This Sky

by Autumn Doughton

  With her eyelids half down and her lashes a dark veil over her cheeks, she tells me that she’ll never forget the way I feel right now. She tells me she would do anything for love. She sings that maybe it’s crazy, but no else can save her but me. She cries that she’s lonely and begs me to give her every fantasy she’s got and hose her down with holy water if she gets too hot. Again, she sings that she would do anything for love.

  At first, it’s funny. Then, it’s fucking perfect. And for just a few minutes, I’m able to forget her hang-ups over her douchebag ex and all the things I haven’t told her.

  My fingers make patterns up and down her body, memorizing the slender curve of her hips and ass and the delicate lines of her upper arms. She’s so gorgeous that it squeezes something inside of me. I’m lost, pulled down by the rush of the tide, forgetting to make myself take in oxygen.

  “Are you okay?” she whispers into the skin of my neck as the song closes.

  Exhaling harshly, I nod. She smiles and I bend to tease her lips with the pad of my thumb. I can’t hold back anymore. I know it’s reckless and I haven’t asked for her permission, but I can’t stop. All of me is aching for her touch and I don’t care who the hell knows it. Let the bar staff talk and make assumptions.

  Gemma reaches up to touch my face with the tips of her fingers, her dark eyes imploring. “Landon? What’s wrong?”

  This is too much. You’re too much.

  My heart is beating everywhere—in every part on my body. My chest. My wrists. My neck. My feet. My forehead. My fingertips.

  I kiss the tip of her nose, lingering to feel her eyelashes flutter against my cheek. Then I catch hold of her shoulders and pull her so close that I can feel a tremble working its way down her body like an electrical current.

  I’m so far gone that I almost lift her face and kiss her on the mouth. I almost admit to her that I’m losing myself. I almost tell her I love her. Insane, I know.

  Gemma slips her arms around my ribcage until her hands are splayed across my shoulder blades. She rests her head against me and I can feel that her lips are still going along with the words of the song, spilling the words onto the skin just above my heart.

  Damn. Where is the guy who thought he could handle this arrangement?

  How could I have calculated everything so poorly? How could I agree to take a single step, knowing full well that moving is exactly what exposes the cracks?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Gemma

  “Roasted…” The voice is low. Niggling but gentle.

  “French press, Columbian beans…” Each syllable is carefully enunciated.

  I groan and curl my legs up underneath my butt so that I’m shaped into a misshapen ball in the middle of the bed. A hand moves over my head, pushing aside my hair. In response, I burrow farther beneath the smooth sheets. Laughter sounds as I squeeze my eyes tight and mumble incoherently.

  The hand keeps going. Long fingers trace the bumps of my ribs and run from breast to waist, then waist to thigh. “Cold drip, café latte…”

  “Am I dreaming?” I murmur into the pillow. “I don’t want to open my eyes but you are seducing me like crazy with your coffee talk.”

  Warm breath washes over my ear. “You think it’s hot?”

  “Very,” I say, yawning and stretching out my limbs like a cat. My eyes are still closed, but my hands find Landon’s face. I pull him toward me and kiss him gently.

  He groans and pulls back. “I can’t,” he says, his voice strained with regret.

  “Huh?” My head comes up. I open my eyes, tiredly squinting toward the window above his bed. “It’s dark out. Like really dark, Landon.”

  “That’s because it’s four in the morning,” he tells me, moving his hand down my leg and wrapping his fingers around my bare ankle.

  My mouth opens in surprise. “Four? Why are you up right now?”

  He leans in and kisses me again. This time on the nose. “I’ve got to go,” he says, but he lingers over my body, and I feel his chest rise with a drawn in breath.

  Seizing the opportunity, I press myself beneath him, wrapping my leg behind his knee, stealing his leverage and pulling him down to the bed. He releases another groan and all of the blood in my body rushes to the surface of my skin.

  “No, no, no,” he says, his grip on my ankle going loose.

  I lay a trail of kisses over his jaw and scrape my cheek against the hard bristle of his early morning beard. “Get back in bed,” I command.

