Chapter 8
(Robbie)
“Oh, you’ve got moves,” I growled in Nova’s ear as I splayed my hand across his abs and yanked him back against my body while he rode the thigh I’d pressed between his legs.
“Yup,” he replied, his hand hooked over the back of my neck as he tilted his head back to look up at me. “Rusty ones, but still.”
“Don’t look rusty to me,” I replied, nuzzling the bit of exposed skin beneath his ear. “Don’t feel rusty to me either.”
He giggled, the warmth of his body sinking through the front of my shirt as we danced.
“You come here a lot, don’t you?” He said as a redhead, I’d seen several times before stepped up to dance in front of him.
“Used to,” I said. “It’s way more fun coming with somebody than hoping to find a partner on the dance floor.”
I said that part louder than necessary, for the benefit of the guy who’d decided to sandwich Nova between us.
“My best friend is always saying the same thing,” he replied.
“Though sometimes I get the impression that the main reason she likes having me tag along is so she can pretend we’re together when she wants someone to leave her alone.
Unfortunately, I’ve had to turn down her invitations more often than I’ve been able to accept them this past year. ”
“Everyone needs a wingman they can rely on,” I said as I spun Nova to face me, since our extra dance partner had yet to get the hint that we were together.
“True,” he said as he wrapped his arms around my neck.
He was an excellent dancer, despite his claims of being rusty, but as the dance floor grew fuller and the room got louder, we were jostled several times, and once he let out an eep and jerked like he’d just been groped.
If I’d seen it, the person responsible would have been nursing a broken hand for the holidays.
“Would you like to get out of here?” I asked, one arm wrapped around him protectively.
“Yes, please,” he replied, slipping his arm around me and clinging.
It took patience and finesse to weave past a packed dance floor full of grinding, gyrating bodies, but we made it to the door without further incident.
“Wow, talk about a packed house,” he said once we were outside. “Some people should not wear platforms if they don’t know how to dance in them. My heel might need a week to recover from that last stomp.”
“Is that what happened?” I asked. “I thought someone had groped you.”
He just shook his head, eyes narrowing. “No, you’d have known if they had,” he declared. “I’d have loudly given them a piece of my mind.”
“Good to know, though I think I might opt for more selfish activities from here on out,” I admitted. “Given your limited time here, I’d prefer not to share you, if that’s alright.”
“It’s more than okay with me,” he replied. “Clubs are fun and all, but I’d rather do my dancing barefoot in the sand, just you and me.”
“I can work with that,” I said as we headed down the street to my truck.
“Thank you, though, for bringing me here tonight,” he said. “It was a nice place, just really crowded, which would have been great if I was looking to meet new people, which I’m not. About an hour in I realized I wasn’t feeling as social as I’d thought.”
“Oh, shit, I’m sorry,” I said, feeling my spirits sink. “I wish you’d told me; I’d have gotten you the hell out of there then.”
“I thought about it,” he replied. “But it’s been months since I’ve gone dancing, so I decided to try and power through. Bad idea on my part. It wasn’t as much fun as sitting on your back porch, listening to the rain and stories about your travel misadventures.”
Chuckling, I opened his door for him. “It was one misadventure, one, and anyone could have made that same mistake.”
“If you say so,” he replied before I closed the door behind him.
“In all fairness, it was totally the GPS’s fault,” I said once I’d gotten in and put on my seatbelt. “I had no way of knowing that it had routed us to Florida instead of California, but at least the surf was amazing in both spots.”
“What clued you in that you guys were going in the wrong direction?” he asked as I pulled out of the parking spot.
“The insane number of peaches and oranges on the license plates of the other vehicles on the highway with us,” I explained.
“It was dark when we left, and my buddy Bryce was riding shotgun, which meant the only thing he was paying attention to was watching videos on his phone and fiddling with the dial whenever Carson, who was driving, needed him to find a new radio station.”
“I’d love to go on a road trip like that,” he remarked.
