The Sea Ain't Mine Alone

by Beaumont, C. L.

  Sydney feels like Jimmy Campbell is twenty feet tall. He barely stops himself from cowering. He opens his mouth to retort, but Jimmy beats him to it.

  “Tell me, what’s your game, Moore? What is it? You want to help me go pro just so you can watch me get my ass handed to me by you and everyone else on the circuit for the next year? Was it pity? Do I look so fucking depressing you felt like I needed a free meal from your blessed hands?”

  “Oh cool it and spare me the theatrics. You’re hardly the first broken sailor I’ve come across on the waves.”

  Sydney hates himself even as the words leave his mouth, but the rage he expects to see on Jimmy’s face is quickly overtaken by . . . irritation? Curiosity?

  “How can you possibly know that? Earlier, when you said . . . Fucking tell me how you knew that about me,” Jimmy demands.

  Sydney physically stops himself from leaning closer into Jimmy’s space. The man is looking up at him with a challenge, daring him to continue to prove himself as a know-it-all asshole so that Jimmy can keep up with his righteous anger in the cool sand. Sydney decides to play along. He files away for later the fact that seeing the furious glare in Jimmy’s deep blue eyes sends a completely unfamiliar thrill up his own spine.

  “Oh please,” he scoffs, trying to hold himself upright, “how many people do you think you’re fooling? There are thousands of you. Who in hell wears a full wetsuit at a surf competition in Los Angeles in July? Someone with something to hide. Can’t be an embarrassing tattoo—you’re sure as hell not the type, and probably even too terrified of commitment to get one. You may be short, but it can’t be anything to do with your physique. You rub at your weak shoulder every chance you get when you think no one’s looking. You magically arrived here sleeping in a van two years ago with absolutely nothing to say about how you spent the last five years of your life. You stand up straight like you’re at inspection when you wait on the start line. The Navy was just a lucky guess—some sentimental bullshit having to do with your childhood spent in the waves I’d guess. Combine all of that with the fact you keep even your apparently closest friend a twenty-foot pole’s length away from your actual thoughts and that you change your shirt in secret alone behind a lifeguard station after just winning the competition of your life, and I’d say I’d have to be an absolute airhead not to have worked it out before, Seaman.”

  Sydney blushes hot across his cheeks as his mouth spits out the last part about seeing Jimmy change on the beach. The admission hangs between them like a lead weight in the air. He tries to control his breathing so it doesn’t rasp even louder than the waves.

  Jimmy stares him straight in the eyes and takes a deep, grunting breath. “Swear to God I’ve never wanted to say ‘fuck you’ to anyone as much as I want to say it to you right now, and I’ve seen people do some terrifying shit.”

  Sydney’s mouth goes dry at the sheer rage, the vibrating, barely contained power radiating out from the fiercely controlled man in front of him. “Well, what’s stopping you then? Your delicate sensibilities? Getting soft in your old age?”

  Jimmy huffs out at the water before looking back at Sydney with a sharp danger glinting in his eyes. “Watch yourself. I’m not that fucking old.”

  “No? If you’d asked me that five minutes ago, I’d have said the exact opposite.”

  “Oh yeah?” Jimmy growls. “Says who?”

  He puffs up his chest and steps into Sydney’s space, face just inches from his.

  Sydney’s mind flashes through images of Jimmy Campbell looking alone and lost in the middle of a crowded pier—slumped shoulders and tired legs and shadowed eyes just moments after absolutely annihilating his first heat over surfers a decade younger than him.

  Sydney laughs, a harsh, shallow breath. “Says you!” he cries. His arms flail out to the sides like a dramatic idiot on a daytime soap. “You walk around this beach like you’ve got a noose around your neck and you’re five steps away from the gallows. If you hadn’t won, I don’t think I would have even seen you smile all fucking day. We’re surfing, for God’s sake. It’s muscle and adrenaline and physics. It’s just a game. We’re not standing on the brink of World War three.”

