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Twenty-Three

I plot to sneak into Ozzy’s hotel room while he’s out schmoozing with our bosses in the aftermath of our surf school shenanigans.

He broke into mine, after all. It’s theoretically possible.

After hanging dangerously far out my balcony, however, I determine that Ozzy has the climbing skills of a mountain goat.

I, on the other hand, am more of a sloth.

There’s no way I’ll attempt the perilous crossing from my balcony to his.

Instead, I play dirty and convince the housekeeper to let me in. She’s been following our road trip and is Team Pozzy. All I have to do is tip her and I’m in.

Ozzy’s suite turns out to be twice as big as mine, which is probably an indication of how TripFriendz’s executive team is leaning.

It’s fine. I knew it would be an uphill battle, and it’s not over yet.

Don’t give up yet. I hear Ozzy’s words in my head as I admire his marble bathroom (the tub will hold both of us) and steal the snacks from his minibar.

I also steal his hoodie. I flop—sloth-like—on his enormous bed.

I burrow under his puffy white duvet and roll around in his sheets.

The way he comes in tells me his meeting with our evil overlords did not go well.

He shuts the door hard and tosses his key card onto the credenza with a muttered curse.

He angry-rips his shirt off. Now might not be the time to pop my head out and yell Surprise!

He’s already at greater risk of a heart attack because of his rage fit.

The person-shaped blob in his bed gives it away, however. He stops cursing and pads toward the bed. His bare feet slap against the tile floor.

He is a hunter. “Are we playing hide-and-seek?”

“Sure.” My voice is muffled by the covers.

He tugs them down. Resistance is futile. “I win.”

“I think you cheated. You didn’t count to a hundred.” I consider sticking out my lower lip, but duck face is not my strong suit. His eyes spark with glee as I roll onto my side.

“You’re such a poor loser.”

“You’re worse.”

He nods his head. It’s true.

I lace my arms around his neck and pull him down onto the bed with me.

We’re nose to nose, mano a mano. My hair’s a giant cloud of snarls around my head.

It’s my anti-halo. Ozzy doesn’t seem to mind.

He likes me angry, prickly, sick, cranky, singing along off-key to his playlist. I’m just myself around him, and if there’s a side of me he hasn’t seen yet, he’s always pleased to meet her.

I press a kiss against his jaw where it’s five o-clock stubbly. Pull the hair tie out of his man bun so his hair can enjoy some free time. “How’d it go?”

It’s his turn to make a face. “They’d like to turn me into their surfing Ken doll. Also, they’re self-serving assholes.”

It’s cute he sounds surprised. “Bob is pretty bad. He could be worse, though.”

“How?” Ozzy is outraged on my behalf.

“Is now the appropriate time to discuss our middle-aged director of engineering?”

He makes a humming sound. He’s considering it. “There are other people we could talk about. Roz. Rosie. The venture capitalists who think TripFriendz will make them gazillionaires.”

“Because they’re going to trade on your enormous stardom and my brain.”

“They must have a better plan that that.” Being the supportive person that I am, I kiss his ear to show him how much I’m listening to him.

“A photo shoot of me in swim trunks.” He kisses me back. Ear, cheek, the corner of my mouth.

“Pffft. They should at least make it a Speedo. A leopard-print one would be good. You could shoot across the water beating your chest. It would be Tarzan surfing. When was the last time you really surfed?” I pull his arm out into what I pretend is a surfing pose.

Kiss the piece of him I’ve captured. Trace the dark lines of ink on his forearms with my tongue.

It’s all swirls and ocean waves. I’m sure there’s a coded message in there.

“Fishing?”

“Don’t you want to tell me? Maybe I could help.”

“I wish you could.” He rolls onto his back, pulling me on top of him. My legs hug his hips. His hands grip mine. We’re Pozzy for real now, all mashed together.

“Why can’t I?”

“Because the yips are just one of those things. There’s no magic cure. You can’t work through them or talk through them or make them go away.”

“Did you see it coming?” I don’t think this is coming out the way I want. Feelings aren’t my area of expertise at all, but someone needs to hear him, and I want that someone to be me. “I bet the timing was awful.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you’ve seen the video of my wipeout.” His fingers trace my spine.

“The longest five minutes ever.”

He closes his eyes. “Eternity.”

I close my eyes in solidarity. Breathe in with him. Out. He’s not underwater.

“I was in the barrel.” I imagine what that must look like, the wall of water rising and rising overhead, the curve and the curl of something that isn’t solid but you’re on it anyhow.

“And then I overcorrected. I was just a little off, but I knew I was about to wipe out. Some mistakes can’t be fixed, and you just wait them out, start over. I had time for one breath. No more.”

