The Sea Ain't Mine Alone

by C. L. Beaumont

  James stares at him, and Sydney couldn’t decipher the lines on James’ face if his life depended on it. The moment drags on, and Sydney starts to worry that he did something terribly wrong by taking it out of James’ shorts and pocketing it in his own. That somehow that action was akin to picking up the gun and shooting James himself.

  His palms sweat. He tries to wipe them silently on his boardshorts, but they noticeably rasp against the fabric. Finally James speaks, and his voice is thin and hoarse.

  “I think I’d rather know that you have it,” he says.

  Sydney places his palm over the bulge in his pocket and swallows over the sudden lump in his throat. He can only nod in response.

  They take a mutual breath and both reach for their respective door handles. Sydney feels his body change the instant he steps outside the car. Already his shoulders are back, chin higher, eyes itching to get behind their protective dark lenses. He leaves them off—just a few minutes longer. This continued desperation to hold on to his final seconds as Sydney Moore takes him by unwelcome surprise. He helps James unload his board and bag in silence, makes sure he has the water they packed and some food.

  “Take extra time stretching your left calf muscle,” Sydney says, breaking the thick silence as James shoulders his borrowed bag. “It looks tight.”

  James nods and picks up the board under his arm. He turns to leave. Sydney keeps talking.

  “And watch out for that rip current if your heat ends up starting after 9:30, it’ll make dropping in on any waves that are angled southwest impossible and you’ll get sucked backward into the bottom of the pipeline.”

  Again, James only nods. Sydney swallows over his rising internal panic. The desperate need to say something, anything, that will snap James out of this somber silence he’s fallen into—like a robot preparing for his doom of being taken apart by Sydney’s very hands.

  “Your strong suit is staying low and tight around the board. Your height, obviously. Plus your strength. You’ll be gouging into the face of the wave while Hamilton and Fu will just try to zoom out of the pipeline as soon as possible. Judges here love when you go deep and spend extra seconds inside the barrel, so try and use that to your advantage—”

  “Alright, mom, I get it. Thanks.”

  James’ tone is icy, and Sydney stops mid-word, mouth hanging open. He feels like he’s been slapped. A blush burns across his cheeks, and his fingertips tap against his sunglasses still hanging over the collar of his shirt, itching to pull them on.

  Of course James doesn’t need his help—doesn’t need Sydney rambling on about things he already damn well knows when he’s trying to calm himself and focus on the task ahead. For the first time in an achingly long time, Sydney remembers what it feels like to be a child scolded by the favorite parent. Except James Campbell has kissed him, man to man, and Sydney considers simply sticking his head down in the sand and never taking it out again. Not even when James wins.

  Sydney takes a step back from James and reaches for his sunglasses, taking one last look at the true golden color of James’ skin before slipping them on over his eyes and running a hand through his curls to smooth them. He sets his mouth in a firm line and steps aside wordlessly to let James go by, fists clenching at his sides.

  He looks away from James, out towards the end of the street, when James’ voice draws him back. He sounds tired and small. He hasn’t taken a single step away.

  “Sorry, I—Sydney, come on. Don’t be like that.”

  Sydney tries to resist—after all, he’s going to have to resist for the entire rest of the long day—but James Campbell just said his name twenty feet away from the Banzai shore, without a hint of hesitation or shame, so Sydney turns back to him. He leaves the sunglasses on.

  James sighs and looks up towards the clear, open sky. “I just . . . I—” he sighs again. “Shit, I feel like such a fucking idiot. I have no clue what the hell I’m doing.”

  Sydney frowns and takes a step forward. “Why do you say that? You know exactly what the hell you’re doing. You can read the waves. You’re a good surfer. Just trust yourself.”

  “No, I know, it’s not that. It’s . . .” He grimaces, hums with a low growl in his throat, and Sydney starts to wonder whether he should be preparing to duck another punch when James says, “I just wish that I could stay with you today. On the beach, between heats. While you’re off . . . being the reigning champion and I’m sitting alone shitting bricks. God, man, I wish that so fucking badly.”

