The Sea Ain't Mine Alone

by C. L. Beaumont

  At 5:45, he groans and allows himself to pop up from the shitty mattress. He figures if he takes extra long to get dressed, and walks as far as he absolutely can to find coffee and something to eat for breakfast, and then walks all the way back to his motel before hopping back on the bus he now knows will take him out near Danny’s home, he’ll be there just late enough in the morning that it will be reasonable. That it won’t be absolutely pathetic what time he’s there.

  He's burning with questions that swirl maddeningly through his mind as he navigates the unfamiliar city streets. What Danny does for a living, who he surfs with along the shore over on the other side of the island, how he ended up with that house, how he ended up with his own fucking private beach, if he sways alone on that hammock all the hours he isn’t doing . . . whatever the hell else he does.

  James’ mind is whirring so intently that he doesn’t even check his watch until he’s just stepping off the bus, five minutes away from the dirt road leading down to Danny’s hut. James curses under his breath and groans. It’s only quarter to eight.

  He really is a chump. He’s a nervous, sweating teenager on the doorstep of his prom date’s house, realizing he’s thirty minutes early and too afraid to knock on the door. He’s a sore thumb in the middle of tropical paradise.

  He certainly doesn’t feel like a grown-ass man, a fucking professional surfing vet on a relaxing vacation in Hawaii. He doesn’t feel like he’s even lived a day of his own life.

  He looks around him at the small, sleepy town, though, and quickly realizes he doesn’t really have another option. It’s either wander around Danny’s little stretch of beach until he wakes up, looking absolutely stupid and trying not to feel too small or embarrassed, or it’s wander around this town as the new town creep. With a resigned sigh, he moves down the now-familiar path towards the beach, quieting his steps through the brush as much as he can.

  He eases his way around the last bend in the shaded lane, watching the early sunlight drift through the trees in swaths of swirling gold. He’s expecting to find a quiet, sleepy hut with gently lapping waves, still enshrouded in the cocoon of stillness from the night before.

  Instead he nearly jumps out of his skin when he hears, “James, you’re here! Excellent. I see you ate breakfast. Coffee before we go?”

  Danny Moore is standing on his patio, leaning out over the railing and gazing at the sea, fully dressed in khaki shorts and a black t-shirt with a mug of coffee in his hand, sunglasses hanging off the front of his collar.

  James stops in his tracks and tries to mentally catch up. He feels like a kid caught out sneaking around after bedtime. “I, uh—I honestly didn’t think you’d be awake.”

  “Yeah, yeah, sure. And you thought I’d wake up and see you on my beach and think you were a creep and then you’d be humiliated forever. Dull. This way we get a head start on the day, dig it?”

  Without waiting for James to answer, Danny ducks back into the hut for a moment and emerges with a backpack and a thermos which James barely catches after it’s tossed his way. Without even being on boards out in the waves, James is back in the whirlwind, back to being the breathless disciple chasing after the sunlit storm. Back to being completely out of his depth.

  He ignores the small voice in the back of his head that feels patronized by Danny’s impersonation of a goddamn tour guide leading the way in front of him. Instead he lets his excitement and curiosity cautiously grow, drawing him forward with each step as he follows Danny back down the lane and through the trees up to the whitewashed house.

  He follows him in silence, looking at every branch and leaf he passes instead of the back of Danny’s calves. Danny’s walking the same way he did that day on the dockyard—the way James watched him walk up to the starting line in Hermosa a lifetime ago. Legs long and confident, back swift and straight.

  “You’re probably wondering whose door you knocked on yesterday,” Danny says.

  James rolls his eyes. “You know, I almost forgot after four days how much you love showing off.”

  To his surprise, Danny doesn’t argue back, but just tilts his head to the side. “Bummer for you,” he says, slightly out of breath from their brisk walk just as the red Jeep parked to the side of the house comes into view.

