Page 58 of Malibu Rising

He left shortly after and as Nina watched him walk away from her, she was surprised by how easy it had been for him to grab her attention.

When she got home, she sat at the phone, flicking the card with her thumb and forefinger.Money,she kept thinking.How much money?

Nina didn’t love the idea of posing for photos, but what other options did she have? The restaurant was in the red from a slow winter. She knew for a fact it was going to fail a health inspection. Hud’s tuition for next year was going up. Kit needed her cavities filled. The roof had started leaking again.

She called the number on the card.

• • •

The photographer and assistant kept insisting she wear these tiny bikinis during their shoot at Zuma. They shot for hours, her coming into and out of the water, her rolling around in the sand. She found it uncomfortable, the leering eyes of the men behind the camera.

But then she saw the photos. She stared at the negatives with the photographer’s loupe and something ignited within her.

She was beautiful.

She’d known, on some level, her whole life, that she was pretty. She could tell by the way people sometimes lit up at the sight of her, the same way she’d seen them react to her mother all those years ago.

But was this really how she looked to other people when she was in the water? This gorgeous? This carefree? This cool?

It was jarring, but altogether lovely, to see herself like this.

She was in the June 1979 issue ofVivant,a photo of her face—skin copper from the sun, hair slicked back by the water—set across from a headline that said,CALIFORNIA COOL: THE NEW BEACH BUM.

When everyone pieced together that she was the daughter of Mick Riva, the phone started ringing off the hook.Where had this famous progeny been hiding?Her fame took off like a wildfire.

A surf magazine, two men’s interest magazines, ads for two different swimsuit companies, a wet suit shop, and a commercial for a surf shop later, Nina Riva was the face of women’s surfing.

She wanted to enter surfing competitions and see if she could place, see if she could make a name for herself as an athlete out there in the water. But her new agents discouraged it.

“No one cares if you win contests,” her modeling agent, Chris Travertine, had said. “In fact, it’s better to not find out. You’re number one to everyone right now. Let’s not test it. Not put a different number on it.”

“But I want to actually surf,” Nina said. “Not just pose for photos.”

“Youaresurfing. You’re a surfer. We have the photos to prove it,” he said, exasperated. “Nina, you’re the most popular female surfer in the world. What more is there?”

Before the year was out, she was offered a calendar. Twelve shots, all her.

She took Jay, Hud, and Kit with her as she and her team set up shop at some of the best surf breaks in SoCal. She surfed the wild ripple of waves at Rincon, the crowded perfection of Surfrider, the isolated rugged cliffs at Torrey Pines, the larger waves at Black’s Beach, the far-out reef breaks at Sunset Cliffs, and spots all in between.

It was watching Nina ride that showed Kit there was a future for female surfers.

And it was talking to Nina’s photographers during shooting breaks that allowed Hud to get serious about surf photography.

And it was the sting of the fact that Nina had gotten paid to surf before he had that made Jay realize he needed to get way more serious about going pro.

“SoCal Babe: Nina Riva Gets Wet” featured Nina in bikinis of ever-changing colors, catching waves from Ventura to San Diego.

When the calendar was done, Nina flipped through the final proof. Her at Trestles straddling a Lance Collins single fin in a red bandeau bikini, her at Surfrider hanging five as seven male surfers tried to get a wave behind her.

But the most startling photo was placed squarely in the dead of summer, July. Nina was riding a wave at Rincon. The ocean was crisp, the water indigo blue.

She was wearing a white string bikini on a hot pink surfboard. The angle of the camera allowed you to see the side of her face, smiling as she tackled the water—and you could also see the side of her ass barely contained in her swimsuit, and the side of her breast, escaping her top.

She realized, looking at the photo, that her bikini had not been as opaque as she had been led to believe. The wet white fabric left very little to the imagination. Her nipple and the line of her ass were faintly visible underneath.

Whenever Nina looked at the picture she felt uneasy. It was not a good wave, her stance was not great, and she knew that seconds later, she had fallen off the board. She was a better surfer than that photo could ever attest to. She was capable of so much more.

But naturally, it was that photo that became a sensation. The one where you could see her body, unintentionally exposed.

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