  James’ face looks like he’s embarrassed to admit the words, and Sydney’s chest clenches, completely overwhelmed. Without a second thought, he reaches up and yanks the shades off his eyes, blinking against the harsh sunlight. He takes a quick look side to side on the little dirt road, then steps chest to chest with James, walking them a handful of steps backwards to be shielded by the Jeep.

  He slams his eyes shut, leans forward with a pounding heart, and brushes his lips against James’ forehead. The breath shakes from the tips of James’ open lips. Sydney smells the remnants of his own bar of soap along James’ hairline, takes a precious moment to breathe it in, and the loudest thing on earth is James’ swallow in the air between them.

  “Surf like hell, James Campbell,” he whispers into his skin, and then he does something absolutely insane, completely reckless, because they haven’t even fucked, haven’t rocked against each other just to get off and then yanked up pants while avoiding eyes. They haven’t said or done anything at all, just kissed, in front of a sunrise that it would be impossible not to want to look at with someone’s hand stroking your cheek. They haven’t and they aren’t and they don’t. It’s only been two hours.

  But still, Sydney kisses James softly just beneath his hairline—a single press of his dry lips.

  James sighs, long and slow, out through his nose. Sydney feels the tension seeping out from James’ body in front of him, feels the hot lines of nerves running rigid through his muscles somehow soften and relax.

  Without trying to give any sort of excuse for what he just did, Sydney forces himself to step back, trying to casually mask how stunned he is at his own daring. He shoulders his own bag, flicking back on his sunglasses and mentally preparing to enter the churning crowd. Beside him, James squares his shoulders, doing the same.

  They share one last look before James turns to walk down towards the beach alone, leaving Sydney behind by the Jeep. They’d discussed this—how they should arrive on the sand separately, careful minutes apart. The last thing they need—the last thing James needs—is a rumor flying around about why the hell he showed up with the reigning champion he embarrassingly defeated two weeks ago in LA. Not when he’s trying to focus. Not when he’s trying to win.

  When James is ten steps away, Sydney can’t help himself. Suddenly the sight of James walking away from him towards the thronging beach feels too final—like a goodbye he hadn’t even known was coming until it had already come and gone. A wild pulse shoots through his gut, the sudden need to open his mouth and call Jimmy Campbell “James” one last time that day.

  “James!” His voice cracks, but he can’t bring himself to care, and James jumps before looking back over his shoulder with a raised brow.

  “I’ll be there,” Sydney says to him, voice steady and low. He wills his body to remain still, trying to pour assurance out of every inch of his own nervous, shaking limbs.

  James’ answering grin is more beautiful than the entire blooming mountain at his back. It’s the same smile he’d given Sydney on the beach just after telling him about the war, only this time Sydney doesn’t feel the need to look away.

  Sydney shuffles his feet in his flip flops for another fifteen minutes by the car, perfectly imagining every step James must be going through down at the competition. He can see the beach clearly in his mind—the crowds lounging across the already blazing hot shore, the canopies of palm leaves, the sea of surfboards all stacked and standing in the sand, waiting to be waxed, the cliques of surfer
s from all over the world standing in huddles with their beards and their long hair and their girlfriends hanging at their sides.

  Sydney closes his eyes and remembers back to his nineteen-year-old self, hiding alone in the dense trees near the beach and waiting for his opportune moment to run out and steal a board and prove to everyone that they were all absolute novices at surfing the Banzai. That he was the only man on that beach who wasn’t just a sucker.

  He huffs now, remembering how unbelievably irritated he’d been watching the world’s so-called best pipeline surfers wipe out in wave after wave for getting stuck too deep in the barrel, or for failing to stick low and close to the face for fear they’d be pitched over—as if the entire point of surfing was not to get wet.