  He releases me, putting his hands on either side of me and pushing away with reluctance. “Gemma, I’m sorry I woke you but I didn’t want you to worry if you got up and saw that I was gone.”

  Now I’m becoming more awake. I rub my eyes and rise to my elbows. My messy brown hair falls over my shoulders like a silky shawl. “What are you talking about?”

  He’s looking right at me. His head is tilted. “I didn’t want you to wonder why I left. But now that I’m thinking about it, I realize that I should have written a note and let you sleep. Maybe I just wanted to kiss you.”

  I shake my head to clear it. “Where are you going? Isn’t it Friday? Or is it Sunday?”

  “It’s Saturday,” he tells me, laughing softly and smoothing his hand over my hair. “Just go back to sleep.”

  “No, I—” I finally register that he’s got a wetsuit on the lower half of his body. My voice is still bleary. “You’re going surfing at four in the morning?”

  He nods, unable to keep the amused grin off his face. “I have my phone programmed for big surf alerts and it looks like Blacks is about to get western swells, which means double-overheads. Maybe triples,” he says happily. “I want to get up there before the lineup gets slammed.”

  “You’re going surfing at four in the morning?” I ask again. I’m sitting up completely and the bed sheet is bunched at my waist. From the corner of the bedroom, Wyatt lifts his head and whines at us.

  “I am.”

  I blink, letting this sink in. Then I yawn widely and roll my neck. “Hold up. I’ll come with you.”

  Landon laughs.

  Still sniffing the sleepiness away, I turn my head and nail him with a look. “Is that a problem?”

  He makes a placating motion with his hands and smiles with one side of his mouth. “Gemma, you’ve been out on the water and you’re better than I expected you to be—but you’ve lost your mind if you think I’m letting you go out on big waves in the dark. I am not risking that. That’s how morons die.”

  I’m already reaching for a pair of cutoffs by the bed and adjusting the t-shirt he let me borrow for bed. “I didn’t mean that I’m going to try to surf with you, Landon. I’ll just go with you.”

  “No,” he says, pushing a hand back into his hair. “It’s dark out. You won’t be able to see anything. You’ll be bored.”

  “You’ve said that before, but I know I won’t be bored,” I answer, finding a hair holder on the table by the bed and gathering my long hair into a bumpy knot at the base of my skull. “Even if I am, so what? That’s my problem.”

  “You’ll be cold out there.”

  I shrug my shoulders and release a sigh. “So be chivalrous and loan me a jacket.”

  “You’ll be tired,” he says softly, losing steam.

  “I don’t care. I want to go with you.” Maybe it’s because it’s the middle of the night and words and secrets seem thinner at this hour, but I lift my chin and look at him. “Who cares if it’s too dark and I’m tired and cold? You’re worth it.”

  Landon

  When I was very young, I didn’t know how bad things were.

  I thought my life was normal. Better than normal actually.

  I decided I was lucky, growing up with the Pacific as my backyard. And when Claudia complained about our mother’s boyfriends—the ones who yelled and shouted and smashed things around—or the thrift store clothes we had to wear, or cold canned soup for the fourth night in a row, I reminded her things could always be worse. We easily cou
ld have been born landlocked in say, someplace like Iowa.

  As the years passed, I started noticing the differences between Claudia and me and the other kids at school. Most of them had more than one pair of shoes. They didn’t seem to worry about whether or not they were going to have enough money for lunch, or if they would have a place to sleep at night. They seemed happy. Safe even. I watched them get dropped off by smiling mothers and fathers in shiny SUVs and I thought of the dad we’d heard of but never met. I thought of our mom, who was probably still sleeping it off on the couch. And the vicious red and blue punctures that crawled up the inside of her arms like bug bites. And the empty glass bottles smelling of licorice and sink cleaner that were always on the floor of the apartment.

  I thought of the dirty bathroom and the rusty-looking stain on the wall above the toilet. The empty shelves in the refrigerator and the TV that only worked about half of the time. The medicine and bags that looked like they were full of baby powder in the drawer by our mom’s bed.

