The Sea Ain't Mine Alone

by Beaumont, C. L.

  Now, in his silent apartment without any photographs or trophies or medals, James smirks again to himself, sipping his coffee as he remembers the look on Rob’s face when he’d told him why he couldn’t meet up with him to surf in the morning.

  “Fucking hell, Jimmy, I told you to beat him, not date his sorry ass,” Rob had joked, eyeballs popping out of his head.

  James had swallowed down his panic and laughed along, explaining Danny’s warped reasoning for why they should train together and decidedly leaving out the part of the story where Danny had picked up his most treasured possession from the moonlit sand, black magic figured out where he worked, and then followed him to his job a forty-five-minute drive away from Hermosa just to return it in person.

  Rob said he had early morning shifts over in Torrance anyway that whole week to train with the beat there on freeway pursuits down the notorious 405, and so after a few more jokes about how Jimmy needed to knock some sense into Danny Moore and not let him be too much of an asshole, James had hugged Lori goodbye and clapped Rob on the back and driven back to his dark and empty room by the shore.

  James is startled from his thoughts of the night before when a tall, dark form appears down on the grey sand, hair blowing in the misty fog that the slowly rising sun hasn’t burned off yet.

  James fights back a smile and ignores the thrill down his spine as he grabs his skateboard and surfboard and hurtles out the door. The pre-dawn streets are sleepy and quiet, suspended in the hazy fog like a breath waiting to be exhaled come rush hour. Palm trees sag limply in the grey light, fronds hushing by him in the breeze as he weaves his way down the sloping avenue to the shore.

  Danny doesn’t even look his way five minutes later when James finally walks up next to him and sets his board down in the sand. He’s standing perfectly still, gazing out over the water, eyes soft and unfocused. James stands frozen at his side and breathes in the sharp, cool air, slowly filling his lungs. He silently marvels at how comfortable it is, standing there next to this man who he’s spent the majority of the past two days either yelling at or inwardly gritting his teeth over.

  Here, with their backs to the world, it feels like they’re the last two people at the edge of the earth, being beckoned side by side out to the sea. The reverent, foggy air melds with the steady roll and thrum of the waves lapping at the shore. James gazes out at the first hints of sunlight reflecting on the water as it rolls towards the flat horizon, and he has a sudden, panging thought that some people go their entire lives without ever seeing the ocean.

  He thinks back to Harold Carmichael, one of the Army recruits sent to share Intel with James’ ship docked off the outskirts of Hanoi, who’d never seen a body of water bigger than a Kansas pond in front of him until the Army jeep carrying him from the southern base camp near Saigon dropped him off at the Navy ship dock, and who’d wept in secret in his bunk under James that night over the fact that he’d never seen so much water up close in his whole damn life.

  After a moment, Danny kneels beside James in the cold sand and gets out his wax, settling into an age-old routine in silence. James follows. He lets his toes curl up in the dry grains of sand, breathing deep at the stretch in his thighs.

  James thinks as he waxes in slow, steady circles that the man next to him seems to be able to transform into an entirely new person at will. That this contemplative, peaceful presence next to him is anything but the pushy runway model from the day before, or the hesitant man who eventually held out the bullet, or the frizzy-haired kid splaying him open in the moonlit sand, or the statuesque god who scoffed at him out on the waves from behind a pair of aviators. The man beside him now isn’t even the man from the pier.

  Something warm flutters in the pit of James’ chest when he thinks that maybe only certain people get to see Danny Moore this way—unadorned and wiped clean, kneeling silently in the sand to the sound of the waves. The prospect that James has somehow been chosen to witness it shouldn’t feel as exciting as it does.

  Eventually, Danny sits back and rolls his neck to stretch, then pulls his grey hoodie up over his head. James goes to follow and hesitates, fingers tightening over the zipper of his jacket. He realizes in a moment of panic that he completely forgot to don his full wetsuit while he spent the morning lost in his thoughts. He’d simply gone on muscle memory, pulling on the board shorts and jacket he would normally wear to the beach with Rob.

  Danny’s eyes are on him as he stands and brushes the layer of sand off his sweatpants. James stands on shaky legs beside him as Danny shucks off the sweatpants to reveal a pair of short black boardshorts rippling in the breeze. He bends down next to James to secure his ankle strap, and James can’t stop himself from turning his head to finally gaze at the tattoo covering Danny’s back.

  He sucks in a breath and stares.

  A giant black and white jellyfish radiates out from Danny’s shoulder, its billowing, translucent tendrils winding their way across his spine as if his back is made of water. It looks like a crisp, clean photograph painted onto Danny’s smooth skin.

  James has seen plenty of tattoos. The other sailors in the Navy had their arms practically covered in anchors and koi fish, pinup girls and American eagles. But he’s never, never seen anything like this. It’s oddly beautiful, unsettling and precise. The inked lines look poised to swim away at any moment, threatening to leap off Danny’s back and disappear into the sea. James is lost in it—eyes drowning in the swirls of translucent tentacles. He leaps back startled when Danny chuckles softly from where he’s bent over his ankle strap before standing tall again.

  “Were you expecting a koi fish? A giant heart that says ‘mom’ in it surrounded by an anchor?”

