Riding the Wave (18 page)

C
old. Tanner felt himself go as cold as snow. The sultry air felt like an arctic breeze cooling the sweat on his skin. His blood slugged to a halt in an absent roar of sound.

Mako still prattled in his ear. Going on about . . . something. Words Tanner couldn’t grab hold of. Because he didn’t really want to. A rattling, horror show of destruction bounced around in his skull. His chest wrenched and pinched on something that was supposed to be air, but fell far short. This was . . . bad. Fucking awful.

Because Avalon was scrambling to her knees on his bed. She’d lost her shorts and bikini bottom but the dark blue strings of her top were still tied in place. As if they hadn’t been crawling all over each other. Wrapped up as if nothing else could get between them. But that wasn’t exactly true, now was it.

Her eyes were absolutely huge. Giant and glimmering. Begging him silently for understanding. But the color in her round cheeks was long gone. Guilt if he’d ever seen it before.

Tanner’s fingers gave a numb tingle. He was clenching
her phone entirely too hard, the metal edge biting into his fingertips.

Still watching her, he uncranked his fingers one by one. The phone fell, but unfortunately it landed impotently on the bed in a soft bounce. Avalon grabbed it, then lifted it to her ear.

Half of him cringed at the added betrayal. The other half felt like it was watching from miles away.

He’d almost drowned once. The same time he’d sliced his face open on the reef. The blow had disoriented him, twisting up from down and flipping his mind inside out. He’d lost himself.

So many factors would have kept this from wrecking what little emotional balance he’d been able to achieve. It wouldn’t have been nearly so devastating if she hadn’t talked to the one person he couldn’t stand in the world. Or if Avalon didn’t mean so much to him. Or if their afternoon hadn’t already been so . . . right.

She lifted the phone to her ear, offering him a weak smile. “Not now.”

He didn’t hear the response but it wasn’t like it mattered. He raised an eyebrow. Challenge met. How she thought of him was more than obvious now.

Her tongue slicked across her bottom lip. The fast flutter of her pulse at the base of her neck said she was beyond anxious.

He ought to care. He didn’t. Instead there was the chilled wasteland inside him.

Rolling off the bed, he scooped his board shorts from the floor. At least they weren’t clammy as he stepped into them, then tugged them up over his ass. He wasn’t about to have this conversation with his junk hanging
out. Small favors, right? He obviously wasn’t getting any big ones.

“I can
not
do this right now,” she said into the phone in a half whisper. “No! Don’t do anything. Don’t go anywhere.” A pause, then her eyes managed to go even bigger as her gaze flew to Tanner’s. She scrambled off the bed, tugging her bikini top back into place. “Do
not
come here.”

Tanner pointed at her. Cold, hard fury rocked down his spine, pushing everything else out of his way. At least if he was pissed, he couldn’t be mopey depressed over chick shit like getting his feelings hurt. So he let the anger come. “Tell that fucker if he shows up here, my fist will finally land in his goddamn face. He’s not a teenager anymore.”

She blanched even more, her cheeks going seafoam green. “Don’t fucking do it.” And then she hung up on him. Finally.

“What the hell is going on here, Avalon?” He yanked open a dresser drawer and grabbed the first T-shirt his hand touched: Tahitian Bureau of Tourism. Fuck that noise. He yanked it right back off over his head again. Plain black worked. “What? Cat got your tongue? Fucking shark got your tongue, maybe?”

She grabbed her shorts and pulled them up over the sweet curve of her ass without even hunting down her bikini bottoms. He looked away. He needed to focus on being mad, on being angry. He couldn’t think of their fucking, or the sex, and absolutely couldn’t think about the way he’d started hoping for more.

The hard yanks she raked through her hair left finger tracks in the dark mess. “I’m not even sure what you
think is going on, but I’m damned sure I don’t deserve this.”

