The Sea Ain't Mine Alone

by Beaumont, C. L.

  He hears Sydney’s laugh continuing behind him, spreading warmth through every inch of his chest.

  “Quit whining, you old grump, we’ll be ready on time. Didn’t they train you to take fifteen second showers in the Navy?” Sydney calls through the door.

  James can’t fight the grin on his face as he frantically flips the shower on and fusses at his hair in the mirror. “They also taught me how to effectively drown someone in the Navy, so watch it with the sass, you dickhead,” he calls back.

  James hears a muffled, “Aye, aye, Captain” through the door before he steps under the warm spray, letting it wash the smell of sex from his skin. He takes a deep breath of the humid air to fill his lungs, trying to steady his racing heart.

  It feels real, now. Standing in the shower trying to look presentable in eight minutes so he doesn’t look like he just fucked another man when a stranger will knock on their door for the very first time.

  He thinks to himself for the hundredth time over the past few weeks that if someone had walked up to him a year and a half ago when he’d just finished a morning surf with Rob, or just ended his shift at the dockyard, and told him that today he was going to somehow bind himself forever to another man in front of a living, breathing witness, he probably would have passed out or vomited or punched whoever told him, or all three.

  Fear coils thick and sudden in his chest, a little voice in his ear begging him to hide behind the door like a child when Chris comes. Apologize to Sydney later when he finally crawls out of his cave and say, “Come on, man, we’ve already said we love each other, so there’s no real reason to actually have some sort of ceremony for it, is there? Is there?”

  Then, through the sound of the pounding spray and the ragged breathing from his chest, James hears Sydney whistling as he gets ready in the next room—some tune James has heard on the radio but can’t quite place. He hears Sydney’s brave, brilliant voice again in his mind, crystal clear and sharp as if Sydney were standing right behind him in the shower.

  “Yes. With me.”

  The fear dissolves, rushing from his body like the foam fades back from the shore with the rise and fall of the passing tide. He blinks back the water forming in his eyes and ducks his head to be battered by the spray, flinching when it hits him as if he’s flayed open and raw.

  In a sudden rush, James shuts off the water with a shaking hand and wraps a towel around his waist, then immediately peeks his head out of the bathroom door, steam billowing out around him into the living room while he drips wet puddles onto the floor.

  Sydney’s standing by the window already in his clothes with his hair tamed and styled, calmly looking out at the shore with his arms crossed over his chest. He turns to look over his shoulder when he realizes James isn’t moving from the doorway and frowns slightly, confused.

  James’ heart races.

  “I love you, you know,” James says, his lips numb.

  Sydney smiles, free and open, and traces his eyes gently up James’ dripping wet skin. The moment pulses between them, and James has a sudden flashback to those mornings they’d spent on the beaches in Los Angeles together before everything had been laid open and made known. Mornings when the air would spark with electricity and buzz in the space between their bodies, tantalizing and hinting at more—fierce and dangerous and vulnerable like an open flame.

  A harsh knock sounds at the door, breaking the thick, warm silence. Before he turns to answer it, Sydney shoots James one last look that banishes the last icy fingers of anxiety still clutching tightly at his heart.

  “I know,” he whispers softly, eyes crinkling. And then he gestures his head for James to go on and finish getting ready while he goes to answer the door, hand perfectly steady on the doorknob.

  ~

  “Shit, do you think we should have worn ties?”

  James runs a hand over the back of his neck, feeling odd and itchy in his skin. Sydney snorts under his breath and shoots him a sidelong look, and James can tell that he’s irritatingly trying to suppress a fond grin.

  “For what?” Sydney whispers back, gesturing with his head to the empty beach. “To impress the adoring congregation?”

  James huffs and shoves his arm against Sydney’s shoulder. “You know what I fucking mean.”

  Sydney gasps quietly, eyebrows comically raised up his forehead. “James Campbell, cursing in a church? Wash out your mouth.”

  “Oh for God’s sake—”

  “And using the Lord’s name in vain!”

  “Jesus spare me.”

