Page 83

A muscle flickers in Luke’s cheek. “If you jump with your board at just the right moment and angle it right, I bet you could get past all that and paddle out.”

“Luke,” I say before I can stop myself. “No.”

There’s way more anxiety and desperation in my voice than I want to betray, but everyone is too busy agreeing with me to notice. I step toward him but catch myself before I go farther.

“She’s right, man,” says Beck. “Think about it…Even if you survive the jump and even if you manage to paddle out and don’t get swept into the rocks, how do you get back in? You’re still facing the same problem you were on the way out.”

Luke swallows. “I think if you rode in through the center of the channel and timed it right, you’d be fine.”

“That’s a really big if,” says Danny.

Luke glances at me, and before he even says a word, I already know exactly what he’s thinking and what he feels: that he wants to surf, and that he’s angry about so many things, and that if it doesn’t work out…it just doesn’t fucking work out.

“I can do it,” he says.

“Please,” I whisper.

He looks at me for one long moment. Too long. “It’s good, Jules.”

A simple thing, those words. Only I know what he’s really saying: that he understands the risks, and that I’ve made my decisions and now he’s making his.

He grabs his wetsuit out of his bag and goes to change.

“Someone needs to stop him,” Libby says. “This is stupid, even for him.”

The guys glance at each other.

“It is stupid,” Liam finally says, “but if anyone could pull it off, he could.”

Panic tightens my chest, but the rest of the crowd shrugs in reluctant agreement, and when Luke emerges, there’s a weird combination of anxiety and excitement in the air. They all do things someone else has suggested is ill-advised, and Luke is a far better surfer than any of them. He surfed Mavericks, after all. Telling him he can’t make this is like telling an Olympic athlete he can’t break a record—none of them feel qualified to say what he can or cannot do.

“Wish me luck,” he says before taking one last look at me and disappearing downstairs.

My stomach drops to my feet.

We gather on the deck, and a minute later we see him walking out to the beach with his best board, the one he used to win at La Jolla—yellow, white, and black striped—like he thinks it will make him invulnerable. It won’t. That fucking board could snap in half the second he hits the water if he lands wrong.

“This is crazy,” Libby says firmly. “He probably won’t even survive the jump. Make him wait until tomorrow. The weather will be better, and he can surf then.”

“The weather’s not going to be better tomorrow,” says Beck.

“That’s not the point!” I cry. “Make him stop!”

Don’t they see he’s acting like someone with nothing left to lose?

“Juliet, even if we wanted to stop him, we couldn’t,” says Beck. There’s sympathy in his gaze, sympathy that wasn’t there when he addressed Libby just a moment ago. It’s almost as if he knows exactly what’s going on here.

It’s Mavericks all over again but worse this time. Luke isn’t doing something he knows other people have succeeded at. He has no clue what could happen. And I didn’t try to stop him at Mavericks, but I still remember those moments when I thought he was gone. I still remember how deeply I regretted not trying to talk him out of it.

“No,” I say, dropping Danny’s hand and taking off at a run.

Danny shouts at me to stop, but I ignore him, running down the stairs and chasing Luke across the sand.

I know we’ve got an audience and I just don’t care. Nothing matters to me as much as convincing him to stop.

The gravel slides under foot as I scramble up the cliff behind him. He’s halfway there by the time I catch him.

He glances over his shoulder at me, his face stern. “Go back, Juliet.”