“No?” He folded his arms over his chest because he’d be damned if he could figure out what else he could touch. Not her, because he almost wanted to throttle her, and if that wasn’t an old-fashioned idea, he’d never heard one. He’d obviously lost his goddamned mind over her. “Then explain. Were you or were you not talking with Mako behind my back?”

“It’s not like that.” The lush line of her mouth set into a hard pout. “You’re making it sound like I’ve been doing something shitty.”

“You fucking have been. Or you wouldn’t have been hiding it.”

“I’m trying to figure out how to help. He didn’t really give me—”

He cut her off with a hard slashing motion of his hand. “You fucking hid it. How is that at all okay to you?”

“I just wanted him to stop making trouble.”

A dulling roar of confusion washed over him, starting at the top of his head and shaking down to his churning guts. “What the fuck? What are you talking about?”

Over the past couple weeks, she’d taken to bringing along a bag when she didn’t have to be home by a certain time. She fished a tank top out, then tugged it down over her head. Her shoulders bounced on a heavy breath. When she turned around, she seemed calmer. “If he didn’t get to meet Eileen, he was going to go back to
SURFING
and tell them that Hank first met his mom when she was underage. I don’t even know if that’s true, but would it matter? The Wright name doesn’t need to be dragged through the mud.”

He shook his head. Hard. But nothing put the brains back in order. “Threats? Why didn’t he tell me?”

“Because you’ve been so friendly to him?”

“Mom doesn’t need trouble from him.”

“I know! That’s exactly what I was trying to avoid.” Avalon’s eyes flashed bright, and her lips parted as if she’d say something else. But then she swallowed it down with a shake of her head.

“Say it.”

“No.”

Something hard and mean rose up. The little boy who was so pissed at the father who’d slipped out of his grasp. There was nothing he could do about that, but he
could
make Avalon say whatever she was holding back. That would be child’s play. And maybe he’d have someone else to be mad at. “No, say it. I insist.”

Her neck was marble. Tendons in stark relief, like she’d shatter at any moment. “You’re not in charge of the family. You don’t get to choose like that. Last I checked, we didn’t elect you as dictator.”

“Last I checked, you weren’t a member of the family.”

She flinched. More than that, she withdrew. Pulled down into herself as her eyes dulled out. “I see.”

He ran a hand through his hair. Only Avalon could make him feel like he’d disemboweled a puppy. “I’m sorry, but you’re not.” If she were, they wouldn’t be sleeping together.

She waved a hand as if she didn’t care, but the line of her spine said otherwise. It screamed hurt in its stiffness. “No, I get it. I was only trying to help. He wanted to meet with Eileen and Sage, and it didn’t seem like that big a price to pay to get him to withhold insinuations. It’s not like paying blackmail or something.”

“I know he did. And I told him to fuck off. It’s shitty that he tried to use you to get to them.”

The stance she took seemed almost like she were prepared to go into battle. “Not tried. I arranged a meeting between Mako and Eileen. Like an hour from now.”

“And you let them?” The rage came back, full force. A heart-thumping takeover of his body that sent his brain black. “For fuck’s sake, did you even think about that at all? Do you have any sort of idea what he could say to her?”

“I did what I thought was right. I’d have done the same for my own mom.”

“Except she’s not your fucking mom. She’s mine.” Something sharp and mean twisted him from the inside. His voice dropped sharp and low. “How far will you go, Avalon?”

Confusion clouded her eyes. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“How far will you go to be part of the family for real?” Christ, he’d put so much of himself out there already. But if she’d been hiding something that she had to have known would hurt him that badly . . . “Do you actually even want me? Or were you hoping to marry in?”

Her head jerked back as sharply as if she’d been smacked across the face. “You bastard.”

“No answer? Kinda suspicious.”

“You really think I’d sleep with you for . . . What? Some archaic sentiment? Because I like your mom and sister a lot? If that’s the case, why don’t I bang Sage, hmm?”

She snatched up her bag from the corner and started shoving the odds and ends of her belongings in. Her tiny bikini bottoms from the end of the bed. A bottle of lotion from the nightstand.

