The Sea Ain't Mine Alone

by Beaumont, C. L.

  But he’s here, shuffling his feet at a crisp six-twenty-five. And he hears the sound of a station wagon pulling up alongside him in the dirt.

  He scrunches his nose even as his heart skips a beat in his chest. As he watches the wheels come to a stop in a cloud of dust, that long dormant part of him that had held a torn and faded photograph of Hawaii in his hands is suddenly alive again, face young and open and turned towards the sky. The feeling of a warm palm cupping his hand. The way his momma’s cross necklace would tickle his cheek.

  He picks up his board and straps it down on top of James’ on the roof of the station wagon without saying hello, taking more time than necessary to try and calm the shaking in his hands.

  He hops into James’ cool leather passenger seat, preparing himself for the atmosphere to be tense and awkward, and barely catches the banana lobbed at his chest.

  “Figured you didn’t get any breakfast in that motel of yours,” James says nonchalantly instead of a greeting. He keeps his eyes on the road as he pushes the car into first and peels back out onto the winding coastal highway. His shoulders visibly relax right before Sydney’s eyes as Sydney settles into his own seat, his left knee suddenly just inches from James’ right.

  A hot, tingling weight quickly evaporates off Sydney’s chest—a weight that had been sitting there since James walked away from him in the sand the day before while the blood still pooled in his groin. And now, not twenty-four hours later, here’s James still calmly driving him in his car like it’s nothing at all. Body loose and relaxed even though he has to work later that day, as if Sydney’s mere presence is some sort of buffer or balm. Sydney bites down too hard on the inside of his lip when he realizes he hasn’t responded yet.

  “Thank God,” he says at the window. “How did I ever last living on my own the last seven years without you to remind me that fruit exists?” He peels the banana open anyway and takes a bite.

  “Seven years?”

  Sydney can practically hear James doing the math in his head. He sneaks a glance to see that James’ brow is furrowed as he concentrates on the empty road, zooming along the palm tree-lined highway with the windows down, letting in swirls of fresh ocean air. Sydney just hums.

  He takes a too-large bite of banana to fill the silence. He wants to slap himself in the face. Two minutes in to his last ever morning with James and he’s already gone and said something unbearably stupid—reminded them both of the fact that he’s ten fucking years younger than the man smoothly navigating a stick shift down the Los Angeles highway. Revealed that he apparently did something so absolutely horrible that his own family didn’t even want to see him through until he turned eighteen.

  Stupid.

  James breaks the silence after scratching the side of his jaw. “Did you teach yourself how to surf?”

  Sydney swallows hard and stares out the window, letting the fresh wind blow his curls into his eyes. He starts to reach into his pocket for his sunglasses, then freezes, feeling that somehow, in some way, wearing them would ruin everything now.

  He nods, then realizes James can’t see him while concentrating on the winding road.

  “I did, yeah.”

  Out of nowhere, James laughs. One golden, breathless chuckle. Sydney turns to stare at him.

  “What’s so funny?”

  James wipes a hand over his grin and leans his elbow on the open window. “Nothing, just. Of course you taught yourself how to be the top surfer in Hawaii.”

  Sydney scoffs. “I’m not the top surfer in Hawaii.”

  “Oh what, are you getting humble on me now, Moore?”

  “Of course not. Don’t be an idiot. I’m not the top surfer in Hawaii—I’m the top surfer.”

  And James laughs again, free and open into the clean air. The sound of it fills Sydney with a tingling warmth. It settles deep in his gut, right in the center of his chest, up the muscles surrounding his spine.

  He finds himself chuckling along too, cheeks fighting against his grin as he gazes out at the distant blue horizon through the trees whizzing by. He feels like an imposter of himself sitting just inches away from James Campbell’s warm thigh as they zoom down the empty highway—as if Danny Moore has a secret twin brother who laughs, and surfs with other people, and who has someone coming to pick him up to intentionally spend time with him like it’s nothing special at all. Like it isn’t revolutionary.

