Page 74 of The Dysasters

“Whoo-hoo! It’s a double overhead, dude! Bastien, you’re killing it!” The second guy had made it to the beach and was shouting at the surfer through cupped hands.

Charlotte didn’t even glance at him. She couldn’t take her eyes from the surfer. He kept riding and riding the huge wave as it got closer and closer to shore. She could see his eyes now, and was shocked by their brilliant turquoise color—a color that reminded her strangely of her own.

The wave kept coming and coming… until finally the surfer gracefully stepped off his board and onto the beach as his friend clapped and hooted for him. The surfer turned then, and bowed to the ocean, as if he was thanking it for the ride.

When he straightened he turned, and his eyes met Charlotte’s.

She saw him hesitate and even stumble for a second as another wave smacked against him, but he righted himself quickly and nodded to her in a very Southern, very gentlemanly way—something Grandma Myrtie would definitely have approved of.

“Hello,cher.”

His voice was deep and rich. And Charlotte thought his accent was the sexiest thing she’d ever heard.

“Good mornin’,” Charlotte spoke automatically.

“Aren’t you sweet.Douces comme du miel.I’m Bastien. And this here’s mypodna,Dickie.”

Charlotte almost blurted her name. Part of her wanted to tell him her name, phone number, Social Security number,andher address. Anything and everything she could tell him so that he’d call her and talk to her more in that gorgeous voice. But she couldn’t tell himeverything. He wouldn’t want to hear hereverything,and because of that she would tell him nothing.

But he was looking at her. Reallylookingfrom her long, bare legs to her boy shorts, to the swim shirt that was soaked and painted to her skin. He wasn’t exactly leering, but his eyes were intense and they reflected his very obvious interest, which sent an all too familiar shiver of fear down Charlotte’s spine.

She schooled her face into what her mother would call “acceptable politeness, but not an invitation” and in her best Southern belle accent said, “I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Bastien. Have a lovely day.”

As the very sexy, very handsome Bastien opened his mouth to say more, Charlotte gave him a dismissive wave, quickly turned her back on him, retrieved her backpack, and without one glance over her shoulder she hurried away from him, retracing her steps down the beach.

Maybe someday… Charlotte thought wistfully.Maybe someday I can talk to a handsome young man like Bastien without being afraid, but today is not that day…

Bastien

“Didn’t know all we had to do was get you in front of a beautiful piece to get the words to roll right out of ya.” Dickie clapped his arm around Bastien’s shoulders. “What’d you say back there, anyway?”

Bastien shrugged away from the brotherly embrace. That young woman hadn’t been somepiece. She was anange.An angel. Her hair and the way the salt-licked breeze had twirled it around her head had been her halo. And those arms, long and delicate and goose-down white, would at any moment reveal the wings he knew were tucked up inside her, waiting to lift her from this cruel world. She’d landed right in front of him and he’d talked to her in the only way he knew how.

“Douces comme du miel.”Dickie’s attempt at Bastien’s line tumbled around his mouth and came out battered and broken. “I’ll have to remember that one and use it sometime. You probably just rake ’em in with that accent and all that foreign-sounding shit. Why the fuck couldn’t I have grown up in Arcada?”

“Acadiana,” Bastien corrected, promising himself that this would be the last time he did so without using his fists. Dickie was all right, once you got used to the dick part of his personality. Unfortunately, Bastien had discovered, this was 99.9 percent of ol’ Dickster, but he’d decided that having the boss’s little brother mad at him all the time wasn’t how he wanted to live this part of his life, however brief it was before he got too restless and the sea called him away.

“Yeah, Acadiana. What’d I say?”

Bastien ran his tongue along his teeth to keep from grinding them intopaste. How many times did he have to explain it to this boy? His sister had even given him an article about the origin of the Cajun people and the parishes making up the Acadiana region, but nothing stuck.

“You gonna tell me what it means,douces comme—”

“Couillon,”Bastien grumbled, unwilling to listen to Dickie butcher his language again.

“Say, what?”

“Sweet as honey.”

“Damn, that’s slick.”

Slick was right. Slick like oil. Slick like sludge. Slick like all the things dumped and leaked into the great big abyss named ocean, coating and suffocating and poisoning until there’s nothing left—only silence, only stillness.

Board under his arm, Bastien charged back to the sea. He waded out until the rough waves licked his bare chest and drowned out Dickie’s shouts and questions. He needed to see them, his ocean creatures, to feel them beneath and all around him to remind him of who he was.

He was not the slick before the silence.

That had been his father.