  Before James can clarify he was just joking, Danny continues, “Anyways, his name’s Chuck Hobbs. He’s a writer. No idea what the hell he actually writes—never seen it. He never leaves his house, goddamn terrified of it. But he complains all the time that he can’t write stories if he isn’t around people, right? So I told him I’d meet with clients at his house and use it as an office, and he can watch and take notes in the corner like he’s my ancient secretary, and then in return I get his old beach hut for dirt cheap.”

  James climbs into the Jeep besides Danny and says an automatic, “Yeah, right on,” then halts as he tries to slot all the rapid-fire information into his head.

  “Wait, your clients?”

  Danny starts the Jeep with a roar and revs the engine as they pull out of the weeds. James barely fastens his seatbelt in time.

  “I fix people’s broken shit—not sure what you’d call that.” Danny keeps his eyes square on the road, one arm hanging out the rolled-down window as he rattles on. “Technology, mostly. Televisions, radios, phones, that sort of thing. Do it for a lot of businesses too down in the city. I’m half the price of any other shop.”

  James’ mouth is hanging open. “But that’s . . . how do you even know how to do that?”

  Danny shrugs and steals the thermos in James’ hands to take a long sip of coffee. “Dunno. Just tried it once when I was a teenager and realized I was good at it. Way to make a living—most of the time.”

  James gapes at him in silence, then bursts out into an uneasy laugh. “Shit, man, you’re something else.”

  Danny smiles over at him quickly, the expression a little stiff on his face, then turns back to the winding road to focus. James can feel that something is off between them—too wired and tense and frantic. It dawns on him as Danny navigates them through the narrow dirt roads that he knows more about Danny Moore right now than he ever has by a landslide. That Danny’s lobbing the answers to his unvoiced questions right back at him one after the other. And yet in the same moment, the air between them sits thickly with a cold, dull thud. The little pulse, the little flicker, is nowhere to be seen.

  James looks down at his own hands held unnaturally formal in his lap, the way his back is straight and his knees pointed perfectly forward. It dawns on him with a surprisingly sickening roll of emotion: they’re both trying too hard.

  And the problem is, James doesn’t know what he’s even trying to do in the first place. To be buds? Rivals again? The life saver and the life savee? Two people who happen to surf together? Casual strangers?

  The subtle wrongness of it all builds in his chest as they continue to drive, Danny pointing out facts about the island here and there in quick, unemotional words, and James left trying to absorb it all from the passenger seat. Danny’s left knee bobs incessantly as he flies across the familiar roads, and James knows he hasn’t sat up straight for so long since inspections back in Vietnam—not even for his interview to get the job at the docks.

  After over an hour, Danny pulls off the winding road and parks, ending his explanation of a new flower that was recently discovered on the mountain towering behind them. The silence without the revving engine is deafening. Neither one of them moves to get out.

  The air settles around them, thick and choking. Nothing like how it fizzled the last time they were in a car together back in Los Angeles, all warm and rested and clear. James wants Danny to move his leg over and press it against his like he did before. To hear him ask him quiet questions and watch his body melt into the car seat, muscles completely relaxed.

  But instead, when he closes his eyes, all he can see is his mind’s recreation of Kip’s fist meeting with Danny’s cheek. All he can hear is his own furious, threatening voice scre
aming at Danny until he chased him away on the shore, yesterday’s “thank you” and “you’re welcome” well and forgotten.

  James knows the day can’t go on like this, surreal as it is to be sitting in a Jeep on a gorgeous Hawaiian island beside the greatest surfer of her waves—beside the Danny Moore. James sits up a bit and clears his throat. His mind whirrs for the right thing to say to try and make things right. Wonders if he should apologize or make a joke or take his leave. If he should ask Danny if his bruise hurts, if what James told him about the war was all too much, if he felt James’ lips move beneath his for that horrible second by the rushing tide.

  He starts saying the first words that come to mind, just to end the silence. “Look, Danny, you’ve done me a solid today with . . . with showing me around like this. Would’ve been hell sitting around in the motel, but I’m—”

  “I’m sorry, James.”

  James stops mid-word. “What?”

