The Sea Ain't Mine Alone

by C. L. Beaumont

  But now, as he quietly follows James through the lane leading down to his house, dipping his head to duck under the lower tree branches and watching James grow visibly more at ease with each step they take closer to Sydney’s beach . . . Now he realizes that they would never have had that breathless, laughing, celebratory evening in each other’s arms, consuming each other and devouring strips of bare skin and calling each other the Billabong Pipeline Masters Champion.

  Because James has a plane flight tomorrow. And James feels as if nothing has changed.

  And suddenly Sydney realizes he still doesn’t even know if James is staying with him tonight, or if he’s expecting him to drive him back to his hotel by the airport once he grabs the rest of his things.

  He follows James on shaking legs as James passes by the house and instead walks straight across the sand towards the water, gazing out at the sun spilling its evening warmth across the rippling glass sea.

  “You’d think I’d be sick of it by now. Watching the waves,” James says out to the water.

  Sydney comes up behind him and hesitantly places his hands on James’ shoulders. Immediately, James falls back into the touch, letting Sydney pull him close into his body and wrap his arms tightly around his chest, cheek resting in the salt-dried locks of hair.

  “I never do,” he replies. He’s surprised his voice comes out as normal as it does with all the knots in his stomach.

  James hums, and Sydney holds his tired muscles in his arms, willing his racing heartbeat against James’ back not to give his emotions away.

  He feels his lips moving before he even makes a conscious decision to speak.

  “Stay with me, James. Stay for tonight. Please.”

  Sydney shuts his eyes tight as he feels James’ breath shudder through his body. James makes a wet sound just at the back of his throat as his hand comes up to grip Sydney’s forearm, and his head finally nods against Sydney’s chest.

  His voice is choked and rough. “Okay. Yes.”

  19

  James wakes up all at once. The room beyond his cocoon of warm blankets is stormy and grey, fogged in by an overcast pre-dawn sky and the thick mist rolling off the humming surface of the ocean.

  He squints through the half light at the ceiling and tries to piece together the night before, like flitting through photographs in an album from an old shelf. He remembers Sydney holding him on the beach for a long time—long enough that James had almost fallen asleep standing up—and he remembers leaning back into those warm arms while the sun dropped slowly over the waves.

  He remembers Sydney silently taking his hand, and leading him up to the porch, and plopping him in a chair, putting a bowl of some sort of food in his hands. He remembers feeling wholly, achingly tired, every muscle in his body stiff and sore and begging to be allowed to just melt.

  And that’s when James remembers why his muscles had been so tired and stiff and sore. Because he won the fucking Billabong.

  He won the 1976 Billabong Pipeline Masters yesterday.

  He’d stood on the beach with the lei of flowers around his neck, and reporters in his face, and an entire shoreline of people applauding the way he’d surfed. They’d announced him as the champion, ‘Jimmy Campbell’ echoing across the sand. They’d taken his picture, shaken his hand.

  And yet apparently the first thing that pops into his mind the moment he becomes conscious in a soft bed is standing on the cool shore with the warmth of Sydney Moore behind him, running his fingers up and down James’ arms before asking him, begging him to stay.

  James remembers those words a thousand times better than the words the judges said to him when they presented him with the championship lei.

  And then James realizes with a sinking thud of dread that the last thing he even remembers from last night is him gradually drifting off to sleep on that chair out on the porch. And the last thing he’d seen had been Sydney leaning back in his chair with his bare feet propped up on the banisters, softly plucking at the ukulele in his hands. Sydney letting James drift off to sleep next to him as if they did this every evening—as if James hadn’t just won one of the world’s largest surfing competitions and claimed Sydney’s reigning title just hours before. Like they didn’t only have one last night together before James has to leave, and like Sydney hadn’t begged him to spend that night with him in his home, in his bed.