  Sydney settles back into his seat, watching out of the corner of his eye as the wind ruffles James’ hair in the breeze.

  “And you?” he asks back a beat too late. “Who taught you to surf?”

  James grins, eyes soft with nostalgia. His thumb taps a rhythm on the steering wheel. “This guy who lived in the trailer next door to me and my mom. I thought he was so ancient growing up, but he must’ve been only fifty. He surfed in Florida in the 20s. Can’t really remember how it started, but he must have taken a liking to me, or maybe my mom just asked him to look after me when she was off at work. Who knows. But anyway, he’d keep an eye on me when I was down by the water, and when I was six or so he put me on a board and spent a whole year teaching me how. I don’t even remember his name, actually. Just called him Mr. Cool.”

  “And your mom—she knows he taught you? Does she come out to watch you compete?”

  A thudding silence follows, and Sydney immediately realizes his mistake. He feels sick. He should have known, should have seen it and realized. Who on earth could have heard the tone of James’ voice talking about his home and his mom and not realized it? And yet here he is so captivated by the smooth sound of that very same voice, and James Campbell’s knee just inches from his own, that he goes and asks about a mom who he should have understood, from the first moment James mentioned her at all, was dead.

  He stares straight ahead. He’s too uncomfortable to see what James’ face looks like.

  James’ voice when he speaks is soft and calm. Resigned. “She died,” he says.

  Sydney wants to ask a million things. He wants to ask how and when. Who took care of him, and where Mr. Cool is now, and if James still remembers the exact sound and cadence of her voice. He wants to tell him that she would be proud of him for even being alive—proud that he’s a professional surfer. Wants to tell him that he’s sorry for even bringing it up, and that the Bible apparently says that all shitty things happen for some unknown precious reason, and that he can still hear his own momma’s voice in his dreams (“Not Sydney. Please, not Sydney!”) and that he wishes to God that he didn’t.

  Instead he asks, “What was her name?”

  James turns to look at him. His eyes are shocked, raw and open. Like nobody had ever taken the time to ask him that question before.

  James clears his throat and turns his eyes back to the road, fingers tightening on the gearshift.

  “Helen,” he says, a ghost of a smile just at the corner of his lips. His mouth forms the word carefully like he hasn’t uttered it in years.

  “Helen,” Sydney whispers back. Without thinking about it, he slowly shifts his knee along the bench seat, letting it briefly press up against James’ for just a breath before pulling it away again. The soft hairs at the top of James’ shin brush like velvet along his skin.

  He waits anxiously the moment to feel like the shower all over again—all hot and tense in his muscles, nervous sweat prickling sharply at the back of his neck, a blaring internal alarm screaming wrong, don’t, dirty, mistake!

  Instead the touch feels calm and warm. The bright, clear waters off Oahu lapping gently at his toes. James exhales a long, slow breath beside him.

  “You know, her favorite thing in the whole world was a strawberry-flavored milkshake,” he says with a smile in his voice. “She only ever got one once a year. We’d go on her birthday to this place down on the pier—some old shack that doesn’t exist anymore. And she’d always tell me we would split it fifty-fifty, but then she’d give me way more than half. Plus all the whipped cream.”

  Sydney’s lungs are straining
against his chest. He wants to fly, spread his arms like wings and soar up bolstered on the gust of James’ words—on his evident relief at finally saying these words out loud. They glide to an easy stop at a lone red light, and James looks over at him all easy and soft and grinning and light. He looks twenty years younger now than he did when Sydney first ran beside him into the waves following a blaring air horn.

  “When’s her birthday?” Sydney asks, not fully understanding why.

  James takes a few moments too long to answer. He bites the inside of his cheek as he shifts the car back into first, revving the engine a bit too hard.

  “The day after the Billabong finals, actually.”

