Page 106 of Pull Me Under

I sit.

The kettle boils. The eggs turn out to be fine. She makes toast that’s slightly burned and tea that’s slightly too strong and we eat standing up because there’s only one chair and neither of us wants to be the one sitting while the other stands.

‘So,’ she says, cradling her mug. ‘What do people do on days off in Salt Bay?’

‘People don’t take days off in Salt Bay.’

‘Surely sometimes – Sunday! No one fishes on a Sunday.’ She’s crowing, smug to catch me out, but I wag my finger which causes the cutest little frown to erupt on her face.

‘Fishing doesn’t stop for weekends, Brynn. Or weather. Or personal crises. Sunday is reset day, you should remember that. The boats might not go out, but there’s still work.’ I take a sip of tea, letting the warmth spread through my stomach and into my limbs. And then, before I can think better of it: ‘We could go surfing.’

She raises an eyebrow. ‘Surfing?’

‘The swell was decent coming in last night. With the wind shift this morning, it’ll be clean. Glassy, even.’ I’m already calculating – tide times, wave direction, the way the April light hits the water at this hour. ‘There’s a cove past Pencarrow. Gets the best break on the coast when the conditions are right.’

My words come out fast, eager, and I hear it in my own voice – the first real excitement I’ve felt in weeks. I haven’t been on a board in what feels like an age.

‘I knew you were a surfer beach bum!’ More crowing, which I stop by catching her around the waist and planting a kiss on her mouth.

‘Never said I wasn’t,’ I say when I reluctantly break my mouth from hers. ‘Do you?’

There’s a flicker across her expression. Not quite sadness – more like the careful expression of someone reaching for a memory they’re not sure is really theirs.

‘Not since I left here.’ She turns her mug in her hands.

I want to ask if she remembers. Remembers us wading out, foam bodyboards under our arm, screams of laughter, but sometimes just screams if the waves were too big and we couldn’t touch the floor of the sea.

I remember mum telling us the crop of rock we couldn’t go past. If we did, we’d be banned. The taste of salt, the sting of my nose, the grasp of our small hands as we held one another up. I remember fucking everything. But I don’t ask her because I’m chicken shit.

‘I can’t believe there isn’t an old board hanging around a Trelawney property.’

‘There is, actually. I nearly brained myself on it last week.’ She’s studying me now, gaze shadowed under her lashes. ‘You really want to go surfing? After last night?’

‘Especially after last night.’

I don’t know how to explain it. How the ocean that tried to kill me twelve hours ago is the same ocean that makes me feel most alive. How the weight that sits on my chest every time I step onto the Mary Jane disappears completely when I’m on a wave.

On a wave, I’m not the spare son. Not the one who does the books while his brother does the real work.

Kit fixed the Mary Jane’s gearbox when he was fourteen. Fourteen. Dad told the whole harbour. Bought him a pint at The Ship and let him drink it in front of the crew, never mind that he was underage. That’s my boy. Born to it. I won the county marine science prize two years later – youngest entrant, paper on tidal ecosystem mapping that my teacher said was undergraduate level. Dad glanced at the certificate, said, That’s nice. Now come help your brother with the winch.

That’s the thing. It was never cruelty. Never a slap or a shout or anything I could point to and say, There, that’s the wound. It was just … silence where praise should have been. A persistent, gentle nothing. Kit gets the pint, the pride, the that’s my boy. I get that’s nice. Kit’s name in Dad’s mouth sounds like an achievement. Mine sounds like an afterthought.

Never bad enough to confront. Never quite right enough to celebrate.

On a wave, none of that exists.

‘Come on,’ I say, setting down my mug. ‘I’ll teach you. Or remind you. Whatever your muscles remember.’

She grins. ‘Confident?’

‘About this? Yeah.’ I meet her eyes. ‘This I’m good at.’

Brynn tilts her head, evaluating, gauging, looking at me like I’m pieces she can slot together.

I grab her hand, linking our fingers. ‘What are we waiting for?’

The shed is chaos.