Page 45 of Catch a Wave
“Okay. Okay.” He chuckles and I can’t help smiling along with him.
Neither of us says anything else as we walk toward his board, but I look at him occasionally and he turns his head to meet my glances. No one knows me like Bodhi. There’s no hiding from him. Kai knows me like a brother knows a sister. He knows my past, where I came from, the things only family knows. Leilani knows me nearly as well. But she doesn’t see certain parts of me. She’s usually so busy pushing me or enjoying our friendship. She doesn’t stop to study me the way Bodhi does. I’m exposed in his gaze.
“You know,” Bodhi’s voice is soft and careful. “I didn’t want to get back in the ocean after my accident.”
“I know.”
“But even after I got through the initial healing, I was sure I’d never surf again.”
I nod again, unable to find words or say anything around the lump forming in my throat. Bodhi grabs his towel off the ground and starts ruffling his hair. Then he reaches behind himself and unzips his wetsuit, freeing his torso from the soaking neoprene and revealing his chest and arms, freshly pumped from paddling in the water.
He picks up his board and starts heading toward the watersports shack. I follow along, wishing I had something to hold or carry. The urge to grab his hand and clasp it in mine nearly overpowers me.
“After I got through the initial hell of my accident, I started trying to force myself to imagine a life on land—a life without the two things I loved most in the world.”
Bodhi stops in his tracks and stares down at me.
I don’t ask him what the two loves of his life were at that time. We both know.
Bodhi starts walking again. “Your brother asked me to surf one day. I had a brittle attitude, so I gave him the brush off. I told him, ‘I don’t do that anymore. It’s not who I am.’”
“And in his wisdom—you know that way Kai always has of cutting through everything and getting down beneath the surface—he said, ‘Surfing never was who you were. But it’s what you love. And you can love it again.’ Then he looked me in the eye and said, ‘You can choose to live a half-life or choose to reclaim a part of what you lost. It’s up to you. No one can keep you from giving up. I was just hoping you wouldn’t.’”
“Then he took off for the morning and came back with that afterglow of a good session in the water. Day after day he’dextend the invitation whenever he went out. His words pinched at me like an ill-fitting wetsuit. I couldn’t get comfortable in my resistance. Here I was, living on an island, surrounded by the ocean, working the watersports shack, but never getting in the water.”
I nod at Bodhi, certain where he’s headed with this story, but still craving a small glimpse of what he was like after we broke up. I need to fill in the gaps. Maybe that will help me move on.
We climb the wooden steps to the dock and Bodhi walks behind the shack to prop his board on a rack. Then he starts removing his wetsuit so he’s only wearing his swim trunks.
He keeps talking while he turns on the outdoor shower head. “One day, I couldn’t take it anymore. I went to a different part of the island where there’s a good evening break—all perfect lefts. I sat on the shore in my wetsuit, staring at the ocean as the sun started to drop low.” He looks at me. “I cried like a baby, sitting there, alone on the sand, facing down the ocean, the force of nature that had taken everything that mattered away from me. I had barely cried since the accident. Something unhinged in me and I let it all out in the privacy of that cove.”
He steps under the shower head, and I try to figure out where to put my eyes. He’s oblivious as to how he’s taunting me right now, running his hands through his hair so the water rinses away the residue of the ocean. His biceps and triceps flex and I turn my gaze to check out the surfboard rack. Yep. There are the surfboards … one … two … three … four …
The water turns off, and Bodhi smirks at me when I glance back in his direction. “Sorry,” he says. “I wasn’t thinking that would bother you.”
“Not bothered.” I lie.
“Hmmm.” He hums. “I’d be bothered into next week if that were you under the water and I were standing there watching you.”
He always did speak his mind. It’s one of the qualities that drew me to him in the first place.
“Anyway,” he says, picking up his towel and rubbing his hair with it, and then draping it over his shoulders as he walks toward the back door of the shop. “I sat on that shore, waiting for some magical insight or nudge. Nothing really came, but I walked to the edge of the water and put my feet in. I hadn’t even dared to do that. I didn’t want to have an inch or two of the ocean when I had experienced all of her in the past. So I never even dipped my toes into the shorepound.
“I stood there with her lapping at my feet, the foam was like the kind of kiss you get on a first date—careful and sweet.”
Bodhi’s eyes meet mine and I can’t even look at him for more than a second before memories of all our kisses flood me. What is he doing? Does he even know?
“I can barely describe what happened without sounding like a lunatic, but you’ll understand.” Bodhi moves inside toward the dressing room where he’s stashed his clothes. But he pauses and looks at me. I’m only a few feet from him, following along like a little puppy ever since he asked me to walk with him. No one is here in the shop. It’s still early. The solitude feels decadent and dangerous.
“She called to me, Mavs. The ocean invited me back. I know how nuts that sounds. But before I knew what I was doing, I had turned and grabbed my board and started making my way into the low waves breaking at the shore. And I felt like I was making peace with her in that moment. Like we were getting our second chance.”
I’m hanging on every word, living through this experience as if I’m right there, on the sand, watching him share this intimate healing experience with the ocean.
“And I got just past the mush and lay on my board, belly down, letting my hands swirl in the water with no intention ofgetting up and riding. Even going that far was huge. I could have paddled back to shore and called it a win. But then a swell came, and my instinct kicked in. I paddled into the wave, turned and popped up like I’d never missed a day.”
He’s smiling now. And I smile with him.
“It wasn’t even that great of a wave. But I rode it. And when I bailed, I had to have more. Something broke in me—something broke through to me. I got back on the board and rode and rode and rode for hours until the sun was gone past the horizon, and my arms were burning and my body made me quit.”
