Page 165 of We Are Just Us

The NBC 7 piece had definitely helped. After the City Council voted down the nudity ban, the station aired their segment, complete with a link to Kieran’s original Black’s Beach article.

He’d gone micro-viral overnight. Not internet-famous, not life-changing, but enough that his subscriber count jumped from a few hundred to two thousand in a week.

Now he had twelve thousand subscribers. Not millions. But enough.

Honestly? San Diego had started as drunk observations and evolved entirely.

He wrote about Rory’s recovery. Not the medical details, those were private, but the experience of watching someone you love fight their way back to themselves. About what caregiving looked like. About the local healthcare system’s failures and unexpected kindnesses. About the physical therapist who’d celebrated with Rory the first time he could look over his shoulder without wincing.

The response had been overwhelming.

People shared their own stories. Their own recoveries. Their own loved ones. The newsletter became less about mocking eighteen-dollar smoothies, and more about finding beauty and absurdity in the hard stuff.

Sponsors came. Real ones. Companies that aligned with his voice. A local bookstore. A nonprofit focused on spinal injury support. A physical therapy practice that gave a shit about their patients.

And in the fall, he’d accepted the part-time adjunct position at MiraCosta College up in Oceanside, teaching on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. The same stretch of coast he pulled off of in a panic his first day in Encinitas. Now he drove it twice a week on purpose.

Between the Substack, the sponsors, and the teaching gig, Kieran was making more than enough to split rent comfortably. To help with medical bills if Rory’s insurance fell short.

Rory went back to what he loved. He was consulting with an arborist in Leucadia, trying to get landmark protection for a row of Torrey pines on a residential lot where a developer wanted to demolish a bungalow and build two townhouses. The trees were over a hundred years old. The developer’s plans would require removing three of them.

He couldn’t do the physical assessments yet, still building back the strength, still careful about lifting and climbing, but he could do the research. The planning. The advocacy work that required stubbornness more than stamina.

He was damn good at it.

Kieran had gone to watch him speak at a local historic preservation convention last spring. Not a huge room, maybe fifty people, mostly academics and city planners, but Rory stood at the podium and made his case for why these buildings mattered, why history mattered, why letting developers erase the past was a slow kind of violence.

Kieran sat in the back so proud it almost embarrassed him.

This was Rory at his best. Fighting for things that mattered. Using his voice.

They’d found their rhythm. Work and recovery and quiet evenings on the couch with the dogs. Walks on the beach. Sunday dinners with Sam and Aubrey. The physical therapy exercises Rory did every morning without fail.

Their sex life came back slowly too, not the way it had been before, spontaneous and urgent and half-laughing. Now it was careful. Deliberate. Kieran learned how to touch Rory without hurting him, how to hold his weight in the right places, how to let him set the pace. It was slower. Like they’d traded recklessness for a kind of tenderness neither of them knew how to ask for.

It wasn’t perfect. Some days Rory’s neck still ached, Kieran could tell by the way he held himself, the careful way he turned his head. Some days the fatigue hit him hard and he had to rest instead of work. Some days Kieran caught that look in his eyes, the fear that never fully went away.

But he was surfing again.

Kieran had been there the first time.

It was a Saturday in early spring, overcast, the marine layer refusing to commit. Eighteen months post-op. Rory had been doing pool exercises for weeks, rebuilding his paddle strength, testing his range of motion in water where the stakes were low. His physical therapist cleared him for “gentle ocean activity” with a list of restrictions long enough to wallpaper a bathroom.

Rory had read the list, folded it, and put it in his pocket without comment.

That morning, he’d waxed his board in the driveway the way he always used to, slow circles, methodical, meditative. But his hands paused more than they used to. And twice Kieran caught him reaching for the back of his neck, pressing his fingers against the scar like he was checking that everything was still in place.

They drove to Moonlight Beach, where the waves were predictable and the water was shallow enough to stand if something went wrong.

Rory sat in the truck for a full minute after Kieran killed the engine.

“You don’t have to do this today,” Kieran said.

“I know.”

“We can come back. There’s no deadline.”

Rory stared through the windshield at the water. His jaw was set in that way Kieran recognized, not stubbornness exactly, but the look he got when he was arguing with his own fear and refusing to lose.