What catches my eyes the most, drawing me in, is not his chest—I know, I know—but what he’s carrying. He doesn’t have a shortboard, but instead, secured under his arm is a longboard.
“I thought you had to work out this morning,” I call out, as he gets closer. I glance down at my shortboard and wonder if I should go back up to Geer’s garage and grab his longboard.
“I woke up early for it. I just got done.” He sets his board in the sand. “The water colder than yesterday?” He gestures toward my wetsuit and I grimace. I don’t feel like defending my outfit choice. It’s none of his business. Besides, I was wearing one yesterday. I wear one every morning, keeping my scars hidden.
“I get cold really fast.”
He nods, like my answer really isn’t as important as I take it to be. I’m on edge. I start shaking out my limbs, yawning in the process. My eyes water and Bash yawns back.
He starts to say something, but another yawn from me cuts him off. He yawns back and pretty soon we’re only communicating in yawns.
Looks like we have a yawn-off, y’all.
“I didn’t sleep last night,” I say around another yawn. “Or the night before. I’m just exhausted.”
“Are you okay to go out there?” Concern invades his voice and something weird tickles my stomach.
“I can surf half-asleep, Bash,” I tell him. “I could probably surf still asleep.” And I’m not cocky when I’m saying that. It’s just that ingrained into my being.
Surfing is like breathing. My oxygen.
“You’re cockier than most of my friends.”
“Is it cocky when you can back up the words with action?” I ask, shaking my head. “I think that’s actually called confidence. Which I have a lot of.”
Except in certain areas.
“Clearly.” A challenge rises in his words, the competitor coming out and my body hums with what’s about to happen.
I pick up my board and he shrugs out of his backpack, dropping it in the sand. “Race ya.”
I don’t answer until I’m almost to the water. Looking over my shoulder to shout something, I see him hot on my heels. I grin as my board and I hit the water, paddling out to sea with a pro right next to me.
If someone told fifteen-year-old me that I would be surfing with Bash Cleaton at nineteen, I wouldn’t have believed them.
If they had told me I would have been surfing with a hotshot surfer from the 80s, I’d believe them in a heartbeat.
My entire life has been spent around people that used to be the talk of the surf world.
As I paddle, I sneak glances under my arm at Bash as his arms slice through the water with ease. He looks at home on the board, the ocean breeze blowing his hair across his forehead.
He really is too attractive for his own good, a surfer body with a fun personality. Making him a deadly combination.
When he was fifteen and making a name for himself, magazines called him a teenage heartthrob, but now he is something more.
Age has been kind to him. His boyish features that made him famous on preteens’ walls have sharpened, matured, heightened. He’s more than a heartthrob now; he’s a heart-wrecker.
We don’t say where we’re going to stop; instead an unspoken agreement passes between us when we both halt in the same area, sitting up on our boards.
“So, come here often?” Bash asks and I laugh, shaking my head. He laughs with me before the sound fades into the breeze.
“Oh, you know.” I dip my fingers into the water. “Just every morning.”
“Dedicated.” He tries to laugh, but it dies off in the end.
I watch him with a frown.
“When did you know you loved this?” His voice takes on a more serious tone.
“This as in…?”
“Surfing.” He watches me, waiting for a reaction that never comes.
My poker face is on like a mask.
I know people can fall out of love with a sport.
It happened with Dez and baseball. He played all his life before quitting his junior year of high school when he needed shoulder surgery. But that can’t be why he’s asking, right?
“It’s just something that has always been a constant in my life.” I lay out on my board, still running my fingers over the cool water. “Growing up, surfing was as common in my house as football. A second religion where the beach was our church. I learned how to crawl, then how to surf, and then I learned how to walk. It’s in my blood. I can’t help but love it.”
His face is pinched in thought. “Have you ever tried to break up with it?”
I nod, thinking how much I should explain. It’s not like what happened to me is a secret. It was nationally televised, even internationally in some places. But there is a difference between a stranger telling my story through a screen and me telling it to someone face to face. I can’t stand to see the pity in their eyes when there is nothing to pity.
I’m alive, it doesn’t matter that my body has scars. What happened wasn’t anyone’s fault except mine for testing nature.
Nature and her inhabitants can’t be controlled. They can’t be tamed. Trespass on their territory to the point where they feel threatened and they will defend themselves.
“I did. I didn’t even go near the water for a year.” Back when I let the fear of what happened control me. Rule me.
“How’d that feel?” He doesn’t ask it like my therapist did. He asks like he fears it’s happening to him.
“Like I lost a piece of me,” I whisper. “That year, I wasn’t living. I was existing only to go through the motions.”
Bash is silent as he paddles closer to me, the current bringing us out further into the ocean and away from shore. He gently splashes water onto my back. “Did you ever get it back?”
I nod, not saying anything.
“How?” His lifeless eyes tighten, a glint of light that I can’t place. I don’t speak eyes.
Looking out at the horizon, I see a set rolling in. “I surfed.”
DEZ IS SITTING ON MY couch, a beer bottle in one hand and his cell phone in the other. He keeps glancing down at the device and I can’t help but give him shit. “Waiting on a girl to text?”
