One hundred and thirty-eight hours now, as he braces himself against the wind and spray and tracks the current of the waves by the light of the graying stars, memorizing their rises and falls, completing the tables and formulas in his head that will help him pick the largest wave tomorrow at the competition.
He knows that to whoever the hell is watching over them all from above, this is what he was born to do. Or at least, meant to do ever since he picked up that sharpened red crayon and opened the stiff pages of an outdated, water-damaged textbook. He looks out at the ocean and sees her secrets hovering over the waters. Sees her currents and forces, the whispers of her underbelly and the pull of the tides.
It used to thrill him—that mental spark of muscle and adrenaline and physics coalescing into one bursting firework of action when he threw his board down into the towering waves. The possibility of winning in a challenge of man versus nature.
And then James fucking Campbell had gone and poured his emotions over the surface of the ocean, drowning Sydney’s perfect calculations into the chaos of the whitewater and leaving him instead with the loneliness that comes from standing at the edge of the world just before dawn. Leaving him with an echo of his momma’s voice singing prayers in his head that hasn’t stopped since the moment he’d looked out at the sea with James Campbell no longer beside him. Five days and five centuries ago.
He feels as if he’s really floating above in the darkened clouds, watching himself down below on the shore. And what a horrifying sight he is . . .
Sydney grits his teeth, growling at the empty air, stunned and indignant and repulsed that he’s been stripped down to such a sorry state—that the man he’s known himself to be since he was fifteen was really all just a façade, easily blown away by the breath from James’ mouth when he’d first parted his lips and said, “We actually haven’t met, yet. My name’s Jimmy.”
It’s all just a little bit ironic, he thinks, in a way that seen in any other person’s life would have made Sydney roll his eyes and scoff, throw up his hands and mutter, “Of course! What the hell did you expect?”
Because here he is staring at the surface of the water, stripping bare her secrets and forces hidden beneath. All the while scoffing at the other surfers who only ever bothered to notice the height of the waves, maybe their basic shape or speed. And apparently he’d forgotten all this damn time to apply the same logic to himself.
And James Campbell had taken one look at him barreling across the sand with his head held high, aviators over his eyes, and seen straight down to the seafloor of Sydney’s soul. James had taken shelter there, and kissed it gently with his soft, salty lips, and then calmly stepped onto a plane with a bullet-free pocket and a championship title to his name. Trophy tucked away in his bag.
Sydney wants desperately to stand there in the darkness and lie to himself like this—tell himself that James is living perfectly fine without him over there in Los Angeles. Probably tired of having a stuck-up kid hanging around him all the time, especially a kid that everyone agrees with no contest is a complete pain in the ass. He wants to pity himself standing alone and morose on the beach, trying to smell James Campbell’s skin in the sweatshirt he’d worn for only a day.
The day he’d won and walked back to the Jeep and thrown himself into Sydney’s arms, kissed his mouth, leaned his weight against his skin . . .
No. James Campbell is doing exactly what he’s meant to be doing in Los Angeles. He’s moving on and up. Thanks, Sydney, for the hints at the Billabong. You’ve been a real help. Don’t be a stranger at the next competition on the pro circuit.
But then he sees James’ face in his mind like a haunting ghost—the broken, shattered, desperate way he’d stood there naked and trembling in Sydney’s home, right before rushing to his side to hold him together with his bare hands. The way the lines around James’ mouth had deepened when he whispered his name before walking away into the airport.
And Sydney knows he can’t lie to himself and say that he’s the only one affected—that he’s the only one who wanted James to stay.
Somehow that makes James getting on that plane feel even worse.
Sydney waits for one last swell to come in, noting the composition of the wave and adding it to the mental catalog he’s been building during similar vigils and practice runs all week. Now more than ever he knows he needs to surrender himself to the giant pillars of water crashing down into the unsuspecting shallows. He needs to pick up his board in his steady hands tomorrow, and sprint out towards the uncertain horizon without looking back, and let the earth hold his life in her palms—man versus sea.