  An odd pang thrums through Sydney’s chest, one he can’t quite pin down. He has the feeling that if he spread his wings now to fly, he would just thump straight to the ground. All he can do is hum, and James doesn’t add anything more.

  Despite that, the rest of the drive passes in a startlingly easy silence. Sydney watches the palm trees and stop signs zip by like the steady ticks of a clock. By the time James pulls off the road nearly an hour later, they’re down somewhere near Laguna, and Sydney marvels that any time passed at all.

  “Rob and I found this place last year,” James is saying as he parks in the dirt strip alongside the road, one that looks out over the bluffs leading down to the shore. “Usually empty this time of day, but great surf.”

  Sydney hates his own body for tensing at the sound of the friend’s name, flinching away from it like it’s some sort of intrusion. It makes him feel like a child, clapping his hands over his ears to block out the sound of the word “prayers” or “chores.”

  He climbs out of the car, following James’ lead, and gets down his board in silence. He’s suddenly desperate to reach the water, as if this will all just disappear up in smoke if he doesn’t get down to the waves fast enough—if he wavers at all.

  James carries his board over his head, biceps bulging, then sets his board down in the sand beside Sydney and strips off his shirt without a moment’s hesitation. He gracefully drops to his knees and starts waxing as if they do this every morning. Business as usual. All the time in the world.

  And yet, for some idiotic reason, the liminal space of the sand—caught between the silent comfort of the car and the open freedom of the waves—licks sharp and threatening at the edges of the fragile, tender little flutter of something that Sydney always feels in the air between himself and James Campbell. That warm thrum of a spark that flickers and pulses, pulling on his bones like a magnet. And now it’s on the verge of being put out forever—snuffed by the wind on the breezy shore.

  Sydney waxes his board in half the time it usually takes, then leaps up and runs straight to the roaring water, haphazardly kicking up sand in a way he never, ever does. His breath catches in his chest when he glances over his shoulder and sees James following on his heels, full-out sprinting with his board under his arm. He hurls himself into the whitewater just after Sydney as if he can’t reach the swells fast enough either.

  “Fuck, Danny, give an old man some warning before you sprint off to start!” he calls, grinning as he paddles in his wake.

  Sydney’s left breathless as that spark flames into a crackling heat. “I thought you ‘weren’t that fucking old,’” he yells back.

  “Alright, so that’s how you want to do this, huh?” James pauses to sit up and catch his breath for a moment, then smirks before tilting his head back to slick down his hair. Sydney grips his board hard and tears his gaze away from James’ long, dripping column of tan neck before that internal alarm starts blaring again.

  James just shoots him a grin. “Try and keep up, kid,” he says over his shoulder, voice dripping with a challenge.

  Before Sydney can even think of a response, James is off, rocketing on powerful strokes across the surface towards the rushing wave. His chest is heaving, shoulders flexing under the sun, as he turns his board and readies for the drop in down the face. Sydney clutches the sides of his board with both hands and lets out a shaky breath of anticipation. The hair on the back of his neck stands up in a silent, shivering thrill as he stares breathlessly at James Campbell dropping in on the powerful wave.

  He can’t look away. Wouldn’t look away if someone was holding out a million dollars just over his shoulder.

  James zooms along the face, shooting off spray behind him as he pumps hard with his legs for speed. He reaches down to grip the side of his board, shoots out the other arm for balance, and then absolutely soars up into the sky. The sound of it settles with a thud in Sydney’s gut, hovering right at the base of his throat. James lands his jump solidly on the lip of the wave and glides smoothly to the end of the shoulder, fitting in one fierce cutback before letting the whitewater swirl around his shins.

  When James finally falls gracefully into the shallows on his back, sinking down into the earth, Sydney hears a quiet moan slip free from his own throat. He swallows it away.

  James surfaces with a great gasp and reaches for his board bobbing on the waves. He runs his hand through his dripping hair and catches his breath before flopping down on his stomach to paddle back out towards the calm water. Sydney perches on his board, frozen, and pretends he isn’t counting the number of strokes it takes James to reach him.

