by A. Nybo
Table of Contents
Blurb
Author’s Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Epilogue
About the Author
By A. Nybo
Visit Dreamspinner Press
Copyright
Three Bears
By A. Nybo
At Three Bears surf break, the attraction between a group of friends is anything but “Luke warm….”
Dan goes to stay with his best friend Josh in Margaret River, the surfing capital of Western Australia, to sort out his sexual confusion. But his best friend is the source of that confusion. Having never been attracted to a man other than Josh, Dan fears risking their friendship just to discover men aren’t his thing.
Within the first few days, Dan meets Luke, a local barista who offers him surf lessons. Dan soon finds himself emotionally coveting not one, but two men. When they go to Three Bears, his hidden desires begin to emerge. As the ambiguity of Dan’s mixed signals clears, it becomes apparent both of his surfing companions want him—badly.
It is only when Luke and Josh hook up that they formulate “Operation Three Bears,” an adventurous plan that might lead to a satisfying outcome for all of them.
World of Love: Stories of romance that span every corner of the globe.
Author’s Note
ALTHOUGH MARGARET River and the surf spots are real, this is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Chapter 1
DAN
THE HORN honked, and I tripped up the curb trying to get off the road. My face burned as the people on the sidewalk turned to look at the idiot who’d nearly got himself run over. Despite being here for almost a week, the four-thousand-kilometer drive from Sydney to Western Australia, and then another 270 kilometers down to Margaret River, had taken a lot out of me.
Although everyone on the sidewalk had probably already forgotten the twit that had run out into traffic, I ducked into the first café as much to be out from under judgmental gazes as to fulfill my need for a coffee.
I joined the short line at the counter and was wondering how long it would take my brain to get with the program when I heard one of the staff ask someone in the queue what they wanted. Trying to decide what I wanted, I read the chalkboard menu off to one side.
“Can I help you?” I had just made my decision when the barista said again, “Can I help you, dude?”
I looked around to see who the rude bastard was that was ignoring the guy to find the bright green eyes of the barista looking directly at me. “Oh God, I’m sorry. I didn’t know I was the rude bastard!” Where the hell had the people in front of me gone?
He drew his head back. “What?”
Realizing I was now including him in a conversation that was previously only occurring in my head, I sighed. “Sorry. Can I have a flat white?”
“Sure, no problem.”
He glanced at me several times while he organized the grind. Averting my gaze, I moved behind the food warmer and examined the quiches on offer, but my thoughts quickly drifted to Josh, my longtime friend, person of my desire, cause of my sexual confusion, and my host for the next three months.
“Just down from Perth?”
“Yeah.”
The barista grinned and revealed straight white teeth. “Don’t sweat it; I’m not a stalker or a mind reader. Almost everyone I don’t know around here is just down from Perth.”
He must have misread my stress as concern.
His sun-bleached corkscrew curls were mostly hidden beneath a hairnet, but the odd one had escaped, giving him a stylishly haphazard look. “Just visiting or planning to stay?”
“Three months.”
“You make it sound like a prison sentence.” He smiled.
“I’ll tell you at the end of three months whether it was or not.”
“What do you plan to do while you’re here?”
“What is there to do?” I asked.
“That depends on your interests. You could go wine tasting, chocolate tasting, spelunking, camping, hiking.”
“Spelunking? That sounds torturous.”
“Only if you’re claustrophobic. Do tight places worry you?”
“I don’t really know.”
“Well, have you ever been shut in somewhere small? Like a closet?”
God. Was it written on my face? “Um….”
He gave me a curious look that lasted a little too long. “C’mon, didn’t a brother or sister lock you in the closet or under the stairs or something when you were little?”
“Not… not that I recall.”
His mouth pulled down at the corners, and he bobbed his head from side to side. “The real question is—do you surf?”
I exhaled slowly. “I like to be poetic about my skills. That’s why I call it falling on water.”
“Well, my man, you have come to the right café.” He moved the jug up and down to froth the milk for my flat white. “It just so happens I am a fabulous surfing instructor.”
“Modest too.”
“There is a place for modesty, but it doesn’t really live inside me. Visit? Sure. Live? No.” He waggled his eyebrows, and I couldn’t help but smile at his flippancy. “So, falling-on-water dude”—he made it sound as if it was some westernized version of an Native American name—“would you care to learn how to ride the water?”
“You’re going to teach me, are you?”
“If you’d like.”
“And how much would you charge for the pleasure?”
“For you, I’ll do it for free.”
“Because I’m special.”
“Now who’s got tickets on themselves?” He laughed. “You just have to tell me if you’re interested.”
“Sure.” I had nothing else to fill my time, and while moping around had been acceptable for the first few days, it had grown old pretty quick. Besides, it was time I got to know a few people.
