Blue (3 page)

Eventually the suit was over my legs and I was grabbing the neoprene on my hips and tugging it up, while holding on to the towel with my chin and jumping down deeper into the suit. Zeke was trying not to watch this, but I could tell he was amused.

“Need a hand?” he said.

I forced my arms into the damp fabric, dropped the towel and turned my back to him. “Yeah. Thank you.”

He grabbed the zip and I could feel his fingers on my back, giving me goosebumps. He zipped me up slowly so as not to catch any skin and I turned back around to do the same for him, when I noticed a jagged scar running between his shoulder blades up to his neck.

“What's with the
Jaws
scar?” I said.

“Coral reef tattoo.”

I zipped him up and was going to ask him more when a car with some crazy heavy-metal tune pumping came tearing down the road. As the car slowed behind me, I realized the track was “Killing in the Name” by Rage Against the Machine, and then I saw the blue VW Beetle with a black shark painted on the hood. Daniel. Next to him was his new girlfriend.

“Yo, Iris!” Daniel shouted, waving. He dropped his hand and looked at Zeke.

I walked over to the car, and he turned down the volume of his stereo for the last part of the track, the main sentiment of which was probably his personal anthem.

“All right, Daniel,” I said, my heart sinking down to the pit of my stomach at the sight of my ex-friend Cass sitting there, all straightened blond hair and red lipstick. Daniel was wearing the gray Vans cap I had bought him on our trip to Bude. Back when he had promised me we'd be together forever.

“We're gonna park up and watch the sun go down. It's supposed to be amazing tonight.” As Daniel said this, he looked slightly apologetic. Cass smirked. Watching the sun go down. Yeah, right. And the rest.

I turned to Zeke, who looked up and gave me a big smile.

“Who's the new kid?”

“Hardly a kid. He's a year older than you, Daniel. And taller.”

“Skinnier though.”

“More like fitter.”

Daniel was muscly, not fat, but he had that thick, bull-necked build. He was five foot nine to Zeke's six foot one. Like most surfers, Daniel was constantly eating, or drinking protein shakes. You could pretty much eat what you wanted when you surfed.

“New boyfriend?” Cass said, nodding toward Zeke. I ignored her, something I intended to do for the rest of my life.

I looked at Daniel. “No.”

“Who is he, then?” Cass asked.

I spoke to Daniel again.

“I just met him and we're going surfing. He's not my boyfriend.”

“No wonder,” said Cass. “Premier league, that one. Would you look at the shoulders on him. Good arms too, perfect V torso, fab butt.” Zeke turned toward us. “
Amazing
eyes.” Jesus, Cass was annoying. She was worse than boys for perving. I honestly didn't know how Daniel could stand her.

Daniel was still eyeballing Zeke with a grim look on his face—not that he had the right to say anything about who I spent time with. Not anymore.

“I know that dude,” Daniel said.

“No, you don't.”

“Not
know him
, know him. I mean I, like, recognize him.”

“So who is he?”

“Dunno. But I seen him somewhere. I don't forget faces.”

“I'll never forget that face. In fact, let me get a photo,” Cass said, smirking. I shot her a pissed-off look, but she didn't put her phone down.

“You don't know what you're talking about,” I said to Daniel. “He's new here. Just arrived last week.”

“New from where?”

“Hawaii, I think.”

“Just what Fistral needs. Another foreigner thinking he owns the place, disrespecting the locals and scratching for every wave out there. Be two minutes before he gets a slap off one of the tribe.”

Zeke was busy waxing the boards and was totally ignoring Daniel, although he must have heard Daniel talking stink about him.

“He's cool, Daniel. Just leave him alone, OK? You not going out for the glass-off?”

A glass-off is the early evening when the sea is calm, the wind drops and the breaking waves are smooth as glass.

“Nah, the plans with the missus gotta come first, eh? Check out the quiver of boards on that van. You'll have fun keeping up with him, dear,” Daniel said, turning to nod at the breakers coming in thick and fast.

Daniel had spent the past two summers as a surf instructor for Ocean Ride Surf School, which is when he'd started saying things like “a quiver of boards.” Waves were no longer good, they were “porno,” “crippler” or “super-epic.”

