by Ryan Schow
“How long has he been surfing and in what kind of waves?”
“How long have you been surfing?”
“Years.”
Twisting a strand of hair in my hand, I say, “It’s been awhile for him, too. Mostly he surfs small to medium waves. Nothing professional. You seem to know a lot about surfing. What kind of board to you have?”
“It’s custom.”
“Is it new?”
“It’s broken in,” he says with a smile.
“I think if I could have you make me a board, I’d have you make your dream board. The one you’d make if it was yours. If money wasn’t an issue.”
“Is money an issue?” he asks.
I look at him, smile softly and congenially and say, “No, it’s not.”
“Even if the price is around a grand? Because Jack’s around the corner on Main has tons of pre-made Channel Islands boards to choose from, and they’re about half the price.”
“Custom is better.”
He smiles, then says, “Indeed it is. So when do you need it by?”
I tilt my head, ease out a smile, then pull a strand of my long black hair into my mouth and say, “How long will it take?”
“A couple days. Maybe three depending on what you want.”
“That long?” I ask feeling girlish and warm.
He pauses for a moment, totally cool, just looking at me, appraising me. Then: “You want to see what goes into making a board? It’ll explain the need for time. Plus, you never know, you might even find the process interesting.”
I can’t help smiling. “Yeah, sure. I guess.”
5
They say you should act your age, but if you don’t look like your age, should you really act it? What would I really say if I was acting my age? The truth is, nothing will send a guy like Sebastian into boner shock as badly as if you start calling him Sonny, like he’s your freaking grandchild or something. Unless his name is Sonny, then that’s another thing altogether.
So I follow Sebastian into a large, multi-room workshop where there’s a tall rack of long, white unshaped boards.
“These are called blanks,” Sebastian tells me, pulling one down. “They’re basically just Styrofoam with wood in the middle. Are you okay on time? Do you have somewhere else to be?”
I reach out and touch the blank he’s holding. “I’m sort of on vacation here, so time is the one thing I have plenty of.”
“Are you here with your parents?”
“No.”
“There’s this great sandwich place around the corner. If you want, maybe you could grab us a couple of sandwiches, my treat. That’ll give me a chance to set the computer and run your board through the shaping machine. It’s pretty cool to watch, if you want.”
“I don’t know…”
He shifts from one foot to the other, brushes something off the board, then says, “I’m going to be alone here all day, and this place isn’t exactly hopping with business, so honestly I could use the company. Unless you have to get back to your friend…”
“You know,” I say, “lunch would be great. And I’ll buy this time.”
“That’s generous of you, but it’s my suggestion so please, it’s my treat.”
“So long as you let me buy next time.”
He smiles, then relaxes into himself and says, “Deal.”
I grab us a couple of smoked turkey hoagies, some chips and a couple of fountain drinks with the thirty dollars he gives me, then return to the shop thinking how much I love being with him. I’ve been around enough men over the years to know that feeling this good with him is how every great relationship starts. Plus he smells good. Like sand and salt water and the faintest hint of a very subtle cologne.
“Is that Versace you’re wearing?”
Smiling, he says, “It is.”
“I like it.”
Before we eat, he says, “Check this out,” then shows me how the lasers cut the blank and I have to admit, it’s a little thrilling. I’ve always wondered how they made these things.
“So what’s next?” I ask.
“When it’s done, I’ve got to cut and shave it a bit here and there, then smooth it out and detail it by hand.”
“You do that?”
“I’m the master shaper, so yes. I finish off all the boards.”
“Then it’s done?”
He laughs and says, “Not by a mile. It’ll get a fiberglass sheeting and resin to seal it in. The process is called ‘laminating’ and it’s done twice for strength.”
“Then it’s done?”
“I love how excitable you are over this whole thing,” he teases.
“It’s impressive seeing a man this passionate about his craft. These days, most kids are zombies at their jobs, just doing what they do for gas money or pot money or rent that was late two months ago.”
He starts laughing then says, “Be careful, you’re starting to sound older than your years.”
Ha! Little does he know…
“Plus,” he says, grinning, “I’m famished and those sandwiches smell amazing.”
While we’re eating, he’s thinking of me, stealing glances at me. Then he’s thinking of Raven and then Corrine. He and Corrine broke up recently and she’s been calling him a lot. Trying to really talk to him for the first time in forever.
Crawling around in his memories (which I should feel bad about), I realize that by having a fling with Raven, he’d come face to face with some very hard truths about his relationship with Corrine. Truths that became impossible to ignore. As much as he loved Corrine, they weren’t meant to be together. She, on the other hand, was nothing if not typical.
First you shit on him, then you cheat on him, then when he breaks up with you, you just cry and cry and cry for him to take you back because you just love him soooooo much.
Oh Christ, speak of the devil…
“You have company,” I say, trying to hide my disdain, and my curiosity. I’ve always wondered about her: Corrine.
“What?”
A moment later, the front door opens and Corrine comes strolling in. The first thing that happens is I see how pretty she is and this sends a bolt of jealousy right through me. Corrine sees me and stops. She puckers so hard the earth’s axis actually shifts a full degree.
