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FOSTER
“Just a little further,” I said, practically bouncing in the driver’s seat. “I promise, you will not be disappointed.”
“You said that thirty minutes ago,” Adrianne piped up from the backseat. She was curled into Ethan’s side in the back. Callan sat in the passenger seat beside me. Ethan had called as they were leaving from the studio and told me and Callan to think of something fun to do for the rest of the day.
It was pretty easy to come up with a plan. By the time they got home, we’d loaded his truck with beach supplies. After a short stop at my place for my surfboards, we headed toward the beach. “We could have been at the beach in less than an hour, you know,” she added after a moment. “Head west, and you’ll hit water.”
I snorted. “I’ve got somewhere a little more special in mind. You’re getting a surf lesson today, and I figured you may not want an audience.”
In the rearview mirror, I saw her beaming smile. “Thank you, Foster.”
We wove our way down the Pacific Coast Highway, and finally, I saw the unmarked turnoff. I maneuvered off the main road, and we bumped down over a hill made of gravel and sand. “You’re getting my truck washed and waxed after this,” Callan groused, but I could see the beginnings of a smile on his face.
“Are you finally caving? We’re going to The Spot?” he asked. “Seriously?”
“What’s ‘The Spot’?” Adrianne asked.
“Foster’s secret surfing spot,” Ethan explained. “He’s been bragging about it for years, but he’s never taken us. Callan has literally tailed him
black ops style, and he’s still never gotten close.” Callan scowled. “Shut up, Merc.”
“You don’t have to tell them your secret just for me,” Adrianne said.
Callan whipped around on her. “Yes, he does! We’re his best friends. He should have brought us ages ago.”
She leaned forward enough to pat his cheek. “Whining makes you look so sexy, Cal,” she teased.
Ethan and I laughed, and even though he pouted, Callan was holding back a laugh too. Despite whatever happened at the studio-Ethan wasn’t the most forthcoming on details-everything felt light and good right now. We rounded a curve, and the small cove appeared before us. It wasn’t a large spot, but it was largely private and had good swells.
“Oh, it’s so pretty,” Adrianne cooed. “How long have you been coming here?”
“Since I was a kid,” I replied. “An old coworker from my first fast food job showed it to me after I agreed to cover a shift for him so that he could go on a date.”
“You traded a shift at work for a surf spot?” She laughed, and it was a good sound. Musical and light. “God, you really are a Cali boy.”
“That I am.”
I parked the truck at a tiny gravel lot-any further, and the tires would sink into the sand-and we unloaded the truck. Adrianne picked a spot halfway to the water’s edge, and we spread out the blanket. Ethan and Callan got to work on setting up the umbrella. I stripped my shirt over my head. “Come on,” I urged her.
Adrianne took off her cover-up. She’d put on a red one-piece swimsuit that had cutouts on the sides that somehow made her look even curvier. “Damn, you’re beautiful,” Callan said, and she blushed.
I took her hand, and we ran to the water. She shrieked and clung to me as I dragged her into the surf. “It’s freezing!”
“That’s why you run in,” I said. “To acclimate.”
She laughed as a wave came crashing down on us. I pulled her against me. She wrapped her legs around my waist. “See?” I asked. “It gets warmer.”
Adrianne grinned and brought our mouths together. She tasted like sea water and earth, and it made my head dizzy. “Show me how to surf, Cali boy,” she said, and my cock twitched in my board shorts.
I kissed her again. “Music to my ears,” I said, and she giggled.
We walked back up the beach to get the two surfboards. “Anyone else up for a surf lesson?” I asked.
Callan, who was still wrestling with the umbrella, shook his head. “Not right now,” he grunted.
Ethan was stretched on the blanket on his back. “I’m better as a spectator.”
I leaned into Adrianne. “Ethan sinks like a rock,” I explained. “He has no buoyancy to speak of.”
She furrowed her brow. “Isn’t swimming essential for being a Navy SEAL?”
“I can swim!” Ethan shouted, not even opening his eyes.
I snorted. “It’s the floating that’s the problem.” Ethan flipped me off, and I gestured for Adrianne to follow me.
On the water’s edge, we laid the boards out, and I walked her through paddling out and popping up into a standing position. “Try it?”
She lay on the board and paddled, albeit a little awkwardly, and then pushed herself into a standing position. It was a little slow, but she could work on it. She had good instincts. “Let’s practice in the water,” she said.
“You sure?” I asked.
Adrianne nodded. “I want to do it for real.”
“For real” was a bit of a disaster. I helped her onto her board and threaded the strap around her ankle before I climbed onto my own. We paddled out into the break, and I grabbed the nose of her board and helped her to turn so that we were facing the beach. “Now what?” she asked.
“When I tell you, start paddling in hard, and then I’ll tell you when to pop up.” She nodded, determination set into her features, and I looked behind me at the coming swell of waves. I let a few waves roll beneath us- they weren’t right-but then the perfect wave started to roll toward us. “Go, go!”
Adrianne began paddling in. The wave began to crest, and I shouted, “Pop up!” She stood, but the movement was too slow, and the board pushed out from beneath her. She fell backward into the water. The board flew up. When she didn’t surface right away, I pulled off my ankle strap and dove beneath the waves.
The roar of the waves was muffled here, and I pushed through the water quickly. I wrapped an arm around Adrianne’s waist and aimed up at the
surface. I heard her suck in a lungful of air. “Are you okay?” We hit sand, and I let her go. “Adrianne?”
Even though she was panting, she grinned. “Let’s do it again.” “Are you sure? That was a pretty nasty fall.”