Every move screamed her fury. Well, good. Because Tanner was as pissed as well.

“I don’t need this shit two days before the Pro.”

A bitter smile twisted her mouth as she tossed a glance over her shoulder. “Funny. That’s pretty much what I figured. You know. When I decided to go behind your back. It was the primary reason I didn’t tell you and all.”

“Oh, so sorry,” he said, sneering. “I didn’t realize there was a good reason for my girlfriend to lie to me. It’s all good now.”

“Was I ever your girlfriend, Tanner?” She slid the zipper of her bag shut and it was a wonder he could even hear it over the harsh rush of his breath and the pulse that still slammed inside his skull. “Or was I one superconvenient fuck? If you’ve got to have a photographer hanging around, might as well take extra bonus points for nailing her.”

“Don’t make this my fault.”

Her shoulders curled inward. A glassy sheen spread over her eyes and her lashes fluttered against quick blinks. But somehow she dredged up a tremulous smile. “It doesn’t have to be anyone’s fault.” Her throat worked over a clench. “Come over to your mom’s with me. Mako will be there soon. We’ll all sit down and talk.”

And that almost made it worse. Because she was still making nice. Smoothing over the family. The family that wasn’t even hers. He wanted her to keep fighting for herself. To be spitting mad at him. She’d almost been there, so close his breath had caught.

“I want you, Avalon. You, not any of the other shit. Can you say the same about me?”

Her expression shuttered down. The soft pink of her lips opened, but then slammed closed again. The battle against her tears was lost and one went skating down the curve of her cheek. Misery on the wing.

Seeing his girl crumple so suddenly rocked Tanner down to his soul. He wanted so badly to grab her, to hold her close. Keep the two of them locked up until the rest of the world fell into the ocean. But he couldn’t afford that right now.

And to be honest, he wasn’t sure if he could. He wasn’t going to fight for something that wasn’t actually there. The relationship he’d thought they’d been building could have as easily been nothing more than hormones. Because it was obvious to see where her loyalties lay.

So he didn’t touch her. Not even when she walked by close enough for him to smell her sea-salt sweetness.

Instead he kept his arms crossed over his chest and his chin tucked down. The door shut on the silence of the room.

And she was gone.

A
valon had to get her shit together. Standing on the front step of the house she shared with Tanner’s sister and mother was not exactly the place for crumpling into a tiny ball and sobbing until her lungs fell out.

She’d wait for that until she got upstairs.

But first, she had to breathe. Her chest felt like it was fifteen inches smaller than it had been just an hour ago. But that wasn’t any excuse.

She blinked, turning her face up toward the palm trees lining the street and the breeze that did absolutely nothing to ease the hot ache behind her eyes. That was all pending tears. Nothing to be done about it. At least she’d managed to beat back the few that had fallen as she’d left Tanner’s house.

This shouldn’t have been any surprise. And yet it was. A tearing, gasping-for-oxygen sort of surprise.

The stairs had never seemed quite so steep or long before. For regular suburban construction, they were fairly Escher-like. Never ending. But she was eventually in the quiet of her room.

Alone.

She shut the door quietly behind her, the soft
snick
of the latch holding no bearing on the violent tumult of emotions inside her. This was where she belonged. Where she should be.

And where she’d always known she’d end up. Keeping Eileen and Sage happy was easy. It was everyone else, men particularly, who became so twisty and confusing.

She wanted to tell Tanner to go to hell.

She’d also wanted to tell him that she needed him, desperately. That she’d do anything to keep him happy and, hell, to keep him. But that hadn’t been what he’d meant. And she’d had no idea how to separate him from the rest of it. Everything was so badly bound up together.

The right thing became more difficult to tell when she’d fallen in love. There was only Tanner in her mind and she’d thought keeping everything quiet until after the Pro would help. But she’d been so damn wrong, at least in his eyes.

When she put her back to the door, she melted as if her bones had turned to liquid misery. She slid down, down, her knees folding in front of her. The moment her ass hit the floor, it was like she unlocked.

