Out of the Blue

by Kathryn Nolan

  “I’m ready for tomorrow,” she said. “But I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’m always a little more afraid at The Wedge. They’re smaller than the bombs at Nazaré and Jaws, but they come in so fast, and the undertow is really strong.”

  I brushed my lips against her forehead, grateful for her honesty. Maybe never seeing her admit fear only over-activated my own, as if she wasn’t taking it seriously.

  That realization sat heavy in my mind because Serena and Marilyn had described me as reckless lately.

  “How about I tell you if I’m scared?” I said. “And you do the same thing?”

  Her smile was brilliant, even in the dark. “I’d like that.”

  I pulled her close to my chest, wrapping my arms around her as her breathing slowed and her body fully relaxed against mine. A bone-deep exhaustion tried to claim me, but I resisted it for as long as I could. I was with Serena, in our bed, falling asleep with our limbs entwined like we had every single night for two years.

  This second chance of ours couldn’t be coincidence. And we couldn’t mess it up this time.

  The hard, beautiful truth was the last thing I thought of before finally drifting off to sleep.

  We were each other’s destinies.

  How could I let her go again?

  32

  Serena

  It was an hour before dawn.

  The entire house was still and hushed in the dark purple twilight. I clicked on the salt lamp on the dresser, bathing the bedroom in a pink light. Then I perched on the bed and watched Cope sleep.

  He’d held me close all through the night, the sound of his heartbeat a steady metronome that lulled me into an undisturbed slumber. Between the mind-blowing sex, our conversation, and the plan we’d made for Aerial, I woke up clear-eyed and eager for today.

  I told the truth last night—I was afraid of the danger that faced us going toe-to-toe against a billion-dollar company. It was a fear paired with responsibility though, which made it easier to sit with. That type of fear, I was discovering, was its own kind of focus because it held the possibility of justice and a happy ending.

  My body was already buzzing with preparedness, toes curling against the carpet, my mind replaying my training videos from yesterday.

  I reached forward to brush the hair from Cope’s forehead. Sleeping next to him was like sleeping with a tender-hearted teddy bear who always won in a fight. He was all thick, strong thighs and ridged muscle and chest hair I loved to yank on.

  And he was so cheerfully casual about his skills I often forgot the way he could control his body, those tactical punches and kicks revealing the hand-to-hand combat expert hidden beneath his lopsided grin.

  “I can feel you doing that creepy staring thing again,” he whispered, lips quirked but eyes closed.

  “As if you never watched me when I slept,” I whispered back.

  He opened his eyes and rubbed them with a massive yawn. “Wow. Called out before the sun comes up, damn.” He blinked rapidly. “Wait, is that just a plate of bacon?”

  “And a cup of strong coffee.”

  He sat up like I’d informed him he’d won the lottery. “Did you get up early on the day of your competition to… make me a plate of bacon?”

  I smirked. “A small token of my gratitude for fucking me into oblivion last night.”

  Cope fisted a hand into my shirt and pulled me forward until our lips danced barely an inch apart. “Are you a dream?”

  “I’m all real.”

  He crashed his lips to mine in a very dirty kiss. I laughed against his mouth, threaded my fingers into his hair, and gave in to him. Two seconds later, and I’d dropped the plate onto the bed and let him scoop me against his chest and kiss me even harder. Both hands gripped my face, holding me still, as he ravaged my mouth the way he’d ravaged me last night. We parted, and I inhaled a shaky breath.

  “I just…” He pressed our foreheads together. “I fucking love bacon so much, Serena.”

  I burst out laughing and shoved at his chest. “I know. That’s why I cooked it for you, you dick.”

  He took the plate and winked at me. I turned on the surf report, volume low, then passed him a mug of coffee. We had half an hour to waste before the day officially began—a whirlwind of packing, waxing, stretching. And at the competition, he’d be my bodyguard, not my sleepy, sexy husband. So as he munched happily to the sounds of swell measurements, I climbed back onto the bed and settled myself between his spread legs.

