The Red Bikini

by Lauren Christopher

  Giselle felt tears stinging her eyes again, and this time let them fall. She leaned over and gave Lia a big hug. “You don’t know how much I needed to hear that.”

  “You’re welcome,” Lia said in a strangled voice. “Now let’s break into the wine. We haven’t had a sisterly ‘whine-fest’ in a long time. I wish Noelle were here. I’ve got a lot to tell you about New York. . . .”

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-five

  Giselle wrapped up the brochure, and it came out better than she expected. She got releases from all the parents she needed, and her photos were stunning. At the last minute, however, Rabbit decided to change the name. He wanted to call it the Jennifer Andre Grommet School.

  “For Fin,” Rabbit told her over coffee at Lia’s dining table. “We’ll give a Jennifer Andre scholarship to a former camper when he or she goes to college anywhere in the country. I think this might help him. He funds the school, you know.”

  “No. I didn’t know.”

  “The scholarship’ll be perfect. He’s always telling us we should go to college, even when the big sponsors come sniffing around.” He blew the steam from his mug. “I think he’d like that he could do something for Jennifer.”

  Giselle’s chest filled with gratitude. These boys loved Fin so much. They were good people. Although Fin hadn’t called once in two days, and Giselle was starting to wonder whether Lia was right after all, she wanted nothing but the best for him. He had a good heart. And he’d loved Jennifer. All he needed was a chance to move on.

  “Hey, your photos were slick,” Rabbit announced. “Jezzy’s agent wants to buy a few. And Corky’s manager wants some, too.”

  “Oh! Yes, certainly.” She knew she’d done a good job. As well as Fin had helped her feel like a desirable woman again, Rabbit and the boys had helped her feel like she could forge forward with whatever career she set her mind to. “Should we do a focus group?” she joked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have a couple of friends stopping by to say good-bye, and we can ask them which brochure they like better.” She pointed to the two versions she couldn’t decide between.

  As if on cue, the doorbell rang, and she welcomed Tamara, Fox, and Toni. Tamara looked completely overdressed for Lia’s little apartment—her huge copper earrings brushing against a silk blouse that probably cost more than a month’s worth of rent here—but Tamara didn’t seem uncomfortable at all, flinging herself onto the couch and making herself at home with Rabbit.

  The three of them stayed for about an hour, helping her select a brochure, discussing whether Toni might sign up for Rabbit’s camp next session, and reminiscing over the Pageant of the Masters show. Giselle was going to miss them all.

  “Can Toni spend the night, Mommy?”

  “Oh, darling, no. This isn’t our house. And besides—we’re flying home tonight.”

  “Home?”

  Coco knew this, but it seemed like it was hitting her again, anew.

  Giselle nodded, and Coco burst into tears, running into the bedroom. Toni stood, looking perplexed.

  “Sweet, why don’t you go cheer her up?” Tamara asked her.

  Toni nodded and went to find Coco.

  “She doesn’t want to go?” Tamara asked.

  Giselle shook her head.

  “We wish you could stay, too.”

  Fox came to life and leaned forward. “I’ve never seen Fin quite as happy as he was when you were here, Giselle. I think you were good for him. I hope you’ll visit soon.”

  “I still can’t believe you two weren’t really dating,” Tamara said. “The affection in both your eyes . . .” She shook her head.

  Giselle wished Lia weren’t at work so she could hear these assessments from others about Fin’s reaction to her. It was confusing her now, and she wished Lia could help her sort it out.

  “I’ll visit as often as I can,” she promised, although she wondered how possible that would really be until she could secure custody. Who knew how long that took?

  She walked the Foxes to the door, under dramatic protest from Coco, and was met with Roy on the other side of the threshold.

  “What are you doing here?” she whispered.

  “Wanted to say good-bye to Coco.” He and Fox eyed each other uneasily.

  “Davis Fox.” Fox thrust his hand forward.

