Page 108 of Pull Me Under

And I’m free.

The world narrows to this. Just this. The board beneath my feet, the water rushing past, the wall of the wave curling beside me. I drop down the face, bottom-turn hard, feel the spray hit my back as I carve up toward the lip.

Everything else disappears.

The boat. Dad. Kit. The accounts, the suppliers, the catch logs with their quietly wrong numbers. The university prospectus I’ve looked at a hundred times and never once filled in. All of it – gone. Washed away by salt and speed and the simple, perfect physics of a body in motion.

There’s a word for the way light bends through the face of a wave – I learned it once, in a marine biology module I never finished, and it surfaces now like it’s been waiting: refraction. The way energy moves through water without the water itself going anywhere. I used to think that was beautiful. Used to fill notebooks with equations about wave mechanics and tidal patterns and the invisible architecture of the sea.

Now I fill spreadsheets.

The wave closes out and I kick off the back, already scanning for the next one. My blood is singing. My lungs are burning. I’m cold everywhere the wetsuit doesn’t cover and I don’t care, don’t care about anything except the next set building on the horizon.

It’s been weeks since I’ve been out. Weeks without the one thing I have that’s mine.

Kit’s a good surfer. Competent. But he doesn’t feel it the way I do. Doesn’t need it the way I do. For him it was always just another skill to master, another box to tick – and Dad respected it more when Kit did it, because Dad respects everything more when Kit does it. For me it’s oxygen. It’s the only time I can breathe.

I catch wave after wave, pushing harder, riding longer, until my arms are screaming and my legs are shaking and I’m so tired I can barely paddle.

When I finally drag myself onto the beach, Brynn is sitting on the sand, her board beside her, watching me.

‘Jesus,’ she says.

I collapse next to her, breath ragged and uneven. ‘What?’

‘You.’ She shakes her head, her expression one I can’t read. ‘I’ve never seen anyone surf like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like it was the only thing keeping you alive.’

The words hit me softly in a place that bruises.

‘It feels like that sometimes,’ I admit. ‘When everything else is—’ I stop. Wave a hand vaguely.

‘Too much?’

‘Wrong. Like I’m wearing someone else’s life and it doesn’t fit.’ I stare out at the water, the waves still rolling in, patient and endless. ‘Out there I don’t have to be anyone. I can just … exist.’

She’s quiet for a long moment.

Then she reaches over and takes my hand. Her fingers are cold and pruned and still slightly sandy.

‘I get it,’ she says. ‘The way you feel on a wave – that’s how I used to feel when I was driving. Nowhere to be. No one waiting. Just the road.’

‘But you stopped still when you came here?’

‘Maybe I ran out of places to go. Or maybe this was the place I was always heading to.’ She looks at me. ‘Maybe you need to stop waiting for permission.’

‘Permission for what?’

‘To be who you actually are. Instead of who your dad thinks you should be.’

I don’t have an answer for that. Don’t know if there is one. Because the cruel thing isn’t that Dad won’t let me go. He’s never said, You can’t leave. He’s never had to. He just made sure I understood that leaving is what Kit did – and look how that turned out. Look how it felt. Look at the distance it put between them that neither of them knows how to close.

Staying isn’t loyalty. It’s fear dressed up as duty. And I’ve been wearing it so long I’ve forgotten what my own shape looks like underneath.

But her hand stays in mine. And the waves keep rolling in. And for a few more hours, at least, I don’t have to figure it out.