The Kiss Principle (Hazardverse: Sidetracks)

19

In June, even on a weekday, Surfrider Beach was popping. Cars were parked up and down the Pacific Coast Highway, and as I searched for a spot, I watched beachgoers making their way down the sandy hill toward the water. I ended up having to park near the Malibu Pier. Then I got out and walked.

After the first few times coming here, I’d gotten smart. I wore my flip-flops instead of shoes. Shorts. A tank that Augustus had given me, with two cats high-fiving on the front and, on the back, two sassy tails. I was walking bait for ass pirates, if I do say so myself. But since I was, technically, an ass pirate myself—at least occasionally—I figured it was time to get into the spirit of things. Plus I thought it might make him smile.

I’d thought about that a lot during the last couple of weeks. About whether I should do this. And when I realized I was kidding myself—when I was forced to admit I wanted to do this—wondering how. I’d done a lot of thinking the last couple of weeks. It was strange what having a semi-normal sleep schedule did for your brain.

Part of that was because Augustus had been willing to stay, and he’d helped with Igz. He’d been a natural, too; I knew he was good with Lana, but seeing him with an infant reinforced it. More than helping with Igz, though, he’d been…well, weirdly close to a friend, which was hard to reconcile with the Augustus I remembered (the park-cruising, ass-hook-dangling, spank-o-rama Augustus, in other words). He talked to me when I wanted to talk. He listened. When I came home from my intake session, he didn’t ask why my eyes were red, and he didn’t say anything about the fact that I’d sat in the Escalade for a good half an hour after getting home, even though he must have heard the garage door. He sat me on the couch with Igz, got me a beer, and watched the last half of a John Wick movie with me. And I knew, if I wanted to, I could tell him about it. About all of it. Even now, after he’d gone home, I knew he’d be there if I picked up the phone.

I tried calling Zé; I want that on the record. But he hadn’t answered my calls or texts. He hadn’t called back.

A gull dove in front of me, pulling my attention back to the beach. It swooped for a half-eaten drumstick, caught it in its beak, and flapped its wings to rise again. Other gulls swirled around it, a fucking tornado of squawking feathers, and the bird dropped the drumstick. Another gull immediately dove, and the whole process started over again.

There were always gulls, of course—too many beachgoers leaving too much half-eaten food, some of them stupid enough to feed the birds on purpose. And, as I’d been coming here over the last couple of weeks, I’d started to form my mental list of what stayed the same and what changed. The line outside the organic café at the pier was always long, even if the faces changed. The number of people on the beach ebbed and flowed, but there were always people—people in bright swimsuits, people smelling of sunscreen, people laughing and shouting. There was always Joel, the guy standing knee deep in the surf, banging on a drum he wore on a strap around his neck. Going to fucking town on it. I don’t even know if his name was Joel; the second or third time I came to Surfrider, I heard this leathery beach bum say, “Joel, knock it off,” but if his name was Joel, he kept pounding away.

Other things stayed the same and, at the same time, were different too. The lifeguard tower was painted the same blue as the sky; that stayed the same. But the lifeguard changed. Today, he had on tiny red shorts and a white tank, and every inch of him was corded with swimmer muscle. I guess that was a change too; I guess I’d always been able to admire a guy’s looks, but now it felt different, because that door was open.

The surfboards changed—dozens of them leaned against a sagging wire fence—but there were always surfboards. Always surfers too. I watched one guy trying to get down to the water. He must have slipped because he fell face forward onto his own board and bit it, hard. His friends were watching from up the beach, laughing. They kept laughing as he dragged himself out of the water and limped toward them, leaving a trail of bloody footprints in the sand. I thought about what Zé had said, about how toxic surf culture could be, but the laughter sounded friendly—even if nobody was trying to help him.

The sun was hot on my neck as I continued up the beach. The air seemed to shimmer above the sand, and on every breath, I caught that familiar cocktail of beach smells: brine and zinc and a hint of decay. The first time Mom had taken Augustus to a beach, there’d been a dog rolling on a dead seal. I’d had to tell Augustus they were playing, and we’d gone the other direction. The sun sparked on the water. A helicopter floated overhead, blades and rotors thrumming. Someone was playing cumbia . My heart was running wild in my chest.

If he’s not here, I told myself, you’ll come back tomorrow. And the next day. And the next. A part of me was vaguely aware that this was pretty much the definition of stalking. But I ignored that part and focused on my heart—specifically, on trying not to choke on it, since it seemed to be lodged halfway up my throat. He had told me about this beach, about coming here the first day he’d been in the United States. He’d told me this was where modern surfing was born. And I knew he would be here today; I knew it. He would. He had to be. Because today was different.

I found him at First Point; he was watching the surfers, of course. He wore board shorts and a ratty old T-shirt that he must have owned for a million years—this one showed a dinosaur on a longboard and said SURF-O-SAURUS—and all I could do was try to think if I’d seen it on him before. It was easier to think about that, to try to remember, than to think about everything else: about how long his legs were, about the strong, bronzed muscles of his thighs, about the lines of his neck as he turned his head, about the way the wind tangled those thick, dark curls. He was watching a girl ride a wave to shore. She was young, maybe not even a teenager yet, and she rode the water like she’d been born to do it. He wasn’t smiling as he watched her, but he looked happy.