“Your enthusiasm is overwhelming. But if you’re going to be in a surfing town, you gotta at least be able to talk the lingo. And while talking it will get you by, actually doing it will earn you megapoints around here.”
I wasn’t sure what those megapoints were likely to get me. The way life had been going, I just hoped it wasn’t a broken nose.
“I’m Luke, by the way.” He held out my coffee. “But most people call me Mitch.”
“Dan,” I said as I put my hand around the coffee cup. Instead of letting it go once I had hold, he moved it up and down, using it as a conduit for our shaking hands.
“Pleased to meet ya, Dan.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “You too, Luke.”
“Don’t like to run with the crowd, eh?”
I must have looked confused.
“You called me Luke instead of Mitch,” he clarified, “So I figured you aren’t ‘most people.’”
“Sorry, is that a problem?”
Wry amusement was written in every line of what was probably a late-twenty, early-thirtysomething face. “Hey, if you don’t want to run with the crowd it’s fine by me. Unique individuals make life interesting.”
Our conversation had diverged, and since I habitually caused that, I performed damage control by backtracking to his name. “Why do people call you Mitch if your name is Luke?”
“Luke Mitchell.” He shrugged. “I don’t really know why people use my last name when I have a perfectly good first one. It’s not like it’s been worn out o
r anything. It still works.”
I laughed.
“There ya go. That wasn’t so hard was it?” The whiteness of his teeth contrasted strongly against such a deep tan, but it was his light green eyes that had me mesmerized.
“What?”
“Having a laugh. You looked like you needed it.” He winked.
I did. Josh had been trying to draw a smile from me for days. And I had been trying, I really had, but for all the laughing I’d done, none of it had been real. I was attempting the “fake it till you make it” road. Maybe it was working, or maybe it was just Luke. Either way, here I was smiling like a loon.
I decided to take Luke up on the surfing lessons, so we organized to meet that afternoon down at Redgate, a local beach he called a “beginner’s break.” I assumed that meant the waves were small—for which I was grateful. My knowledge of the ocean was limited. I knew enough to know how quickly it could take you and never give you back—not alive anyway. Not only that, but there was the myriad of ocean wildlife to deal with, such as great whites, blue-ringed octopuses, and all the other beasts that weren’t keen on intruders.
I texted Josh to see if I could borrow one of his surfboards. He told me to take one from the quiver in the shed, as those in the house were the ones he currently used.
I spent the intervening hours on the internet learning what I could about surfing. By the time I was to meet Luke, so much surfing lingo was running around in my head, I couldn’t remember what any of the terms meant. Not that it mattered. It was really only a way to while away time I normally would have spent alternately questioning my feelings toward Josh and lamenting my cowardice.
When I arrived, Luke was standing on top of a sand dune looking down at the beach. He turned and waved before heading toward me. I released the bungee cords and took the board from the roof of my station wagon before going to meet him. “Hey,” he said as he neared me. “Glad you made it.”
“I said I would.”
“Not everyone does what they say they’re going to do.” He looked at my board. “A single-fin?” He was trying really hard to hide his amusement.
“It’s okay if you laugh,” I assured him. “I’m under no misapprehensions that I know what I’m doing, so go ahead. I’ve only surfed a couple of times, and they were kind of under duress.”
He did laugh as he ran a hand over the board. “Where did you get this? I haven’t seen one of these for years. Is it yours?”
“No. It belongs to my housemate.”
“Not much of a surfer then, your housemate?”
“Yeah, he is. He told me to take one of the ones out of the shed, so I just grabbed the one closest to the door.”
For whatever reason, that seemed to spark new interest in the board. “One out of the shed, eh?” He looked it over. “Who is your housemate? Has he been in Margs for long?”
I shrugged, “Josh Stern. Been here a few years I guess.”
“Josh Stern.” Luke said it like he was sifting through an interesting catalogue. “Josh,” he tried. “Does he have shoulder-length blond hair?”
“No. Black.”
“Does he work in Margs?”
“Are you a detective?”
His frown of confusion was washed away by a sassy smile. “They get paid more than coffee-swirlers, don’t they?”
“I can’t say I’m all that familiar with the pay grades of either.”
He laughed. “I like you.”
I liked him too, but if I was to say so, it would come out weird and awkward. I couldn’t get away saying things like that. It wasn’t my style.
“No, I was simply trying to place him.” He paused. “I know most of the locals, but they tend to get a little mixed up in my head.”
“That must be painful.”
“It can be. Not to mention embarrassing.”
“Sounds like a story lurks there.”
“One or twenty.” His lewd grin made it clear he was referring to something sexual, so I let the conversation drop. Since sexual confusion was circling me like a shark, the last thing I wanted to speak of was blood.
With the board set out on the sand, Luke had me repeatedly go from lying on the board to standing. With every attempt, he suggested alterations to the way I stood. When I didn’t understand how he thought I should put my back foot, he bent over to place it correctly.