Dez has quickly become the best friend I’ve never had in my life, something I didn’t realize I was lacking until I came to this small town.
Through the years we’ve hung out after competitions and the times we’ve hung out since I got here, I like to think I know this dude pretty well and I’ve never seen him this borderline desperate for a chick’s attention. Which is why this has become so amusing.
Since the party, he’s been moody and snappy. He’s hardly able to handle any jokes.
“Fuck you,” he grumbles, flicking me off while his eyes are attached to the screen.
See.
I lean back in my chair, chuckling, taking a pull of my own beer. Shit’s too easy. “So, who is she?”
My mind immediately goes to Brit, Emery’s friend, kind of hoping it’s not. I’m trying to make friends with Emery and can’t have one of my friends screwing shit up with hers. That makes for an awkward friendship.
“Not a she.”
My eyebrows shoot up and I fight a smirk. “Didn’t know you swung that way, Daimon.”
He flips me off again, repeating his insult as well. “I’m waiting on a text from my nephew.”
I don’t point out I didn’t know he was an uncle, but I knew he had an older sister. So, rolling with it, I ask, “How old is he?”
“Seven.” His voice tight, knuckles tightening around his phone.
“Didn’t know they gave kids cell phones that young.” Fuck, I didn’t get my own phone until I was fourteen.
“I got him a prepaid one for when he goes and visits his dad. I like to be able to talk to him and I don’t trust his fucking father to let him use his phone.” He sounds tired, but at the same time his phone goes off. Dez gets quiet, his eyes roaming over the text, but whatever is on the screen has him sighing. “T
hey’re all good.”
“They?”
“I have a niece, too,” he says. “My sister and her ex-husband had Max and Ellie while their marriage was still young. They’re twins, but her dickwad husband couldn’t handle her job and he cheated on her. She was in the Air Force, fucking brave as hell and came home to find her husband cheating on her. On their bed, with their kids in the next room.”
Fuuuuck. “What a piece of shit.”
He nods, clenching his phone in his fist. “My sister’s a veteran now and has full custody of the kids, but once a month she lets Dale see them. I don’t know why—he doesn’t give a shit about them. I keep telling her to stop sending the twins over there, but she won’t.”
“You’re a good uncle, Dez.” My parents aren’t close with their siblings, so I don’t have relationships with my aunt or uncles. Something I desperately wanted growing up. A big family with lots of cousins to hang out with. “They’re really lucky to have you.”
He rubs a hand over his face. “They’re so smart and have this light in their eyes. Still so innocent and I’m always afraid it’s going to go out next time they come back from their dad’s.”
We don’t say anything after that, just sitting here, sipping our beers.
Speaking of sisters, I haven’t called mine since I left Cali. She’s texted me a few times and called a bunch, but I’ve only sent her one text. Letting her know everything is fine and I’m good—in relative terms that is.
I’m usually not such a shitty brother. I try to call Rachel once or twice a week, if I’m busy, and four times when manageable.
While my mother might not be a mom, my sister is the best. The one to always cheer the loudest at my competitions and the one making sure my ego never got bigger than my heart. She was always there to bandage my scraped knees and take me out for ice cream growing up.
“Fuck, man. I’m sorry.” He takes another pull from the bottle. “Didn’t mean to unload all this family shit on you.”
I wave him off. “Nah, you’re good. Sometimes things are easier to say to someone you haven’t known for a long time.”
“Ain’t that the truth.” He takes another pull. “So, did you get a hold of Emery?”
I take a pull of my own bottle, the condensation wrapping around my hand, as I stall for an answer. “Yep. We went surfing this morning.”
He freezes, eyes wide and mouth slightly hanging open. “You and Emery went surfing? Emery Lawson? You’re shitting me, right?”
I scrunch my brows together as I look at him. “I don’t know you well enough for that.”
“Dude, Emery doesn’t surf. She hasn’t since a few years ago.”
My brows pinch in confusion. The memories of this morning with Emery are vivid in my head.
Clearly, we aren’t talking about the same Emery. We can’t be.
I don’t even remember if her last name is Lawson. It could be Donaldson. The Emery I know definitely surfs, and according to her, she does it everyday.
“Maybe we’re talking about different Emerys.”
Dez snorts, shaking his head, and gives me a look that says he knows what I’m up to but it’s not his business. “Yeah, that’s it.” I don’t need to note the dry tone in his words, but man, can the dude lay the sarcasm on thick.
Dez drops it and we hang out for a while longer, putting on some sports channel, and knocking back a few beers.
It’s fine until my phone starts going off and, without checking the caller I.D., I answer, “Hello?”
“Sebastian.” Her voice makes me cringe and my skin crawl. I haven’t talked to her in weeks and have successfully been able to avoid all the calls coming in from back home, but hanging out with a friend and a drinking a few beers like a normal person has lowered my guard.
Damn it.
“Mother.” My tone doesn’t even sound like me. Cold and hard.
With a realization, I startle. That’s what my tone was always like. Angry and distant. Detached.