Did you feel that?
“Oh,” she says. She recovers, putting on a smile and swallowing her concern.
“It’s okay,” I tell her. “I’m a customer. We’re just having lunch while he’s shaping a new board for me.”
“I don’t want to interrupt.”
Ah, but she does.
I wipe a dab of mustard from my lower lip, stand up and offer her a hand and say, “You must be Corrine. I’m Savannah Crawford-Swann.”
She takes my hand in a limp handshake, eyes glazed, mixed emotions crashing around in her lovely little head. The girl is mesmerized by my beauty. She’s crushed by the fact that I’m sharing an intimate lunch with her ex, and startled because in her hand is a brown bag with two hoagies from the same sandwich shop I was just at.
“Nice to meet you,” she says. Taking a deep breath, she’s about to exit stage left when I cut her off from whatever she’s about to say.
“Why don’t you eat with us. You’re obviously here for lunch and it would be nice to have you.”
I slide over so she can sit in between me and Sebastian, but it’s not what I wanted. I’m really just improvising here. I’m not supposed to know about Corrine, and Sebastian knows this, but if I can keep her here then maybe he won’t ask how I know her name.
This, of course, is a really vanilla way of me admitting I just f*cked up.
“We were talking about surfing,” I say, which we weren’t. “He was telling me how my board is going to be made and it’s pretty fascinating.”
“You surf?” she asks, unwrapping her sandwich. She has no idea how to take me.
“I’m getting the board for a friend.”
“Do you live here?” she a
sks, faking confident curiosity. As I’m answering, she takes a conservative bite of her sandwich, leaving a bit of lipstick on the bread, same as me. These aren’t small hoagies.
“No, I’m just visiting.”
“From where?” Sebastian says, eyeing me suspiciously.
I look at him, blanch at his change of mood, then smile away my mounting discomfort and say, “New York.”
Corrine gulps down her food and says, “I’ve always wanted to go to New York, what’s it like?”
“Sometimes it feels too big, and sometimes it’s too intimate at the same time. Not commercial at all. Kind of like this surf shop.”
“Are you inside New York City?” Corrine asks, mesmerized.
“Manhattan, actually.”
“What are the people there like? Are they as brash and abrupt as everyone says?”
“Sort of, but not really. They certainly don’t have the filters Californians do, but their hearts are huge. It’s like, people love the city. And they love what they do. A lot of them live in New York because they’ve done it all their lives and can’t imagine doing anything else. The truth is, I love New Yorkers.”
“Isn’t it expensive to live there?” she asks.
Obviously she knows nothing of Manhattan. “Is a frog’s ass watertight?” I say with a giggle. I’m eating chips at this point because it’s easier to talk with food in your mouth when it’s not a big ass sandwich.
“So what do you do?” she asks. Now it’s all about me and Corrine and I’m okay with walling off Sebastian because he still can’t get it out of his head that I somehow know his ex-girlfriend’s name. Or that I knew she was coming in before she was even in the building.
“I’m a writer,” I say.
“Really?”
“Have you ever heard of the Ambitious B!tch series?”
She almost chokes on her food, then says, “Oh my God, that’s you?”
I spread open my hands and grace her with a smile. “In the flesh.”
“But I thought…wait, you use a penname?”
“Elizabeth Vanderbilt.”
“Ohmigod,” she says a few more times, low and fast for good measure. She’s not hungry anymore. She’s not even thinking about Sebastian or the fact that I’m better looking than her and having lunch with her ex-flame. She’s just rosy-cheeked and star struck.
6
The thing about Corrine is, she’s got lovely features I can’t stop studying. I really am jealous of her. As jealous of her as she is of me, to be precise. Though I may be more beautiful than her, she’s had him for several years and I only had him for an evening.
This gets me thinking.
She’s had lots of sex with him, and loved him for years, but then she cheated on him. Why would she do that? I hate her.
Yet I don’t.
Man, girls are freaking dumb!
With her creamy white skin, her big blue eyes and her perfect eyebrows I can’t stop thinking about how I was born a toad and she was born…like this.
She’s always been like this, I think.
She’s always been real.
“You have the most beautiful eyes,” I tell her. “And I love your hair. It’s so thick.” I can’t help it, the compliments just come out. Reaching up, I brush a strand of hair out of her face and say, “You’re a natural beauty, Corrine.”
She doesn’t know how to react, so she just says, “Thank you,” and blushes an even deeper shade of red. She’s completely attracted to me, emotionally and energetically, not sexually, and it’s got her more confused than ever. Her mind is spinning. She’s wondering how it is that one of her favorite authors from New York is sitting here having lunch with her Sebastian. The boy who left her. The boy she’s trying oh-so-desperately to win back.
Turning from her I say to Sebastian, “So what’s next? After you laminate the board?”
He clears his throat, but his energy is waning. He’s all over the place emotionally. Most of all, he wants to know how I know Corrine’s name.
He’s not letting go of that.
“Holes.”
I laugh when he doesn’t elaborate and say, “That’s it? Holes?”
