Boomer didn’t bother pretending he hadn’t heard a damn thing.
40
Blacks Beach, La Jolla, California
Fly paddled with practiced strokes, his muscles burning as he fought against the incoming surge. The sun glinted off the water's surface, momentarily blinding him as he positioned himself for the monster wave building behind him. This was the kind of heavy water he lived for, the moment when man met nature at its most raw and powerful.
When he rode a wave, the world fell away. The board became an extension of his body, and he wasn't just riding the water. He was soaring above it. There was a weightless, breathless moment at the peak of the swell where gravity seemed to let go, and he was suspended between sea and sky, riding an invisible thermal of wind and water.
His mind, honed by years of training and instinct, automatically calculated his approach. With split-second precision, he aligned himself to slide through the barrel of the oncoming wave. One miscalculation, and he would be thrown out or crushed by the fold.
Something massive moved toward him from the beach, a shimmering wall.
The wave rose, magnificent and terrifying. Where he was supposed to enter the barrel, something warped. His angle was suddenly off, so off that he was in serious trouble. The physics of the situation were wrong, impossible even.
But to his shock, his board slipped into the roll with an odd sense of déjà vu that made him almost lose his balance. The ride was so clean, so effortless, something settled in him with a discordant pulse, a bombshell to his brain that didn't compute.
"What the fuck?" he muttered, barely audible over the roar of the water.
He should be crushed beneath heavy water, but he was almost gliding on a surface that felt as if it was too loose, too forgiving. The wave should have been fighting him, but instead, it seemed to cradle his board, guiding him through the barrel with an unnatural precision.
As he emerged from the tube and dismounted from his board, he paddled back toward shore, shaking uncontrollably. Something fundamental had shifted. The world felt different, thinner somehow, as if the laws between possible and impossible had been temporarily torn away.
Bolt and Shamrock were cheering from the beach, oblivious to the strangeness of his ride. To them, it had just been another perfect wave, another demonstration of Fly's skill with a surfboard.
But he knew better.
Fly's mind, usually a fortress of logic and precision, was being unwritten. All those years of burning muscles, all the near-misses, all the perfected timing, suddenly rendered meaningless.
A powerful wave was an adversary, something he conquered, danced with, and commanded. It was never forgiving. But this wave…it had cradled him. The techniques he trusted no longer aligned with outcome. Ocean physics punished error. In all reality, at this moment, he should have been pushed to the bottom and held down by tons of churning water.
He was furious he wasn’t dead.
He looked back, almost afraid of what he would see, but the waves were familiar, rhythmic. The water behaved again. The sets lined up the way they always had.
He waited for the certainty to return.
It didn’t.
His gut clenched, nausea on the edge of threat.
By the time the light drained out of the sky, they were packing up and heading back toward Calsbad, the city lights waiting inland like a promise of order. Blacks stayed behind them, dark and open, the surf still breaking long after they were gone. Sand clung to them as if it didn’t want to let them go.
In the vehicle, Shamrock kept talking about the ride. Fly nodded and smiled, but nothing about the praise touched him on any deep level. His gut churned and protested, and that furious energy just built like a rising wave. There was just this feeling of being an impostor inside his own body, and he’d never in his life felt that way. What he did was genuine. If it wasn’t, he left it in his wake.
“I mean, Surf talked about you handling heavy water, but that was just talk. You walk the walk, lad.”
Bolt whooped. “We need a drink to celebrate that famous ride and numb ourselves a little before we get our tats.” He looked out the window and said to Fly, “Oh, here’s good. Pull over.”
Fly just wanted the night to be over so he didn’t have to hear anymore. North was quiet, but he often was.
The bar was low-lit and narrow, wedged between a surf shop and a closed café, its windows fogged from the contrast between warm bodies and cooling night air. Salt and beer hung thick in the room, layered with old wood, citrus cleaner, and the faint metallic tang of taps that had seen too many hands. A chalkboard over the bar advertised drink specials in sloppy block letters, half erased, as if no one had bothered to finish the thought.
Music thumped from hidden speakers, something with a heavy bass line that vibrated through the floorboards. Laughter rolled in uneven bursts from clustered tables, tourists and locals pressed shoulder to shoulder, the kind of place where stories got louder with every round. Surfboards were stacked in one corner like discarded shields, their waxed surfaces catching stray flashes of neon.
Fly paused just inside the door, the noise and heat hitting him all at once. The room felt tight, compressed, like the air pressure inside a collapsing wave barrel, the moment before the world imploded. He could already feel his stomach knotting again, that wrong, restless energy humming beneath his skin.
They claimed a high table near the back, shadows pooling around them as the door swung shut, and the ocean vanished behind glass, and the night closed in.