  James stretches out his legs and remembers he’s naked under the sheets, skin dry and scratchy since he never took a shower the night before. He can see what must have happened in his mind like a film—how Sydney must have somehow gotten him from the porch into his room, and must have laid James down on the mattress and carefully taken off his sand-covered clothes, and pulled the sheets up over him so he could rest. How he must have lain there next to James wishing he was awake—wishing they were still out chatting on the porch, or holding each other close, or laughing on top of each other in bed calling each other the Billabong Champion in between breathless kisses. In between desperate, hungry kisses.

  He finally turns his head to look at Sydney’s sleeping form and instead sees two pale blue eyes staring back at him, clear and open and fixed on James’ face.

  “I didn’t mind,” Sydney whispers with a raspy voice.

  An ache twists in James’ chest; Sydney’s eyes hurt to look at. “How did you know what I was thinking?” he whispers.

  “You show your thoughts on your face.” Sydney shrugs one shoulder. “Sometimes, at least.”

  James turns onto his side, his entire world shrinking down to the three inches of space between Sydney’s eyes and his in the semi-darkness.

  “And you can read my face that well, can you?”

  Sydney hums. “You tell me.”

  James tries for a smile, but his eyes sag at the effort. He hears the seconds ticking by in the air like bombs dropping, each one pushing him further and further away from Sydney’s air. Sydney is looking at him as if he could memorize every inch of James’ face if he only stared hard enough, eyes roaming slowly from his forehead to his chin and back again, eyebrows furrowed in concentration behind a curtain of morning-soft curls.

  James knows, with a terrible sense of foreboding through his core, that if he reaches out and touches Sydney now it will only feel like an electric shock, a heated pulse of aching need that would surge through his body from his fingertips, crippling his lungs. He keeps his arms tight against his own body, cramped in the tiny space between their warm, naked skin.

  He licks his dry, chapped lips. “About last night . . . Look, I’m—I’m sorry that I fell asleep . . . that we couldn’t—”

  His throat closes up, and the words catch on his tongue. He’s not even sure what he would even be apologizing for. For falling asleep last night before they could do anything together, or for keeping his plane ticket, or for stealing Sydney’s title from him, or for even trying to talk to him in the first place that day out on the waves off Hermosa. Or for all of it at once and then some.

  But Sydney’s face crumples at James’ cut-off words, shattering into tiny broken pieces. He barely gets out a hoarse whisper of James’ name before James is reaching out towards him through the grey light and pulling him towards his body, tucking Sydney’s head under his chin. Heated pulse of aching need be damned.

  James grips him so fiercely he can feel Sydney’s bones creak in his arms. Sydney lets out a choked noise and shivers against his chest, clinging to every inch of James’ bare skin under the sheets, digging his nails hard enough into James’ back and shoulders to leave a mark.

  And James wishes Sydney’s fingernails actually would pierce his skin and leave their mark. That they would draw blood and scar. His own version of the tattoo that rests warm and soft on Sydney’s back beneath his palms, infinitely more beautiful than the mark blasted into James’ own rough skin.

  And Sydney is so small all of a sudden in his arms. His skin fragile and smooth. His muscles quiet and lean. And James wants to cover him forever with his own body
, protecting him from the storm swirling outside their fogged-up windows, from every other set of eyes on earth, from the force of the waves . . .

  “Goddammit,” James chokes out. He buries his face face in Sydney’s curls as Sydney gives a moan in muffled response.

  The air grows damp and thick. James grounds himself in the warm, heavy weight of their limbs wrapped around each other, skin to skin. Feels Sydney’s soft penis pressed into his thigh, bared and unashamed. The soft hair on his calves and thighs trailing along James’ legs.

  For one piercingly clear second, he wonders what the rest of the surfers—what Rob and his friends, what Russell and O’Brien—would think if they suddenly walked in on them now. Two grown men, two of their own kind, clinging to each other naked and trying not to cry in the dark. It’s hard to believe that those other people even exist—that this embrace between them is something that’s occurring in the same universe as everyone else’s life. That it’s something that could even be discovered or known.

