James doesn’t know enough vocabulary words to describe the sharp emotions rushing through him. Doesn’t have enough space inside himself to contain them.
Sydney’s thumbs dig deep into the muscles in James’ shoulder, rubbing out the dull soreness from the day. James can feel every second of surfing he did aching through his body, from his neck all the way down to his ankles and toes. He’s completely spent and limp, body still rising and falling beneath his skin in tune with the bob of the waves.
He feels Sydney’s cheek rest against the side of his head, nuzzling gently into him as he slowly, patiently works out the tension in James’ shoulder. James leans into the touch. There’s a safety in the warmth coming from Sydney’s skin. Safety, and also danger, whispering against his back as he stands right on the vast, unknown precipice of something. Toes itching to jump.
And Sydney lifts his cheek, and presses his lips firmly into James’ hair while his palm strokes warm feeling into the raised scar on James’ skin without hesitation, and that’s when James feels himself start to cry.
He’s silent. Stunned. His chest clenches on his breath, and he shudders through his core, and the tears slide gently down his cheeks, leaving cool trails in the evening breeze. They drip down onto his collarbone, pooling in the hollow of his throat. The churning emotions that had been slowly piling up inside him since first setting foot onto Hawaii—hell, since first opening his eyes in the shallows to see two terrified blue ones staring down at him—suddenly spill over inside of him, pouring shivering streaks down his face.
He sees Sydney from earlier that day in his memory—standing apart from the crowd on the beach, looking radiant and beautiful and strong. Sees the way Sydney’s face was threatening to break and crumble just after James surfaced from the water, gasping for breath and desperately scanning the shore for a head of curls before he could even think to be thankful for being alive. He thinks of that moment—bobbing alone in the water and gulping down air and realizing that he absolutely had to paddle back out and catch the next possible wave. To prove to himself that he still could. To prove that he had the courage to jump off the cliff. Straight into Sydney’s arms.
He remembers lifeless black eyes covered by long wet hair, lying frozen still on the floor of a red and steaming jungle, pumping out gurgling blood into the screaming void. Remembers the terrifying, sharp, nauseating fear that had coursed through his body two seconds after the world had exploded through his very chest. The feeling of his numb lips moaning out the word “mom” into the shattering gunfire, hoping that maybe, now that he was drifting between the worlds themselves, she could finally hear him again.
James realizes, sitting there with Sydney’s hands on his skin, tear tracks on his face, that he’s furious—furious at everything and himself. Angry that he doesn’t have the strength in this moment to sit up on his own away from the support of Sydney’s body behind him. To let himself be darkness and fear all on his own without contaminating the radiating sun of a man holding him up.
He’s angry that his mom wasn’t there to kiss him on the cheek when he first stepped onto the gleaming boat. That he was thinking of Billy Madden’s hands when Lisa Kerny trailed her fingernails across his skin in the sunset tidepools. That the ocean that keeps him alive just by letting him ride her waves is the same one that pushes him back, back, back to the shore—back to existing and breathing and working, eyes open eyes shut, when he just wants to keep swimming out to the horizon and finally rest.
Angry that he’s too young to be this tired.
And on top of all of this, he apparently can’t be a normal person and sit and appreciate a fucking beautiful sunset, with a fucking beautiful man holding him, without falling apart and cracking into pieces like someone who belongs in an asylum for the vets who’ve lost it. Angry that he can even sit there and think of a man as beautiful in the first place.
He wants to tell the universe to just give up and lock him away since he doesn’t have the decency to appreciate a good thing when he sees it. To banish him into the black since he can’t laugh and pump his fist and overflow with joy that he’s surfing in his dream competition tomorrow. That the best surfer on the whole damn island somehow believes that he won’t embarrass himself. Somehow sees something in him to believe in.
And here he is crying instead like a child. In a kid’s arms.