  “Roy Underwood.”

  “This is my wife, Tamara. And my daughter, Toni, is back there.”

  “Roy is my ex,” Giselle blurted. She was starting to get used to the line.

  Fox nodded, still studying Roy strangely, while Roy peered past Giselle’s shoulder to try to spot Coco.

  “Is she inside?” he asked.

  “Yes.” Giselle stepped to the side and let him through. Although she wasn’t crazy about being around him anymore, she was glad he was coming to say good-bye. She never wanted Coco to feel anything but adored.

  “Mom’s right behind me,” he notified her, stepping inside.

  Giselle greeted Lovey with a big hug, then excused herself to say good-bye to Tamara and Fox on the street.

  Once Toni was buckled into the backseat, and Coco and Toni exchanged good-byes and Polly Pocket dolls, Giselle waved to the Foxes as they pulled into the palm-tree-lined streets of Sandy Cove.

  She would never forget these two weeks.

  Or these wonderful people.

  Or Fin.

  • • •

  Rabbit stood behind Giselle with his hands in his cargo pockets, watching the planes fly in.

  “I have a date,” he whispered when Lia and Coco were out of earshot.

  “With Callie?”

  He winked. “I listened to what you said.”

  “Flight 258, now boarding.”

  Lia rushed over from the window where she’d been watching the planes with Coco and threw her arms around Giselle.

  Giselle was going to miss Lia again. She hadn’t gotten nearly enough time with her. “I’ll try to come back soon,” she promised.

  Lia nodded. “Mom’s mad we didn’t drive up there. We can meet in L.A. next time. Noelle will meet us, too.”

  Giselle agreed, but she wanted to come back here. She would always want to see Fin now, although matching up with a week he happened to be in town would be miraculous.

  “Thanks for everything,” said Rabbit, yanking her into a hug. “You were great for all of us here. And thanks for your advice about . . . you know.”

  Giselle hugged Rabbit back. “You were great, too, Rabbit. You did a great job watching over me, even though I didn’t want you to. And good luck with ‘you know.’”

  He dropped to one knee to give Coco a big hug, along with some last-minute advice about how to practice pop-ups as a goofy-footer; then Lia wriggled Coco into a huge bear hug.

  Soon, Giselle and Coco were buckled into seats 8A and 8B, Coco crying and looking out the window.

  “I’m gonna miss it here,” she whispered to no one in particular.

  Giselle sat back in her seat and swiped at her own eyes.

  She would, too. . . .

  • • •

  They arrived home close to midnight, Coco asleep on Giselle’s shoulder.

  The house felt strange and tomblike, sort of like Lovey’s house, only without the death. Or maybe there was.

  She set her purse down, and her tote bag, and Coco, then spotted a package on the backyard deck in front of the slider. She opened the door with a whoosh of summer humidity and drew the heavy box inside. It had a note attached from her neighbor: “Thought you’d want this when you got home.”

  Giselle tore into the brown wrapping. Amid the tufts of paper and Styrofoam popcorn was a miniature bronze statue of Camille Claudel’s “La Valse.” It was a replica of the bronzed man, shirtless, clinging to the woman in the hold of being cherished, o
r maybe being saved.

  A note accompanied the package.

  “This is the one that really reminded me of you,” it said. “Fin.”

  Giselle walked through the dark house to set the statue on her living room mantel.

  She touched the man’s legs, his face, his protective arms. She would never forget these two weeks, or the man who’d saved her, even temporarily.

  She swept Coco off the couch, turned off the hallway lights, and carried her little girl through their house of loneliness.

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-six

  The waves broke hard and to the left.

  Fin stood in the sand with his competition jersey on and studied the next set.

  The contest had gone from ninety-six competitors to forty-eight, then to twenty-four, then to sixteen, and now he was one of the eight left going into the quarterfinals.

  “Good luck, mate.”

  Fin nodded back to Jess Casper of Australia.

