AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She couldn’t talk to him now. He was already headed out to an enormous wave. Panicked, she glanced ahead of Kai and saw the wall of water he was heading toward, an intimidating swell.
She felt suddenly scared for him, her stomach one giant knot of muscle. She watched, fingers clutching the binoculars, as the Jet Ski led him straight to the crest of the wave. Then he let go of the line and he was free, cascading down the face of a wave that was six times his size. He looked like a tiny fleck next to the massive stretch of blue cresting above his head. Jun held her breath. The drones with the cameras buzzed around him, getting his ride from all angles.
She could see his face through the binoculars, his steady concentration. If he was afraid, he didn’t show it, his square jaw firmly clenched as he focused, every ounce of his body about balancing on that board, every muscle engaged as he tried to outrun the mountain of water behind him. For a second, she felt elated: he was doing it. He was surfing. His knee was holding. Thank God. She looked again at the towering wave behind him and thought...he was amazing. How could he do that? It seemed to defy all laws of physics, and yet there he was, riding that enormous wave, cresting atop one of nature’s most powerful forces and standing tall.
Pride bloomed in her chest. She’d helped him get back to this.
As she watched him, she saw his leg twitch. Her heart dropped into her stomach.
No. Not the knee. Not now.
He had a wall of water behind him traveling faster than a car, a wall of water that weighed more than a ton, ready to crash down on him. His leg twitched again. She could see Kai struggle to hold on, to keep his form and balance. She saw the will on his face to keep his knee from giving. Yet she saw the uphill battle, knew in her gut that the knee wasn’t going to hold. A second later, it buckled, and down Kai went in a spectacular whirling fall. He hit the wave hard, and it threw him back up, thirty feet or higher in the air, his board snapping free of its tether and shooting out in the opposite direction. Kai, pinwheeling, plummeted into the churning water, taking out one drone as he fell. The other popped up, spinning high above the water.
The crowd near her gasped at the horrific wipeout. Concerned murmurs rose in a hum around her, but all she could do was stay mutely rooted to the spot. She searched the white foam of the frothing water, but Kai didn’t come up for air.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
A WALL OF WATER hit Kai on the head so hard it felt like a baseball bat ramming his skull at full force, batting him down so deep beneath the surface of the water that the sunlight faded almost entirely and when he looked up, he saw the churning surface far, far above him, seventy feet at least. He kicked futilely, trying to move to the surface, his life jacket on him with just one buckle, the force of the fall having snapped the other two clean in two. He felt disoriented and fuzzy, his ears ringing with the impact and his vision blurred.
He kicked hard, but just when he got to the surface, another wave pounded him back down, sending him even deeper this time. He rose to the surface once more, caught a wet breath and then was pummeled back down into darker, blacker depths.
The water wasn’t letting him up; the ocean had decided that today he wasn’t getting a second chance. Somehow he knew that. He’d pressed his luck, used up all his lives, and now, finally, the ocean would take what belonged to it. His ego. He’d been stupid, he realized, so stupid. Bret had been right. He should’ve retired. Should’ve given up this folly of chasing the biggest, baddest waves on the planet.
He thought about his father, about how silly it seemed, Kai, a grown man now, using surfing to battle such old demons. Who cared if his father had another family on the mainland? He was a man now. He shouldn’t care what his father did or didn’t do, what his father had done or not done.
Father. Now he’d never be one, and he’d thought, he’d really thought, he could’ve been a good dad to Po. He realized now, being held down by a wall of water, that playing a meaningful role in that boy’s life wasn’t scary. Drowning, now, that was scary. Being a dad was...an opportunity to do something that mattered. That wasn’t about ego or thumbing his nose at gravity or about fame or money. That was what had been missing in his life: things that mattered.
