by Nikki Godwin
Rough Waters
by Nikki Godwin
***
Copyright © 2014 Nikki Godwin.
All rights reserved.
First edition: June 17th, 2014
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Dedication
For Jezza, who brought me back to where I belong.
Chapter One
If I knew A.J. wouldn’t somehow end up in jail for it, I’d set that billboard on fire. Colby’s smug grin looks down at me, and he almost makes me regret crossing the city line. Almost. He may be the reason I’m even driving into Crescent Cove right now, but he won’t influence my plans this summer.
I bypass the condo and drive straight to Drenaline Surf. No one is expecting me for another two hours. I’ll never admit how fast I drove to get here in time to see Miles surf today. I pull into the ‘employees only’ parking lot behind the store and dig through the glove compartment for the employee decal that Topher swiped for me during spring break. I never thought my parents would let me move across the country for college, but they fell in love with Crescent Cove. Not that I blame them. This place is amazing.
The blue decal suctions itself to the corner of my windshield. I hide anything of value, grab my keys and cell phone, and make my way to the front of the store. It was hard as hell to pretend I’d never been here when I visited with my parents, but this feels like last summer all over again – new, exciting, and a sense of freedom.
I push through the entrance of Drenaline Surf and scan the building for A.J. But I don’t see him. In fact, I don’t see anything of familiarity aside from Shark’s actual shark photographs. I walk over to the front register, but the cashier is new. Her nametag reads Kerianne.
“Hi, can I help you find something?” she asks, all smiles.
“Is A.J. Gonzalez here by chance?” I ask, hoping she doesn’t glare at me and curl her lips in disgust like most people did at the mention of A.J.’s name last summer.
She shakes her head, sans a disgusted look. I’ll never forget the way my mom’s face twisted into this ugly concoction of wrinkles and heavy makeup when she met A.J. last spring. Vin sent A.J. in his place for my senior prom because of Drenaline Surf obligations. My mom would fall out as dead as Colby Taylor’s true identity if she knew A.J. was one of my roommates now. What she doesn’t know in North Carolina won’t hurt her.
“He went down to the beach a little bit ago for Miles Garrett’s heat,” Kerianne explains. “He’s probably at the Drenaline tent, but I doubt you’ll be able to get to it through the people. They’ve been here since early this morning to stake out their spots.”
She shrugs and gives me a slight frown, like she wishes she could help but knows there’s nothing she can do for me. She clearly doesn’t know who I am, and I have no intention of telling her. I open my mouth to thank her, but my face stretches into what I’m sure is the stupidest, biggest smile ever the instant I see him exit the office door.
“Haley! What in the hell?” Topher drops the box he’s carrying and dashes toward me, full speed. He wraps me up in the tightest of hugs, spins me in a circle, and pulls back to look at me like a proud parent. “You weren’t supposed to be here for another two hours,” he says.
I nod in response but don’t speak. I saw Topher two months ago when I was here, but I swear, the guy has buffed up even since then. He’s broader, firmer. His hair is still messy, and his smile is still goofy, and his eyes still dance like the ocean. But he’s different.
“I haven’t missed Miles yet, have I?” I hate that those are the first words out of my mouth to him. I should’ve asked how he’s been or where his brother is. I should’ve told him I’ve missed him or that he looks ripped. Asking about Miles? Random.
“No, I’m headed there now,” Topher says, bouncing in his flip flops. “He’s going to be so stoked that you got here in time to see him surf. He’s been killing it in competitions lately.”
That’s what I love about Topher. He goes right along with the random like it’s completely normal. He retrieves the box of Drenaline Surf T-shirts that he dropped, introduces me to Kerianne, and then gives this dramatic eye roll when she asks if I’m Vin’s Haley.
We trek down the beach, and Topher talks about how Ocean Blast Energy would rather have him as their poster boy instead of Miles, but Vin still refuses to give Topher a chance at a sponsorship. He complains about how much the swell has sucked lately and that it’s not fair how Colby can travel to better waves and he can’t. This is nothing new to me, though. Topher tells me these same things on a weekly basis via text message. At least I’m in the loop.
The blue tent comes into view. Kerianne wasn’t kidding about the mass of people. Plastic chairs and giant umbrellas stretch on and on like the ocean.
“Stick close,” Topher says. “There are like a thousand girls waiting to see Colby and Miles, and they’re swarming the damn tent. If they think you’re trying to cut ahead of them, they’ll pull out the claws.”
I heed his warning and ease closer to him as we approach the tent on the opposite side of the crowd. Topher sets the box on a fold-up table and clears his throat. Vin looks over and…half-waves at me. Seriously? You haven’t seen me – your girlfriend – in two months and all I get is a half-wave? I know he’s in manager mode, and summertime is insane for Drenaline Surf, but a smile wouldn’t have killed him.
For half a second, I debate tearing into him and ripping him like a surfer on a killer wave, but the air horn disrupts any train of thought I had. Everyone and everything around me turns into a mess of shuffles and movement as one heat ends and another one prepares to begin.