  And the guys. There were a few that weren’t too bad, but most of them gave me the creeps. And Steve—he was the worst. I hated when he got drunk because he got angry. And when he was angry, he liked to hit things. And me.

  I could picture him standing in the doorway to my bedroom, just a long, skinny shadow framed by the yellow hall light. I could imagine his piss-warm breath and feel him creeping closer, his finger probing through the dark to check if I was asleep. Sick with the fear of an animal that knows it’s trapped, I’d hold my breath and squeeze my eyes tight.

  I wouldn’t let myself cry—not even when he yanked me out of bed by my hair and kicked me in the gut and called me a pussy. No tears. No tears. No tears. Because then he might turn to Claudia. And I could handle anything but that.

  The only good part of our lives was Uncle Dean, who loved surfing and Mountain Dew Code Red and quoting bad movies like Spaceballs and Jurassic Park. He couldn’t do much about his junkie sister or the carousel of temporary dads rotating in and out of our lives, but he could take Claudia and me to La Jolla on a Saturday afternoon and teach us how to catch a wave and buy us an ice cream cone at the end of the day.

  For my ninth birthday, he bought me my very own board. After that, nothing could keep me from the Pacific. I became the water. I became the salt and molecules and that tide reaching for the moon. I became the seasons.

  In the summer, with the southerly swells pushing up the coast, I surfed raw and hard, hitching rides farther north to Oceanside so I could tag the jetties there and maybe rip a hollow or two.

  Autumn was a mash-up of waves fanned by the Santa Ana winds. I quickly learned that this was the best time to stick to the beach breaks. Most days, I’d take a board out to Sunset Cliffs and fall in with the locals who staunchly enforced the lineup out there.

  The slide into winter meant larger breaks and fewer people on the beach, which was fine by me. Under a glazed blue sky, I’d suit up and hit the water, losing myself in a zip of northwestern swells, possibly driving a backside toward Crystal Pier at Pacific Beach.

  The surf generally quieted in the spring, but occasionally we’d get a nice peaky combo created by lingering north winds crossing the southerly swells. I used these months to hone my skills, practice aerials and let myself experiment on the water.

  I wanted to know exactly what my body could do with a board.

  I wanted to know just how far I could push it.

  And no matter what was happening in the background—my mother’s skeezy boyfriends, the drugs, the evictions—I had the Pacific Ocean shimmering beneath my legs and arms. I had a place to be. I had a real home—a home that no one could take away from me. A home where no one could hurt me. A home where I could forget.

  Eventually, the older guys on the beaches started to take notice of me. With Uncle Dean’s help, I got a coach and a sponsor and surfing became less about escaping and more about going someplace. All of a sudden, I was a person who counted. I had a plan.

  What I didn’t plan for was the bus driver who missed a red light and slammed into Uncle Dean’s car on a Tuesday morning when I was sixteen. What I didn’t plan for was the hot anger that bloomed inside of me.

  I stopped talking. I cut classes. I got into fights. I ignored my sister. I started messing with our mom’s stash.

  It was like all the years and all the shit started to spill out at once in a steady stream of guts and blood and pain. And nothing I did could stem the flow.

  ***

  If you’ve never seen a big wave up close, it’s hard to describe. Even with all the waves I’d tackled in California, I didn’t understand it until I was fifteen and one of the surf magazines flew me out to Oahu for a photo shoot. I remember that I stood on the shore for a solid hour just staring at Pipeline—my heart thumping, my mouth open in awe. I’d seen photos. I’d seen videos. But I’d never seen it or felt it.

  The rawness.

  The fury.

  The unchained power of the water.

  It’s a fucking rush.

  And right now, that rush is building inside of me.

  It’s still dark, but the sky is slowly starting to change—the night washing away to reveal a soft creamy yellow of an approaching dawn. I watch as the elastic slivers of light peak above the cliffs, their threads moving from wave to wave, skipping over the foamy white tips and disappearing past the horizon.