  “I hope you beat Caleb,” Jess went on. “I feel like he stole that heat from Winny yesterday.”

  “I’ll do my best.” Fin smirked at him.

  The competition had been more heated than he’d imagined. He tried to distance himself from most of the crap—he stayed in his own hotel, as he had for years, rather than in the luxury homes that housed tour surfers together.

  But he was here.

  And he had the nagging feeling Giselle might be watching him on television.

  He blew out a breath and inspected the swells again.

  He didn’t know, of course. For all he knew, she could have forgotten about him the second she hung up the phone that night. It sure didn’t seem hard for her to cancel. Her lying asshole ex was able to sway her pretty easily. He rubbed his neck and tried to tamp down the anger that surfaced every time he thought about it.

  But the thought that she might watch him made him perform. He’d pulled off airs in these last few days that he’d never tried before: flying above the lip of the wave with one-handed grips on the board; doing one-eighties on the board in midair; and even some cutbacks he hadn’t done since he was a teenager.

  And now here he was in the quarterfinals.

  He couldn’t believe it.

  Giselle had, in essence, become his muse. . . .

  He ran his hand down his face. The winds had been variable all week, and storm clouds moved in now, casting Ballito’s waters in a gray-blue. The surf kicked up, throwing some angry backlash.

  He watched the next two surfers—Jose Manilla from Mexico, who was dominating Pierre Petrone from France. The bad set didn’t seem to stop Jose from scoring twelve points compared to Petrone’s nine-point-six. Jose moved easily to the semifinals.

  Fin looked for Caleb while the next pair of surfers went out. It was only four heats today, and he and Caleb would be head-to-head. With his new comfort level for the airs—and his knowledge that thoughts of Giselle fueled him—he knew he could take Caleb.

  When his heat was called, he hustled into the cool waters of the Indian Ocean and threw his board down, paddling out hard with sweeping rotations of his shoulders. Caleb was right behind him.

  The storm clouds drew the water into riotous ridges, rather than the smooth glassy waves that barrellers like him favored. He glanced at the yellow buoy that noted where shark waters were, and pulled to the left. A nice eight-foot lift rose ahead of him.

  He took it with confidence, and Giselle popped into his head. He showed her what he could do: He rode straight up the wall, hitched his board back, and rode it down, then repeated the action four times on a long, wild wave. On the last ride up, when the wave had more face, he gripped the board with one hand and pulled it into the air, spinning once and landing with a splash back into the white water. He bent low and looked for whatever barrel was left, then let it curl over him and rode it out, dragging his hand along the wall. He came out the other side to wild applause from the sweatshirt-clad beachgoers on Willards Beach.

  Damn.

  He loved showing off for Giselle.

  Caleb took the next wave, which was—admittedly—shitty. Bad luck of the draw. Fin straddled his board, sluicing the water off his face and watching Caleb barely make it out of his tube. The wave had given Caleb such crappy lift that he hadn’t caught any air or done a single trick. Fin could see him swearing under his breath.

  Fin paddled out for the next one and managed four awesome maneuvers. The crowd went wild.

  Caleb followed up, paddling past Fin with a glare, then went into a few simple turns before his wave turned to mush. The crowd didn’t love him, and obviously he’d pissed Mother Nature off, too, because she was delivering some crappy white water that gave him nothing to ride.

  Fin took his last wave with ease. He knew he’d already won, and knew he’d drive his score up even further with the beautiful gray waves Mother Nature was handing him. He pretended Giselle was watching his rolls, his twists, and one last spin, when he rode way up over the lip like an acrobat.

  At the end of the day, Fin had scored an impressive fifteen to Caleb’s nine-point-two.

  He was going to the semifinals.

  “Thanks, Giselle,” he whispered under his breath as he trudged back up onshore.