Topher grabs my arm and pulls me toward him. “I’m going with Miles to the competitors’ tent because he’ll be in the next heat,” he says.
I glance behind him and spot those messy dreadlocks immediately. Miles nods his head in response to someone. Then he leans in and kisses a girl on the cheek. It’s not Kristin.
“But I’m leaving you in good company,” Topher says, pulling me through the overflow of people.
I dig my fingers into his arm, steadily slamming my shoulders against people as we force through this human hallway. I spot Jace’s truck once we reach a clearing. A.J. paces the shoreline, talking with his arms. Reed is the first to look up and notice me.
“Look who’s back from the east coast,” Reed hollers out, waving from the other side of Jace’s truck.
That’s all it takes for A.J. to race toward me. He slams into me with open arms, like a wild bird that just flew into a window pane.
“What the hell?” A.J. asks, checking the time on his cell phone. “You’re not supposed to be here for hours. Did you drive like me?”
Topher laughs and nods. A.J. says something about the water and then something about how I can go with him when he gets his next tattoo – completely irrelevant and random – and I feel at home for the first time since I left last summer.
“I’m passing him off to his other other half,” a girl’s voice says from behind me.
I glance over my shoulder. There’s no forgetting this girl, ev
en though she doesn’t have the eyeliner heart drawn next to her eye. Instead of skinny jeans and a band tee, she wears a blue and purple sundress. But it’s definitely Enchanted Emily clinging to Miles’s arm.
“Haley,” she says instantly with a huge smile, like we’re old friends rather than people who just happened to meet on The Strip. She’s the one who led me to Reed, though. She’s the only one who took a chance on me when everyone else laughed in my face for searching for Colby Taylor. I can totally hang with this Emily girl.
Miles rushes Topher because he’ll be disqualified if he’s late. Emily follows A.J. and me to Jace’s truck, and no one seems to find it strange that she’s joined us. She squeezes in next to me on the tailgate, and the words she said finally click – other other half.
“You and Miles?” I ask, hoping she’ll somehow make sense of the question without having a direct line to my train of thought.
She smiles and nods. “We’re finally able to be open about it since Kristin left,” she says. “We started talking in December, while she was on her family Christmas vacation, but it’s been hell keeping it hushed. I’m glad she went to school out of state.”
She rambles on about how Kristin only wanted to date a surfer and how Miles is terribly awkward with girls. She talks about how in the year that they dated, Kristin never knew that Miles worked two jobs to help his mom pay the bills or that he is allergic to peanuts.
“And he’d eat pickles with every meal if you’d let him,” she says. “Of course, she didn’t know that either.”
For them to have only been together for six months, I swear, she knows more about him than I’ve learned about Vin in a year. I blame the long-distance thing, push the thoughts to the back of my mind, and tuck them in between crevices of my brain for safekeeping.
The rest of her words are eaten by the shrill screams of the girls to my far right. I crane my neck to see around A.J. but wish I hadn’t once I see the reason for their fangirling – Colby Taylor. If I didn’t know him and his crazy history and horrible attitude toward life, I could actually see the appeal. His tan is perfect. His hair is the typical sun-kissed blonde of a classic surfer. His soaked competition jersey clings to every curve of his body. At a glance, he’s beautiful. These girls just can’t see the ugly, tortured soul underneath.
He signs a few autographs as he pushes through the crowd, and we lock eyes. That smug grin from the billboard is live in the flesh. He shoves his surfboard toward one of the security guards working the competition and works his way over to where we sit.
“Look what the east coast threw away,” he says, shaking the salt water from his hair.
“Taylor!” Vin shouts. He approaches us and jerks Colby’s arm. “What did I tell you about keeping a professional image? You better watch every word that comes out of your mouth.”
Colby heaves an annoyed sigh and nods along as Vin directs him to a reporter from Shaka Magazine who had first dibs for interviews after the heat. Colby stalks off, half-pissed and half-cocky, and Vin lingers in front of the tailgate.
“Do you mind?” he asks Emily, motioning to where she sits next to me.
She jumps up to let him have her seat and joins Theo and Jace on the toolbox behind us. Vin slips an arm around my shoulders and hugs me close to him. It’s not the “drop everything for me” hug that I received from his brother, but it’s better than a half-wave.
“How fast did you drive?” he asks, his voice low.
“I got an early start,” I lie. I already know he’s going to get all mechanic-like on me.
“I’m sure what’s under the hood of your car will beg to differ,” he says. Then he laughs, thank God. “I’ll check the fluids tonight. I wasn’t expecting you so soon. I thought I’d be off the clock once you got here.”
He doesn’t say anything else due to a text message from Topher. He shakes his head and clenches his phone like he’s crushing an aluminum can.
“Dude, what’s wrong?” A.J. asks from my other side.
Vin holds up the text. It’s a photo of Topher, Miles, and Kale in the competitors’ tent. Topher waves the shaka while choking Miles with an arm-hold around his best friend’s neck. Kale is on Miles’s other side, tongue out like a crazy rock star.