No, not a kid. A man. A man with a deep voice and stomach muscles and thick hair and—
Sydney’s fingers are running through his hair. James has absolutely no idea how long they’ve been doing that. They card through the saltwater-stained strands slowly, gently, and then Sydney reaches around and wipes his thumb across the wetness on James’ cheek, without saying a word.
His long, strong arms surround him, softly pressing him into his body in a way that makes James wonder if he’ll ever physically be able to let go. For a startlingly fierce moment, James wants to escape, to break free from Sydney’s hold and run out into the ocean and finish what he meant to do years ago. To let himself finally be one with the sea.
Then he hears Sydney’s voice in his head, or maybe it’s somewhere in his chest, or maybe it’s out loud over the steady thrash of the sea.
“I’m here, James. I’m here.”
For the first time since he wrote a letter to Helen Campbell on a Navy ship in the middle of the ocean, James allows himself to actually cry. Sydney pulls him closer into himself and holds him steady as James’ chest heaves on choked breaths, and his hands come up to cover his eyes. He curls himself tight into a ball, willing his bones to disappear. Letting Sydney’s bones take over.
James isn’t sure how long they sit there. Sydney doesn’t move a muscle behind him—doesn’t shift or fidget or tense. He swallows down the sea breeze, opens his throat and mouth, and presses his spine back into a warm chest.
When James can finally take a full breath again without making a strained noise, he almost laughs. His lungs feel one hundred pounds lighter in his chest. It’s the same sensation from when he’d hovered weightlessly in the air, right after leaping off the cliff into the gentle, steady blue, Sydney’s eyes tracking him as he flew.
He knows somewhere deep in the pit of his soul that he doesn’t need to tell Sydney a single reason behind what just happened. He tells himself he doesn’t have to pretend that there aren’t any tears still on his face, or that Sydney didn’t just physically hold him as he broke apart, or that Sydney’s hands weren’t caressing the ugliest part of his skin like it was the petals of a beautiful, fragile bloom.
Sydney’s arms are still wrapped around his waist, and James lets his head rest back onto his shoulder as they look out over the heavy sunset still slowly streaking its way across the sky. It feels impossible that he’s only known this man behind him for two weeks, and that he’s spent probably half of that time being a combination of intimidated by and infuriated with him.
James muses as he lies back against Sydney’s chest, and their breathing starts to align, that he could probably spend the rest of his life naming emotions and still never name each one he’s experienced since the moment he first locked eyes with Sydney Moore on a pier.
But James knows now. He knows Danny Moore, and he knows Sydney Moore, and he knows. The same way Sydney had looked at him on a moonlit beach and told him how he knew he’d been in the war. James can’t imagine now how he’s ever spent a sunset in his life apart from Sydney. Sydney who feels like the vitality of life itself effortlessly holding him up and out of blackest depths of the sea.
After a while, James pulls forward out of Sydney’s reach and turns to look at him on the blanket. He tries to stop himself from feeling hotly embarrassed that his eyes must be puffy and red.
Sydney holds his gaze for a long moment, then smiles. Smiles. Like there’s something in James’ swollen, wet eyes that’s pleasant for him to see. James sniffs and wipes his face one last time before breathing out the last bit of tension from his chest. He waits for the moment to feel uncomfortable, s
itting silently alone together while James clears his stuffed-up nose.
It doesn’t.
“Here, let me return the favor,” he finally says, looking down at the blanket for Sydney to lie down.
Sydney smirks. “I don’t really have anything I feel the need to cry about right now, but thank you.”
James huffs as a strange warmth bubbles over in his chest. “Not that, you asshole. Lie down and I’ll get your back.”
Sydney looks steadily into his eyes. An odd look crosses over his face for one brief, fleeting second. A slight quiver of uncertainty. And then he gives a tiny, crooked grin—one that James notices doesn’t quite reach his eyes—before turning onto his stomach on the blanket, settling down into the sand.