  He remembers the beautiful, soaring recklessness of that moment—when he’d taken a breath, and run full speed from his hiding place, and told everyone in his path that they were morons and to fuck out of the way and let him through. When he’d sensed the perfect set just on its way in from the horizon, tingling in his fingertips, and he’d known that he couldn’t miss it if he was gonna show everyone who was really the best at pipeline surfing.

  And he had been the best, hadn’t he? They’d mailed him the prize money (well, they’d mailed Chuck Hobbs the prize money, and Sydney had found it a week later taped to one of the trees near his house with a bill or two missing), and they’d given him an automatic spot on the pro circuit. They’d sent him the competition schedule for the rest of that summer and the next, and he’d placed in the top four at every major competition since.

  The realization of how easy it had all been makes him ashamed in retrospect, thinking back to James’ somber, determined face that morning. Thinking back to the look of sinking devastation on his face in Hermosa when Sydney had been just about to beat him in their round.

  A fiery, foolish part of him wants to run down to the beach and scream, “For God’s sake, please let James win. He almost fucking died protecting all of you, and he won’t tell any of you to fuck off, and he didn’t get caught with any photos in high school, so you have to let him win this. You don’t understand but you have to!”

  And then he remembers James’ terrifying face in the moonlight when he’d accused Sydney of losing on purpose, and suddenly that desire is replaced by the need to go down there and find James Campbell and scoop him up and carry him away from it all and back to Sydney’s home, back to the beach where no one will stare at the way his raised scar shows through his wet shirt.

  Shit, he’s never had so many ridiculous conflicting desires all at once in his whole life. He’s felt nothing but reckless for the past forty-eight hours. He could have let James Campbell walk away from him down the road and gone back to his peaceful solitude and his hammock and his music, and instead he’d called after him and practically begged him to come back to him the next day, like the world’s neediest travel agent. Like a total spaz. Like someone who had never experienced finding another person good looking before, forbidden or no.

  And he still doesn’t even know what came over him when he’d placed his hand on James’ chest there in the shallows and blurted out loud what he’d been thinking as James leapt from the cliff—you were brave—and he sure as hell hadn’t planned on reaching out and wrapping his arms around James’ body, holding him close against his own bare skin like he’d wanted to do when he was watching him change in secret behind the lifeguard tower, what feels like lifetimes ago.

  In fact, he has no idea who he even is anymore—this man who suddenly wishes he could be back at home with another human being instead of out surfing, clobbering the competition again and again. Doesn’t know if that man is Danny or Sydney or ‘the fag from Oahu’ or some version of himself he hasn’t even had a chance to meet yet. He’s not even that old, for God’s sake.

  And speaking of God, goddamn, he can still feel the ghosts of James’ hands on his skin from when they stood there in the evening waves. The way James clutched at his back and buried his face into his neck, letting the stubble on his cheek rasp against Sydney’s collarbone, being willingly held in his arms for the entire ocean to see.

  And then Sydney had looked at James in the soft, grey light that morning, and burned up with desperation at the need for James to know that he could win, and he’d heard James’ perfect lips forming the sounds of his name—his name—and he’d leaned forward and kissed him.

  And there, standing next to the Jeep alone and grinning like a total loony, Sydney realizes for the first time all day that he’d never actually leaned forward and kissed anyone before. That that part of his body had been left completely overlooked. Untouched.

  He brings his fist in front of his mouth to secretly touch his lips, as if they’d somehow feel different now, molded by James’ own. Then he coughs before pulling his shades back on and grabbing his bag.

  It’s time.

  He slicks back his curls and takes a deep breath, reminding himself what it feels like to be Danny Moore again, and then he quickly makes his way down to the buzzing shore, already starting to receive shocked stares the closer he gets to the beach.

  The first day of the Billabong Masters is never quite as insane as the Finals on Day Two. Sydney restrains himself from immediately searching for James in the smaller crowd once his feet finally reach the beach and he kicks his sandals off, leaving them in the middle of the sand. The Surf League guys are running cables to set up for the announcers’ stand, and the judges are starting to arrive—old surfing dudes with greying hair who work with typewriters and journal articles now instead of ankle straps and wax.