  “I’m sure he’s got better shit to do then come and look after your sorry ass.”

  “Sure doesn’t seem that way when he swoops down and saves me every couple years.”

  “I’m sure he makes mistakes.”

  “Do you ever fucking stop?”

  “Do I need to make you put a dollar in a jar for every time you curse on our wedding day?”

  “God, you, sir, are fucking something el—”

  “You two all set?”

  James startles and looks up at Chris watching the two of them with an amused smirk, then coughs to clear his throat while something like embarrassment fizzles in his skin. He can practically hear the laughter he knows Sydney is hiding back in his chest standing next to him.

  “Yeah, sorry,” he forces out.

  Chris holds up a patient hand, then gestures with a nod towards the rocky cliff far behind him, silhouetted by the slowly purpling sky. “Let’s go then,” he says.

  James takes a deep breath and starts walking beside Sydney, both of them trailing behind Chris as they walk along their stretch of beach just like they’ve done hundreds of times. Only this time, James feels each grain of sand against his bare feet as he takes step after step, tickling against his toes and gently pushing him forward across the shore towards the place where he’ll take Sydney’s hand in his and be expected to say words that will actually somehow mean something. Words that could somehow convey even half of what he feels as he listens to Sydney’s steps gently swish beside him in the sand, echoing back and forth with his own. Because that’s all they have, isn’t it? Just words?

  No. More than words. So much more . . . and yet . . .

  James thinks as they walk in mutual silence that Chris is absolutely nothing like the man he’d been picturing when Sydney first said he’d sniffed around and learned who he was. His name, and the fact that he was willing to perform a ceremony like this, meant James had been picturing some young New Age dude from San Francisco or New York, freshly arrived in Hawaii with a string of fake puka shells around his neck, chanting something about Krishna like the parades of people he’d seen the last couple years in orange robes along the downtown LA streets.

  He definitely hadn’t been expecting the elderly Hawaiian man walking carefully in front of them now across the sand, with a simple garland of leaves about his neck and a plain canvas bag slung lazily over his shoulder, grey hair glinting in the thick sunlight.

  James had done an embarrassing double take that morning when he’d walked into the living room dressed and ready where Sydney was already talking casually with Chris. It was a shock to see someone else in their home for the very first time, and even more of a shock when that person was the complete opposite from what James had been expecting.

  He’d paused, irrationally waiting for Chris to look him up and down, look back at Sydney, and then give a face of shock or disgust—a mirror image of Lahela’s face that day she told James he didn’t look at all like ‘the others’. Because now Chris knew.

  But when Chris didn’t look at him oddly, or say any of these things, James had been the one to stare as he stood like an idiot in the corner of the house with his mouth half open. Until Chris had said, laughing, “Ah, so you’re one of the ones who was expecting me to be some young guru from the mainland. A common mistake, I assure you.” And Sydney had snorted down into his mug of coffee before gazing at James with twinkling eyes and gesturing silently for him to come sit b
y his side, as if they had coffee every morning with a stranger who knew that they kissed in the safety of the dark. And James had just noticed how tightly Sydney’s hands were holding his own mug, as if he needed James to be by his side for them to finally relax.

  So James had joined them, neck beet red with embarrassment, and then grown even more surprised when Chris hadn’t immediately taken them outside, joined hands, said the magic words, and been done with it all and gone by ten-thirty. Instead he’d leaned back comfortably in their rickety wooden kitchen chair and drank his coffee so slowly James had to get up to use the bathroom twice before Chris was done getting through his first cup.

  He’d asked James about his life—where he grew up and what he did and where he’d surfed. And when James had glossed over a few years of his life with a low, “I was away,” Chris had taken one long look at him in the silence, then stuck out his hand and shook James’, hard and firm over the rough kitchen table, giving him a nod that James knew in his tight chest somehow meant, “Thank you.”

  Then Chris had turned to Sydney, still sitting loose and comfortable at the table without even a tapping finger or fidgeting leg in sight, despite Chris’ endless list of questions, and despite the fact that James had noticed Sydney was seeming to turn and scan out the window every ten minutes. Chris had smirked a bit and said, “So, the infamous Danny Moore. I hear you’re designing a new style of board in that shop of yours?”