  It’s the first thing either one of them has said all morning. James shakes his head and looks back to the water, embarrassed, swallowing over the dryness in his throat. He doesn’t answer the question.

  “Can the rule of today be ‘you don’t get to be an annoying dick all the time just to get a rise out of me’?”

  Danny picks up his board and starts walking towards the water. He looks back over his shoulder at James and smirks. “Sure. But only if your rule of the day is ‘don’t be a killjoy and stand there for ten minutes wasting time debating whether or not to take your jacket off’.”

  James huffs and mutters an “unbelievable” under his breath as he watches Danny casually jog into the waves. The jellyfish glistens on his back in the sunrise light, hesitantly peeking out through the cool, grey fog. James takes a deep breath of salty air and listens to the seagulls start to make their way across the sky. The beach is quiet, save for the gentle roar of the waves on the sand, the smooth hiss of foam spreading out across the shore. They’re utterly alone—nothing but the craggy mountains at their backs.

  James unzips his jacket and reveals bare skin with shaking fingers. He feels brazen and reckless. It took him months to get to this point with Rob, to trust him to see the darkest, blackest part of him etched permanently into his skin in an ugly snarl—a reminder that he was sent back broken, unwanted on either soil.

  And now, after just a handful of tense lines and two days, he’s shedding his jacket and running breathlessly towards the waves where Danny Moore waits perched on his board for him, the barest hints of a smile at the corners of his mouth as he watches James shiver at his first dip in the icy water.

  James braces himself for more sarcastic comments when he finally paddles out to Danny’s side, mentally preparing for a day of irritation and wasted time that will inevitably lead to both of them agreeing never to do this ever again.

  Instead, Danny angles his board so that he’s right next to James, shins gently butting against each other beneath the ocean’s surface, and he points out to the distant horizon tinged with gold, and, in a smooth, velvet voice, he tells James everything he knows about the waves off Oahu.

  And just like that, James is sucked up into a hurricane, utterly at the mercy of a force of nature. Danny’s lips move a mile a minute, spou
ting facts and statistics, studies and observations. His eyes rapidly scan James and the horizon and the swells and back to James again. Tracking the waves, the wind, the currents, the correct and incorrect lines of James’ body as he hunkers down across a rumbling wave.

  Danny drops in with him on barrels, calls out his corrections, tells him how Hawaiian water would be different from the Los Angeles swells. He makes James laugh and scoff, shake his head and listen with such focus that every cell of his body is zeroed in on the rich sound of his voice over the churn of the waves. He’s an encyclopedia, and he’s ruthless. Fierce and awkward and ridiculous and terrifying and charming. James finds himself following in Danny’s wake like a breathless disciple, amazed and indignant as he tries to hold on for dear life just to stay afloat in the sheer onslaught that is surfing with Danny Moore.

  They surf for almost three hours. By the last wave, James is aching and sore, arms trembling with exhaustion as he paddles after the largest wave yet of the set.

  “Come in at a southeast angle!” Danny yells between cupped palms from his board. “This will have a perfect face for cutbacks, so gather your momentum from the drop-in and gain a little air up at the crest. Judges love that!”

  James bites his lip over a cutting remark that obviously judges love that—that he didn’t just wake up one day and get to where he is by sheer luck— and then does exactly what Danny says nevertheless. If the past three hours have shown him anything, it’s that Danny can read the ocean like a damn book. Every current, every force, every swell—he maddeningly plots out the ride in perfect sequence and practically hands it to James on a platter. It feels like flying and cheating all at once. Like James has somehow never once known how to really surf, like all of his wins up until now have been nothing but luck since he never before had this kid to barrel in and show him how.

  James digs deep and pops up in one clean motion to catch his final wave of the morning, legs shaking with the rushing force of the water beneath him. It’s not a full pipeline, just a towering face with plenty of spray flying off the top, exactly as Danny predicted. James squats his legs like he knows how to do and pumps down the face of the wave, shooting towards the very bottom before twisting his core and rocketing back up to the crest, shooting off a wall of spray and whooping at the top of his lungs at the sheer speed beneath his board.

  When he finally falls back into the whitewater and surfaces to gulp down air, he half-expects to hear, “Far out, old man!” echo across the waves in Rob’s familiar, even voice.

  Instead, he hears, “Not horrible, but you could have easily fit in two more cutbacks. You’re convinced your legs will give out on you sooner than they will.”

  James’ elation dies. He practically crawls back to shore, dragging his board behind him, his fingers clasped behind the back of his sore neck. He glares at Danny waiting for him in the sand, with his head high and arms crossed like a petulant teenager.

  “You couldn’t have just trusted yourself to fit in two more turns?” Danny asks, voice haughty. “The wave was only just beginning to crest and you didn’t have any wind resistance. If you’d only just trusted your instincts, the wave wasn’t gonna cave on you before you could –"

  “And you couldn’t let me just have one moment of victory, could you?” James bites back, cutting him off and inexplicably tingling with fresh rage. “I just surfed for three fucking hours while you mostly just sat there and talked at me. You couldn’t just let me have fun on my last ride?”

