Air

by Lisa Glass

  “She kissed me. I wasn’t kissing her. Like the time you made out with your psycho ex-boyfriend.” He made the jerk-off motion with his hand, which I’d never seen him do before. “Y’know, on that frickin’ rust-bucket fishing boat?”

  “Oh, so you’re still hanging on to that one, eh?”

  Zeke always made out that he was so Zen about everything, but when it came down to it, he could obviously hold on to a grudge with the best of them.

  “Hanging on to it? Nope. Remembering it from time to time, yeah. But I get it: sometimes stuff just happens.”

  “So you’re actually saying you didn’t kiss her back?”

  “OK, for one thing, I’ve known Amber and Inga for years. And, two, the kiss was for a picture.”

  “Oh, well, that’s all right then.”

  “It’s not as if I was making out with her. I kissed her two seconds for a picture. You think I’d kiss another girl for real?”

  “Of course it was real. I saw it. You kissed her, Zeke.”

  “For one breath. What am I pushing her across the room the second she touches me?”

  “Cool. The next time I get talking to a lad, I’ll snog him and we’ll see how you like it.”

  “Iris, come on, it was a second before I stepped away. It meant nothing. And PS, even if I did make out with some other chick, you don’t get to put yourself in danger just to spite me, OK? That shit is not gonna happen ever again.”

  “So I should just smile and pretend everything’s all right, even when my boyfriend’s getting off with another girl?”

  “No. That’s not what I’m even saying.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “That’s a flat-out lie and you know it. Just rethink the scorched-earth policy. You don’t have to burn everything down the second I mess up.”

  A group of people had left their glasses of red and white wine on the shiny coffee table next to me. They’d hardly been touched. I picked up a red, and my fingers twitched to throw it in his face, twitched so hard I almost did it, but instead I raised the glass in front of his eyes, said, “Cheers, brah,” and downed it in one. It tasted horrid, like some chip shop’s cheap vinegar. I slammed down the empty glass and with my eyes dared him to say a single thing about it. Then, before I could back down, change my mind, I picked up a glass of the white wine and downed every last drop of that too. I did this with another two glasses before I was done.

  I belched and shoved my hand over my mouth because I sensed the belch was a prelude to a stream of winey vomit. I waited a moment, and when the danger was over said, “You can’t control me, so don’t even try,” which was admittedly a dramatic thing to say, but I’d been listening to Greg Holden’s “The Lost Boy” a lot, which had a chorus that banged on about not being commanded and controlled. To make it less weird, I added, “You’re not the boss of me.”

  “I don’t want to be.”

  “Right, so I can do whatever I want.”

  “Not if you wanna be my girl,” he said. “I can’t deal with that BS. You scared me to death out there. I thought you were getting trafficked out of the country on some cargo ship.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Your imagination needs to calm right down.”

  “How was I supposed to know you were fine? You totally ditched me. Wait,” he said, remembering something, “I need to call Chase and tell him I found you.”

  Zeke got out his phone. “Bro . . . Yeah . . . At the hotel . . . South Beach . . . Uh-huh . . . Right? That’s what I said . . . Because of Inga . . . Yeah, I’ll tell her you said hey. Catch you later.”

  He sank down on one of the lobby sofas and put his head in his hands. I moved to stand in front of him. He sighed, and when he looked up his eyes looked old and tired.

  What the hell, I thought. I’m gonna go for it. Come out with the thing that had been bugging me for months. Why shouldn’t I tell him the truth?

  “I’m fed up with girls throwing themselves at you. You just let them. You should tell them to get lost. You shouldn’t even be talking to them.”

  Zeke looked genuinely shocked. “I shouldn’t talk to any girl but you? You sound like a twelve-year-old.”

  “And you sound like a dickhead.”

  “I’m gonna talk to people, and since half the people in the world are girls, I’m gonna talk to girls.”

  “Even when they’re blatantly trying to pull you?”