  I’m flying through the water. It’s moving all around me, echoing an offshore storm. The wind. The surf. The sky. Everything is screaming—building to a frantic crescendo that’s going to explode around me.

  I turn, making a hard cut toward the bottom of the wave. My legs are bent and my arms out. My eyes are in front and behind.

  I sail right.

  Then left.

  My hand drops and I know it was the right move. Now I’m catching speed, my board shooting through the slippery burnished light like a silver bullet.

  I pop over up the lip and come back in low, carving fast and sharp on my frontside and fighting my way back into the pocket. A shot of water sprays up behind me. I snap my hips left, holding the angle steady so I can keep the nose of my board up while the wave breaks.

  Parsons and Brett and some guy on a twinny just went down. I’m the last one left and it feels good.

  Gemma is up on the sand watching me roll in. I know that even in the trickling hyaline light of the approaching dawn, there are more people up there watching me. Blacks Beach is a place for some of the best surfers in San Diego County to congregate, especially in these conditions. There’s no doubt in my mind that most of these guys out here this morning know exactly who I am. And for the first time in nearly two years, that doesn’t leave me feeling pissed off.

  I’m surrounded before I can even get air into my lungs. People I’ve never seen before are slapping my back, trying to shake my hand. I stand, unzip my wetsuit and roll it down to my waist. Some girl in an oversized hoodie hands me a towel and I wipe it over my chest and arms, sopping up the chilly saltwater from my skin.

  “That rail turn was killer!”

  “You tore it up!”

  “Super solid, man.”

  A guy I recognize from the jetties in Oceanside approaches. I think his name is Dominic.

  Grabbing my shoulder, he says, “You haven’t lost a shred of your dominance, man. I saw you once in competition in Huntington Beach and you pulled some of the gnarliest shit I’ve ever seen.”

  “Thanks,” I say, shaking the water out of my hair and taking in a jerky breath.

  “Word floatin’ around lately is that you’re planning to make a return.”

  I keep my response evasive. “That’s always the word.”

  “Here’s to hoping,” a new voice says.

  “I’m stoked to see you back, Young!” I feel the gentle bump of a fist against my shoulder.

  “That was sick!”

  Looking out over the beach, I see Gemma racing toward me. I hold my hand up so she can see me and I extract myself f
rom the crowd before anyone can say another word.

  “Hey!” Gemma calls out. She’s breathless from running.

  The sun is halfway above the cliffs now. The new light makes her eyes shine with gold and reveals the pinkness of her cheeks. God, she’s so pretty that she seems almost unreal. She’s wearing an old sweatshirt of mine. It’s about fifty sizes too big but I love seeing her in it. As she closes in, I reach out to catch her hand in mine and reel her in for a kiss.

  “You’re so cold,” she says into my mouth, her lips shaping the words against my skin and her hands pushing salty water from my face.

  “You’re so warm,” I whisper back and she laughs.

  Our tongues connect and for a moment I am lost in the moisture and the heat inside her mouth. I close my eyes and cup her face and kiss her long and slow, reveling in the fullness and the closeness of our bodies. Gemma lifts her arms to my neck and clings to me, pressing all of her weight against mine.

  Eventually, she makes a sound of regret and stops to catch her breath. She’s smiling. So am I.

  “Well, everyone seemed impressed with you, didn’t they?”

  I grunt.

  Gemma blinks and turns her face away. “So, have you ever thought about it?”

  “About what?” I ask, even though I understand what she’s getting at.

  She shrugs and sweeps her arm out over the ocean. “About doing this, Landon. It’s obvious that you’re great at it. Maybe better than great.”

  Keeping my expression hard to read, I pull away from her and pick up my dropped board. “I can’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I hesitate. It’s not that I haven’t thought about it. Truth is, I think about trying to get back on the tour almost every day. But I’m not sure I’m ready. I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready. “I just can’t.”

  She accepts my statement with a nod, but then her eyes move over my shoulder questioningly. “Those people,” she says, fingering a long strand of hair. “They acted like they knew you.”