“You’ve never been on a road trip?” I asked. “Not even for spring break?”
“Not one where it was just me and my friends,” he explained.
“I’ve been stuffed in the back of an SUV with my siblings on more than a few family vacations, but our folks planned everything out right down to where we’d be eating dinner each night, so it wasn’t like we had the freedom to cut loose, explore, and discover things on our own.
As for spring break, the closest I’ve ever come to that vibe was the state fair, which was as overwhelming as it was amazing. ”
“Sounds about right.”
“Honestly, I’m not really a party guy,” Nova admitted, his voice having taken on a note of hesitation.
“I don’t like to get drunk, and I find crowds to be loud and exhausting.
Small gatherings of friends are more my speed, especially if there are games and food involved.
I just find it hard to enjoy myself when I’m being bombarded with noise and overstimulated by too many things happening at once. ”
“OI get that, I do,” I replied. “In my heyday I was Mr. Goodtime party boy, but it was way too easy to burn out at that pace. I felt like I had to be on all the time. Laughing, cracking wise, and being loud for the sake of being the center of attention. After a while it got to be too much and started to feel dishonest. I was much happier after I started dialing it back and just being myself.”
“I bet. It must have been difficult, trying to be someone you weren’t.”
“Until I stopped, I didn’t realize just how much effort it was actually taking, or how much I really didn’t like the person I’d become,” I admitted.
“Nowadays, age and the waves keep me humble. Experience and regret help too. You know how it is, being so busy chasing your career that you forget to find balance.”
He sighed at that and leaned against the window.
“I hate it. I’m not even working my dream job.
Like, maybe it would be worth it if I’d landed the job I went to school for, but even then, I don’t know; sometimes it’s hard to see the point in what I do.
It all just feels like another cog in the capitalist machine, our sole focus on making a product attractive enough to bait people into buying it. ”
“Why go into advertising if you felt that way about it?” I asked.
He let out a low, rueful chuckle. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him scrub a hand over his face and fiddle with a lock of his hair.
“Because a video marketing degree was far more acceptable to my folks than a video production one,” he explained.
“Trying to explain to them that I wanted to make videos for entertainment purposes would have gone over about as well as suggesting we have pizza instead of turkey for Thanksgiving dinner.”
“Sounds like my family,” I said. “They were always very rigid about their traditions and very anti anyone who broke them, which I found out the hard way.”
“It’s funny, though not in a ha-ha way, when I think about the way my parents broke a bunch of traditions just to be together,” he explained.
“It’s like they have one set of rules for dating and another when it comes to careers.
They never tried to tell my siblings and me who to date, even when my sister came home from college with two boyfriends who happened to be best friends that were also dating each other.
They always insisted that we follow our hearts in that regard.
Careers were a different story. They expected us to have five-year plans in place by the time we graduated college.
Hell, they hold promotion parties as elaborate as other folks celebrate engagements and births.
They are as married to their careers as they are to each other, and they are both okay with that. ”
Nodding, I could easily picture what he was describing because I’d lived it.
“My old man was married to his job the same way his old man was. Same job, too. Probably still is, but we haven’t spoken in years, so I have no idea what he’s up to now.
My mom was the stereotypical society wife, involved in everything from the PTA to a wide array of charitable endeavors.
She was always rushing to committee meetings in between dropping us at different activities, since it was important that we be seen being active in things the same way she was.
My father viewed our level of participation to be a direct reflection on him.
Making him look bad was the worst sin you could commit, hands down, especially if he had to take time out of his busy day to deal with whatever it was one of us did. ”
“Oh man, talk about terrifying. My sister spent the whole day in a panic after one of her teachers called our folks and asked them to come up to the school. She was certain she was going to be grounded for all eternity, or at the very least, all of summer vacation, if they didn’t ship her off to boarding school, which they were always threatening to do.
In the end, she did all that worrying for nothing.