  “Girls can talk to me without wanting to get with me. I mean, I’m flattered that you think I’m this babe-magnet, but it’s really not like that.”

  “At least fifty percent of your friends are female. What bloke has that many female friends?”

  “Fifty percent of human beings are female. Yeah, I have plenty of chick friends. I like hanging out with girls. They’re fun and cool. So what? It doesn’t mean anything. Sometimes people are just being friendly, you know?”

  “Over-friendly if they’re giving you their number, or sticking their tongue in your mouth.”

  “Hot damn, Iris, what am I supposed to do? Step away each time a girl asks me how my day is?”

  “Yeah, maybe. You’re allowed to walk away if you don’t want to speak to someone. I would why can’t you?”

  He was looking more and more shocked by the second.

  “Because it’s freakin’ rude.”

  I looked over to the two women standing at the reception desk. One of them was reading a paperback, completely uninterested in us, and the other one was doing her best to appear so.

  I held up my mobile phone in his face and loaded up Twitter. “Look,” I said. “Just look.”

  When I searched for him, @Surfgeekzeke, it was one long string of tweets from girls. Some of them had even tweeted photographs they’d taken with Zeke, and the composition of those photos usually went like this: the girl would be holding Zeke’s surfboard, he’d be standing next to her with his hand on her lower back and they’d both be smiling into the camera, or he’d be smiling into the camera and she’d be gazing up at him. The captions were always along the lines of “Awesome to meet the amazing @Surfgeekzeke. You’re soooo hot and talented!!! DM me, baby . . .”

  “When did this even happen?” I said, looking at the latest one, taken on South Beach and featuring a girl with a button nose, absolutely no hips and a ridiculously inflated cleavage. “Where was I?”

  “Iris, they’re fans. How am I supposed not to talk to fans? Without those guys I don’t have a career.”

  “Firstly, they are not guys, and secondly, they are not fans. Surf fans know about surfing. Those right there?” I said, jabbing my thumb at the screen. “Groupies.”

  Zeke looked aghast.

  “You know that just by looking at them? Damn, girl, teach me your mind-reading skills. Be real handy in the line-up. Besides, guys say stuff about you all the time.”

  “No, they don’t. Not like this.”

  “Uh, how about last week when that picture of you in a bathing suit went up on the Billabong Facebook page?”

  “I didn’t even know it did I haven’t been on Facebook much lately. What did they say?”

  “Let me think: ‘If there’s grass on the field, play ball,’ and like a million worse versions of that. Oh, and one douchebag just posted a picture of lotion.”

  “Why would he—”

  “For jerking off!”

  “Ew. Rank.”

  “I know!”

  “Well, what happened to not caring about stuff that people say on the Internet? It’s nothing to the universe, remember . . .”

  “You wanted to talk about this!”

  “This was supposed to be a relaxing break between contests,” I said, sighing, as if he was completely responsible for this blazing row.

  “So why are you spoiling it?”

  And that’s when I remembered, and felt so ashamed I wanted to stick my head in an oven. I had just given my number to a boy. A boy who seemed interested in me.

  There I was, slagging off girls who flirted with Zeke, and I had gi
ven my Billabong business card to Seb, a complete stranger. Why? Just because I was angry with Zeke? Was I really that pathetic?

  I was a hypocrite.

  My head throbbed and I sat down on the sofa next to Zeke. I could feel my stupid eyes welling up with tears and I wiped them away.

  Zeke was quiet, and then said, “Let me find you a Kleenex.”

  He walked off and I heard murmured voices as he approached the reception desk staff.

  The wine had been strong and the room was starting to spin. Black circles around the edges of my vision closed in and suddenly I was lurching sideways and falling into upholstery.

  The last thing I registered before I passed out was Zeke saying, “Oh, brother,” then getting a grip under my arms and lifting me.

  chapter twenty-three

  When I woke up even my eyelids felt depressed, and I couldn’t seem to bring myself to open them, because once I did, I’d have to face up to what had happened.