And then I stopped because he was wearing the Ray-Bans I’d bought him, and because my emotions had been totally fucked since that intake session, and I was one hundred percent sure I was about to burst into sobs. I couldn’t bring myself to keep walking. I stood there, the sun baking me, the sand working like a convection oven, sweating inside that stupid tank and wondering if I had time to run back to the pier and buy something else, anything else, anything, in particular, that didn’t have two cats with sassy tails high-fiving on it.

He looked over, and I forgot how to breathe.

Surprise first. Then his brows drawing together, his face hardening, his body closing as he hugged his good knee to his chest. He looked out at the water again.

God or Jesus or Buddha, I thought, or whoever is the patron saint of high-fiving cats, please give me one fucking break in my life.

And somehow, for Zé, I managed to move forward.

He didn’t look at me as I approached, even though he must have heard me squishing through the sand. He kept his gaze fixed on the water; the girl was off her board now, paddling parallel to the shore. A chunky little boy in a snorkel mask was coming in on the next wave, and he looked like only the grace of those high-fiving cats was keeping him on the board. Sure enough, he fell almost as soon as I looked at him, and the wave crashed over him. He bobbed to the surface a moment later, sputtering and laughing. Zé’s mouth twitched in a reluctant smile.

“Hi,” I said.

He shifted on his towel. His shoulders tightened.

“Can I sit down?”

“What are you going to do if I say no?”

“I don’t know. Wait for you in the parking lot, maybe. Okay, that actually sounded way more stalkerish than I meant it to.”

“How stalkerish was it supposed to sound?”

“No, I meant—” I stopped. “You ass nut.”

He looked up at me. The Ray-Bans made it impossible to see those dark eyes.

“I miss you,” I said.

“I can tell. I’m surprised you weren’t hiding in the back seat of my car.”

I winced, but mostly for show. Then I sat.

He gave me another, longer look.

“You didn’t say no,” I reminded him.

“I didn’t say yes.”

“You’re not going to make this easy, are you?”

“What do you want, Fernando?”

“I want to apologize,” I said. And then my voice was too thick to continue. “I want to say I’m sorry. And I want to tell you I miss you. And I think I love you. Still.”

He put his hand on his forehead. Maybe like he was shading his eyes. Maybe like he had a headache. Maybe I was giving him a headache.

“You were right,” I said. “About a lot of things. About me. About how I’m living my life. Or not living it, I guess. About the—the shitshow I’ve got going with my mom and Chuy.”

It seemed like a long time before he gave a tiny shake of his head, and his voice softened into what I remembered as Zé’s voice. My Zé’s voice. “I shouldn’t have said those things. That wasn’t the time, and it wasn’t kind, and it certainly wasn’t my place.”

“But you were right,” I said. “And I needed to hear it. From you, I mean. Because it was your place, you know what I mean? You’re so important to me. And you’re the only person who I could hear it from, actually hear it.” He didn’t say anything, so I went on. “Chuy said I do this stuff—all this stuff with him, with Augustus, with my mom—I do it because I want to. God, that made me so angry. But, uh, I’ve been talking to someone, and I think, maybe, there might be a little truth to it. There’s a lot of shit with my dad I’m unpacking. Even more shit with my mom. Tubular shit.”

A startled laugh escaped Zé before he managed to stop it. His brows drew together like I’d tricked him somehow, and he said, “That’s not how you use tubular.”

“Well, I’m not a super-hot surfer bro, so I’m kind of playing it by ear.”

He pushed the glasses up onto his head. His eyes were the exact shade of brown I remembered. The red-tailed hawk. That last, final band of brown. He was watching me watch him, and something changed in his face: color coming into his cheeks, the lines of his mouth softening. He blinked and looked away.

“I’m glad you’re talking to someone, Fernando. I want you to be happy.”

“Well, I’m not happy because I fucked everything up with you, and you make me happy.”

He pulled his knee closer to his chest. He looked out at the water. Every inch of him was drawn so tight I thought he might snap.

“I’m sorry about everything, Zé. About my mom and how awful she was to you. About how I reacted when I went to pick up Chuy and you tried to help me see I was doing something stupid. But mostly I’m sorry that I was such a fucking shitheel when it came down to it. When my mom made that crack about us. When I found out about—” The drugs wasn’t exactly the direction I wanted to take, so I settled for “—everything. I thought about that a lot. About how you lost all these people in your life by being yourself. I should have made sure you knew how important you were to me. How much I care about you. I should have told you I love you.”

I hadn’t meant to say those words. It had been so much easier to hide behind I think . But they popped out, and when I heard them, a flush ran through me, and fresh sweat broke out everywhere, and I had a panicked moment that I was going to be sick, puking on my hands and knees while Zé stared at those sassy tails on my back. But then it passed, and I felt…good. Open. Relieved.