A harsh sob racked her throat with tiny knives. She shoved the back of her hand into her mouth, but it was too late. The tears burned.

She’d known it was coming. There shouldn’t have been any surprise. Yet there it was, a raw hole inside her chest that refused to yield. This was more than simple hurt. It was open and cruel and flat-out hideous.

And it all came from inside her. She’d earned this. She’d known what could happen and she’d flown headfirst into the fray. Didn’t care.

Another sob choked in her throat, swallowed before
it could ever find voice. She sniffled but nothing could hold back the tears. Candy hadn’t ever liked drama that she didn’t cause herself, so Avalon had learned to cry quietly. But it didn’t make it any easier.

A knock on the door at her back made her twitch. The heels of her hands made poor tissues but she swiped the wet away from her eyes anyway. “Who is it?”

“Me.” Sage’s voice was quiet. “You okay?”

“Fine.” Christ, talking was hard. The very act shoved more sobs up into her chest, clawing their way out. She gritted her teeth. She didn’t want to worry Sage. “No problem here.”

“Are you sure?” The doorknob twisted but obviously Sage wasn’t getting very far with Avalon’s butt planted in front of the door.

“Fine. Sure.” She swiped at her eyes over and over, but they wouldn’t quit leaking. “You can go, it’s no biggie.”

There was a long pause and for a moment, Avalon thought Sage might have gone away. And to prove she was as crazily neurotic as ever, she had a painful flash of resentment that Sage would take her word so easily.

Something poked her in the ass, a bare quarter inch above the floor. She scrambled to her knees. A pencil.

Sage had stuck the eraser-end of a pencil under the door and was poking at Avalon. “If you don’t let me in, I’ll pester you ’til you come out. You do realize that, right?”

“Okay, okay.” Avalon took one more useless swipe of her eyes, this one with the back of her wrist, as if that would help. But she was still a mess.

She kept her face averted as she opened the door, then immediately grabbed a handful of tissues and went
face-first across the bed. Warm lavender and vanilla filled her head, but it wasn’t enough to drive away the pure spun sadness. If anything, it made it worse.

Sage dropped to the floor on the far side of the bed, where Avalon’s head had landed. Her long legs folded underneath her butt, she stroked Avalon’s hair away from her face. “What happened?”

The sobs Avalon had been holding back so well finally won the battle. A harsh, painful drag up her throat, then her chest collapsed in on its own black hole of hurt. All because she couldn’t even explain. Didn’t have the words.

Saying she and Tanner had broken up wasn’t exactly true. Because they hadn’t ever really been a concrete
thing
in the first place. And only in his absence did she realize how much she’d invested in him. How much she’d wanted to believe that they could be something. Nothing fancy. Not forever. Just to . . .
be.
With Tanner.

She shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut. But the tears wouldn’t even stop. “Tanner and I are done.”

“I didn’t realize you cared about him this much.”

Face buried in the comforter, she shrugged her shoulders in a stupid gesture. “Maybe I didn’t realize, either.”

“Does he know?”

Another shrug. “Doesn’t matter. I screwed up.”

“Mako?” Sage’s hand ran over Avalon’s head in a soothing gesture.

“Yes.” Her mouth crumpled around the word. She dissolved into another round of tears.

But Sage didn’t go anywhere. She sat next to the bed, providing the comfort Avalon had always absorbed like a greedy sponge.

This, here. This was why she’d been willing to balance
everything on a knife’s edge. Because Sage had always been there for her. And she knew without a shadow of a doubt that Eileen would be patting Avalon’s back if she knew. This was home. This was where she ran when her wounds bled too deeply.

If she’d gone to Candy, she’d have gotten some advice on not crying too long because it would ruin the Botox—and what did she mean she didn’t use Botox? Candy would have tried, but ultimately always failed when it came to the kind of comfort Avalon needed.

