26. Then #2
He turns away to stare at the ocean again. “Then it looks like I’ve decided. Go back to your boyfriend.”
I hesitate before I give up and return to the tent, wondering if I might spend the rest of my life regretting not telling him the truth.
* * *
The sun is barely out when we arrive at the cliffs overlooking Mavericks. We’ll be watching from here since the tide has swept the beach away.
The guys argue about which board Luke should use. He’s got a big wave gun now, ideal for the conditions. He doesn’t want to use it because he’s worried it will break and his logic sickens me. If you’re that worried your board will break, you shouldn’t be out there in the first place .
All the guys clap Luke on the back as he zips up his wetsuit. The girls hug him. I stand frozen, doing neither, and I’m the last one he looks at as he turns to start climbing over the rocks to reach the water.
He waits at the lowest rock until the tide rushes in before he jumps, and then he’s paddling furiously, a tiny figure on a blue and green board, fighting his way through violent surf to reach the break.
Soon he’s inside what’s probably a sixty-foot wave, working his way to the top, and my heart is in my throat.
Am I the only one who understands how wrong this can all go?
He’s scaling something that could crush him in seconds.
“You want the binoculars?” asks Summer, and I take them with shaking hands, zeroing in on him. He looks like an ant in that wave even now, impossibly fragile.
I think of my brother, of how invulnerable he seemed when he left to talk to the police. They said he never even saw the shooter. That he walked out of the station and was on the ground seconds later.
Humans are so much more fragile than they seem, and you don’t know it until it’s too late. If Luke fails today—assuming he manages to survive the wave itself and isn’t shattered in a thousand ways from that alone—he could still be held under for ten minutes if luck isn’t on his side.
I hand her the binoculars. If these are his last moments, I don’t want to see him up close. I don’t think I want to see them at all.
Danny, beside me, is tense. “This was a bad idea.” At last, there’s concern for Luke instead of bitterness. “I should have stopped him.”
I press my face to my hands, thinking of this morning. I should have told him not to do it. I should have begged him. I should have told him how I feel, either way.
“He’s up next,” someone says.
I peel my hands from my face just as he takes the next wave, paddling hard to get ahead of it, popping up at the top of the crest before gliding down.
It’s a mountain of water, and he’s flying over the surface as if it’s something solid and unmoving, as if the energy beneath his board isn’t rumbling like a freight train.
“He’s got it!” someone shouts. “He’s fucking got it!”
“Wow,” Danny whispers. “He’s really doing it.”
But just as Luke enters the barrel, there’s a bump and he’s just…gone.
As if he was never out there at all.
Every exultant shout stops entirely, and everyone—even the strangers scattered across the viewing area—are staring at that one spot in the water where he disappeared.
“Fuck,” Beck hisses. He looks to Caleb, then Danny.
They all stand, and suddenly it’s chaos.
Summer starts crying. The crowd is shouting, and the guys start toward the rocks, though I don’t know what the hell they’ll do when they get down there—they can’t possibly reach Luke without boards.
Even with boards they’d all just get sucked into the wave and drown with him.
Inside, my very bones are pleading with God to let him be okay, screaming it, but I’m locked so tight I couldn’t say it aloud if I wanted to.
I will do anything You want. Just don’t take him away from me.
Everyone is running, moving, crying…but I can’t seem to unfreeze. I scan the water, desperate for any sign of him, sick to my stomach and numb all at once.
And then, like a miracle, Luke appears. He’s bleeding from a cut on his arm and his board is gone but he’s there, swimming back toward the shore.
A sob swells in my throat as the guys wade out to help drag him onto the rocks, but it’s only when he climbs out and looks straight at me that the sorrow wins out, and I rise to my feet and run.
I have no idea where I’m going. I only know I feel completely out of control, that I can’t let anyone see me like this.
I push through the brush with tears streaming down my face, and when I’m out of sight, I press my face to a tree and cry like a baby.
I don’t even know why . He’s okay. But my tears aren’t just over the terror of those last few minutes.
They’re about all the things I want from life that I’m not going to get. Luke, most of all.
A twig snaps behind me. I turn to find Luke marching toward me, wetsuit hanging off his hip bones, water glistening on his skin, still bleeding.
“What the fuck, Juliet?” he begins.
I round on him, suddenly livid. It enrages me that he took the risk he just did. How could he?
“You fucking scared me!” I cry. “Do you have any idea how devastated I’d be if—”
Before I can say another word, he’s closed the distance between us, one hand wrapping around the back of my neck as he pulls my mouth to his.
It’s not a sweet, gentle peck on the lips. It’s as if I’m his only source of oxygen, as if he’ll die without it. Something desperate, something magical, is pulsing in my blood, blooming as his hands grip my jaw, framing my face in his palms.
“I thought I was going to die, and the only thing that mattered, the only thing I wanted, was you,” he says against my mouth. “You were all I fucking thought about.”
He pushes my back to the tree, the saltwater on his skin seeping through my clothes. I groan as his hands slide down my sides to drag my hips closer, and I let my fingers dig into his hair, the way I’ve wanted to…always.
This is what existed between the two of us whether we were touching or not. This is the source of my sharpness with him, the source of his narrowed eyes as he watched me at dinner, and the rage leveled at me as often as it was leveled on my behalf.
I register the large, solid weight of him against my abdomen—this too is different from Danny, and thrilling. If there’s a voice of conscience inside me, whispering, “This is wrong , ” it’s too faint to make a dent.
I wasn’t empty when he left, the way I thought. I was broken . And now I’m a bird free of its cage, soaring through the air, and I never, ever want to go back.
“Juliet!” shouts a voice, and it takes us a minute to register that it’s Danny’s voice.
Luke is still pressed against me, still holding my hips, his breath coming as fast as my own. He flinches and steps away, his gaze locked on mine as he shouts his reply. “She’s here!”
The horror of what I’ve just done sinks in. “Luke…I’m sorry.”
His nostrils flare. “Don’t you dare take it back.”
He turns and walks away, down the hill toward camp, and only seconds later, Danny is before me, his shoulders sagging in relief as he wraps an arm around me. “What happened?” he asks.
“I don’t know. I just freaked out.”
“Why are you wet?”
I think of Luke’s body pressed to mine. The fever of it, the urgency.
“I tripped,” I say. “I’m fine.”
He slips his fingers through mine, taking me at my word.
And he really shouldn’t. Because nothing is fine. I’m not sure it ever will be again.
* * *
Luke and I don’t say a word to each other for the rest of the morning. But his eyes meet mine as Danny and I climb in the truck, and there’s a question in them: What are you gonna do, Juliet? Are you going to end things with him now that you finally understand?
“I don’t know , ” is the answer. I don’t know what to do. I promised Donna I’d help. I can’t just abandon them now.
But God knows I might not be doing them a favor by staying, either.