“You were thinking free ride,” I smirk. “Scholarships are handy like that.”
“Don’t start that shrink shit on me.” He throws a ball of wax at me. “This is a shrink-free zone, remember?”
I just laugh. He knows I’m right. I’m pretty damn good at reading peoples’ emotions.
Thirty minutes later, I’m paddling like hell, the waves roaring around me as other surfers fight for their spots on this monster I’m ready to fall down on, and all I can think is: finally. There’s white foam all around me, and Jesus, this is what I’ve been missing.
I’m home.
“Did you guys have fun?”
I throw my bag down on the tile and lean over and give Ash a kiss. She’s barefoot and hot as hell right now, wearing one of my college sweatshirts and tiny shorts. “Yeah, it was fun.”
“Fun?” She laughs, shakes her head so that her light, golden brown waves go flying. “Fun is going down to the boardwalk. Fun is definitely not risking your life just for a high. I totally expect this sort of behavior from him,”—she hooks a thumb toward her brother—“but not from you.”
“You make me sound so boring,” I murmur, pulling her close. Damn, she smells so good right now, like vanilla and cake, which makes sense since she works at a bakery until she finds a job out here.
“Oh, you’re definitely not boring,” she murmurs back, standing up on her tiptoes to kiss me. “I don’t think anyone could ever call you boring.”
The same could be said for her.
And ... then Logan is there, shoving his hands between us. We both sigh and then laugh. “Not in front of me,” he says. “It’s bad enough you guys are living together now. I don’t want to see my best friend and sister makin’ babies, you know?”
Ash kicks his butt; he just grins and heads toward the fridge.
“So, you survived,” she says to me.
I pretend to look wounded. “You didn’t think I would?”
I did more than survive. I lived, I think. When I hit the white water after my first ride, I had this moment, though, where I looked around for ... I don’t know. Something. Somebody? Not Logan, though. It was weird. I wanted to share this moment with ... hell, I don’t know. Somebody that should have been here?
“I had faith in you, baby,” Ash is saying. “When you put your mind to something, you always do it.”
I’ve definitely got my mind on a few things right now, and they don’t have a thing to do with surfing.
Logan passes over beers to the both of us before cracking his open on the counter. “You’re like a communist, Ash. You grew up on the ocean. Hell, you learned to surf before I did. How could you say that about Mavericks?”
She takes a log swig before saying, “It’s because I grew up surfing that I say this about Mavericks.” And then, “Lo, I love you, you’re my favorite brother—”
“Your only bro,” he pipes in. “And your twin. So, there’s that.”
She simply smiles. “But honestly. You have a college degree. Don’t you know what communist means?”
“Not all of us went to an Ivy League, babe.”
She turns to me. “Somebody switched babies in the hospital. I can’t possibly be related to him.”
Logan pulls a lime out of the fridge and tosses it onto a cutting board. “More like you were a greedy little twin who siphoned all the good stuff in mom while we were baking.”
She rolls her eyes. “We’re fraternal twins. We had separate amniotic sacs, you idiot.”
It’s nuts, but I envy them their bickering. It’s not real; these two are as tight as they come. As an only child, I would kill for this kind of relationship. It’s embarrassing, and not anything that I ever tell Ash, but part of me is resentful for what they have. Sometimes I wonder if, in a past life or something, I had a twin of my own, because all too often it feels like I miss him or her so much without even knowing who they are. Like I’m missing a limb or something. My psych advisor tells me it has something to do with being an orphan, but ... I don’t know. It’s eerie, and every day the sensation grows stronger.
I even dreamed about it one night. Dreamed about surfing with someone who looked like me. Woke up feeling ... sad. And yet, hopeful all at once.
“Why you keep hanging out with this knucklehead is beyond me,” she’s saying to me.
As her brother slices the lime for our beers, I pull her close. “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have met you, would I?”
Logan cackles. “He’s got a point, Ash!”
She looks up into my eyes, and I’m wishing her brother were far, far from here right now. Because my girl is sexy as hell right now. Meeting her was the luckiest day of my life. “Okay. I’ll give him that.”
Logan comes back over and shoves lime wedges in our beers. Then he holds one up. “To surviving Mavericks.”
To coming home, I think.
We clink our glasses together and take long swigs.