She nodded. “Absolutely.”
We rescued the boards and paddled toward the breaks again. This time, when the right wave came along, I paddled in with her. “Pop up!”
We stood at the same time, and for a handful of moments, Adrianne stood on the board and sailed over the crest of the wave. She was like a sea goddess overseeing her domain.
Then, she fell into the ocean-a little more gently than before. She surfaced pretty quickly and got ahold of her board. I rode out the wave and then sank into a seated position and paddled over to where she was floating. “How did that feel?”
Adrianne beamed. “Amazing! I didn’t know I could do that.”
“Just think about where you could be in a couple of months with some practice . . . riding the board for thirty seconds or more.”
She splashed at me. “You look hot on that board, Foster,” she said and grabbed for the side of the board and tipped me over. The cool blue surrounded me for a moment. It was total peace. And then Adrianne was grabbing me and hauling me back up. “Foster! I’m so sorry!”
I like her holding me like this, I thought and smiled. “I’m fine, Princess. Let’s go in and grab a snack.” We each threw an arm over our board and paddled in. We dragged the boards up the beach, and as we reached the blanket, she collapsed beside Ethan. “That was . . . graceful,” he said.
Adrianne waved a hand at him. “I stood up on the board,” she said. “It was the most amazing feeling.”
I kissed her temple. “You tell him, baby.”
Callan opened up the picnic basket and grabbed out the snacks that we had packed. We sat, the four of us, and enjoyed the food and stretched out in the golden sunlight. “Every day should end like this,” Adrianne said in a dreamy sort of way.
“On the beach?” Callan asked.
She glanced at him, completely fond. “With you all,” she said. “You’ve completely cured my bad mood.”
We were silent for a moment. “What happened this morning?” I asked.
Adrianne’s face twisted, and Callan kicked at me, spraying sand across the blanket. “Nice going, dick,” he snarled.
“No, it’s important,” Ethan broke in. “We need to talk about it.” He glanced at Adrianne, who shrugged but nodded, nonetheless. “The production company wants her to be photographed with Ryan Jacobs in public.”
“They want you to date him?” The thought was inconceivable. We were already hiding what was growing between us as is, and watching her kiss the man for a movie was painful. I didn’t think I could handle it if it was for real.
“Not in so many words,” she said. “But they want me to ‘lean in’ to the image of it. Be photographed with him, hang out in public.”
Callan swore out loud, but Ethan spoke before he could argue. “She’ll lose the movie if she doesn’t agree. It’s absolute bullshit, but she can’t get fired, either.”
Absolutely not, I thought. “That won’t happen,” I said. “We won’t let that happen.”
Adrianne played with the blanket. She was having a hard time looking at any of us. “I don’t want to lie about being in a relationship with him.”
“So we set up that boundary,” I suggested. “You refuse to answer questions about him or make any statement to the press about any kind of relationship. You’ll only agree to be photographed in public with him. Let the press make of it what they will.”
Adrianne sighed. “I still hate it.”
But there was no way around it without risking her future in the movie. “It’s going to be okay,” Ethan said and reached to take her hand. He brought it up to his mouth and brushed her knuckles with his lips. His face puckered slightly. “You taste like salt.”
He obviously doesn’t appreciate it as much as I do, I thought. “The ocean is salty, Merc,” Callan commented.
Ethan shook his head and lay back out on the blanket. “We’ll tell Cheswell our decision in the morning,” he said.
“You mean my decision,” Adrianne countered. “Since the production company can’t know about you all.”
She sounded so sad that Callan and I shifted closer to her. It was automatic, instinctual, and it was hard not to overthink that one. It was too soon to feel what I was feeling, but spending an afternoon in the sunshine in
my favorite spot with my favorite people made it all the harder to deny that I was falling for her. “We’re not worried about validation or whatever you’re thinking,” I said. “We know that we have something special here.”
She turned her gaze to me. “Is it?” she asked. “Special?”
“Like you said, every day should end like this,” I repeated her words back to her. “That’s pretty special in my books.”
Adrianne nodded. “Yeah,” she agreed.
When the food was largely gone, Callan and I decided on a few more runs in the surf. Adrianne opted to lie in the sun with Ethan. “You’re falling for her, aren’t you?” Callan asked as we walked down the beach.
“So are you.”
He coughed. “Can you never answer a direct question?” “Sure,” I said and shot him a grin. “Of course, I can.”
“I’m seriously thinking about drowning you.”
I laughed. “You’ll have to catch me first,” I taunted, “and remember who taught you how to ride that board.”
Callan was from New Jersey. Before we’d met, he’d never so much as seen a surfboard in real life. He was athletic and took to it naturally, but he still learned to surf relatively late in life. It was easy to best him in a race or a contest. He still had a natural fear of the water that kept him from an overabundance of reckless decisions.
We raced out into the water like we were a couple of teenagers again, and in our race to catch the most perfect wave, I won by a landslide. We nearly turned back out, but Ethan was waving us in. “Come on,” I said. “They want us back.”
“You cheated.” Callan pouted as we paddled in.
“Sure, I did,” I said in mock sympathy. “I used my magic wave making machine to create perfect waves for me and leave nothing for you.”
He splashed me, but I made it back to the shore unscathed. Even as we approached the blanket, we could tell that Adrianne wasn’t thrilled.
“She called Cheswell and told him about being photographed,” Ethan explained. “They were happy about it, but she’s feeling guilty. I’m thinking it’s time to head home.”
Callan and I nodded. “Agreed.”