  Turning my head, I caught his shocked and then emotional expression. He placed the plate down and laid his hands between my shoulder blades, a wisp of a caress.

  “Can you braid my hair?” I asked.

  “Are you sure?”

  I bit my lip. Nodded.

  The expression on his face was the same one he’d given me when I stepped out of the thrift store dressing room in the short white dress I’d been lucky to find. It was total astonishment. I turned back around, overwhelmed, but then smiled when I felt the gentle tug at my scalp, the mess of my curls being gathered back between his careful fingers.

  Cope was braiding my hair.

  I couldn’t remember how we’d started this tradition except that it seemed to always make him happy, doing this simple thing for me in the morning. And I struggled to admit that kind gestures like this filled a hole in my heart borne from my parents’ total disregard for their children’s well-being. Self-soothing was a behavior I became very good at it.

  I focused on the tug and release of my hair being woven into a braid. His fingers stroked against my scalp, pausing to scratch. This was intimacy cranked up to eleven. Combined with last night’s passion, we’d flung ourselves into the most treacherous territory.

  But despite my promises from last night, I didn’t do what I should have done. I didn’t say, ‘I’m still in love with you, Cope, but I’m terrified we’ll hurt each other again.’

  “Fair warning,” he said, “I haven’t done this in a while. I’m probably going to make your hair look terrible.”

  “A risk I’m willing to take,” I replied.

  He scraped another clump of curls back. “You know who I dreamed about last night?”

  “Who?”

  He kissed my cheek. “Frankie and Loretta.”

  I smiled, surprised. “The Elvis Presley sisters?”

  “Are there any others worth mentioning?”

  The Vegas wedding chapel we’d stumbled into across from the dive bar was called Blue Suede Shoes and promised the best Elvis experience on The Strip! It was small inside, walls painted white with famous Route 66-style neon signs hung everywhere. Route 66 Drive-In Theater. Blue Swallow Motel. Dell Rhea’s Chicken Basket.

  The actual chapel was covered in neon hearts and fake palm trees, and the woman who married us—Frankie—was an Elvis Presley impersonator. Her sister, Loretta, ran the business side of things. Although she stood next to us and bawled her eyes out during the ten-minute ceremony like she was a close family friend and not a literal stranger.

  “Loretta cried harder than any person I’ve honestly ever met,” he said. “You ever think about the couple getting married before us?”

  “Oh, you mean 5:30?”

  When we’d wandered in, Loretta had taken one look at us—giggling, hands clasped, smelling of tequila—and said, “We’ve got a 6:30 slot in an hour if you want it? Only caveat is we don’t do the licenses here, so our ceremony is known as a ‘staged’ wedding. We also call it a ‘not real’ wedding or ‘completely fake.’”

  That sent me into peals of laughter, but Cope was just sober enough to agree and sign the paperwork.

  “Yeah, those two,” he said. “That super unhappy and serious couple waiting in the lobby. I think about them all the time.”

  “They seemed mad at each other,” I said. “Loretta kept saying, ‘Chin up you two, it’s only for forever.’”

  He laughed against my hair. “Oh my god, I’ll never forget those sisters for as long as I live. Frankie
coming out, dressed as Elvis, strumming that out-of-tune guitar.”

  My shoulders started shaking. “Did you think you would ever see me get escorted down the aisle by a lady Elvis?”

  “And they say dreams don’t come true.”

  I dropped my head into my hands, unable to stop laughing. After a second, Cope tugged on my now-finished braid, tilting my head back. He kissed the top of my hair. “At least the thrift store was fun.”

  “We almost had sex in the dressing room.”

  “I was really excited to have our first dance to ‘All Shook Up.’”

  He looped his arm around my front and pulled me back against his chest. “It was the kind of fake, not real, staged wedding I always wanted.”

  “Even though everyone was mad at us for doing it spur of the moment and not inviting them?” I asked.