He needs to prove to himself that there is something higher at play than waiting on a moonlit beach for James Campbell’s arms to come up behind him and kiss the back of his neck in a ghostly embrace.
He watches the rushing spray and foam settle back into the earth after the crash of the wave, the water fizzling down into the wet sand like tiny fireworks exploding across the sky. Then he holds the hair back from his eyes against the wind, tucks his nose down into the neck of the sweatshirt, and makes his way back to his Jeep, legs stiff and sore from a long night of standing watch.
He’ll conquer the tallest waves on earth tomorrow. Gut strong and hands steady and neck held high, flinging himself down into the spray from the heavens, fighting against the great heaving force of the water and foam.
He’ll do it whether James Campbell’s deep blue eyes are seeking him out on the sand or not.
And he knows that they won’t be. They definitely, unequivocally won’t.
~
On the drive back home along the winding beachside road, Sydney blinks out of his aimless, boring thoughts to the sudden, intense desire to just grip the wheel and swerve his car off the dirt road towards the trees, wanting to hear James curse and panic next to him. Wanting to hear him laugh (well, mostly curse).
His fingers grip the wheel hard and he starts to do it—drive like a maniac in an action film who’s gotta save the girl before the bomb goes off. His toes zing as they press the accelerator over the roaring engine. His fingertips buzz.
Then he realizes the car would stay totally silent if he did, only the wind as a witness to a random Jeep swerving across the road. The wind doesn’t laugh like James Campbell, not free and deep and open like waves rolling over smooth rocks on the shore. The wind doesn’t know how to curse, either. So Sydney drives the rest of the way home straight and narrow, five miles under the speed limit with careful turns.
When he gets back to his house, he throws his keys haphazardly across the room, missing the table, then turns to make a cup of coffee when he stops dead in his tracks.
The photograph.
As if the side table had been nothing but empty for the past five days, there is a photograph. The photograph. One he has carefully not looked at for nearly one hundred and fifty long hours.
In a daze his numb legs carry him four steps across the creaking hardwood floor to the little table, and he picks up the frame in careful, trembling hands. His momma’s skin is golden and shining like the sun, eclipsing the tired metal and grey of the airfield surrounding them and covering Sydney’s small frame in warmth.
He strokes across the surface of the photograph with his thumb, gently tracing over the locks of her hair as if he could feel the individual strands. He realizes he’s never picked it up and held it in his hands before—not since he first set it down on the table on the day he’d moved in, when it took him ten hours to sand down the hardwood floors and just ten minutes to unpack all his belongings.
James Campbell had held it in his hands, though. He’d squinted hard at Ruth Moore’s elegant scrawl, and studied her brilliant, crooked smile, and looked up and formed the word “Sydney” with his lips, fragile and perfect in the private, salty air.
It had been the first time Sydney had heard his real first name since he was ten-years-old on an Arizona porch. And now he misses the sound of it so badly he’s tempted to whisper it
just to himself in the stale and empty air of his house, feeling younger and more alone than he ever has in his life—even that night sleeping out on the beach. Feeling naked.
“Sydney, baby, what’s it say in Exodus chapter twenty?” his momma had asked him that day in the car as she drove him, swerving down the road towards Ft. Knox, three miles away from their house. She’d looked back at him in the rearview mirror with half-glazed eyes and a nervous smile perched on her lips.
“Exodus chapter twenty verse twelve: honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee,” Sydney had recited proudly, not caring in the least what the verse actually meant.
“That’s right. So what’s that mean we’re gonna do when we see your father at work today?”
“It means just do whatever he says,” Sydney had mumbled.
“Sydney . . .” she’d warned.
“Aw, come on, Momma. You know he’s just—”
“Sydney Daniel Moore.”
Sydney had sighed, loud enough that he knew she could hear. “It means say ‘yes sir’ and be respectful,” he tried again.
