Then, before I could respond, he was gone.
I watched him sprint full tilt for the beach and leap onto his teal shortboard, paddling like a bonafide expert out into the surf.
The kid followed me into the water, and I gritted my teeth in frustration. No one had surfed this beach in nearly a year… not sincethe incident.
I had no idea that someone had bought the shack, and honestly, while I knew I should have been happy that Jake’s…legacy,for lack of a better word,was finally starting to be erased, I really just felt annoyed that this little prick was here disturbing my peace.
Because it was agood thingthat the town was finally moving on. The boys had done everything in their power to keep the accident from becoming this big, sensationalized thing. And most of the fail-safes they had installed to keep Leviathans a secret seemed to have been heldup. Or so I had thought.
The last thing I wanted was people like this dumbass kid swarming to Leviathans and killing themselves riding waves they had no business riding.
I’d always been against keeping the shack as some sort of weird shrine, no matter what Jake’s death meant to the town… what it meant tome.
Selling the place meant that the tragedy would fade into the past where it belonged, and I could finally rest in peace knowing that my foolishness wouldn’t put an entire new generation of surfers at risk.
I wished the guys and I had never discovered Leviathans in the first place. Now, with this punk-ass kid paddling out after me on his highlighter pink board, I regretted it more than ever.
“Fuck off, kid. I surf alone,” I snapped over my shoulder, tossing my wet hair out of my face as I prepared to drop in.
“Yeah, except you’re surfing onmy beach,dickhead. The least you could do is hear me out!” the little shit called after me as I caught my wave.
His protests melted away, however, as the water tumbled and rolled beneath my board. I leapt to my feet, completely forgetting about the annoying kid the second I caught traction. I fell into the familiar feeling of carving through the green room, running my fingers across the warm wall of water as I passed through the barrel of the wave. Already lost in the magic of the sea, I caught myself smiling at the cacophony of sparkling whites, blues, and aquamarines that made up this temporary world of liquid glass.
A moment of true peace possessed me as I edged my toes over the nose of my board, hanging ten, and I thought:Thismustbe what heaven is like…
The thought was fleeting, however, as that punk-ass kid suddenly ripped past me, carving out in front of my board in a clear attempt to force me to bail.
Rage flared through me.
Dropping in on someone else’s wave wasn’t only bad etiquette, it was fuckingdangerous.
And this asshole wanted to ride Leviathans?
Fucker!
I wiped out just as the wave broke, and my board shot out from under me. My tether snapped taut, both keeping my board from getting lost in the ocean and causing a small spark of panic to shoot through me.
As I rolled through the aftermath of the wave, instinctively righting myself and following my tether to the surface, I hauled myself out of the water and straddled my board.
I could hear the kid cackling in the distance, and anger like I hadn’t felt inyearsripped through my veins.
I locked eyes on him, and suddenly, he wasn’t laughing anymore.
Laying down on my board, I started paddling toward him. This little shitheadclearlyhad a death wish.
He wanted to kill himself on Leviathans? I would make it easy for him and drown his skinny ass right here, right now.
He gulped when he realized I was out for blood, and he plastered himself to his own board, catching a baby wave into shore.
I cursed under my breath and followed suit.
By the time I was in the shallows, he was already sprinting through the sand back to the shack, and I almost laughed.
He was sorely mistaken if he thought he would be safe from me there.
I’d basically grown up in that shack. I knew things about it that no other living person knew, like the fact you could disable the lock mechanism in the door handle by pushing it in slightly and giving it a clockwise, quarter turn.
Sprinting after him, I ripped the quick release off my ankle tether, abandoning my board and following the kid into the shack.
