Chapter Eleven #2
“It’s nice to see you out here,” he says. “You come on the weekends these days?”
I shake my head. It’s wild to me that he doesn’t know I don’t surf anymore, that I haven’t been out since it was us together. That to me the water is ours when it so clearly isn’t for him.
And then I hear Bert shout. “Oui!”
A wave is incoming. Stone and Kai paddle into it.
“Ho!” Stone says, warning Kai not to drop in on him.
I duck-dive under the wave and come up to see Stone riding it in.
“Dude!” Bert says. He looks at me sympathetically. Better luck next time.
I spit out some salt water and keep my eye on the horizon.
The second wave of the set comes in. I start to paddle against it, hard as I can.
“All yours,” Kai says. “Let’s go, surfer girl!”
My arms move, I’m hardly looking, and then I feel that familiar hovering, and I put my hands on either side of the board and pop up into a crouch.
I drop to the bottom after takeoff and then come up and hit the lip as I move down the line.
I’m inside a wave for the first time in ten years, but I can’t even think about that—I can’t think about anything but my stance and core and the movement of the board.
I’m right here. And there is nothing but space.
Even time doesn’t have a place here. It’s total and complete presence.
That’s why we love it. No past, no future.
There isn’t even awareness. The second you think about anything but your breath, it’s over.
But man, those few seconds. There’s nothing like it.
I fall into the water at the tail end, grateful for the refresh, and come up to see Stone paddling fast toward me.
“Shit,” Stone calls. “You been surfing in your dreams or something?” He reaches me, a little out of breath. “How long have you really been out of commission?”
I’m winded and shocked. I feel simultaneously wrung out and high on adrenaline. It was a tiny wave—not tunnel, but still. I forgot this hit. I forgot how good it is. There are no problems out here—no financial strain, no infertility, no husband across the country ignoring my text messages.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Well, you killed that,” he says. “How did it feel?”
I shake my head, my breath still coming in fits and spurts. I pull myself up onto my board and straddle it. We’re getting tossed around by the break, but I don’t care. It feels great. No, it feels better than that. It feels like elation.
“Epic,” I say.
Stone reaches over and holds my board steady. I feel us begin to float together—whoosh whoosh whoosh. It sends me straight back to our last morning here.
We paddled out like we always did, first thing, before the sunrise. We were twenty-five then. We’d been surfing the same break for almost a decade, but since I’d gone to USC for college we’d been out less and less. I was out of practice; I wasn’t as in step with him as I used to be.
We’d been in bed that morning at Bonnie and Jeff’s house when he told me. Stone had the whole downstairs, and their place was and is spectacular. A thirty-million-dollar McMansion—a floor for everyone.
“I’m moving to Boulder,” he said. “I decided I’m going to do it.”
I remember not knowing what he meant. Move. Boulder. What?
We were naked. His chest was bare, and so was mine. He rolled onto his side and rubbed the curve of my back.
“I have to get out of here,” he said. “I want to start Board Up, and I think I’ve figured out how there.”
I just looked at him. I still couldn’t quite compute. “Here is me,” I said.
He exhaled. “Laur, it’s not. Here is the fact that I’m doing absolutely nothing with my life.”
“You’re twenty-five,” I said to counter.
I knew Stone was restless. I knew that when he dropped out of SMU he moved back in with no plan and things had more or less remained that way.
My mom often said that Stone’s fatal flaw was that he’d never have to work a day in his life.
I thought she was ridiculous. Who cared about work?
He could surf, and he would. It had felt like enough.
It had been enough. It was all he ever wanted—me and the ocean.
“I don’t want to be a beach bum for the rest of my life,” he said.
I felt breathless with the sting. The rejection of everything that made up our life together.
“So don’t. Go back to school, get a job in town. There are a million things you could do here. Why do you have to move to Boulder to do something?”
As if Boulder was the only place to have a real life.
Stone didn’t even like the cold! He complained when it was sixty-five degrees outside.
I remember thinking then that this was just a passing idea—like when people take up gardening, buy new gloves and pots, and then abandon the whole thing a month later.
He’d get over it, move on. The plane ticket would never materialize.
“Come with me,” he said.
I had just started as an assistant at Shatz and Steinberg, the CPAs who worked for half of Hollywood. I hated it.
“We’ll get a little house. I’ll start Board Up.” He looked at me. I could tell he was genuine because Stone was a terrible liar. “We could have a baby.”
I blinked at him.
We could have a baby just hung there.
It was appealing in the way grown-up life is appealing when you’re very young.
When everything feels like pretend, like the best version of itself.
When a house and a baby is cardboard and plastic and you think it’s romantic to get by on very little.
When love is enough, really, because it’s all in theory anyway.
I wanted to go with him because I was in love with him.
He had been my constant for so long—as long as I could remember, really.
I had no idea how I’d do life without him.
But I also knew, somehow, that I would. That I was not going to be the kind of girl who marries her first love.
That even though our relationship was so very real—ten years!
—it wasn’t permanent. It’s just that every time I thought about this particular inevitability, it was so far in the future it could have been someone else.
“I can’t,” I said. “My parents—”
It had been ten years since my dad’s accident, and while I didn’t remember it—none of us did but my mom—I knew that life that far outside of this place was not for me.
I didn’t feel like I could leave them, if it came right down to it.
Whether that was for them or for me, I didn’t know.
I wanted a life separate from them, but I wanted them in sight.
Stone said nothing. It occurred to me that he could be reconsidering. That maybe now was the moment’s he’d say everything I knew he felt: “Never mind, dumb idea. What do you want for breakfast?”
But instead he was silent.
“Stone,” I said. “Are you for real?”
I saw his eyes fill up. And I wanted to roll closer to him, bury my face in his chest, and smell that smell that was so uniquely him—sex, wax, and salt water and something else liquid, like gasoline. Something that could burn up the whole room.
He turned on his back and looked up at the ceiling. When he finally spoke, it was barely a whisper.
“I need to go,” he said. “I have to do this. I’ve already found the space.”
I wasn’t angry. Maybe I should have been, but there were parts of Stone I knew I didn’t have access to.
There were parts of him maybe I didn’t want access to.
When you’re that in love you don’t want to sacrifice a piece of it to reality.
We were used to seeing each other so intimately up close that it was easy to ignore how all the details hung together.
“Let’s get wet,” he said.
“Stone,” I said, “We should talk about this.” I didn’t want to, I just knew it was what grown-ups did, and I wanted us to be grown-ups now. We weren’t sixteen anymore.
“Then let’s do it in the water.”
In six minutes we were paddling out. We broke up out on the water. We did everything out on the water.
Now I look at Stone holding my board—and I feel something rise up in me. I’m out of breath from the run and aware of my body—all the pieces that used to work together that don’t anymore but that maybe still could, with enough time.
“You miss it,” Stone says. He’s smiling slightly. The edges of his mouth curl upward.
It’s not a question, but I answer anyway.
“Yeah,” I say. “I guess I do.”