And he remembers, vivid as the photograph in his hands, how his momma had smiled back at him in the rearview mirror and wrapped a curl of her hair around her index finger.
“You know Momma loves you,” she’d said.
And he’d beamed in his chest and whispered “I know, Momma,” too young to realize that her words were heavy and slurred.
And James Campbell had held this photograph in his hands. He’d held it—held it with the same rough fingers that had run through Sydney’s curls when his face had been down between James’ legs, James’ body in his mouth, and the same fingers that had touched Sydney’s cheek first thing in the morning, pulling him from soft sleep to the quivering air of sunrise.
A wave of self-disgust suddenly washes over him, sharp and stifling and hot. He slams the picture frame face down on the table, takes two steps away, then reaches back and guiltily flips it right side up again. He clenches his fists and sets his shoulders, walking confidently towards the taken-apart record player in the corner that he was supposed to have finished over a week ago.
For the first time since James Campbell waltzed into his life across the sand, Sydney’s fingers itch to get themselves back inside the intricate workings of a machine—the wires and knobs, switches and electrical currents. The knowable logic of a perfectly made system. Sydney takes his project out to the porch and sets up his usual workspace on the rough wood boards, out under the open sky and overlooking the sea.
He tells himself one last thing before he loses his mind to the steady zen and predictable logic of the broken parts waiting expectantly beneath his hands:
He has his work, and he has his waves, and he has his little place in the world. And James Campbell has reduced him to a lost and trembling shell of the man he created that morning after he turned fifteen for the very last goddamn time.
He ignores the tiny part of his brain that whispers to him that he still has the memory of James’ lips against his own. One hundred and forty-one hours ago.
One hundred and forty-two hours ago.
22
The sun is bright and heavy in the sky when Sydney finally blinks hard and looks up from his work.
He’s been switching back and forth between the record player and recording his notes on the waves from the night before in his notebook, working until the passing hours disappear like seconds as his mind buzzes steadily ahead, refusing to do anything but think. His stomach growls roughly, and his eyes start to droop closed against the harsh blare of the sunlight reflecting off the white sand. He suddenly realizes he hasn’t eaten or slept in well over twenty-four hours, and shakes his head angrily at himself.
So much for taking back control of his life—he can’t even keep his new resolve for four hours without letting himself sink to a state that will only come back to bite him in the ass tomorrow morning at the competition when he’s tired and weak.
Idiot.
The warm breeze weaves through the old seashells hanging from the eaves, gently clinking in the wind with the soft hush of the restless ocean. He twiddles the screwdriver in his hand and tries to think. He could eat now, or he could take a nap, or he could get another few practice waves in down at Waimea. He could go for a swim to condition, or he could start on the project for his next client sitting untouched up at Chuck Hobbs’ place, or he could sit here and close his eyes and remember the precise color of James Campbell’s eyes in the moonlight just moments after he’d orgasmed, clinging tightly to Sydney’s shoulders and covering him with the heavy, trusting weight of his body.
Nope. Not that.
Sydney groans and runs his hands over his face, gripping tightly enough at his hair to sting his scalp. He feels like a mess. He can’t even decide what to do with his goddamn day without thinking of James fucking Campbell, and he’s been deciding what to do with his days just fine for over seven fucking years. Even earlier than that, if he’s really honest with himself, despite everything Lahela and his father tried to do.
He sucks in a frustrated breath and gets quickly to his feet, still gripping the screwdriver tight in his fist and hoping that his feet will somehow lead him on to the next activity for the day—the next meaningless thing to fill the time. Nothing but a series of steps and movements and thoughts that will carry him successfully through hour one hundred and forty-five so he doesn’t go and do something pathetic again like stand lonely on a windswept and rocky shore with his curls blowing into his face.
He turns to head up the lane to Hobbs’ place, thinking he might as well go and lose himself again in his work. Maybe Hobbs’ll even have something semi-edible sitting out on a counter for him to shove in his mouth.