  And James had watched, chest fluttering and warm, as Sydney had come absolutely alive—eyes bright and hands flying and lips talking through physics and waves and materials faster than even James could fully keep up with, and he’d heard it all a hundred times before. Chris had sat there and nodded and asked questions like he actually knew what the hell Sydney was talking about, all while Sydney’s knee pressed warm and steady against James’ own under the table.

  Finally, Chris had leaned back in his seat, set down his empty mug, and taken a deep sigh, smiling at them both. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to take a few minutes for myself,” he’d said. “I’ll come back when I’m ready for you two and we can go?”

  James’ heart had started racing, and Sydney had nodded when neither of them said a thing.

  “Do you have a specific place in mind?” Chris had asked, pushing up from the table.

  Sydney had shot James a quick glance, placing his hand hesitantly on James’ knee. James covered it with his own, even as his mouth went dry.

  They hadn’t discussed this before. The question hadn’t even crossed his mind. But then Sydney had squeezed his leg gently and looked up at Chris standing in the doorway, head steady and high. “There’s a small cliff just at the end of the beach,” he’d said. “I think we’ll do it there.”

  And just as Chris was about to disappear outside, James had blurted out the question he knew he had to ask before he could stand up on that cliff and let this man somehow bind him to Sydney forever.

  “Why do you do this?” he’d asked suddenly.

  Chris had paused, looking thoughtful. Then he’d looked across the shore towards the waves for a minute, patient in the buzzing silence. “I practice the old religion,” he’d finally said, words slow and carefully formed on his thin, chapped lips. “The old beliefs of my people.”

  James had felt Sydney go rapt with attention beside him, eyes clear and focused and fixed on Chris’ silhouette in the doorway. Chris had taken a breath and gone on, his voice somber. “Then one day we were no longer free, and those beliefs became outlawed for hundreds of years.” His voice had grown haunted, shaking slightly as his body grew still. “People were thrown in prison. Or killed. It is a very long story. I am giving you the book jacket version.”

  Sydney and James had both quietly hummed.

  Then Chris had slowly turned back towards James sitting frozen next to Sydney, meeting his gaze with unbearably soft eyes. “So it seems we have a small something in common, no?” And with a final nod, he’d disappeared through the doorway, ambling down towards the shore. Leaving James and Sydney to sit in a house that now felt oppressively silent without Chris’ voice to fill it.

  Now, twenty minutes later, James follows along in Chris’ footsteps in the sand, Sydney’s presence next to him flowing out to cover every inch of his skin. James smells him in the air, feels the ghosts of his warm touch still hovering on his face and hands, tastes the words from his lips on the thin ocean breeze, mixed with a frothing layer of salt.

  James is walking to a wedding, his wedding, which would be the most absolutely absurd phrase he’d ever heard in his life if it wasn’t undeniably true. It’s unbelievable, and it’s nerve-wracking, and it’s beautiful, and it’s final. And it’s also sad, as James looks around them at the empty beach, the oblivious rush of the waves across the sand, and the distant birds in the sky.

  And James can’t turn back now, couldn’t turn back even if he knocked his head and wanted to, but he also wants to wake up next to Sydney just one more time before everything changes. Except, nothing is changing. Except, everything is changing. And Chris is walking so fast, flying across the sand, even as his footsteps amble so slowly he doesn’t even kick up any warm grains.

  Sydney still keeps glancing over his shoulder back to the house, eyes keenly darting across the trees, and James is finally about to ask him if he’s afraid someone is going to walk by and see them when Sydney halts, puts a hand on James’ arm, and abruptly stops them in the sand, an odd look on his face. James looks down at Sydney’s hand on his arm and frowns as Sydney calls quickly up to Chris ahead of them. “You mind if we take a quick moment?”