  Sydney feels like he could fly with all the energy pumping through his body. He hasn’t had a conversation this long with someone in years, even if it has just devolved into a shouting match. Being less than a foot away from Jimmy’s heaving chest, pectorals rising under his thin cotton shirt, is causing his brain to short circuit. Spitting out anything and everything and not even able to pause for breath.

  He stands breathless and waits as Jimmy lets out a long sigh through his nose. Suddenly, before his very eyes, the fight leaves Jimmy’s eyes, completely snuffed out. Sydney’s heart hammers in alarm within his chest. He clenches his fists to keep from reaching out and shaking Jimmy—from trying to shake the life and the anger back into him to keep his eyes from pooling dull black like they are now.

  “So it was pity, then,” Jimmy finally says, holding his gaze. “I’m pathetic, to you.”

  Sydney’s mind practically screams at him to say, “Anything but.” He simply doesn’t understand. They’re on a fucking beach in one of the most beautiful places on earth, getting paid money to fling themselves across the surface of the ocean and rip through the spray. But Jimmy’s eyes look like they’re still facing down the barrel of a gun on a beach in Hanoi.

  Sydney realizes he’s been silent for far too long, and when he opens his mouth to respond, Jimmy holds up a hand to stop him.

  “Shut it. I don’t want to hear it,” he hisses, but it sounds weary. Jimmy takes a step back and runs a hand through his hair. He looks out at the crashing waves and breathes slow and deep. Sydney wishes he knew what Jimmy was looking at—what he was really seeing out in the moonlit sea.

  “They warned me about you,” Jimmy eventually says. Sydney can barely hear him over the roar of the oblivious water.

  He drums up the last of his energy, forcing himself to spit out the words he thinks Jimmy’s expecting. “Let me guess—that I’ll check out your ass? Force myself on you when you aren’t looking?” he sneers back. He suddenly thinks of his hand down his pants earlier that evening in his dingy motel room and forces himself not to visibly shiver with shame.

  Jimmy hesitates, then looks straight at him. His body goes absolutely still. It’s terrifying.

  “No,” he says. “That you’re a miserable asshole who thinks he’s the Jesus Christ of surfing.”

  Sydney scoffs. “That’s the most ridiculous insult I’ve ever heard. It’s not even clever!” He doesn’t realize he’s closing the gap between him and Jimmy again until Jimmy’s hand is on his shoulder, pushing him away so roughly that they both stumble in the sand.

  “Stay the fuck away from me,” he growls. “I’m telling you now, Moore. I don’t fucking care about whatever grand plans you have to humiliate me. Whatever shit you pulled in the water today, I fucking earned my place here. I earned it. You can look down on me from your high horse all you want, but I know what I want, and—”

  “And what do you want?” Sydney interrupts. “Besides just lounging around on a beach all day with chicks lining up to wish you good luck, huh?”

  “God, you are something else.”

  “Just tell me, then!”

  “I don’t need to tell you shit,” Jimmy snaps as he starts backing away quickly. “But, for a start, I want you to stay the hell away from me!” With that, he turns and begins to storm down the beach, kicking up sand behind him.

  Sydney’s gut clenches. The reason for his wipeout earlier hits him so hard in the face again he feels dizzy with it, his vision blacking out everything but the man practically running away from him now in the sand.

  “Well tough shit!” he yells after him, “Because your precious pro status means you’ll see me again in two weeks at the Billabong!”

  Jimmy doesn’t even turn back to look at him as he flips him off.

  Sydney watches him go, chest st
ill heaving. He finally forces himself to roll his eyes, without exactly knowing why, and turns to leave when he spots something glinting in the sand. He reaches down in the moonlight and picks up a bullet casing, dropped a few inches from where Jimmy had shoved Sydney back from him. He doesn’t have to think hard to know exactly where the bullet casing is from. He looks quickly bath and forth, for some reason needing to make sure he’s alone, then pockets the smooth metal.

  In a daze, Sydney walks down the beach in the opposite direction of the bar and his motel. The opposite direction of Jimmy Campbell. His fingers rub the worn metal casing in his pocket until the sun starts peeking up over the mountains at his right, sending puffs of slowly warming salty air across his skin. His body is exhausted, begging him for rest and water. He pats his other pocket to reach for cash for a cab and realizes he left his wallet back in his motel the night before like an absolute moron.