  “You gonna sit on your lazy ass all day?” James huffs out as he glides up to his side. “Come on, Mr. Top Surfer. Show me what you can do.”

  Those words, said in that voice, send a zipping trail of heat straight down Sydney’s spine. He rolls his eyes to gain a moment to recover before laying down flat on his stomach to start paddling.

  “I just wanted you to have your precious minute of victory before I embarrassed you,” he says in his usual smooth voice.

  James barks a laugh and mutters “unbelievable” behind him as Sydney’s arms start cutting through the icy water, propelling him forward. The sun beats warm and dry on his back, draping over his shoulder blades like a blanket of fresh heat. The horizon stretches out before him like a piercing slash across the heavens, and the salty air settles down around him in a silent cocoon.

  And out of nowhere, he hears his momma’s voice in his head.

  “And God said, ‘Let there be a firmament’—that means cut ‘em in half, Sydney—’in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.’ And that’s how come the sea and the sky look the same.”

  And he remembers his small voice asking, “Have you seen the sea? Is that how come you know it looks the same?”

  He hears her voice, faint around the edges, whisper back, “No, honey, but your father has. He told me all about it.”

  Sydney halts his paddling and waits for a good enough swell to come in. He’s achingly aware of James’ eyes on his back, probably tracing the tendrils of his tattoo. He shuts off the voices in his head and looks out over the water, eyes scanning rapidly for signs of a good swell, following the drifts of the current and the tides, judging the depth and composition of the ocean floor beneath him.

  He sees the familiar physics rise up in front of him like they’re written plain as day in the air. Equations and predictions and models all hovering over the face of the waters.

  “And darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God hovered upon the face of the waters.”

  He gasps at the sudden clarity of her voice, relegated for so many years to his dreams and now crisp and sharp in his ears. It hurts. A dam he never even realized he had built suddenly cracks open and breaks, releasing a floodgate pouring out from his skin and into the sea lapping at his hips, causing the water to rise, and rise, and rise. He hears the clack of her cross necklace falling to the floorboards. Hears the imagined sound of Helen Campbell telling James he can have the whipped cream. Hears his own momma calling out his name, snot dripping from her nose, down across her smeared pink lips.

  “Danny?”

  James’ voice shocks him from his thoughts. He turns around sharply, and sees that James has
paddled out a bit to meet him. His brow is furrowed in confusion, tense like he’s approaching a wounded animal about to strike.

  “You alright?”

  Hot embarrassment flares across Sydney’s cheeks. Everything is quiet—silent save for the gentle lapping of the water against the undersides of their boards in tandem with both of their breaths.

  “Yeah, I—sorry.”

  James twists his mouth like he wants to press him for more, but then settles on a faint smile. “Stop thinking so hard about it all, Einstein.” He nods his head towards a far off swell, one that looks particularly large. “Here, drop in on that wave with me.”

  Sydney nods dumbly and follows, mind still reeling. He allows his eyes to zero in on the broad, quiet strength of James’ back as he paddles out ahead of him, and all the while his own arms and legs move thickly like molasses. His heart pounds in anticipation as the wave starts to build and crest behind them, lifting up the tails of their boards where they wait about ten feet apart. He’s never ridden a wave with anyone else before, aside from someone else snaking in on him to try and screw him over in a competition.

  The misting wind rushes against his face and stomach as he drops in on the wave and lets his muscles take over. He follows in James’ wake as James snaps off the top and then does a quick cross-step so he can hang five. Sydney knows James is showing off on purpose, trying to snap Sydney out of his own mind and goad him into a competition of friendly fire. But Sydney can’t get his own limbs to move. He soars in a frozen stance across the face of the wave and closes his eyes. Feels the droplets of spray flying off James’ board splash against his cheeks, his eyelids. Feels the solid, comforting weight of the heaving earth beneath his feet.