  Then Sydney looks up at James with wet cheeks, and touches the side of James’ face so gently James barely feels his palm at all, and he leans up to place the softest ghost of a kiss on James’ mouth. His lips tremble, and Sydney’s thumb swipes once across his closed eyelid. They both hold their breath.

  The other surfers in James’ mind immediately disappear. He gives in to the kiss, the caress of Sydney’s lips across his mouth, desperate in its timid, gentle touch. James quivers and responds to Sydney’s body, pulling him close by the small of his back, knowing that if he gives in and does what he really wants—presses Sydney back into the mattress and tastes every inch of his skin—that no force on earth would ever be able to pry him off.

  Sydney is still planting chaste kisses on his mouth, small and soft and wet, never-ending, when suddenly his alarm clock goes off, exploding in the velvet grey air and cutting through their sleepy fog. Sydney lets it ring and lifts his head to kiss James’ cheek where it meets his nose, holding his lips against his skin for the span of three shallow breaths. Then he pulls back and turns over to shut off the alarm, the smell of coffee already drifting to them on the ocean breeze flooding through the house.

  James’ heart pounds. He’s frozen—lips locked into the last position they’d been in when Sydney had pressed his tender mouth to his.

  That kiss had felt an awful lot like a goodbye.

  Sydney stretches his limbs before abruptly sitting up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed to stand. “Let’s go then, soldier,” he says, as if he hadn’t just clung to James in the darkness and left a sheen of tears across the scar on his chest.

  James wants to grip his arm and yank him back into bed. Fear runs through his body like thick ice as Sydney stands without looking back at him, spine straight and rigid. It’s too soon for all of this, for everything. It’s far too soon.

  James turns his nose into the sheets and frantically gulps down one more deep breath, memorizing the combined scent of their skin, the hints of Sydney’s shampoo, then he heaves himself from the mattress while Sydney already paces about the room, gathering James’ things.

  “Should take a shower. Don’t want to smell like seaweed on the plane,” Sydney says steadily, tossing James a towel he barely catches in time.

  James shakes his head to try and fully wake up, pushing down the panic in his chest as he watches Sydney slowly transform into the man he’d been the morning James had met him to go out and see the island. Three days and three lifetimes ago.

  “Right,” he mutters. He catches the clothes Sydney tosses him, the ones that are actually his. The reason behind why he’s had to borrow Sydney’s clothes for days suddenly slaps him in the face, and he groans up at the ceiling. “Shit, I wonder if the hotel even kept my stuff. It’s been three days . . . I didn’t even think about it.”

  “No need. It’s taken care of—they’re holding your stuff for you.”

  James stops mid-crouch to pick up a sock. Both of them are still naked. “What?”

  Sydney walks out into the living room, talking louder so that James can hear, voice crisp and businesslike in complete odds with the lazy ocean and palm trees right outside. “I made two calls that day when we were eating lunch. First one was to the WSL about your entry, and the second was to your hotel.”

  “What the—” James stumbles out into the main room of the house, awkwardly holding his bundle of clothes in front of his crotch as if anyone could see him through the wide-open windows.

  Sydney stands tall and proud in the kitchen, pouring out a cup of steaming coffee with his back towards James. The silhouette of his bare, inked skin against the foaming grey sea through the window makes James want to gasp out loud at the piercing beauty.

  Instead, he grips the bundle of clothes tighter and plants his feet on the hardwood. “How did you even know what hotel I was staying at?”

  Sydney turns towards him as he takes a sip of coffee, frowning down at James’ attempt to cover himself. “James, don’t be ridiculous. You know there’s nobody around here to see.”

  James does know. He had sex right right there out under the stars on that beach, and still he holds his clothes firmly in front of him with both hands. A fiery hot madness starts to churn deep down in his gut. The blinding need to grab something made of glass and break it.

  “That’s not—seriously, how did you know the hotel? And that I would stay here? We hadn’t even done . . . you know. We hadn’t even said I was staying here,” he says.