  And when he finally drops down limp onto his motel bed almost three hours later, sweating and dehydrated and spent, he lies there and tries very hard to hate Jimmy Campbell with every fiber of his being. To hate him for staring straight into his eyes in the middle of a crowded pier, and for stubbornly insisting on introducing himself while they waited for the waves, and for emerging from the whitewater as the winner, and for making Sydney’s throat tighten when he placed his warm, rough hand on his shoulder and pushed him away, and for being so damned unpredictable.

  He tries to hate him for hours, listening to the cars zoom down the busy street outside his motel window, filling his mind with the grating hum of urban white noise.

  He fails.

  7

  The last hour before a meal break always drags by like an eternity. James can feel every muscle he used the day before in the competition screaming out at him now, exacerbated by getting only a couple hours of sleep after he’d stood staring out the window of his apartment all night fuming, Danny Moore’s choicest phrases repeating through his head on an endless loop, smothering the excitement of his win.

  You’re hardly the first broken sailor I’ve come across out on the waves.

  Who do you think you’re fooling?

  It’s just a game.

  They’re doing maintenance on a shipping ramp today, welding and soldering metal with bursts of flame cutting through the heavy late morning sun. James’ skin feels like his own personal humidifier, and his button-up work shirt is plastered to his back and sides with sweat.

  His coworkers are distracting themselves with stories of their exploits from the night before—girls and booze and Sunset Boulevard antics. The older guys are arguing over last night’s Dodgers’ 9th inning upset, distinctly leaving out any mention of wives or children.

  James remains characteristically silent. After over two years, none of them even know that the reason his hair is still damp when he gets to work each morning is because it’s ocean water from surfing, not a shower at home with a fake wife and kids. No one wears a wedding ring on the job; it would just get lost. It makes it easier to lie.

  He thinks briefly back to those times on the Navy ship in between missions, playing cards late into the night in a cloud of cigarette smoke, on shore leave in Ha Long in a seedy bar with Christmas lights hanging from the ceiling and warm beers covering the rickety wooden table. It’s a hard thing to realize about himself, and he recoils from the thought like he always does. Hard to know he only ever really gets close to people if the threat of death is hanging over his shoulder, creeping beneath his skin.

  And here, now, on this sunny Long Beach dock with four hundred and seventy-two accident-free workdays in a row, and counting, he grimaces and shakes his head against the unwanted thought that he wishes he was back in a camouflage dinghy motorboat hovering off an exploding jungle coast, surrounded by bright, freckled faces with adventure and fear in their eyes, smears of blood and mud on their cheeks, looking over at James like he’s been their best friend since the womb, knowing that one of them will be dead by nightfall.

  James stands up straight from his crouch, hauling a stack of new wood over to the building site, and winces as his back pops and groans. About half of the men sweating and grunting around him are older than him, some by a lot. Their spines creak and sag as their calloused, gloved hands reach for the next shipping container, the next thick cable, the next lukewarm beer. It’s like working surrounded by ghosts of his future self.

  A quick look into his finances that morning at the bank before his shift had showed James that even if he won a small amount of money at every major professional competition that year, he’d still have to keep the dockyard job part time to make ends meet—at least to cover plane tickets until he could rope together a sponsor. As much as Rob tries to convince him otherwise, he’s under no delusions that the call from Val’s will ever actually come through. The thought of it feels like suffocating in slow motion. Stuck on an unmoving surfboard as the water heaves and rises around him, trickling down into his lungs.

  The whistle eventually blows for lunch, and the entire dock lets out a collective groan of relief. James wastes no time booking it over to his water canteen in a tiny block of shade against a fence, ripping off his work shirt so that the breeze can cool his skin through his sweat-soaked undershirt. His work boots feel worn and heavy on his feet, and the thick leather gloves covering his hands are quickly torn off and thrown to the ground. Finally he removes his hard hat and swipes a hand through his dripping hair, shivering as rivulets of sweat drip down the back and sides of his neck.

