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A car engine hums in the distance. I’m so close to coming it barely registers. It’s only when the wall behind me starts to vibrate—the garage door opening—that I realize what’s going on.
I gasp. “Shit. That’s Donna. You’ve got to stop.”
His eyes are nearly black in the dim light. “No.” He slams into me again and again. I know exactly how it will sound on the other side of that wall.
“She’s going to hear,” I plead. “You’ve got to stop.”
“Then you’d better hurry up and come,” he taunts, slamming into me again as her car pulls in.
His hand covers my mouth as I cry out. He thrusts once more and stills, biting my shoulder as his hips pump silently, squeezing me so tight I’ll be bruised in the morning. He breathes into my neck as we stand frozen, waiting for the sound of the side door to open and shut.
“Fuck,” he gasps when it finally does. He releases me, and my feet hit the ground at last.
“This was wrong,” I say, pushing my dress down. I walk off, and this time he doesn’t follow. But once again, there’s a part of me that wishes he had.
26
THEN
DECEMBER 2014
Just before Danny comes home for winter break, Donna pulls me aside and tells me the pastor is having bypass surgery in January. She doesn’t want Danny to know because he’s already going through so much, though in truth, I think she’s mostly worried he’ll drop out of school. He’s mentioned it more than once to both of us—a childish tantrum about being cut from the team that he’s trying to pose as altruism.
She’s going to be covering more of the pastor’s duties at church—pretty much every aspect of the job aside from the Sunday sermon—and she needs me at the house to keep an eye on him when I’m not at my internship. She teared up as she explained the situation they’re in. “We don’t own this house. We don’t have anything saved. If things go downhill and they remove the pastor from his position, I don’t know what’s going to become of us.”
It’s Grady she’s worried about. Fucking Grady, always offering to step up, as if he truly cares about the pastor’s recovery and isn’t trying to get himself a fucking job at the end of the year.
I’ve only been able to work evenings and weekends this year, so it’s been an uphill battle to even replenish the money I lost at the end of the summer, and now I might be giving it up entirely.
But the hardest part is that it means…I’m staying.
And I stopped wanting to stay a long time ago.
* * *
When Danny gets home, we meet all the guys at the bar Beck’s mom owns, thirty minutes to the south. Surfing equalized them all, but that disappears when they’re away from the beach. Caleb rolls up in his dad’s Range Rover. Harrison has a Rolex. Fucking twenty-one-years-old and he’s got a Rolex.
And I bet he’d give it up—I bet they’d all give up everything—to be Luke.
“I can’t believe he’s surfing Mavericks,” says Caleb, shaking his head.
“What?” I whisper. My voice is dry, raspy with shock. Mavericks hosts some of the deadliest waves in the world.
Caleb looks from me to Danny. “You didn’t tell her?”
Danny shakes his head. “No, because it’s stupid. I was hoping he’d change his mind.”
“It’s all set,” argues Caleb. “He’s coming up after New Year’s and we’re gonna drive out to watch. I think he’ll be okay.”
Danny rolls his eyes. “He just started surfing again two years ago.”
It’s what I was thinking too. The difference is that I’m worried sick, but Danny just sounds pissed.
* * *
On the day after New Year’s, Danny and I take the pastor’s truck to a camping area just off the beach, only a few miles south of Mavericks. It’s only the two of us, and the silence is deafening. I’m sick with nerves over both the prospect of seeing Luke and the possibility of him being hurt tomorrow. Plus, there’s not much to say. Danny doesn’t want to hear that I hate the internship, he doesn’t want to hear about my songs.
He breaks the silence by again floating the idea of staying in Rhodes instead of returning to UCSD. “I hate leaving my dad like this. It doesn’t feel right.”