In fact, since Daniel started working there, he'd begun acting like he owned the beach, dropping in on the waves of other surfers if he thought they weren't good enough to ride them properly. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that
Daniel had become a total tool in the past year: ultra-competitive and selfish. No wonder he didn't like the look of Zeke. God help a guy that Daniel thought might surf better than he did.

Cass piped up with, “Keeping up with that dude? She
wishes
,” which annoyed Daniel even more.

“Shut up, Cass,” he said, “you're really starting to give me a headache.”

Ha. Good. They deserved each other.

“I've gotta split,” I said, seeing that Zeke had almost finished waxing the boards and was looking over at me. There wasn't that much time until nightfall.

Daniel couldn't resist one parting shot. “Don't waste your time, Iris. You know he'll end up with a Barbie on his arm.”

“Yeah, you'd know all about that,” I shot back.

“Well, don't blame me when he breaks your heart.”

I walked back to Zeke, still sick at the thought of Cass and Daniel all cozied up together and having the nerve to take a shot at me.

“Sorry,” I said to Zeke, shaking my head.

“Friends of yours?”

“No.”

“Used to be, huh?”

“I guess not,” I said.

Zeke gave me a look like he knew a thing or two about people letting you down and breaking your heart, but he changed the subject.

“So let's go surfing already,” Zeke said. He locked his van, stashed his keys on a magnet under the wheel arch and then picked up his board.

But it was as if all the courage had drained out of my feet, because all I wanted to do was turn back and go home. In the end, I made myself go.

Walking down to the beach, I could tell that other people were staring at Zeke, most likely wondering what he was doing with me in my horrible rented wetsuit and easy board.

We were wading through the ankle busters when, at the worst moment possible, just when I had dropped my board leash and was bending over to get it, three tweeny girls came up to Zeke and took pictures of him on their mobiles. They tried to do this slyly, but the flashes from their camera phones lit up the evening beach.

Zeke didn't say anything. It seemed like he was embarrassed. Still, they were just kids and probably went around taking photos of all the hot surfers on the beach.

Zeke started limbering up and, as he tossed his board on to the water, I was glad to see that he wasn't moaning about needing boots or a hood, or complaining about the coldness of the water. Some foreign surfers would just not quit going on about how cold it was, or how much better it was to surf free, without a wetsuit cramping their style. I thought the cold was a small price to pay for surfing the most stunning beach break in Europe.

It was low tide and it was breaking clean, the waves peeling off perfectly. We paddled out, and Zeke was off, much faster and stronger through the water than I was. He made the line-up, which is where surfers wait to catch a wave, while I was still battling the impact zone. Finally outside, paddling through the pack of hunched surfers, I tried to find my sweet spot by checking the markers on land that I always used to position myself at
the best sandbar location. Today, though, the current was zippy and I had to paddle just to maintain position. I was too far outside and I missed a few sick waves.

Zeke got them.

He had some killer moves. I watched him shoot across the wave face, then turn the board 180 degrees and back again for a perfect cutback. On his next wave, he really embraced the speed, and when I saw how fast his board was moving across the water, I knew what he was going to do. He accelerated toward the crest of the wave, where his board lost all contact with the water to score him some serious air on an aerial 360-degree turn. He must have been six feet above the water.

Not many surfers could do that. Hucking air was the sort of thing you'd have to do thousands of times before you got any good at it. And Zeke was really good, with his own loose, super-graceful style. I'd never seen anyone surf Fistral like that. Zeke was slipping across the waves like a skater, light-footed, as if he and his board weighed nothing. He must have spent most of his life in the water.

There was so much I could learn from him. If he wanted to teach me, that was, but I knew that not many surfers of his ability were bothered about teaching other surfers. They were just out to do what they loved as well as they could, as often as they could, and wanted everyone else to get out of the way. Zeke had total control, total power, total grace.

Basically, his style of surfing couldn't have been more different from Daniel's.

Daniel only taught people to surf for a living because it paid really well. He resented the time away from his own surfing.
He'd get so frustrated with his students' lack of talent that when it came to his own sessions he'd psycho-surf. Even his riding stance looked like a fighting stance. He pushed it too far. Taking off too late, charging hard, then riding in so far at Little Fistral that he almost ate the rocks. And he was always breaking boards in insane wipeouts, which was not funny as surfboards cost hundreds. He'd perforated his eardrums, slashed his hands on rocks and he'd lost three teeth, although he wore a partial bridge so you couldn't tell.