  Chris nods and turns to keep walking away, leaving James and Sydney alone on the beach that James suddenly feels has never looked so open or so vast. Sydney takes both of James’ hands earnestly in his own—the new rough spots and scars across his fingers from his time in the back of the shop. The scars James has cleaned, and patched up, and kissed.

  Sydney’s voice is surprisingly soft and low, blending in seamlessly with the steady thrush of the waves at their backs. “Are you alright?”

  James’ heart unexpectedly melts, churning in his chest, and without thinking, he leans forward with a sigh and falls into Sydney’s arms, burying his face against Sydney’s neck and feeling Sydney’s hands come up to hold him steady around his back.

  They stand there in silence, heartbeats synchronizing to the same even beat of the waves. James feels Sydney press his lips into his hair, styled for once, and warmed by the sun. Listens to Sydney breathe in the scent of him as Sydney’s arms run slowly up and down his back, holding him close.

  “Thank you,” James whispers into his skin.

  Sydney kisses his hair again and hums. “For what?”

  James pulls back and takes in the breathless sight of Sydney Moore glowing in the light of the glittering afternoon sun. The crisp white of his button-down shirt is nearly blinding, and James can just barely make out the faint colors of the tattoo spilling across his shoulder, which peek through the fabric made transparent by the radiant sun. The shirt hugs the lean lines of his chest and stomach, tucked into khakis that cling to his hips and drape across his thighs.

  James takes him in, eyes roving slowly from his bare feet in the sand up to his eyes like the sea, and he swallows as emotion chokes the back of his throat for the innumerable time that day. James smooths down the front of Sydney’s shirt with his hands, fixing up his open collar before gliding his hands down his chest, stopping to rest just over Sydney’s heart. He prides himself that he didn’t just look over his shoulder to check if Chris could see, and Sydney smiles down at him, his eyes sparkling and wet.

  James takes a deep breath through his nose, willing the irritating nerves still crackling through his body to disappear with his exhale, pushed out and away across the sea. “For doing this,” he finally answers. “Just, slowing things down for a second.”

  Sydney nods silently, understanding. James has a strong feeling Sydney didn’t just stop for him. He sta
res at the dip in the hollow of Sydney’s throat, fanned by the crisp white lines of the new shirt James had given him for his birthday—because James had come to realize over the past year that Sydney owned approximately two shirts that weren’t tattered almost to bits, one of which James had seen him in that day Sydney appeared out of nowhere on the docks, and so James had made it his mission to supplement Sydney’s wardrobe over every possible holiday in the future, bit by bit.

  “You look handsome,” James says, the word gliding across his tongue.

  Sydney blushes across his cheeks, then blinks hard and smirks. “Aren’t I supposed to look beautiful? I’m the bride in white, after all.”

  James huffs a laugh and groans, slapping Sydney on the arm. “You’re so full of shit,” he whispers so Chris can’t hear, chuckling.

  Sydney grins and runs his hands slowly up James’ chest in return, smoothing down the dark navy shirt Sydney had thrust at him the night before saying, “If you don’t wear this, I’ll pose an objection at the altar.” Sydney’s thumbs run gently over his collarbones, then he traces the fingertips of one hand around the scar hiding under James’ shirt, finally covering it with his palm in a gesture James has come to realize stands for a thousand unspeakable words.

  “You sure you’re alright?” Sydney asks, even as he himself glances back at the trees over James’ shoulder. “You seem . . . there’s something on your mind.”

  James almost laughs. Only someone like Sydney could pull off asking if James is alright when meanwhile he’s the one who keeps making sure they can’t be seen down the lane, or across the beach. But then, James would also be an idiot if he thought Sydney couldn’t tell that he isn’t exactly prancing carefree up to the cliff, either.

  James looks once more towards the sea from where he’s sheltered from the salt breeze by Sydney’s chest, watching the sunlight dance and dapple across the surface of the water, then he covers Sydney’s hand on his chest with his own. He waits until Sydney’s pulse seems to flow straight through the veins under his own skin. “It’s just sort of sad, isn’t it?” he finally says. “I mean, this is the celebration you wanted—we wanted. But we’re doing this alone.”