  Sydney wonders how far word’s spread that he isn’t going to be surfing. If it hasn’t, there’s going to be a stupid high-school gossip mill exploding in about two hours once everyone figures out he doesn’t have a board with him. If it has, that same high-school gossip mill is currently tearing itself to shreds wondering whether he injured himself, or had a mental breakdown, or is playing some big trick on everyone, or finally got arrested for one of the ridiculous activities he supposedly does when he’s not just being a stuck-up asshole. He tells himself ‘supposedly,’ as if the times he’s surfed in San Francisco and Australia don’t really count (or the activities he’s done once the surfing was over . . .).

  Oahu’s a small island, and surfing’s a small world. Sydney Moore’s not gonna kid himself by pretending he isn’t a topic of conversation, and a favorite one, at that. He has been for the last four years.

  He finds a spot in some shade at the base of a tree and sits to wait it out, trying to look as simultaneously intimidating and invisible as possible. He breathes in the sea air and tries to calm himself over the next couple hours, watching the beach slowly come even more to life—as the surfers begin warm-ups out in the waves, and the announcers start going over the day’s match-ups.

  He watches James stretch his left calf muscle over and over again. Keeps constantly searching for a golden blond head moving throughout the sea of tanned bodies and native Hawaiians, bobbing among the other surfers warming up in the massive swells. James looks tense. He can see it from a mile away. It takes all of Sydney’s willpower to stay where he is, to just let James be. The best thing he could possibly do for him at a surfing event in Oahu is stay as far away from him as possible. The raw truth of that hurts somewhere deep and unfamiliar in his chest.

  The first heat of the day is completely forgettable. All three surfers struggle to hold their ground against the sheer velocity of the Banzai waves, clearly all new to the terrain, and none of them make higher than a six on any of their three scored waves. It would make Sydney feel smugly victorious, if he wasn’t ready to throw up at the thought of James losing his nerve under the pressure.

  Fifteen minutes before James’ Wild Card heat is set to start, Sydney takes a deep breath, pushes off from his hiding spot, making his way down into the crowd with head held high.

  The inevitable happens. The crowd parts before him like Moses entering the Red Sea.
<
br />   Some are silent. One surfer Sydney’s never cared enough to try and recognize calls out, “Danny! Yo, Moore!” to no avail as he strides by. Last year’s rivals give him the reluctant but expected head nod. There’s a snicker, a “Well, look who the fuck finally decided to grace us all and show up,” and the fans who don’t know enough yet to know they should hate him gasp and plead with him to hear if it’s true he isn’t surfing the Masters. If he hurt himself, if he got sick of winning, if he’s embarrassed as hell about Hermosa. If an Undercover finally caught up with him in a stall. If he’s single.

  He stays silent.

  He makes his way to the far side of the judges’ area and finds a clear spot of sand to sit as close to the waves as possible. To be able to see James. He can feel the crowd hovering in a murmuring cloud at his back. He gives a silent, mental thank-you to the few locals who only know him as “the winner” who gave him soft applause and then went back to their lives.

  All of it, in the end, makes him feel prickly and sick. He knows exactly what they’re saying now that his back is turned—an exact copy of what they say to his face, and then some. And he can’t blame them, if he’s honest. Half of it probably pales in comparison to the way he’s insulted his fellow surfers’ abilities in years past in the sand. Those kooks deserved it, every word. But, still.

  Before, he used to find it all mildly amusing—the various rumors people came up with, the stares, or the new complaints they had about his surfing or his personality or his tattoo or whatever the hell else people decided to take issue with as his reputation grew.

  “If only our champion wasn’t a miserable asshole.” “If only our champion didn’t think he was God’s gift to surfing and actually knew how to make friends.” “If only our champion wasn’t such a fag.”