  Danny takes a moment to think, scrunching his lips, then sighs through his nose as he gazes out over the floral blanketed cliffs in front of them, weighed down by the strong breeze.

  “What I said to you that day. About the policem—about your friend. I’m sorry.”

  James takes a slow breath. Danny’s voice is low and sincere, the apology carefully formed on his lips. The intimacy of it, sitting knee to knee in a silent car with nobody around for miles, discussing insults hurled at each other moments before Danny pulled James from the waves, it bears down on him with a heavy weight.

  James runs his palm along his thigh. “Yeah, well, I shouldn’t have said any of the shit I said either. You know, about the rumor or . . . or that shit about the man you’re pretending to be.”

  Danny lets out a single laugh, low and brusque. “I think this entire island would line up to disagree with you there,” he says, the sarcasm not quite hiding a darker tone.

  Without thinking about it, James moves his leg so that it brushes against Danny’s, and he holds it there, letting the warmth grow between their skin. He waits, heart pounding, as Danny’s body tenses up next to his, the air in the car vibrating with tension. Long seconds pass.

  And then, with a long exhaled breath, Danny pushes back warm and firm against James’ touch. He settles back into his seat. James unclenches his fists.

  The icy, frantic vastness of the air between them suddenly vanishes, and the cold weight is lifted off James’ lungs with the change in the atmosphere. They sit together, gazing out over the gorgeous landscape, as the breeze rustles gently through the car’s open top and sides. James knows he doesn’t have to say anything more. His leg against Danny’s is somehow enough.

  After a minute, Danny steals the thermos again for another sip of lukewarm coffee and grimaces.

  “God, how have you been drinking this shit on the whole drive?”

  James laughs. “You haven’t had coffee on a Navy ship. Makes that taste like something you’d drink in Paris.”

  “Oh, were you in the Navy? I didn’t know,” Danny shoots back with a smirk, and James pushes him in the shoulder and curses at him, not even bothering to fight the grin creeping onto his face. And for the first time in years, James Campbell feels eighteen years old again without the familiar accompanying wave of shame—that he should be moved on from a racing heart at another man’s touch, from the sound of another’s laugh wrapping itself around his own lungs.

  Everything changes.

  They spend the entire morning touring the island in the Jeep, stopping now and again to get out and look at the view. Danny makes fun of James for gasping every ten minutes, and James rolls his eyes when Danny gets twenty minutes too deep into a discussion of one beach’s waves or a specific site’s historical fact. It’s the sort of vacation his mom used to talk about with faraway eyes, licking the spoon from her annual milkshake, and then she’d shake her head and tell James that they already lived in paradise, in the City of Angels, so what more could they need?

  Danny knows the island like an intimate friend. Can read every rise and fall of the earth like a novel waiting to be cracked open and adored, the same way James watched him predict every swell of the waves. James listens to Danny’s warm, smooth voice vibrate with energy and sits back as the words rush over him like warm, gentle water. He feels wide-eyed and light, desperate to take in every sight to see in this new and brimming landscape, and at the same time he can’t help but feel absolutely assured, as if he’s been to these same places hundreds of times before. Danny Moore at his side.

  They stop for lunch at a little stand Danny knows about that seems to appear out of nowhere next to the one lane highway stretching alongside the beach. Danny orders for them both before James can get a word in and then leaves James with his mouth hanging open when a man inside the trailer home behind the food stand leaps out the door and bear hugs Danny after running to him across the grass.

  The man is older, a native Islander. They whisper quietly together for a moment, both sets of eyes darting quickly once to James off to the side. Finally the man pats Danny once on the back with a smile and goes to speak to the boy in the little kitchen.

  James shoots Danny a look that says “what the hell was that about?” and Danny merely shrugs.

  “I rigged up his cash register for him a few years back, made some improvements.”

  It’s the most anticlimactic explanation James has ever heard. He’s also never seen someone bear hug another human being over a cash register. But Danny turns back to get their food, leaving James alone with his questions. Danny silently hands him a bowl made of banana leaves once James is sitting on a wooden bench overlooking the ocean by the road.

