He was done. Done with suppressing his own needs for her to have her act like he was an emotional blow-up doll who would bounce back up again with a stupid grin on his face.
He’d respected her every inch of the way. And not been granted anything of the sort in return.
Sean paddled hard. The rain was battering the sea, battering his skin. Doing this without a wetsuit was the stupidest idea, but straight thinking wasn’t on the table anymore.
What was on the table? Forgetting Cherry, that was what.
Paddling harder. Away from her, away from Kinshore, away from the grief and the pain of everything he’d lost and was about to lose.
The waves were wild. Huge, seven-foot bastards. You didn’t mess with waves like these.
But Sean wasn’t here to mess about. He was here to surf. To do the only thing that reliably gave him unabated satisfaction.
In only board shorts and a rash vest, his skin was already raw from the cold water and the pounding rain. There was a strange pleasure in the pain. He realised that this was what he did. Put himself in stupid positions like this, laid himself open to the danger in the hope of an adrenaline payoff.
It was exactly what he’d done with Cherry.
Except, with her, the adrenaline had come first. And he’d been stupid enough not to realise how hard the pain was going to hit when it did. Marrying someone on a whim wasn’t like moving to London or buying a house. It was so much more. Why was he arrogant enough to think that it would work out? She was a professional emotional athlete. He was a giant blazing heart on a humongous fucking sleeve. All his life, he’d been warned about getting ahead of himself. Like his teachers had told him at school, and likehis dad had said every second day during Sean’s teenage years, he only had himself to blame.
‘Calm doon, son.’
After this surf, Dad. I need this one to calm me down.
One more wave, and he was out the back, ready to pivot that board, to paddle until his arms burned and use every muscle he had to keep himself standing while he rode that wave to wherever it went.
It wasn’t a death wish, but Sean was happy to be taken on a ride where he didn’t have to think about anything anymore.
Didn’t have to think about Cherry.
About how much he loved her.
Wild, untameable Paradise.
He saw it when it was two hundred metres away. The swell. It was his. No one else was out here. His wave. His ride home. Or to nowhere. Who cared?
Sean paddled like the devil was on his back, emptied his mind of anything but getting onto the enormous dark belter rising behind him. Growling at him to get going.
And then Mother Nature was cresting beneath his board and hammering down from above. You didn’t take anything for granted out here. She was a punishing matriarch, and you worked for every second you were on that board, earned every ounce of exhilaration storming through your bloodstream. If you wanted the headlong rush of surfing waves like this, you’d better take it seriously, because if you went down, you would know who was in charge and it wouldn’t be you.
Sean respected the fickle nature of Mother Nature, especially the Scottish version. You didn’t pick a fight with a Scottish maw.
The cold of the water was bracing, the recent hottemperatures a far-off memory. That version of Kinshore was a different world. Gone were garden sprinklers, sun-scorched roses and clear blue skies. Today was an iron sea, steel grey clouds and a mood like a torn-up Ace of Spades.
Knee deep in the shallows, the first ride over, Sean turned his back to the village and waded out to sea, primed to go again – the gargantuan breakers beckoning him back with their curled fists, saying, ‘Come and have another go, Seany. We promise it’ll be worth it.’
He didn’t doubt them for a second. It was always worth it. Since he’d first stood up on a surfboard, his dad and older brothers cheering him on, Sean had lived for the rush of it. Surfing wasn’t easy, but nothing good ever was.
Like his wife.
Out the back again, rain hammering like nails onto the petrol blue surface of the sea, so dark and deep, he identified the next wave from its incipient swell and, turning his board, paddled again.
‘Come on, Sean. Paddle, paddle, paddle.’His dad’s voice was right by his side, straight out of his eight-year-old’s memory bank.
‘I got it, Dad. I’m good, I’m good… I’m the fucking wave master.’ Except he hadn’t sworn in front of his dad because that would have landed him in serious trouble.
Like they understood one another perfectly, in completely synchronicity as if it were all choreographed beforehand, Sean’s board caught the peak of the wave, he jumped up and wave and man were as one, tearing away from the deep, dark waters of the sound and into shore.
Into Kinshore.