James has never seen the tattoo this up close before without moving, and he drinks it in, taking advantage of the last rays of the red sun still streaking the sky. The ink forming the body and tendrils of the jellyfish swirls in delicate, fluttering black lines across the smooth skin of his back, gliding over muscles and dripping down his spine. The detail is miniscule and sharp, unlike anything he’s ever seen. James sucks in a deep breath and holds it, somehow reluctant to blow his exhale out across Sydney’s bare skin, then leans in closer to get a better look.
Sydney instantly tenses up beneath him the moment James draws closer, and James realizes from the tense lines of his shoulders that he’s nervous. James bites his lips as a wave of sadness washes over him. He honestly doesn’t blame Sydney one bit for tensing up at the feeling of someone looming so closely over the lines on his back, seeing every intimate detail of the history inked onto his skin.
In a rush, he remembers the shit he heard all day at the competition about ‘Danny Moore’ from the other surfers as he tried to focus on the waves—the tattoo just one thing on a list of his sins. The faceless memories make James feel nauseous, hair prickling on the back of his neck as if the memories themselves have populated the empty beach behind them. He wants to shut his eyes tight and force out the memory of those words, get on with the simple back rub like he promised—return the favor.
Then he looks at Sydney’s back, still lying deadly frozen beneath him. Even his ribs aren’t moving, chest clenched waiting for James’ reaction.
James keeps his eyes open, then licks his lips and warms his palms with his breath before placing them down squarely on Sydney’s shoulder blades, anchoring him down into the earth.
“This is pretty beautiful, you know,” he whispers.
To his relief, Sydney immediately relaxes beneath him, and James begins to run his palms up and down the length of Sydney’s back. He presses deep into the skin, gliding smoothly from the tops of his shoulders down to the divots above the backs of his hips. The tattoo stares back at him, forcing him to remember that this is a man’s back, Sydney’s back, the man he’s kissed’s back. James gathers the new lightness in his chest, his eyes still stinging and red at the corners, and he stares right back, watching his own hands trace the tan skin.
Then Sydney just barely arches his spine, pressing his hips down into the earth and his back up against James’ palms. Deep in his rough throat, Sydney sighs.
It’s the most erotic thing James has ever heard.
Sydney’s marked skin slowly undulates beneath his hands, rocking to the rhythm of his touch, seeking more pressure between James’ shaking fingers and the sand. James doesn’t even stop to think as he lifts a leg to straddle over Sydney’s hips, sinking down onto the solid warmth of his body beneath him. Sydney shivers as James lightens the touch of his fingers and picks up the trail of one of the tentacles etched into his back, following it slowly down his trembling skin.
“Tell me about this,” James says. “The story.”
He continues tracing and following the lines of the tattoo, leaving shivers in the wake of his fingers, as Sydney takes a deep breath in and huffs out a gentle laugh.
“I don’t think anyone’s ever asked me before,” he says back, voice low and muffled by the blanket. He pauses for a long moment, arching his spine up into the pressure of James’ hands, then goes on.
“You’re probably wondering by now how everyone knows I’m gay if that bathroom story isn’t true.”
James sucks in a breath and freezes. It sounds obscene to hear that sentence fall from his mouth so casually. So carelessly. A bomb dropped nonchalantly onto the cool, peaceful sand.
I’m gay.
Sydney turns his neck and peeks one eye up at James when he doesn’t respond.
“You can’t tell me you didn’t realize that part was true,” he says, brow furrowed. His eyes glance down to James’ thigh across Sydney’s lower back, and he raises his brows in a silent question.
James is suddenly acutely aware of the fact that he is indeed straddling the top of Sydney’s ass between his thighs. That he’d grabbed Sydney by the neck and pulled his mouth to his in broad daylight by the Jeep not five hours ago. He stops himself just in time from flinging himself off Sydney’s body into the sand.
“No, I—” He clears his throat. “I knew, I guess . . . Just never heard anyone say it out loud like that before.”
Sydney hums. James thinks he’s going to go on with the story of the tattoo. He waits with impatience, sweating under his arms, hot prickles on his cheeks.