  That had been part of the appeal for us—the whole night and into the next morning was one illicit, sexy secret that only Cope and I shared. It felt wrong in a delicious way, something slightly taboo and scandalous.

  It was only when we arrived home and I suggested we make it official that we told our friends and family we were married.

  “My mother has still not forgiven me,” he said. “Billie wouldn’t talk to me for a week.”

  “Dora shrugged and said, ‘figures,’ and then handed me another weight,” I said, shaking my head. “Though part of me thinks if she’d been there, she would have cried harder than Loretta.”

  “It would be Niagara Falls,” he said. “Hands down. Or maybe tied with Caleb.”

  I chewed on my lip. “I did feel awful about that afterward. He should have been there. If we…”

  I stopped, embarrassed. ‘If we did it again’ was what I was about to say, but we couldn’t open that can of worms when I needed to be getting ready to surf in a few minutes.

  Cope, thank god, took pity on me. “Quentin said something like, ‘Aw, dammit to hell, Cope, I already wrote my best man speech.’”

  I smiled at his impression, but the tail end of this conversation was making me sad. “I guess, looking back on it, I wish everyone had been there. That we’d made a less impulsive choice, as memorable as that night was.”

  “I wish we’d done a lot of things differently.” His jaw clenched as he stared at me for such a long time I got flustered.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  He shifted us around until I faced him on the bed. His knee was propped up next to him, right elbow balanced on it.

  “I’ve never watched you surf before,” he said, uncharacteristically nervous. “I’ve watched your videos, hundreds of times. But I can’t in the moment. I haven’t in the moment. I stare at the sand the whole time and listen to the sounds the crowd makes to discern if you’re doing well or not.” His mouth tipped up. “Spoiler, you’re always doing well.”

  “You watch the sand?” I asked. There was no way I could have known—I was always too far out, and every time I walked out of the water he was always standing there with a grateful smile.

  “I don’t want to…” He cleared his throat, flushing a little. “I spend the whole time worried about you. Like I’m going to watch something horrible happen to you out there. On our third date, when I met you at your surf spot in La Jolla, I spent that morning trying to drag my eyes up from the beach to where you were.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s because I think about my dad. But not telling you always felt wrong to me. Like I wasn’t celebrating what made you who you are.”

  When I was younger, this type of admission from Cope would have elicited a frustrating blend of reactions—empathy, of course. And tenderness. But also a spiky defensiveness that reared its ugly head any time I felt he was trying to get me to quit surfing.

  I assessed him now—the sincerity in his voice, his earnest expression. This wasn’t the old Cope, and I wasn’t the old me either, much as we’d fallen back into those bad patterns in the very beginning.

  “I’m not upset about that at all,” I said, reaching for his hand. I laced our fingers together. “And you don’t have to feel badly about it either. When I’m riding a wave, my senses shrink down to only what’s most vital. Every drop of water, every sound, the smell of the air, the shifting of my feet on the board. I’m utterly unaware of anything else. I’ve never thought about what it would be like to watch me because I’m so focused on just doing it.” I held his gaze, dug a little deeper than I usually felt comfortable doing. “When you were gone, those two days, and we were stuck in your house watching the ticker tape and the news updating us, I really thought I was going to lose my mind. If that’s how watching me would make you feel, don’t do it.”

  He cupped my cheek, thumb stroking across my skin. “But maybe I can today? I want to this time.”

  “Well, now I just got nervous,” I said, smiling. I pressed a hand to my stomach. “What if I suck and you’re watching?”

  “I believe scientists have proven it’s mathematically impossible for you, Serena Swift, to suck.”

  He smiled with me, giving me a nod of appreciation.

  I slowly untangled us, much as I wanted to keep pulling back our layers.

  Cope glanced at the clock and cursed. “We need to get you going. And we’ll call Quentin on the way, okay? I also need to sneak out, run to my car without Falco seeing, then drive my car here and pretend like we haven’t been with each other for twelve hours.”

  “My acting will be flawless,” I promised.