It was like he wanted to prove something. I don't know what, or even who he was trying to prove it to. The whole world, maybe.

I sighed, as if I could sigh Daniel out of my mind, and my eyes settled back on Zeke, which was when he did this incredibly sexy thing. He was up and charging, when the lip of the curling wave started falling on his face, and he did this head-flick. It should have looked cheesy because it was just to get his hair out of his face without using his hands, which would affect his balance. But it was just gorgeous. It was like I was there under that waterfall with him. I could feel the phenomenal weight of that water crashing down on to his broad shoulders and jerking his head forward. By rights he should have wiped out. But he didn't. His spine bent forward under the immense pressure of the breaking wave, but somehow he managed to stay vertical, that head-flick getting the hair out of his eyes and righting his balance at the same time.

He was amazing. I let myself feel the weight of his amazingness and suddenly I felt this strange kind of hunger, a cold ache in my belly. Right there, in that moment, I would have willingly got on the floor, forehead to the tile, and bowed at his altar.

I was never like this about boys I'd just met. It took me a while to get a feel for them and let them in. Even with Daniel, who I ended up falling head over heels for. But Zeke was something different altogether. I didn't know exactly what kind of person he was, but I knew what he wasn't. He wasn't ordinary. He was different from any of the guys in Newquay.

I slid down on my board and went for a wave of my own, my tail spun out, and I got nailed. I ended up on the bottom, with a sand facial and a belly full of Neptune's cocktail. When I paddled back out to the line-up, I couldn't see Zeke. I wasn't worried though. I had just lost him in the mass of black-suited surfers. It's like that out there, with the strong longshore drift current and so many surfers in the water. Unless you keep your eye on someone constantly, which would be creepy and would mean you couldn't surf yourself, you soon lose your friends.

With Zeke out of sight, and some of the best waves I'd seen in ages, I just gave myself up to the moment and paddled and popped up like my life depended on it.

I caught a few envious looks and heard a few hoots and whistles as I grabbed some nice long rides. Other surfers moved out of my way and only a few douches dropped in on my waves, trying to block me out. On any given day there were at least a dozen sexist pigs riding Fistral who could be relied upon to say something gross. Something along the lines of, “Don't come back until your boobs are bigger,” or, “Get out of my way, muff-rider.” Mind you, those were the guys who were pretty jerky to everyone.

Most of the guys were cool, though, and knew me well enough to leave me alone, and sometimes gave me a whistle like they did for their friends when I caught a glory ride.

It was always a great feeling to catch any wave, but that evening I caught one of the primo rides of my life. I could see the waves were starting to hollow out. I'd managed to position myself well in the takeoff zone, close to the peak of the wave, so I stroked like hell.

Those cylindrical waves are the nirvana of surfing. Glassy green walls all around, the lip curling over and locking you in the green room. You never know if you're going to ride out the other side or if the wave is going to stomp down on your head like a giant's foot, but air builds up inside the barrel, and there's this vacuum effect, so that when you're about to come out of it, you feel this pop of air and you know you've made it. It is the coolest thing ever. Like total Zen concentration and total exhilaration at the same time. Adrenalin pouring out of your ears, but freaky calm too.

Just as I was charging for that perfect trippy wave, out of the corner of my eye I saw another surfer going for it too on the other side of the wave peak. I expected a paddle battle as we were both equally close to the peak, but then he swung his board around to paddle wide on the wave shoulder, which was my cue. I went for it. Only after I was up did I realize that I'd seen a flash of green on the surfer's shoulder. It was Zeke.

He could have taken that epic wave right from me, but didn't. No surfer in his right mind would have backed off that perfect wave, which meant that Zeke was mad, ultra-polite or . . . he liked me. And, oh God, I really hoped he liked me.

I felt the bite as I was caught by the wave's momentum. The water was moving super-fast under the board, so that I was streaming along, the most intense endorphin rush charging
through my body. There was so much spray in the water that it was chucking up mini-rainbows. When I finished, my first thought was:
Wow, did Zeke see that?
and my second thought was:
I need another one
. The addiction kicks in so hard, so fierce, that your brain joneses for more. Catching your first real wave is pretty much sticking a needleful of drugs in your arm, because after one insane hit of surf stoke you'll spend the rest of your life craving it.