  “Poke,” Danny answers James’ silent question. He sits down so their knees are touching. James thinks it’s a mistake, but neither one of them shifts or moves.

  Danny talks over a stuffed full mouth. “Lahela used to make it for us all the time. My father would make her grill him a separate steak or something and my little brother wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole, so I got triple helpings of it every time.”

  James takes a bite and almost moans. It’s the most delicious thing he’s put in his mouth in years. He thinks of his usual dinners of plain boiled pasta with canned sauce and feels a blush spread across the back of his neck. Danny practically devours his share next to him.

  “You have a little brother?” James asks, suddenly needing their voices to cover up the small moans and sighs of Danny’s chewing.

  Danny pauses, food midway to his mouth, then finishes the bite and swallows, taking twice as long to chew.

  “Had,” he finally says.

  “Shit, sorry, I didn’t—”

  “He’s not dead.”

  James frowns, then watches Danny place another unenthusiastic bite of food in his mouth out of the corner of his eye.

  He doesn’t know what to say. He feels small and out of place sitting in this sacred landscape, holding up a bowl of food to his mouth that he’s never even heard of, digging secrets from the man next to him whom the entire island would gladly pay to watch surf across their own waves, jackass reputation or no. That sensation of being an intruder starts to settle slowly upon his shoulders once more. That his haunted thoughts are contaminating—unworthy of what’s so far been one of the most perfect, easy days of his life.

  That Danny could be doing literally anything else that day, and instead he’s choosing to waste his time ferrying around the “old washed out vet.”

  Then Danny’s knee presses gently against his, and it stays there as they sit at the edge of the earth for all the ocean to see. James blinks hard against the sudden sheen of water in his eyes. His lungs expand. All he can feel in the moment is calm.

  “I’ll be right back,” Danny says with his mouth full, wiping a hand over his lips. “Need to make a quick call on his phone.”

  James finishes his food while Danny’s back inside the little shack, still not quite believing his dumb luck that he, of all the goddamn people on the planet, is
being given a private tour of a Hawaiian island by the champion of her waves—the man who made an entire Los Angeles beach hold their breath with fear and awe.

  Him, James Campbell, who was just lying in a fucking hospital bed four days ago because he’d turned his back to the sea like an absolute moron, and gotten knocked down onto some rocks like a little kid. Who looks ten years older than he is and moves with a tired ache in his limbs. Who should’ve died on a beach all the way across the world, or spent this whole day sitting around blankly in a Honolulu motel room, or been back at a dockyard loading shipping containers. He is the one to feel Danny Moore’s hand on his shoulder, warm and soft, asking if he’s ready to go.

  They step back into the Jeep and Danny pauses, fiddling with his keys. “I don’t mind dropping you back near the airport,” he says, voice slow.

  James hopes he’s not imagining the vague sense of “please say no” behind those words. He takes the leap. “Please don’t make me sit in a fucking motel room the rest of the day.”

  Danny’s face softens, a small grin on his lips. The sight of it makes James want to pump his fist. “You have a point. If you just moped around for the rest of the day, you’d be a real drag at the competition tomorrow. They’d never invite you back.”

  “Oh, sit on it. Just take me somewhere I can take a piss unless you want me to wreck your car.”

  “What are you, six?”

  “Give or take a few decades, yes. Now step on it.”

  “Let’s boogie, as the kids say?”

  “You are ‘the kids.’”

  Danny tilts his head in the now-familiar gesture of assent, and James smiles when he sees Danny’s driving them back in the direction of his house. The drive passes by in peaceful silence, only the wind roaring as it rushes through their hair.

  They park in the patch of grass by the house and walk down the shadowed lane together with ambling steps, Danny kicking a small rock ahead and doing soccer tricks with it with his sandaled feet. James thinks about joining in, but holds himself back. He pictures what his coworkers back at the docks would think if he did—watching him act half his age playing around in the middle of a paradise postcard. Watching him steal a hidden glance at the flex of muscle across Danny’s lower stomach when his shirt flies up.