  He was up and moving around now, tugging a white shirt over his chest and raking a hand through his messy, sexed-up hair. Before those walls of his went back up—before he was nothing but good humor and charm again—I needed to tell him something too.

  “Every time I go surfing, since the day we met, I think about your dad when I paddle out.”

  He paused in his motions. “You think about my dad?”

  “I never told you because, well, I was always worried I would make you upset. If I was only adding to your grief by bringing it up, making you remember,” I said. “I didn’t know if it was right.”

  His brow creased. “Can I ask, what do you think about?”

  I let out a long breath. “Your sister used to show me old videos of your dad. Old pictures. It gave me a good sense of his style, how he approached the water. He was so fun to watch, Cope. He was really joyful on his board. Like it was a super fun party he loved getting invited to.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “God, I haven’t thought about that in a while. Billie and I loved watching him, the way he moved, like he was dancing with the waves.”

  “He always looked delighted.”

  “He did,” he said softly. “He was delighted. I forget that a lot, actually.”

  I fiddled with my new braid, tugging it over one shoulder. “I picture him like that. Out there, surfing, having a good time while I’m paddling toward the next set. Or waiting during a break. I can see him really clearly, and it makes me feel safe.”

  I wasn’t sure what to expect of his reaction. And certainly didn’t expect the dazzling smile that blazed across his face. “My dad would have adored you. He’d be so stoked that you were surfing the gnarliest waves on the coast today too.”

  He said gnarliest waves in an exaggerated surfer-boy accent that made me laugh. This wasn’t the first time Cope told me that his dad and I would have gotten along.

  But this time felt different.

  “Then I better go do him proud then, yeah?”

  Cope walked over to me and cupped the back of my head, kissing my forehead. “Who’s going to win today, sunshine?”

  Everything that happened in the past day—joy, ecstasy, trepidation, purpose—expanded in my ribcage, filling my lungs with clean, precious air.

  “I am,” I said.

  33

  Cope

  Serena’s heat was up in fifteen minutes, and I was actively working not to have a stress-induced heart attack.

  I was going to watch her surf today, on waves so wild
and aggressive they’d attracted spectators for miles. Drones and camera crews were situated everywhere, lenses trained on the heavy slabs of water tossing surfers around like popcorn in a skillet. People were here to see wipeouts, and there’d already been plenty.

  The woman about to paddle out to surf those monsters on purpose stood a few feet in front of me in her black wet suit, hair still in the uneven braid I’d given her this morning. Next to her, in a straight line, stood Dora, Prue, and Kalei.

  Dora held Serena’s hand, and all three women were speaking to her in low tones, pointing things out on the water as she scanned the horizon with focus. Meanwhile, I kept scanning the beach for the Lattimore brothers, who’d sworn they would be here for a giant, splashy press conference.

  They weren’t. And neither were their podiums or huge banners. I recognized two members of the marketing team, who had greeted Serena politely when she arrived. But other than that, Aerial was conspicuously absent. I peered through crowds of vendors and tourists but still didn’t spot them.

  Tiny alarm bells went off in my head.

  This was made worse by the parking lot this morning. I had absolutely clocked the same black SUV and license plate that had been following us. I couldn’t discern the features of the men in the front seat, but they were of the beefy-and-scary variety.

  I’d sent a quick message to Quentin since he hadn’t answered his phone when we tried him on the drive over. That alone had me feeling on edge.

  My phone finally buzzed with a message from him: Sorry, can’t talk right now. Tail is bad news. No word yet from Joey about Catalina. Stay safe, will call later.

  I slid my hands into my pockets in a pointless attempt at settling my nerves. It didn’t work. I was all jacked up on anxiety and paranoia.

  A loudspeaker creaked on. “Calling next heat, Serena Swift. Five-minute warning.”

  She held out her arms and let Dora tug on her lifejacket. She pulled on her helmet, and Prue checked it for her. Serena’s eyes slid to mine, and I didn’t miss the intention. She was trying to show me her safety protocols and the community that took care of her.