Page 158 of A Winding Wave of Magic
As if in response, the water swelled. A new set rolling in just for me and my new friends.
The water was bright and smooth—a far cry from the oft-windy conditions. I popped up on the board, basking in the beauty of what was shaping into one of the best waves I’d caught in years. I swept down to the base, back up to the lip, and down with a sharp cut-back, adrenaline rising with each maneuver. A deep shadow appeared inside the gray-blue water, out of which popped the shiny black head of a seal.
“Watch out!” the seal snapped in deep, solid Irish.
And then, the voice belonged to a man. Not a seal who could easily duck away from my board, but a fully grown human.
“What the—” I bent my knees to cut away, but tipped into the barrel.
The man and I collided, and the wave rolled over us, snapping my leash and my board as it caught the reef. A few seconds later, I managed to grab hold of the two pieces of foam, fiberglass, and resin before the last wave washed me toward the shore in a tangle of whitewash and kelp. There, I climbed onto a nearby slab of limestone, hurled my broken surfboard to the ground, and sucked in a few desperate lungfuls of air.
“Oi!”
I swung around, still breathing heavily and spitting seaweed, to find a man naked from the waist up the water. He looked to be somewhere around my age, with hair the same jet black, bright as an oil slick against his ruddy skin. His eyes were dark and shining, and his skin, wet from the ocean, carried a similar sheen and flashed dangerously. He was swimming alone and shockingly naked in fifty-five-degree water. He was also very, very angry.
His accent was even thicker than Caitlin’s, and he started yelling at me again in Irish before I could respond. Even with my conversational fluency, I could hardly understand the dialect.
“Sorry, my Irish isn’t great,” I said after my breath returned.
The man rattled off a few more words that sounded distinctly curse-worthy, then snapped, “I said, you need to watch where you’re feckin’ going!”
I rubbed my eyes and glared. Now that we were back in my native language and I was breathing normally, my own sense of surf etiquette flared. “I’m pretty sureyoudropped in on me, man.”
“Jaysus, and she’s an American,” he shouted, splashing the water before releasing another stream of Irish. “Your bleedin’ board nearly broke my head!”
He did in fact have an egg-sized lump swelling on his forehead. I was about to apologize when I remembered that he had swum into the wave when I was already on it, breaking the only surfboard I had and making me swallow half the Atlantic in the process. Worse swimmers might have gotten twisted in the kelp too. More than one person had died that way where I’d grown up.
“Listen, man,” I bristled. “I’m sorry I tagged you, but I was already on that wave when you dropped in on me. You shouldn’t have been bodysurfing so close, and now I’m out a board too!”
“Maybe I was there first,” he shot back, splashing some more water. “I didn’t drop in on no one!”
I wasn’t about to be told about the universal rules of surfing by a naked loon.Especiallyone with such a terrible attitude. “Dude. It wasmywave. I wasonit. That’s freaking rule number one—internationally known, asshole.”
Another thick splash and a stream of rude-sounding Irish flew at me, but it, like the rest, was too fast and idiomatic for my academic understanding. With a last cold, steely glare, the mandisappeared again under the water and started swimming back out into the waves.
“Hey!” I called out from the shore. “It’s not safe to be out there by yourself!”
I raised my hand against the sun as I scanned the water, looking for the rogue swimmer. A hand darted up from somewhere out in the surf, but he was keeping a strong pace up the coast, soon too far for me to see.
The sun was settingas I carried the pieces of my board back to Gran’s cottage, where I found Bronagh waiting on the stoop.
“Hi,” I said shortly, leaning the pieces against the house. I was in no mood to chat. Or demonstrate my bad Irish for her entertainment.
“They can break?” She peered curiously at the board remnants.
“Sometimes, yeah. Pain in the rear, too.” Something occurred to me. “Why, can you fix it?”
She shook her head, causing her hair to rustle into her face before she pushed it out of her eyes. “Not yet. I don’t know the spells for that sort of work, nor do I have the skill.”
I shrugged. “Then I’ll have to take the ferry to the mainland. I think there’s a surf shop in Lahinch.”
“Mam won’t be pleased with you missing a day,” Bronagh noted, not even bothering to hide her glee. She had never quite warmed to me—I suspected it had something to do with her crush on Jonathan.
“She’ll be less pleased if I can’t get in the water.”
“Who was that man you were talking to?”
I sat down on the stone stoop next to her to pull off my booties and my gloves. “Just some black-haired jackass—er, I mean jerk—who dropped in on my wave. Swimming naked too. Guy’s a complete psycho.”