“This is what I deal with,” Vin says. “Topher was supposed to give Miles a pep talk, help him find a zen place, or whatever the hell it is that surfers do. Not this shit.”
He glances back at the tent where Colby speaks with Shaka Magazine. “I need to stick close to him to make sure he doesn’t say something stupid. I’ll catch you after this is over,” he says.
With that, Vin heads back over to his star surfer. Reed replaces him on the tailgate and talks about how glad he is that it’s summertime because college classes are killing him. A.J. says he secretly hopes Colby wins this competition just because he’ll get a slice of the prize money and won’t have to look for a job just yet.
And that’s when I hear it. Screaming. Crazy, fanatical screaming. Enchanted Emily rolls her eyes and mutters the word ‘fangirls.’ Reed nods and A.J. laughs, but I don’t buy it. I push off of the tailgate and glance around. Fangirl screams are the kinds you’d hear at a Spaceships Around Saturn concert. This is more of the kind of scream you’d hear if someone in the boyband Spaceships Around Saturn was murdered.
A rush of media cameras sprint toward the Drenaline Surf tent. Camera flashes spark like lightning around them while microphones dance over the reporters’ heads, hoping to catch a few words. And then there are more screams.
Reed and A.J. jump to their feet, joining me on the sand. Whatever media frenzy this is has nothing to do with surfer fangirls. A middle-aged lady cries out, and then there are shouts that “it’s really him.” More cries. Then sobbing. And her face comes into view. She’s ghostly pale, like she’s just seen the walking dead. A man close to her age helps her stay balanced.
“Wow,” Reed says. “Who knew Colby appealed to an older audience? She’s probably his oldest fan.”
My throat catches when I try to speak. I’ve seen her before – in the corporate yearbook. Page twenty-seven. Burks.
“She’s not a fan,” I say. “She’s his mom.”
Chapter Two
“He’s alive!”
The words ring out and echo across the waves. It’s like a bad beachy remake of Frankenstein. His mom grabs her chest, like she may enter cardiac arrest, and his dad holds her hand. His other hand rests on her back as he helps her walk forward. They can’t be any older than fifty, if that, but they creep along like decrepit senior citizens approaching their ninetieth birthdays. His mom cries out again – no words, just dramatic sobs and moans.
“Fucking hell,” A.J. says. “This is like a bad Lifetime movie…but you know, real.”
The reporter from Shaka Magazine is the first to see the crazed lady stumbling toward them like an overly-emotional zombie. Colby and Vin turn around in what I swear is slow motion. If confidence is what Colby wears on the billboard, this expression is the right opposite.
“It’s him! Oh God, it’s really him,” his mom screams out.
She turns toward the surf paparazzi, bringing a hand to her mouth as if she were a damsel in distress who was just spectacularly rescued by a soldier in the night. She sobs and heaves forward a few times, pretending to mutter, but her words are clear and well-rehearsed.
“I thought we’d lost him forever,” she says. “But our son is alive!”
The reporters sprint under the tent, hovering around their drama queen as she lunges for her long lost son. But no one touches the surf star. My boyfriend stops them.
Vin says something to the media along the lines of ‘no more interviews’ and how Colby is through for the day ‘until this matter is resolved.’ He waves to a security guard, who promptly joins him under the tent, and then he jerks Colby away as quickly as the cameras swarmed in on them. Reed nudges me and nods toward the tent. A.J. and I follow him closer to the media spectacle that is still underway.
/>
“Three years,” his mom says, nodding to a camera. “We’ve searched for so long. We never gave up hope that someday we’d bring our boy home. We ask for privacy at this time as we try to rebuild our family.”
Seriously? She has the nerve to ask for privacy? She’s the one who invited every reporter, journalist, and surf paparazzi to follow her through a crowd of people to the Drenaline Surf tent just to make a scene. She knew what she was doing the minute she stepped onto the sand. I bet the tears weren’t even real. This wasn’t about finding her son. This was all for show.
“This is bad,” I say, keeping my eyes on the woman in the sunhat. She even dressed for the occasion. No wonder Colby died and reinvented himself.
“Way to state the obvious, Haley,” A.J. says. “This woman is loco.”
“No kidding,” Reed says, shielding his eyes from the sun. “I’m going to the store. I figure Vin’s probably flipping out, and he may need someone to intervene. You guys staying?”
I nod. I came to watch Miles surf, and from the looks of things around the Drenaline Surf tent, I may be the only one actually watching. I’ve followed his career over the last year from across the country, from magazine articles to internet chats to photo shoots, but I’ve yet to witness a live event. I wouldn’t call myself a surfer fangirl when it comes to Miles Garrett, but I’ve earned this moment.
The media leaves shortly after Reed ascends the hill of sand back toward The Strip. I’m sure Colby’s parents are holed up at the Crescent Inn giving exclusive interviews to the highest bidder while they await the reappearance of their son. I debate texting Vin to tell him that Colby needs to be entered in a witness protection program, but that’s pretty much where he’s been for the last three years. How in the hell did they find him?
“Did Colby throw a fit and break something under the tent?” Topher asks from behind me.