  I was still wearing my vest and damp shorts, Zeke had his arms around me and I could tell he was fast asleep, his chest rising and falling against my back. Morning was a long way off and my head was still hot and thumping from too much alcohol.

  Not moving a muscle in case I woke him, I lay there, turning it all over.

  Why had I immediately thought the worst?

  Why had I been so completely melodramatic?

  What was wrong with me?

  I swore I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom. Even worse, my mind kept offering me all these flashes of Zeke with Inga, of those gross jocks feeling me up, of me handing over my business card to Seb, of Zeke looking frantic with worry and overwhelmed with relief when I told him I was all right.

  Please sleep, I begged my own brain.

  Suddenly I felt my phone vibrating under my pillow.

  Kelly.

  I weighed up my options, pressed Answer, whispered, “Hang on,” and extracted myself from Zeke and snuck on to the breezeway outside.

  “Can you talk? Or you out on the lash with Ken?”

  “Kel, don’t call him that you know I hate it.”

  “Come on, he does look a bit like the Surfer Ken doll, you’ve gotta admit it. So, anyway, how’s the trip going?”

  “Not great. Being away from you sucks. I miss you so much.”

  “Are you hammered? You sound hammered.”

  “I had a massive row with Zeke tonight.”

  “Oh no. What’d he do?”

  I didn’t want to tell Kelly about Zeke and Inga, as even if he did have an explanation, I knew Kelly would think it was well dodgy and I didn’t want her to think badly of my boyfriend, no matter how annoyed I was with him.

  “It’s just hard out here. Harder than I thought. Sometimes it feels so claustrophobic being with Zeke all the time. Maybe we’ve overdosed on each other.”

  “Well, it’s bound to be tricky. You’ve gone from being strangers to basically living together in no time at all.”

  She was right. Reality had set in, and no amount of picking our way across palm-edged beaches for dawn surfs on deserted coral reefs could change the fact that I now saw him at his worst; he saw me at mine.

  “How are things going with Garrett?” I asked, deliberately changing the subject. Kelly had been so excited for me to travel the world, surf its best breaks, and play out some epic romance with Zeke. I didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth; that it had all gone to ratshit.

  “Don’t ask,” she replied, her voice sounding tense.

  “Why not?”

  The idea of Kelly and Garrett having problems actually made me feel a bit better. At least it wasn’t just me and Zeke who were struggling. I felt seriously bad for this thought when Kelly took a deep breath and said, “Garrett’s poorly.”

  My heart sank.

  “What do you mean? Like, seriously?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Shit.”

  “I know.”

  “Oh God, Kel. I’m so sorry. Do you wanna talk about it?”

  “Not really.”

  “He should tell Zeke though. Zeke has a right to know if something’s wrong with his brother.”

  “Nothing’s wrong.”

  “Well, you just said there was.”

  “God, judgey much? Poorly is a legitimate lifestyle choice.”

  “Being ill is a lifestyle choice?”

  We were both silent and suddenly Kelly laughed.

  “I said POLY not POORLY.”

  “Oh. Well, what the hell is poly supposed to mean?”

  “God, Iris. Haven’t you ever read a sex blog?”

  “Um, no.” As if I could spend time reading sex blogs with millions of events in my diary and Zeke constantly three feet away.

  “Poly is short for polyamorous.”

  I searched the memory banks and came up empty.

  “Not a clue.”

  “It’s the opposite of monogamous.”

  “So, wait a minute,” I said, trying to get my inebriated brain around what she was telling me. “Garrett just goes around cheating on his girlfriends. Cheating on you?”

  “No, because it’s not cheating. Everyone is honest from the start, so there’s no lying.”

  “And you’re cool with that?”

  “Yeah. I think I am. I mean, monogamy is so full-on and controlly. When you love someone, you want the maximum possible happiness for them, don’t you? You want them to make the most of every great opportunity that comes their way, and maybe a great opportunity is a person.”

