Page 78 of The Kiss Principle

He took a long time coming around the table.

I hugged him. I kissed the side of his head. And then I said, “You smell like somebody used a jockstrap to clean a porn set. After, I mean. All those giant, porn-y loads.”

“I hate you. You are the single weirdest human being who has ever been born.”

Neither of us said anything for a long time. His arms tightened around me, and he whispered, “We’ll figure this out.”

I lifted him off the floor because I knew he hated it, and I kissed the side of his head one more time, and I shook him so he’d know he was still my annoying baby brother who’d probably paid for his last year of college with rim jobs. And I whispered, “Thank you.”

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 anythingabout 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 playingcumbia. 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, paddlingparallel 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?”

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