  He's just about to take a sip of water and let his brain shut off for his thirty-minute break when he stops, frozen in his tracks, mouth half open.

  Danny Moore looks like a Hollywood film star accidentally wandered onto the grimy, salt- and rust-stained set of a maritime horror movie. A perfectly cut white shirt hugs his lean body, shirt collar left open to reveal the long, smooth lines of his neck. His legs look a mile long in crisp, ironed slacks, hot sun glowing on his brown suede shoes. His hair is tamed in perfect curls—a night and day difference from the frizzy halo he was sporting the night before when he had caught James unawares in the sand.

  He looks like a completely different person. As if someone straight out of that Star Trek show Rob’s always bugging him to watch made a magic clone of Danny Moore, where the original man is just a young kid in a tank top with frizzy hair, and the clone’s a top-level Hollywood executive just stepping off a private jet at LAX. James’ eyes flicker over the barest hint of collarbone, and he swallows over a dry throat.

  Danny stops walking once James notices him and stands there waiting, eyes squinting hard against the harsh noon sun. James still can’t even believe what he’s seeing. For a terrifying moment, he thinks he must have heat stroke and is seeing a mirage. Because there is absolutely no fucking way that not even twelve hours after thoroughly chewing him out (and being chewed out) on the moonlit sand, and being explicitly told to stay the hell away, that Danny Moore has donned a suit, found out where James works, and come here to . . . what? Humiliate him some more? Gloat? Tell him that all of yesterday was really just a lucid dream, that James was slipped some mushrooms or some shit by a co-conspirator and never actually made pro in the first place?

  James realizes Danny is waiting for him to approach and finally does so, wary eyes watching him with a mixture of apprehension and irritation. The tiny part of James that’s excited at the thrill of this unexpected turn of events is thoroughly clamped down.

  He runs his forearm over his sweaty forehead as he approaches and wipes his dirt- and grease-stained hands on his work pants. He sees Danny’s eyes roam once quickly up his body, probably self-righteously disgusted at the stark difference in their current states. James finds he can’t even blame him one bit. No one he knows has ever seen him at work before, in this dripping, tired mess—not even Rob.

  He decides not even to give him the benefit of a “hello” or a “what the fuck are you doing here.” He stops before Danny and waits, brow furrowed, shoulders bac
k, eyes narrowed.

  Danny licks his lips and clears his throat, hastily looking down at the ground before meeting James’ gaze. It has the unexpected effect of making him look startlingly young. James tries not to get lost in his cool, grey eyes. Little droplets of fresh ocean water in the middle of the dirt, sweat, and grime. He wonders what happened to the aviators.

  “I believe you dropped this,” Danny says calmly, holding out his palm from his pocket.

  James’ blood turns to ice. He hadn’t even realized it was missing. He shoots out his hand and quickly grabs the bullet casing from Danny’s long fingers, shoving it down in a zippered pocket in his pants before looking up and giving one brief nod. The metal is still warm from Danny’s skin. James’ heart is thumping so hard he’s sure Danny can see it through his thin, dripping undershirt.

  James waits expectantly for Danny to turn on his heel and book it out of there as fast as possible in his perfectly shined shoes. Humiliation accomplished. Mission completed. ‘Holier than thou’ gloating quite successfully achieved. When he doesn’t, James starts to grow wary.

  He can practically feel the weight of Danny’s gaze on him—judging, scoffing, pitying. James’ defenses rise, prickling the hairs on the back of his neck and his arms.

  “You got anything else to say or can you leave?” he spits out.

  Danny blinks slowly. His eyes widen a fraction, then stare unfocused at the ground before looking back up at James. His face is soft and unguarded. The man from the pier.

  “No, I—I don’t,” he says. James crosses his arms and puffs out his chest as Danny’s eyes roam quickly over him once more. James stares back, daring him with just a look to say something more. Practically begging for a fight.

  Instead, Danny simply backs two steps away, hands slumped in his pockets. He gives James a ghost of a tight smile, then turns on his heel to walk away, long legs graceful on the rough, uneven dock.