He put his hand on his forehead again. The waves came in. The swash rode up the beach. Joel was still pounding his drum.

“I should have told you about…about everything,” he said, his voice clotted with emotion. “I should have told you that first day. But I was scared you wouldn’t give me the job, and I needed the money, and then I was so embarrassed. Embarrassed that I’d lied. Embarrassed that I was an addict. Embarrassed to tell you how lonely I’d been, and that the pills made it easier, and then they weren’t making it easier but I couldn’t stop, and I kept giving up one thing after another for those fucking pills.” His voice broke. His shoulders shook. I scooted closer and put my arm around him, and the T-shirt was hot against my skin. He jerked away, but I settled my arm again, and this time, he leaned into me. He kept speaking out toward the ocean, wiping his cheeks as tears fell. “And I knew about Chuy, and I knew how hard he’d made your life, knew how scared you were for him, and I couldn’t, Fernando. I couldn’t tell you. I liked how you looked at me. You’re so kind. You always treated me like I was special.”

“You are special,” I said. “I love you. Not because I think you’re perfect. I love you because you’ve worked so hard to build a new life for yourself after you lost everything. I love you because you’re so strong and calm and centered. I love you because you are such a fucking beautiful person, inside and out, that I feel like a human dumpster fire when I’m around you, but that’s okay, because I get to be around you, and that’s what matters. I love you even though you wear the same fucking Quiksilver shirt, like, eight days in a row, and I love you even though you have the absolute worst taste in TV shows—”

“I don’t even watch TV.”

“Exactly! And I love you even though you are the biggest goof on two legs. I love you because you are the biggest goof on two legs.” I had to blink my eyes clear. “I love you. And if you’ll give me another chance, I won’t let you down again.”

His voice was husky when he said, “I shouldn’t have run away. I’m sorry I did that. It was a lot. It brought back a lot. I’ve spent the last few weeks telling myself I did the right thing. I keep telling myself that I can do this on my own. That I don’t need anybody. That I’m better off alone. And you know what? I spent a lot of my life living a lie, and I know what it sounds like when I’m telling myself one more stupid lie.”

I opened my mouth to answer, but before I could, my phone buzzed.

“Go on,” Zé said, wiping his cheeks again. “Check it.”

“No.”

He gave a wet laugh. “Fernando, look at your phone so I have five seconds to put myself together.”

I checked my phone. Mom’s name showed on the screen.

“You’d better answer it.” Where Zé had smeared the tears across his cheek, they left a salt track that caught the light. There was weariness in his eyes. Resignation. He knew, I guess, this was part of the package—if we were a package.

I answered the phone on speaker.

“Cannon took my necklace,” Mom said. “The emerald solitaire. The little shit has been eyeing it for weeks, and now it’s gone, and he’s gone.” Her voice rose into a scream as she repeated, “He’s gone!”

“Mom, I can’t talk right now.”

“Did you hear me? He stole my necklace!”

“I heard you. Did you hear me?”

“You have to find him. He’s probably trying to pawn it right now!”

“Mom, I’m sorry about your necklace. And about Cannon. And I’ll be happy to look for your necklace when I have some free time, but I can’t drop everything and do it this minute.”

“Fernando, I need you right now!”

“I understand. But I’m doing something important. I can’t do it right now.”

“What are you doing that’s so important?”

“I’m trying to convince Zé to be my boyfriend. And forgive me. Not in that order, I guess. Oh, and we had sex when he was living at our house, so I’m bi. You can tell Shannon at your next life-coaching session that you now technically have one and a half gay sons. That’s fifty percent for you.”

Her silence echoed across the call.

“I’m going to go now,” I said, “and I’m going to put my phone on do not disturb because Zé is important to me, and I have a right to my own time and to take care of my own needs.”

“But Cannon—”

I disconnected. It took a surprising amount of willpower to look at Zé.

His eyebrows made those fuzzy peaks again.

“I’m working on setting boundaries,” I said. “My therapist said I should be clear and concise and compassionate. Those are the three C’s. And if I need to repeat myself, that’s okay.”

He nodded slowly.

“I didn’t mean to tell her about the blow job,” I added. “That was a spur-of-the-moment thing.”

He covered his mouth, but I could still see his smile.

“Also, I know I’m amazing at playing it cool—”

Zé’s eyebrows did their thing again.

“—but that was hard for me.”

“I know,” he said softly.

“I know I’ve still got a lot of work to do,” I said.

“So do I.”

“I know I’m not perfect.”

He shook his head and whispered, “Neither am I.”

“But one thing I’m good about, Zé? One thing I’m proud of? I care about my family. When Augustus decided to stay in Missouri, I told him he could always come home. If Chuy would say goodbye before he disappeared, I’d tell him the same thing. We’re family, and they can always come home. And you’re my family too.” I had to stop. The sun was so bright, and I had to blink rapidly to clear my eyes. My voice fought with the crash of the waves, the cry of the gulls, the cumbia blaring on a distant radio. I fought to reach him across that vast space that had opened between us. “Please come home.”