“Do it,” Stella said, lowering her camera as the last color faded. “Coffee with Lindsey. Don’t cancel.”
“I won’t cancel.”
“Promise.”
“I promise.”
“Good.” She raised the camera one more time. “Now hold still. The light on your face is doing something good, and you look like a person who needs evidence that he’s alive.”
Tyler lowered his camera as the last color drained from the sky. His shoulders felt different. Looser. The viewfinder had done something an hour of sleep couldn’t.
A figure appeared on the path from the beach, wetsuit half-zipped, board under one arm. Luke. Of course. October evenings with decent swell—Luke would be checking conditions the way other people checked their phones.
Luke spotted them and detoured up the slope. "Thought I saw you two up here." He looked at Tyler. "You look terrible."
"So I've been told."
"Waves are good. Glassy. Nobody out." Luke nodded toward the water. "You coming or not?"
Tyler looked at the ocean. At his truck, where his board and wetsuit had been riding around untouched for weeks.
"Go," Stella said. "I'll shoot you from the beach. Two middle-aged guys trying to remember how surfboards work—incredible content."
"Middle-aged," Tyler said.
"Go."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Tyler hadn’t worn the wetsuit in three weeks and it let him know.
He hopped on one foot in the parking lot, wrestling the neoprene past his knee while Luke leaned against the truck and watched with the patience of a man who’d been putting on wetsuits since he was twelve.
“Need help?” Luke asked.
“I’ve got it.”
“You’ve been fighting that zipper for two minutes.”
“The zipper’s fine. The zipper is not the problem. The problem is that I’ve been standing over a grill instead of stretching and my body has filed a complaint.”
“Your body filed that complaint years ago. You just started listening.”
Tyler got the suit on, grabbed his board from the truck bed—dusty, which was embarrassing—and followed Luke down the path. The beach was empty. The water was the color of slate going silver, the last light catching the surface in long streaks. Clean. No wind. The kind of evening session that used to be routine and had become something he had to be ambushed into.
They paddled out. The cold hit Tyler’s face and hands and the rest of him remembered. Arms pulling through water. The board under his chest. The horizon ahead, flat and patient.
“When was the last time?” Luke asked, sitting up on his board as they cleared the break.
“Three weeks. Maybe four.”
“Four weeks.” Luke shook his head. “That’s criminal.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“You’ve been poaching eggs.”
“Eggs are important.”