  Danny huffs and turns to head back to their bags, squeezing the saltwater from his curls to dry them out as he walks.

  “I’m sorry,” he mutters under his breath, infuriatingly soft enough that James has to strain to hear it. “I was under the impression you actually wanted to win, not be ‘given charity’ as you so kindly put it.”

  James groans and rolls his neck slowly to crack it. What happened out on the water, their easy silences, the startlingly familiar camaraderie, suddenly feels like a lifetime ago. As if the moment they both set foot on the dry land, the past three hours became just an odd dream, and the air too thin and dry.

  Now, as James bends over to undo his ankle strap, all he feels is weariness and contempt flood through his chest. It’s only been thirty seconds since Danny chastised him for ducking out of that wave early, and James fucking damn well knows that he should have fit in those last two turns, and already he’s completely exhausted. He feels like an old dog, and Danny’s the young kid, irritated and resentful that his pet can’t learn any new tricks.

  And James knows how to surf, goddammit. Knows how to live and surf and survive. He knows how to be shot at, and he wonders if Danny Moore is even old enough to legally drink at a bar.

  He rubs a palm over his shoulder and grimaces, studiously avoiding Danny’s gaze. His work shift is going to feel like absolute hell. He shakes his head finally, not even answering Danny back, and walks towards his bag to pack up and leave.

  It’s just that Danny is so goddamn unpredictable. One moment he’s calmly, patiently explaining a brand new technique to James, one tailored to the Hawaiian water. His eyes soft but alight with excitement, body so close that James can practically feel the heat from his dripping skin. Then the next moment he’s an untouchable genius, telling James everything he did wrong and not even bothering to pay attention long enough to hear James’ retort.

  It’s absolutely nothing like surfing with Rob—all soft comfort and warmth pooling in the pit of his gut and spreading out through the tips of his fingers, smiling across the spray and whooping together for joy.

  Surfing with Danny is more like trying not to fly and drown all at once.

  James can hear Danny following him, breathing slightly hard from the morning’s worth of surfing. Aside from that, the man had hardly broken a damn sweat.

  “I don’t understand,” Danny says, voice barely concealing his frustration, fighting to meet James’ gaze. “You want me to tell you what to do to win, you agree that that’s what you want, and then you hate it when I actually tell you.”

  James sighs and turns to face him, desperately wanting to avoid this conversation. “Look, Danny, I appreciate everything you’ve done for me today. I really do. But I can’t—I just...”

  “You want me to be a surf buddy, not a coach,” Danny says, eyes narrowed.

  James thinks of their shins brushing against each other as they perched side by side on their boards, Danny’s eyes soft and bright and focused on nothing but James and the water. He hates the odd shiver that the thought causes to run along his arms.

  “Something like that,” James replies. “And I know that’s your idea of a worst nightmare, so we’ll just—”

  “Run with me tomorrow.”

  James freezes with his jacket half-zipped up. Danny’s looking at him so intensely it’s like James will disappear if he blinks. James looks at Danny’s impatient, frustrated face, eyebrows furrowed in irritation, and wonders why he could ever possibly want to spend two more minutes in James’ company. Danny couldn’t look more exasperated with him if he tried.

  “But you hated this,” James finally says.

  “No, you hated this, because our age difference and my tone of voice made you think that I don’t already believe you’re an excellent surfer. Which is why we’ll do something different tomorrow. Run with me.”

  James shakes his head, zips his jacket the rest of the way up. He ignores the first half of Danny’s response, and the way it had sparked something hot in his throat. “Look, Danny, I don’t know if that’s—”

  “God, what ever happened to you to make you so afraid of success? It’s the most goddamn irritating thing I’ve ever seen. You already want to agree; don’t lie to me and say you don’t. You’re probably a good runner, possibly even better at it than me, which should excite you. So agree to run with me and you can get your little personal victory in and then we can surf the day after without all of this emotional nonsense.”

  “You know what?” James
huffs as he shoulders his bag and scoops up his skateboard. “You are something else. Fuck you.”

  “So same time tomorrow?” Danny replies, still standing by his board in the sand.

  “I said fuck you!” James calls back over his shoulder.

  He barely hears the “Six-thirty, then,” called after him as he reaches the pavement beyond the sand and does a running step onto his skateboard. The wind whips away the last droplets of water clinging to his hair, clearing the salt and sand from his skin.

  He tries desperately to think about anything but Danny fucking Moore, standing back there in the sand like the know-it-all asshat James had been warned about over and over. Danny Moore who has the goddamn gall to strip away all of James’ secrets, and witness his scar, and then comment on his technique as if James hasn’t been surfing for almost as long as Danny’s even been alive.

  Danny Moore who handed back the bullet in his palm, and spent three hours telling James everything he knows about the waves in Oahu just so that James can win, and who wants to spend even more time with him tomorrow even after James walked away from him with two impressively fierce “fuck you’s” lobbed at his face.

  James sighs as he glides back up Hermosa Avenue on his skateboard, tightening his grip on his surfboard under his arm. He already knows, without a shadow of a doubt, what he’s going to do tomorrow morning.

  He’s going to run beside Danny Moore along the shoreline at 6:30.