  • • •

  In the tented locker room, amid the backslaps of the other competitors who would be joining him tomorrow, Fin peeled his jersey off, changed out of his wet-suit pants, and pulled on dry shorts and a T-shirt. He asked around to see whether any of the Americans had an extra voltage converter. It had been out of character for him to forget—his mind must have been drifting as he was packing—but he found himself stuck in an out-of-the-way hotel room last night, separated from his fellow teammates, with a dead phone.

  But damn, he wanted to call.

  He wanted to call her.

  He’d never had anyone “back home” to reach right after a heat, except managers and agents. When he was a kid, he’d called his parents, but when his dad started letting in with how much Fin was selling out, he’d stopped. Sometime around sixteen. And now . . . Well, now no one cared.

  Except Giselle. She might be happy for him.

  “I have one, bro,” said R.J. Williams from the other side of the tent. He was a young mop-topped kid—his mom had probably packed his converter for him. The kid dug into his backpack and threw it to Fin.

  “I’ll return it in an hour,” Fin said, lifting it in his fist and charging out of the tent.

  He’d just mastered five-foot storm swells and shark-infested waters. But right this minute he’d have to contemplate whether he was brave enough to call a woman.

  • • •

  Once inside his off-the-beaten-path hotel, he plugged in R.J.’s converter.

  When his phone had enough juice, he logged on to hear his messages, his chest constricting when he heard the two from Giselle—one thanking him for the Disney passes and another thanking him for the bronze statue of “La Valse.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed and listened to them another four times. She hadn’t said much else beyond thanks, although she did say she missed him. He wasn’t sure what that meant. And when had he become such a love-struck fool, listening between the lines on a voice mail for anything he could work with?

  He rubbed his face and looked around his hotel room. There was someone else he needed to talk to.

  “Hey,” he said into the receiver.

  “How’s it goin’?”

  “I’m in the semifinals.”

  “Damn! That’s great!” Fox’s voice was jubilant.

  In the last week, Fin had realized how much he liked Fox. Giselle had opened his eyes to how good it felt when you let someone in a little—opened up, told them what was on your mind. And Fox was not letting him down. Fox had never let him down, in fact.

  “I got some crazy airs on Caleb,” h
e said.

  “I’ll watch it on Fuel tonight. Damn, Fin. All you need is this, and it could hoist you into the tour next year.”

  “Yeah, but here’s the thing. . . .” Fin wandered to his window, trying to phrase this in his head. The clouds had parted in the last two minutes, and rays of sun were peeking through the dark clouds, casting columns of light all over the white-walled city of Ballito.

  “What, man?” Fox prompted.

  “I don’t know if I want to do the tour next year.”

  “What?”

  “I think I might be ready to retire.”

  A silence fell.

  Fin knew he was blindsiding Fox with this. He let the last sentence sink in. All this work they’d done together, all these months of planning and plotting for this contract, all the negotiating Fox had done on his behalf . . . Fox was probably figuring out how to beat him over the head with a shortboard.

  “I figured,” Fox said.

  Fin wasn’t sure he’d heard him correctly. “You did?”

  “Yeah. There’s a moment a man reaches, when he’s been chasing success all his life, when he either achieves the success and moves on, or realizes he’s been chasing the wrong thing all these years.”

  Fin watched the clouds open up over the city as a spire of heat coiled in his gut. “And which category do I fall into?”

  “Maybe a little of both.”

  “You think I’ve been chasing the wrong thing?”

  Fin ground his teeth. Fuck that. He thought of the medals, the money, the champagne sprayed over his head on the dais all those years. Fox was sounding like his dad now. Fuck if that had been the wrong thing. . . .

  But, he had to admit, he was still searching. As if the perfect wave were still out there—he kept going back, as if he would eventually feel what he was supposed to feel and know he’d “made it.” But that feeling wasn’t happening.

  “I think it was the right thing for you at the time,” Fox said in the voice you use for mental patients. “But now, I think you found what you were really looking for.”