Sage’s easy peace washed over Avalon, eventually calming her. When Avalon pushed herself up to a sitting position, her joints felt as weak as seaweed. She’d completely exhausted herself.

In a way, she felt better.

The inevitable had happened. Now there was nothing to be done but deal with it.

Sage stayed where she was, but folded her hands on the edge of the mattress and rested her chin on them. “What are you going to do?”

She grabbed a handful of tissues from the box on her nightstand and mopped at her face. “There’s nothing to do. One of those easy come, easy go things.”

Sage’s pale eyebrows twisted into a knot of disbelief. “Bullshit. People don’t sob their brains out over easy come, easy go. You care about Tanner.”

“Of course I do.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. She couldn’t love him if she didn’t care for him. But she didn’t need to tell Sage every single dirty detail either. “But I’ve got to put my big-girl panties on. It’s over. End of story.”

“You could try talking to him.”

Tanner’s cold, hard face rose in her memory. She shuddered. She would do anything to never again see
that level of disgust on his face. Even if it meant playing pretty and polite to keep the surface smoothed over. “No. No way.”

“It’s not worth a shot?”

“Why?” She made herself laugh a tiny bit. “Because Tanner’s such a paragon of rationality and he’s open to discussions?” If he’d broken with his father for almost ten years, there was absolutely nothing to keep him by her side.

It would be bad enough to love him from a distance. Having him nearby, knowing that she felt for him so strongly? No, thanks. She’d already had him in her head for years. Going back would be like walking on ground glass.

And she wouldn’t do that, not even for Tanner.

She could only apologize for being herself for so long, and she couldn’t try to fix everything. Because in the end, she was starting to realize she needed to be needed for who she was. Not because of the things she could do for others.

When she’d made the right choice, she didn’t deserve this level of shit. It wasn’t as if she’d intentionally introduced a serial killer to someone who met his victim’s profile. She’d arranged for a man to speak with the other half of his family.

She knew that she shouldn’t have gone behind his back, but ultimately, what she did was right. She couldn’t let Tanner be a dictator. He didn’t get to make those choices for someone else.

Not for her, at least.

She blinked, realizing Sage was still sitting there. The smile she pulled up didn’t feel like much, but at least it made the worry fade from Sage’s eyes a little.

Avalon wiped at her nose again. “Look, it’s not really that big a deal. Not . . . as things go. I think I’m a little overwhelmed. I have to shoot the Pro, and I turn in the final round of WavePro stuff in less than a week. It’s a lot, you know?”

Sage’s head tilted. She didn’t seem to quite believe Avalon’s line, and, well, she shouldn’t. Every word was both lie and truth at once.

Because really, in the end, only one thing mattered. Avalon’s heart was broken.

Putting the pieces together would have to wait for another time because the doorbell pealed downstairs. She scrubbed her wrists over her eyes, wiping away what she could of her tears. “Showtime.”

Sage sat up. “Is that him? Mako? He’s early.”

Except it wasn’t Mako at the front door. It was Tanner. He stood with his back to the entryway, looking at a middle-aged woman who was walking a small Chihuahua, as if he didn’t even want to be there. The late-afternoon sun gleamed off his blond hair. It was hard to believe it had been less than an hour ago that she’d been in his arms. She willed him to look at her.

Avalon swallowed the knot that had found a permanent home in the back of her throat. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

His mouth was pressed into a flat, hard line. When he finally looked at her, she wished she could have taken back her need to see his eyes. There was nothing there, at least not for her. “Where’s my mom?”

“Probably out back.”

He stared at her for a minute more. The sun beat down on them, making her eyes sting against the tears that had already burned her out. “He’s not here yet, is he?”

She shook her head. She clenched the doorknob, and it was cool against the throbbing heat of her blood in her palms. “No. Not yet.”

Tanner’s gaze shifted past her to Sage. “Did you know about this too?” Sage didn’t answer in words, but she must have nodded because Tanner gave a small nod as well. “Fine. Then let’s do this.”