He walks down into the sand on stiff legs, and he takes two steps towards the lane while staring down at his feet, and he looks up quickly, already wincing, at the spot where James had once surprised him by appearing like magic out of the shaded, tree-lined path. And he freezes.
James Campbell is standing there.
James Campbell is standing there.
James Campbell is standing there with three bags slung over his shoulders and no shoes on his feet. Sunglasses perched in his hair and a tank top clinging to his abs and a brilliant light overtaking his face. A hesitant smile.
“Sydney,” James Campbell says, voice breaking.
Sydney’s heart explodes. It stops beating and soars up straight into the heavens all at once. He drops the screwdriver down into the sand. His muscles ache with adrenaline pumping through them like fire—adrenaline and shock and disbelief and fear that James Campbell is standing there.
James Campbell is—
His mouth is too dry to speak, and his tongue lays limp in the bottom of his mouth. Stunned.
James Campbell has tears in his eyes. “I missed you” he whispers.
James Campbell looks brilliant in the sunlight. It glints off his hair in brilliant golden streaks like the tails burning radiantly behind shooting stars soaring over the ocean. His skin is the warm sand, and his hands are the shade cast beneath the plumeria blossoms, and his eyes are the vastness of the ocean right at dusk. The depth and the secrets and the power of the waves.
And his voice is the calm, rolling moan of the lighthouse cutting through the storm. The hope of dry land in the wet darkness that comes from being trapped without oxygen under a booming wave. Sydney wants to stand frozen on the beach, not moving a muscle, and spend the rest of his life describing James Campbell, until the number of hours reaches all the way up to one million. One million and one.
Instead James takes a step closer to him, gesturing with his chin to the bags hefted around his strong, broad shoulders.
“This okay?” he asks. His voice is see-through and soft.
Sydney feels himself start to laugh deep down in his chest, and it comes out sounding like the choked back exhale of a sob.
“I don’
t understand,” Sydney breathes.
He thinks that maybe he’ll never be able to move again. His eyes are frantic, drinking in every inch of James standing calmly in front of him before James inevitably disappears up into the mist, turning back into a shadow to walk behind Sydney in the blackest hours of the night, guided by restless dreams and the ghostly echo of James’ voice saying his name ringing in his ears.
James doesn’t disappear. He stands firmly in the hot sand and waits, staring through the thick, crackling air between them and looking at Sydney in a way Sydney knows he’s never been looked at in his life. Like Sydney is somehow a sunset covered ocean, and a velvet field of flowers, and the first warm hints of dawn lapping gently at the cool, silvery shore. Like Sydney is one of the beaches back in Vietnam, haunting and terrifying and unreal, catching the soldiers as they fall.
Like he is somehow something more than a stunned man standing frozen in the sand, curls frizzed wildly about his face and mouth half-open and eyes blown wide with disbelief.
James starts to look worried. Sydney stands there, helpless to move or speak, as James’ thin façade quickly starts to fade, revealing the uncertainty beneath.
“Sydney . . . ?”
The spell hovering over Sydney’s limbs breaks away in an instant, cracking in two, then shattering across the shore. He licks his trembling lips, wanting to yell and sink to his knees and fly and run all at once.
“You’re here,” he says on a whisper.
James nods, and Sydney can hear his swallow even from twenty feet away. “Yeah. I’m here.”
“Here . . . on Oahu.” Sydney doesn’t realize it until the words are out of his mouth that he’s asking a question, one that rises in his voice.
Because it suddenly dawns on him, sharp and hot, that James Campbell may be here on Oahu, but that doesn’t mean he’s really here. Here in Sydney’s arms, in Sydney’s home, in his bed. And Sydney doesn’t think he will fucking survive it if James Campbell smiles at him and calmly suggests that they go for a surf together, or go and meet up with some of the other surfers James met along the pipeline, or have a casual chat.
The Sea Ain't Mine Alone Page 39