Instead, Sydney says, simply, “You’re gay, too.”
The air slams into James’ skin. His body prepares to flee, ready to tense up hot and defend and deny and refute. Ready to fight and run. Scream.
But then James hears himself say back, in the smallest whisper, “I know.”
Sydney relaxes beneath him once more, and James’ fingers resume their path along the lines of the tattoo. The air tingles, and James finds himself unable to draw in a full breath.
He feels like a completely new person in the wake of this admission, as if the shape of his mouth has been forever molded and changed by the words. He also feels exactly the same.
He drinks in the words when Sydney goes on, desperate for a distraction.
“When I was fourteen,” Sydney says into the blanket, “I was in this little record store near the Pearl Harbor base where we were living. Trying to kill time before I had to go be home for dinner or something. Guy who ran it had this little counter in the back of the store with . . . magazines. You know what I’m saying. I saw this photo and I—I had to have it. He sold it to me for a penny. Now I think about it he must have been a queer, too. Maybe took pity on me or something, just wanted me to have it.”
James can’t help himself. “What was the photo?”
He watches with wide eyes as a blush forms along the top of Sydney’s neck and back, blooming across his skin as James continues to run his fingertips over the inked lines.
Sydney swallows thickly. “It was of a sailor.”
“Like a Navy ID? A portrait?”
“No, James. A sailor.”
James feels his own face flush bright red. He clears his throat and subtly shifts his position sitting across Sydney’s hips, suddenly feeling a bit warm and heavy in his own gut.
“Right. Go on.”
“Well, surprise surprise, I was fourteen and an idiot.”
“That admission must pain you.”
“You’re hilarious. I kept it in my private notebook—this one I used for notes I took reading other textbooks after school. Didn’t want my brother to find it because we shared a room. But then some of my stuff got taken—was only about two fucking weeks after I bought the damn thing. The wrong kid saw the photo and . . . Oahu’s a small island.”
James realizes his hands have grown still, resting firmly just under Sydney’s neck and fanning across his shoulders. He picks up rubbing his back again, letting him know he’s still listening. His ears tingle in the clear, salty air at the sound of Sydney’s voice, vibrating up from his chest against James’ palms.
His own heart pounds, anxiety churning as if he himself had been caught out in the high school halls—the worst nightmare he
used to think about in the middle of the night when he woke up in a cold sweat with damp warmth between his thighs, the wrong face having been the one touching him in his dreams.
Sydney continues, seemingly unaware of James’ trailing thoughts. “Word got to my father at work on the base pretty fast. You already know about all the church stuff, so you can imagine . . . Day I turned fifteen, I was coming home from being at the beach really early in the morning and all my stuff was in a bag on the front steps waiting for me.”
“He kicked you out?”
Sydney hums. James’ heart races in his chest, and a sickening feeling tightens his throat. He has a million questions. He chooses the least important one.
“Why were you on the beach so early? Surfing?”
To his surprise, Sydney smiles warm and soft, tinged with sadness and longing. James catches it on the corner of Sydney’s lips not pressed into the blanket. “Actually, it was the first day I ever tried to surf.”
“You didn’t surf ‘til you were fifteen?”
“I told you I taught myself, didn’t I? Can’t well do that if I’m still in diapers.”
“I wouldn’t put that past you, of all people.”
“Your faith in me is heartwarming,” Sydney says with a smirk, but when James opens his mouth to joke back, he finds he can’t find the words.
Sydney’s words hover over them on the beach, not fading away. They mix with the last golden rays of sunset still floating through the cooling air. The raw truth of them burns in James’ chest, aching to be let free.
James licks his lips, then rubs his hands up over Sydney’s back, across his neck, through his hair and down across the dip in the low of his back. His silence will have to be answer enough. Then he remembers why this conversation even started in the first place, and jumps at the chance to say something else.
The Sea Ain't Mine Alone Page 23