Being away has shown how empty I’ve been living these past seven years.
The term “finding one’s self” never made sense to me. How does one not know who they are? When Rachel was in college, she did a study abroad program in Australia, taking classes that didn’t correlate with her major. I brought her to the airport, hugging her tight, when I asked if she really wanted to go.
Rach laughed as she hugged me, shaking her head against my shoulder. I’ve always supported my sister, as she has always supported me. We’re each other’s number ones since day one. However supportive I was though, I didn’t want her to go. It would be the first time I’d be by myself. My sister sacrificed a lot for me, to protect me from what my parents were turning into, but she told me she had to go find herself. I waited at the airport until her plane took off.
I was sixteen.
Now, six years later, I finally understand what Rachel was after.
I’m learning new things about myself that I had no idea were there. How does a person go twenty-two years without even knowing if they like IPA or lager beer?
How does one know anything unless they go out and find it?
Dez gives me a look and I get up, leaving the room and heading outside. Once on the porch, I lean against the railing. One hand grips the phone while the other goes through my hair.
“You haven’t been answering my calls or texts, Sebastian.” Her tone is just as distant as mine. As if we’re discussing a business arrangement.
“Correct,” I state since she pauses on her end, waiting for a response.
“I’ve been worried, Sebastian.” She keeps saying my name like it’s supposed to have an effect on me.
It doesn’t.
All it does is make me resent my name.
I roll my eyes even though she can’t see. You’ve been worried about my money. Not me, Mom.
“I need time away.”
“You have a career. You can’t take time off.”
“Why not?” I challenge. A knock sounds behind me.
Turning around, Dez motions that he’s going to take off. I nod my chin at him. “People do it all the time. I haven’t had a vacation in years. I feel like I deserve it.”
What I want to say is that I’ve earned it, but in her eyes, I haven’t earned anything until she’s living in a castle made of gold and marble.
The finer things don’t come cheap, Sebastian, was her saying to me for years.
“As your manager,” she goes on, completely ignoring what I said and I bite back a groan to keep from saying, self-appointed manager. “It’s important to run these things by me, son.” Now I’m son and not Sebastian. “You have commitments that have been on the schedule long before you decided to pull this stunt.”
She’s talking to me like I’m back in high school.
The phone tightens in my grip. “I left the city, Mother, I didn’t leave the planet.”
“That’s wonderful to hear,” she says and I wonder if she even heard me at all. “You have to be in Miami for a charity event in two days. I trust you can see to your own travel arrangements. Your father and I are taking the yacht out for a mini vacation, so I won’t be able to talk to you for a few days.”
Thank God for that.
The irony is not lost on me that my parents, who don’t even have jobs, are taking a mini vacation, but my mother has been calling me nonstop to lecture me on mine.
The one who actually works for a living.
“I’ll be there.” I hang up, not even bothering to tell her to enjoy her time off. We both know she will.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU’VE been surfing with Sebastian Cleaton?” Brit sits on my bed, looking at me like I’ve sprouted two heads. Imagine all the food I could eat, though, if that was true.
“Emery!” She throws a pillow at my face while I daydream about pizza.
“What?” I hug the pillow to my chest.
“Stop avoiding and answer the question!”
“Well.” I lean back against the wall. �
�I told you we were and you stared at me for a while before asking and now we’re here.”
“Smartass.” She moves for another pillow and I brace for an impact that doesn’t come. She puts it in her lap instead. “Now tell me.”
I shrug. “There’s nothing really to tell. I still surf at the same time but now I don’t do it alone.”
“You’re keeping something from me.” She narrows her eyes.
“I’m not.” It’s been a few days of surfing with Bash, but nothing other than surfing has occurred. Yesterday we didn’t even talk past pleasantries.
“Are you sure, Emery Marie?”
Why does she have to go and middle name me! She knows I hate that. “You know me. When do I ever keep stuff from you?”
She’s the only one that knows I’m not going back to school. My secrets are Brit’s secrets as per the rules of best friendom.
“Because you don’t get serious with guys and you’ve always said surfing is more intimate than sex for you—which, by the way, just means you aren’t having good sex.”
I’m not having any sex and she knows that. “He’s kind of a friend, Brit. We just surf. There’s nothing more.”
Except that one time we made out, but neither of us have brought it up and I plan on keeping it that way. Does my time with Bash have to be something more?
Brit says I have commitment issues, both with relationships and friendships. I keep a lot of people at arm’s length, only letting them ricochet off the surface. The closest people in my life are the ones that have been there since birth: Brit, Geer, and my cousin, Nori. Or the people that didn’t take my brush-offs to heart and fought their way in, like my friends Xavier and Sienna.
Both lists are pretty small.
“What’s going on with you and Desmond?” Not wanting the attention on me anymore, I change the subject.
“Nothing life altering.” Brit shrugs, but adds, “We’re going to the movies tonight.”
“Is he why my calls aren’t being sent to voicemail as much?” Surprisingly, Brit’s phone has been charged a lot lately. And I have a feeling our ex-friend is the reason.
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