He coughs out an embarrassed laugh, then says, “I’ll drill holes for the detachable fins. You don’t want them in the way when you’re carrying your board to the beach. There’s more resin involved, and I use temporary fins to set the angle. Once that’s done, it’s off to the grinding room where the extra resin is removed with a power grinder.”
“Then it’s done?”
“No,” Corrine says, jumping in. “After that he’ll sand it down until it’s super smooth, and polish it, and then it’ll be ready to ride.”
“Unless you want graphics,” Sebastian adds.
His sandy blonde hair is a little longer than when we first met, but his eyes are dark brown and dreamy, and though his tan has faded some, the build of his chest and his arms more than make up for it.
God, I really do want the absolute shit out of him!
Tearing my gaze away from him, feeling heat and want having its way with me, I look at Corrine and can’t help thinking about their shared history, how they seem to fit so nicely together. I swear to God, they’re like Ken and Malibu Barbie.
“I have to go,” I say, standing up. Looking at Corrine, I say, “It was a pleasure meeting you,” then to Sebastian I add, “and I appreciate you giving me a tour of your shop, and the sandwich. When will the board be ready?”
“Two days. Three at the latest.”
“Do you need me to pay for it now? Or leave a deposit or something?”
“That’s not necessary,” he says.
“Nice to meet you,” Corrine says, still with that dreamy, uncertain look in her eyes.
7
Instead of walking home, I wander down to the beach, plop down in the sand facing the sea and mindlessly stare into the wet, steel-colored seascape. The sky is overcast. Cotton-fluffy with dark clouds and moisture.
My mood has definitely soured.
Kicking off my shoes, wiggling my toes into the warm sand, I don’t know why, but I start to cry. It makes no sense. I haven’t cried in years, but now I’m sitting here, losing it not over a boy, but a girl, too. Ten minutes later, someone sits down beside me. Sebastian. I felt him coming but decided to do nothing about my tears. A salty breeze rolling off the water and up the shoreline promises to dry them soon enough.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hi,” I say, quiet as a mouse, unblinking.
“Are you okay?” he asks, angling around my shoulder to look at me.
I turn and stare at him, eyes blank and young, then say, “Why are you here?”
He reaches out and wipes a tear from my cheek, not mentioning it while giving it a hundred percent of his attention.
“I sent Corrine home, then closed the shop for lunch. I left the sign on the door, not that anyone will come in. This is the off-season.”
I wipe my eyes and sneak out a smile. “How’d you know I’d be here?”
“I didn’t.” He tilts his head sympathetically, looks deep into my eyes and says, “Will you tell me why you’re crying?”
“It sometimes happens,” I lie. “Though not as often as it should. Or perhaps too often. The jury’s still out.”
“Some girls have ugly cry faces,” he says, his tone sympathetic, his admiring eyes looking safer and more arresting than ever. “I’ve never seen someone look so beautiful and so sad at the same time.”
My face warms to a blush, and for some reason this makes me cry even more. Him saying this, it reminds me of how much I want to be loved again. How it’s been too long since I’ve had a man in my life. All I can do is turn away, try to hide this surprising swell of emotions.
He remains still for a quiet moment, then says, “How did you know about Corrine?”
“She’s beautiful,” I say, unwilling to meet his eyes. “She doesn’t even have to wear makeup and she looks amazing, don’t you think? I mean, t
hose impossible lips. All that hair.”
What I don’t say is that I didn’t imagine her to look like that, but then again, the way Sebastian looks, she’s exactly his type.
“I used to think that, too,” he says.
“But?”
“Now I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“We aren’t dating anymore.”
“I know. I saw that in your eyes. You were disappointed to see her.”
He shifts his body in the sand, pulls his legs under him Indian style until he feels settled. The breeze dies down a touch, washing over us in tempered drifts.
“I was enjoying our conversation,” he says.
“So was I,” I say, smiling to myself.
“You didn’t tell me you were a writer. Or that you lived so far away.”
Looking over at him, I say, “I have a place here in California, too. I’m bicoastal at the moment.”
“Stop deflecting,” he says gently, almost hypnotically.
“Why did you break up with her?” I ask, ignoring him. “The real reason, not the reason you give your friends or your mom, or even her.”
He thinks about this for a long time, then says, “She cheated on me and I couldn’t get over it. It was with a co-worker and she said it was just a fling, that it didn’t mean anything.”
“But it meant something to you,” I say. “A breach of trust. A betrayal.”
“Yes.”
“And something that meant everything to you seemed trivial to her.”
“Exactly.”
“So you never cheated?” I ask.
Now he goes perfectly still. He’s thinking of Raven and wondering if he tells me the truth about his affair, if it will ruin any chances he might have with me. It won’t ruin anything. He can’t know that, but it won’t.
“Before I broke up with her, I met someone.”
“A girl?”
“Yes,” he says, gazing out to sea.
He’s got that sexy playboy look, but he’s less dangerous than he looks. Or perhaps that’s the trap. Am I falling into it? Probably.
Definitely.
“Her name was Raven,” he says. “She was…I don’t know, intoxicating. She was a girl full of contradictions and inconsistencies. A girl I still don’t understand. An unsolved mystery.”