  Sydney fixes him with a look. “Well I wasn’t wrong, was I? Why does that matter?”

  “Why does that—of course it matters, Sydney!” James huffs as fights for his shoulders not to tense and hunch. “You can’t just—how did you know?”

  Sydney sighs like James is the most exasperating person he’s ever met in his life. Maybe he is.

  “James, it says the name of your hotel on your room key, which was in your shorts pocket that day with the tag hanging out most of the time. Even an idiot could have put two and two together.”

  James refuses to feel embarrassed, and in its place, indignation quickly bubbles up from his chest. He feels like an actor in a film, where everyone knows the script but him, and he simply woke up and found himself in the middle of a film set, harsh lights and painted backgrounds and all. He can practically hear the shower calling to him at his back, begging him to get in and get clean so he can pack up his stuff and just leave already.

  He stares Sydney down. “Ok fine, I guess I’m an idiot. But that doesn’t explain how—” James flutters his hand uselessly out towards the sand. “How you knew—”

  “I didn’t know. I saw that you were enjoying yourself, and you clearly didn’t want to go back to your hotel, and I have a couch. You hadn’t even thought of your hotel room that whole day. I figured I’d help you out.”

  “By calling and cancelling my own damn hotel room for me? Without even asking me?”

  “I didn’t cancel it, for God’s sake. I paid them to hold onto it and keep your stuff together until today.”

  “Oh, so now you’re paying for stuff for me, huh?” James hisses. “What, did you pay them to let me back in the competition too?”

  Sydney rolls his eyes. “Aw, come on. Don’t say shit like that you don’t even believe. It’s such a waste of time.”

  “Right, yeah,” James says, and the words taste bitter as they leave his tongue. “Wouldn’t want to waste anymore of your valuable time.”

  “That’s not what I—”

  Sydney cuts himself short, then wipes the surprise off his face and fixes James with one last icy glare. He shakes his head as he starts to turn back to the window, shutting James out as if his back is an unbreachable wall.

  James stands there stranded in the middle of the floor, panicked and hot as he fights against the urge to sprint towards Sydney—to cling to his back so he won’t be alone in the room.

  Instead he practically growls, then grips his toes into the hardwood. “Oh no you do
n’t. No you fucking don’t.”

  Sydney whips back around, eyes blazing. “Don’t what? Don’t look out the window of my own house? Don’t help you out? Don’t breathe?”

  “No, you dick, don’t turn away and go all ‘Danny Moore’ on me when I’m trying to talk to you—”

  “You’re not trying to talk to me. You’re trying to tie up all your loose ends before you have a flight to catch—”

  “Don’t turn your back to me and pour your fucking coffee like you didn’t just lie there crying in my arms!”

  Sydney freezes, coffee mug half raised to his mouth. He looks dangerous, and James swallows down a wave of bile in his throat.

  “You say I’m ‘going all Danny Moore’ on you?” Sydney says, in a voice that would sound fragile and small if not for the terrifyingly sharp lines of his shoulders. “I didn’t ‘go all Danny Moore’ on you, James. I am Danny Moore. You’ve been living with him for three whole days, or did you forget?”

  “The hell you’re Danny Moore!” James gulps down air as his legs shake, cold and exposed in the thin breeze. “Don’t fucking lie to me like that.”

  Sydney glares at him, eyes glinting. He says nothing, then takes a slow sip from the mug in his hands, eyes boring into James and daring him to say something more.

  James almost laughs. The silver light reflecting off the ocean covers Sydney’s skin in gold like a glittering stone. The sight of him, statuesque and beautiful in the dim light of his kitchen, completely unashamed of his naked skin, fills James with sudden nausea—that, and wild anger.

  “So what,” he says, as if they weren’t just yelling. “You’re just gonna stand there drinking coffee and waiting for me to take my shower and leave like we haven’t been fucking all weekend?”