The teacher had wanted to talk to them about a summer research project she wanted my sister to be involved with, but yeah, the fear of them having to take time out was real. ”
“Shouldn’t it be the other way around?” I asked as I pulled into my driveway and parked the truck beneath the carport. “Shouldn’t the threat be not to force them to take time away from their family for bullshit at work?”
There was a rustle of fabric as he shrugged. “In a perfect world, I guess.”
I turned off the truck, and for a moment we just sat, staring out into the night, saying nothing, though I suspected that we were both thinking about similar things, like time we could have spent with family, only they were too busy working, and the way we’d allowed ourselves to roll down the same path.
“I thought I was breaking the mold when I took up surfing and set out to compete at the highest levels,” I said, hand caressing the doorhandle, though I left the door unopened for now.
“It took until after I’d retired from active competition before I realized that I’d done the same thing as my old man.
I’d sacrificed relationships and time with the people I cared about to work a job.
I was a professional surfer. Emphasis on the professional part.
It was my life, my world, my one true ambition.
All the things I used to say to try and justify the difference between my life and his—it was all bullshit in the end.
Sure, I avoided working in an office, but I was still tethered to the beach and my board the same way he was to his desk and computer.
In the grand scheme of things, I turned out way more like him than I ever wanted to be. ”
“I’ve been seeing the same thing in myself,” Nova remarked.
“That I’m becoming my parents. That my life has become an endless stream of conference calls, presentations, and planning sessions.
It’s not very satisfying. Some weeks it's just plain sad. I get that as adults, we’re supposed to support ourselves, but there has to be something more to life than just working all the time. ”
“Isn’t that the truth?”
He sighed and turned in his seat, watching me as he rubbed the back of his neck.
“The day we met, after you left to go find something to eat, I sat on the beach for a while, building a sandcastle and watching the sun set. Listening to the surf lap against the shore and the rolling cadence of the waves was so soothing, I should have been able to get lost in it. Only in the back of my head, I was still worried about the texts I hadn’t looked at and all the things that might have gone wrong during the presentation that had taken place earlier in the day. Kinda sad when you think about it.”
“What’s sad is that we’ve been conditioned to feel that way,” I said.
“In school they teach us the things they claim we need to know to enter the workforce. They group us into categories and groom us to go to college or trade school, the military, or straight into the workforce. They dissect our strengths and weaknesses as some sort of litmus test meant to determine what we’ll be good at while we’re still trying to learn who we are.
When you really think about it, the whole concept of school is as much about establishing the same sort of routine we’re expected to follow in the job force as it is about education. It’s a factory for worker ants.”
“That’s depressing.”
“I know, right.”
“True, though, now you’ve got me thinking about it,” he muttered.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to drag the mood down,” I said. “But hearing that you were sitting on the beach in one of the most beautiful places in the world, obsessing about what was going on in an office thousands of miles away, just made me feel some kind of way.”
“No, I get it, and for the record, you didn’t wreck the mood. You’re letting me get things off my chest that I haven’t dared to bring up to anyone in my friend group back home, not even my best friend Megan.”
“And why haven’t you mentioned your feelings to them?”
“I guess it’s because I don’t want to be the first one to admit that I can’t handle the constant pressure and expectations of the workforce,” he admitted, letting out a long, ragged breath.
“I’ve worked my ass off to excel, to the point of being promoted and even running a division within my department… ”
“But getting to that level and maintaining the kind of schedule required of you has been taxing both mentally and emotionally, hasn’t it?” I asked.
“Yeah, and I suck at finding time for the outlets that help everything not be so overwhelmingly stressful.”
“There’s nothing but time and opportunity while you’re here on the island,” I murmured, cupping his cheek and gently caressing it with my thumb. “Why don’t you let me help you explore some of those outlets?”
“You don’t even know what they are yet,” he replied. “Don’t you think you should wait and make sure they aren’t wacky, weird, or completely out of your wheelhouse before you volunteer to help me?”
“Now what would be the fun in that?”