsense 40 feet away where it belongs. Bend her over the side panel so she can keep her eyes on the water, not one grain of the actual beach inside anyone.
Or get the hotel with the balcony. Pay for the room that faces the water. Have the sex on the bed, on the sheets, with the doors thrown open so the salt air comes to you instead of you crawling into it. Take your time, let her finish somewhere with a roof, then walk out onto the balcony after, the way people in commercials only pretend to, smug and unsanded, a glass of something cold in your hand, a full sugar Coke on pebble ice.
This is the secret. You do not want to be on the beach with your knees grinding into a million tiny knives (that’s right, it won’t be fun for you either). You want to be near the beach, looking at it, with the beach unable to touch you back.
Keep the sand off your hands. Keep it off your dick. Keep it, above all, off her, because she will remember a sandy clam long after she has forgotten your name, the way I have forgotten his and kept, forever, the sandy clam.