  This all seemed very unlike Kelly.

  “You love Garrett?”

  “Christ, no. What am I stupid?”

  I imagined Kelly head-over-heels in love with Zeke’s brother. Something told me that would not end well for her, that the power dynamic had to be tipped toward Kelly for the relationship to have any chance at all. Kelly’s natural tendency to play it as cool as possible, something that had jinxed her other relationships, would probably be a good thing with Garrett.

  “But I suppose I could love him, one day.” She said this as if it had only just occurred to her. “If he plays his cards right.”

  “I don’t get it. This poly thing just sounds like a good excuse for someone to treat their girlfriend like shit.”

  “Or boyfriend. I’m trying it out too.”

  “Sleeping around?”

  “No, neither of us actually are, yet. But if we meet the right people, we will.”

  “Aren’t you worried it’s gonna get weird?”

  “Life with Garrett is already weird. So, is that the end of the interrogation?”

  “Sorry, Kel. As long as you’re cool with it, that’s all I care about.”

  Kelly’s revelation made me feel even more childish for going nuts at Zeke for a photo kiss. She seemed to be in some properly grown-up relationship based on trust and honesty rather than jealousy.

  “Iris, I have to go now, but don’t worry about the row with Zeke. You’re gonna have times where you hate each other’s guts. That’s all part of it. Like my mum says, ‘If you don’t want to leave him or murder him at least once a day, it’s not a real relationship.’”

  “Thanks, Kel,” I said, laughing and wishing for the millionth time that she could be on tour with me.

  I padded silently into the room and lay back down next to Zeke.

  He turned and kissed me on the forehead, and his alcohol breath could’ve stripped paint.

  “Kelly says hi,” I said, as gently as I could.

  “You miss her.”

  I groaned. “So much.”

  “It gets less, with time.”

  “Do you miss anyone?”

  Silence.

  “Zeke?”

  “Sorry. I was thinking. Yeah, I miss a lot of folks.”

  “What were you thinking? That you don’t want to be with me anymore, probably.”

  He shook his head. “I do wanna be with you, but . . . this is still new for me. Spending so much tim
e with a girl. I guess we both have to get used to it.”

  “I wouldn’t blame you if you did want to bail. But . . . I really care about you. More than I’ve ever cared about anyone.”

  “Even that Daniel guy?”

  “Yeah, course. I can’t believe you’d even ask me that. I hate him. When I think about him hurting you like that, I want to rip his head off.” And I hated myself for phoning him.

  “Hey, it wasn’t all one way I got in a couple licks.”

  The sight of Zeke and Daniel fighting was one of my all-time worst memories. If I let myself think about it, which I didn’t often, I remembered the vibration of the punches and kicks, the sound of expelled breath. Wet jeans and pooling blood. So much blood.

  “Iris, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled at you tonight. I was worried, but that’s no excuse and I feel lousy about it. You forgive me?”

  “No, it was me I behaved like a complete idiot. I don’t know what I was thinking. I obviously wasn’t thinking.”

  “It’s just one of those situations that a guy hopes will never happen.”

  “Being kissed by a pretty girl is so awful?”

  “Being kissed by a girl when you have a girlfriend is. Especially when you feel like I do about you.”

  I stayed there, my head against his chest, our breathing settling into a joint rhythm.

  “I can’t believe I went off like that.”

  “I would probably have freaked out if I saw another guy kissing you. It’s bad enough imagining you with Daniel. I hate the idea of him putting a hand on you. I mean, I’m cool with it in theory, because I’m not a nutjob, but if I let myself imagine it? Man, that shit hurts.”

  “So imagine how I feel then. Because I don’t even know how many girls you’ve slept with. You never told me your number. Maybe you should. You know, just get it out there? So we’re both on the same page.”

  “I get that, but the thing is, I don’t actually know how to answer that question. After a certain point I lost track.”

  I let that sink in. “So it’s more than a hundred?”