His touch sizzled through me like a sparkler gone mad, and I was torn as to whether to pull away from him or revel in the sensation. He peered up at me, and I saw a dark ring around the light green iris. A burst of adrenaline shot to my heart. As if his eyes weren’t striking enough on their own, his tan made them positively glow. There was no way either of us could have known what that touch had launched within me or that it would change my life.
His laugh snapped me out of the hypnotic trance. “Are you listening? You look like you’ve zoned out to the Caribbean or someplace.”
Rapture might have been closer to the real location. “Sorry, lost track for a minute there.” Sad as it was, my recovery was admirable given the conditions.
After determining I had a fair chance to get to my feet on the board, Luke took me out past the white water. He had me paddle around for a while, and then we sat on the boards as they rose and fell with the swells.
He was explaining how, under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t bother going out when the wind was onshore like this—it messed with the shape of the waves and made them hard to ride—when he abruptly clicked his fingers. “He works at Dingoes Winery.”
Since he’d finally placed the correct Josh, I guessed it was true what they say about leaving the mind to work it out, which was just as well, since I was desperately trying, albeit unsuccessfully, to adopt that as my life strategy at the moment. “Yeah, that’s the one.”
Water had straightened the majority of Luke’s curls, and although they were a lot darker now that they were wet, the sun-bleached streaks and ends would have made a hairdresser envious. “He’s a hard guy to get to know.”
“Is he?”
“Yeah, a real cagey character. How long have you known him?”
Acutely aware of how close we were drifting toward each other and that our knees might touch, I tried to act nonchalant and shrugged, “A dozen or so years.”
“He seems like an interesting guy.”
“I guess.”
The waves tormented me with the promise of another touch from Luke. I watched our knees part as we went up over a swell, hoping the dip to follow would be deep enough to cause them to bump against each other. It wasn’t.
“C’mon, more paddling.”
I wanted to yell, Wait! We might brush against each other with this next one. Wouldn’t that just have made me sound like a madman? Or a sleazebag. “Okay” was my dazzling reply.
A short time later, Luke must have seen how weary my arms were as he waited for me to catch up because he suggested we call it a day. My relief was short-lived when I saw how distant the shore was. I would have happily sworn to the local magistrate that my arms were filled with Play-Doh.
Luke told me if I put in a little extra paddling effort to catch a wave, I could bodyboard almost all the way to shore. The idea gave me all the incentive I needed to convince my arms they were duck feet.
He was right about the bodyboarding. When we arrived on shore, he offered to give me another lesson the next day. Time away from wallowing in my own thoughts had been a welcome respite, not to mention an awakening of sorts that Luke’s touch had initiated, so I readily agreed.
“Perhaps you could ask Josh if you could borrow a thruster,” Luke suggested. I must have been wearing my patented look of bewilderment. “A board that has three fins,” he explained. “Makes it go faster.”
The idea of talking thrusters with Josh brought to mind an unbidden image of him behind me, dressed in nothing more than a sheen of sweat, asking if I wanted it faster.
Chapter 2
JOSH
DAN WAS cooking dinner when I ar
rived home. He had been staying with me less than a week, and already we had fallen into a routine that we could both live with. Ash Grunwald pumped from the stereo, and Dan intertwined dancing and cutting carrots with such style that it could easily be believed one couldn’t be performed without the other. Since he hadn’t heard me come in, I was able to watch him without fear of being caught.
At this moment, he was the embodiment of rock ’n’ roll. His body undulated fluidly with the guitar, but his limbs snapped and flicked in sharp rock movements with the drum beat. It was poetry in motion. As it often used to, my appreciation slid into the sexual side, and I quickly jolted myself away from those thoughts. I couldn’t let myself go there again. It was too painful. Dan was straight and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
“How did your surfing lesson go?” I asked, over the top of the music.
He swung around, brandishing the knife in one hand, the remaining carrot in the other. Lucky I was a good distance away.
“Jeezus.” He clutched the carrot to his chest and heaved a few breaths before lowering the knife. “You scared the fuck outta me.”
“I thought the spin was part of your dance.” I waved at his stance. I slid onto the stool at the end of the counter.
He set the knife on the bench and then went into the lounge where he turned the music down to a conversational level.
Returning, he picked up the knife, and continued chopping the carrot. “Apparently I’m to ask you if I can borrow a thruster.” The mischief that played across his features was so attractive, it was difficult to look away.
“You took the single-fin?”
Of course he did. It was Dan. He probably opened the shed door and took the first board he could reach, while his mind battled some deep philosophical question about the meaning of life, or whether the colors chosen for Dr. Who’s scarf had some significance to the grandmother who probably knitted it. With Dan it was a fifty-fifty shot at either one of those topics, and he would give both the same deep consideration.