We both breathe in. My lungs are balloons, inflating and inflating. I have enough oxygen in there for two Pandoras.

“And then I was under. It happened so fast that I didn’t have time to control my body position or even finish that breath. I mistimed my cut and the wave won.”

My lungs are burning. I have to take a breath.

“It was a huge wave.”

“Forty feet.” He shrugs. “I’ve ridden bigger. Other surfers have ridden bigger. I wasn’t going for a record. It wasn’t even close. Other people ride fifty-footers all the time, and someday soon someone’s going to surf a hundred-foot wave. It’ll happen.”

He sighs, pining for his monster wave. He loves it as much as he hates it.

“And that wasn’t the worst of it,” he continues. “Because that was just the first wave. There was a second one right behind it, and then a third.”

“It brought friends.” I think I need to laugh about this, or I might cry. The concern in the sportscaster’s voice makes all the sense in the world now. Look! Ozzy has a building’s worth of water on him! And then two MORE buildings! He’s been buried under a skyscraper, folks.

“I hated it.”

“I hate that it happened to you.”

“I’ve had bad rides before. It was nothing new.” He’s all studied nonchalance. No big deal!

“But—” I start the sentence for him.

“But then I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t ride the big waves, couldn’t pop up.

My fingers wouldn’t let go of the board.

I tried a lot. Went to my favorite secret surf spots where no one would be up in my face about it or watching to see if I could handle it.

I’d paddle out. I demoted myself to a foamie, just in case it was a stability issue.

Maybe I had an ear infection or a brain tumor. ”

“But you couldn’t.”

“I’d freeze every time. My brain would think and think, visualizing the ride in my head, running through the steps I needed to take.

I can’t figure out what’s wrong, but then once I’m back on shore, I’m replaying the waves over and over in my head and I’m sure I can do it the next time.

Except I can’t. The yoga and the working out should help, because I can hold my breath long enough now. I’m not gonna drown under there. But—”

“But,” I agree.

“My parents want to know when I’m going back on the circuit.”

“Because they know you love it?”

He also hates it.

He shakes his head. “No. My mom keeps sending me business cards for sports therapists. She worries I’ll lose my endorsements. My dad—”

I stroke the side of his face with my fingers.

This is not the Ozzy who flew across the water on his board the night we first met.

He’s not the man who scaled my wall and gave me shit and laughed with me.

His face is tight, and he’s misplaced his smile.

I want to fix this for him and then rage at all the people who haven’t told him that he’s so much more than what his body does.

“He doesn’t see what the point is of all the sacrifices, of the money invested, of the time we spent living in Hawaii to get me the right exposure when I was still young enough to benefit from it. It’s all wasted if I quit now.”

“Sometimes—” God, I need my whiteboard and an hour of alone time to plot this out. I’m making choices, and I have no idea where they’ll lead. “Sometimes when I’m in my rocket ship, I go out and I explore. I get all the space gems. I fly everywhere and I’m the first one there, the best.”

“I love your space gems,” he says roughly. “So pink and sparkly.”

“Sometimes. Other times, they’re kinda plain on the outside.

Lumpy. You have to really look to spot them even if they’re important rocks.

NASA found one once that wasn’t anything special at first glance.

It looked like a lump of coal. Black. Boring.

But it contained all these tiny amino acids.

It was full of the building blocks of life, and it came from a really ancient meteorite that crashed in Antarctica when there was no one around to notice. ”

“Someone noticed,” he says.

“Yeah. But even that scientist who was all, ‘Oh, I’ll just pick this random rock up because I want to, and not because I think it’s anything extraordinary,’ didn’t need it to be an antediluvian clue.

He just liked it because it was a rock and it was interesting and there it was, right in his path. So he took it home with him.”

My metaphor is going off the rails.

“He liked it, and that was enough. I like you and you’re enough just as you are. You don’t have to be a space meteor.”

He’s staring up at me. I can’t tell if my TED Talk has helped or if he’s finally decided that I’m deranged.

“You are a rock.” Solid, present, my hidden joy, and someone I think I would like to take home with me.

“Thank you for picking me up,” he whispers against my throat. Thank you for playing the game of Life with me. Let’s not compete anymore. “It helps, talking with you.”

He sounds surprised. I think this over while he rolls me beneath him. Ozzy and I have something in common. Same song, different verse. Neither of us knows how to be second-best. People can’t see past his pretty face and ripped body. No one sees him .

If he can’t stand up on his board, if he’s not the fastest, the best on the water, then he’s no one. That’s what he thinks.

I know he’s wrong.