Malibu Rising: A Novel, Taylor Reid [best fantasy books to read TXT] 📗

had been walking back to the shoreline after smoking a joint at the end of the Malibu pier. Lara had been leaving the bar. Her lame date had left an hour ago and she’d been nursing her disappointment with Coronas.

When Jay saw her, she was sitting down on a bench in denim shorts and a tank top. She was in the middle of attempting to retie her white Keds, fully buzzed.

Jay spotted her and smiled. She pleasantly smiled back.

“Lara, right?” he’d said, lighting a cigarette to try to hide the smell of weed.

“Yes, Jay Riva,” Lara said, standing up.

Jay smiled, humbled. “I knew your name was Lara. I was just trying not to seem like a creep.”

“We’ve met at least three times,” she said, smirking. “It’s not creepy to remember my name. It’s polite.”

“Lara Vorhees. You work at the Sandcastle, mostly behind the bar, sometimes waiting tables.”

Lara nodded her head and smiled. “There you go. See? I knew you could do it.”

“There needs to be some room to play it cool, don’t you think?”

“People that are cool don’t really need to play cool, do they?”

Jay was used to women that hung around and waited for him, women that made it clear they were available, women that laughed at his jokes even if they weren’t funny. He was not used to women like Lara.

“All right,” he said, “I get your point. Tell me. If I’m cool, what do I say next?”

“I guess, next you ask me if I’m doing anything right now,” she said. “And then I tell you I’m not. And you ask if I want to go finish your joint, which you clearly have because you’re high and smell like bud.”

Jay laughed, caught. “Are you doing anything right now?”

“No.”

“Do you want to go somewhere and finish my joint? I’m high and I smell like bud.”

Lara laughed. “Let’s go to my place.”

And so they did. Lara lived in a studio apartment in a complex a quarter of a mile inland at the foot of the mountains. Her place had a view of the water on a clear night. The two of them stood on her tiny balcony, nestled between two houseplants, sharing a beer and a roach, and looking at the moon over the sea.

When Lara said, apropos of absolutely nothing, “How many people have you slept with?” Jay was so disarmed he told the truth. “Seventeen.”

“Eight, for me,” she said, looking forward, toward the horizon. “Although, I guess it kind of depends on what we are defining as sex.”

He was surprised by her. Where was the shyness? The coyness? Jay was smart enough to know that these traits weren’t necessarily natural for women, but he was also bright enough to know that they were learned. That most women knew they were supposed to perform them as a form of social contract. But Lara wasn’t going to do that.

“Let’s say we define it as an orgasm,” Jay said.

Lara laughed at him. Actually laughed at him. “Well, then, three,” she said, breathing out the smoke of the joint, passing it back to Jay. “Men don’t give women as many orgasms as they think they do.”

“I guarantee I would give you one,” he said, as he put the joint to his lips.

This time she didn’t laugh. She looked at him, considered him. “What makes you so sure I’d let you?”

He smiled and then pulled back, moving away from her, letting her feel his absence. “Look, if you don’t want to feel an orgasm that starts in your toes and shakes your whole body, it’s no skin off my back.”

“Oh, this is impressive, actually,” Lara said, playing with the label on the beer bottle. “How you’ve managed to make sleeping with me seem like a favor. Let’s be explicitly clear about something, Riva. You wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t interested. But you’re lucky I’m interested. It’s not the other way around. I don’t care who your daddy is.”

Jay figured it was then. That moment. When he fell in love with her. But there were other moments, too, that night. Moments it could have been.

Did he fall in love with her when she took her clothes off right there on the balcony? Maybe it was when she touched his face, and she looked directly into his eyes, and moved on top of him.

Maybe he fell for her as they interlocked themselves together, legs pretzeled, bodies pulled tight until there was no space left between them. They moved together like they knew exactly what they were doing. No fumbles, no mistakes, no awkward moments. And Jay thought, maybe that was love.

Or maybe he fell in love with her later, when it was pitch dark out, and the two of them were pretending to be asleep but each knew the other one was also awake. She had lain there bare, no gesture toward covering up. And her skin was the only thing he could see in the dark.

It was then that he took a deep breath and, for the first time, told someone else his big new secret. The one that was eating him alive.

“I was just diagnosed with a heart problem,” he said to her. “It’s called dilated cardiomyopathy.”

This was the first time he’d ever said the phrase out loud since he’d heard it from the doctor the week before. It sounded so strange coming out of his mouth that he wondered if he’d mispronounced it. The word repeated, over and over in his mind, until it sounded like nonsense. That couldn’t be right, could it? Cardiomyopathy? But it was. He’d pronounced it just like the doctor had.

He’d been having chest pains for weeks. He’d noticed them starting shortly after he got thrown off his board and then caught in a two-wave hold down in Baja. He’d been underwater so long he thought he might die. He struggled and struggled against the current, trying to decipher up from down. He pushed himself against the weight of the water, desperate to reach the sky. But