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

he just kept tumbling and tumbling, pulled by the riptide. And suddenly, he broke through the surface and there it was: air.

Ever since, these pains appeared from time to time, as a tightening that took him by surprise, arriving out of nowhere and stunning him silent and then passing on, leaving as quickly as they came.

The doctor wasn’t sure what was causing them until suddenly the doctor became very sure indeed.

Lara put her hand on his chest, moved her warm body closer to his, and said, “What does that mean?”

It meant that Jay’s left ventricle had been weakened and would not always function the way it should. It meant that anything that might cause overexertion and adrenaline, especially something like being thrown underwater, was no longer in his best interest. Putting his heart into overdrive by almost drowning had triggered it, but the underlying condition was hereditary, given to him by all of the people who came before him, lying in wait in his blood.

Jay spared Lara any more of the details, but told her the worst part. “I should stop surfing. It could kill me.” His glory, his money, his partnership with his brother … One little defect in his body would take it all.

But on hearing that, Lara said, “OK, so you’ll find something else to be.” She had made it seem so simple.

Yes, Jay thought, that was when he’d fallen in love with her. When she made what had felt like a fatal blow seem easily overcome. When she’d cracked open his bleak future and shown him the light shining in.

When Jay woke up the next morning, he’d found a note from Lara saying that she’d had to go to work. He didn’t have her number. Since that day, he’d been down to the Sandcastle three times, trying to find her.

• • •

“I wasn’t sure how it worked,” Lara said, handing him his chocolate cake. “With the invites, I mean.”

Jay shook his head. “No invites. It’s a pretty simple system: If you know about the party and you know where Nina’s place is, you’re invited.”

“Well, I don’t actually,” Lara said. “Know where her place is.”

“Oh,” Jay said. “Well, luckily you know me.”

He wrote down his sister’s address on a napkin and handed it to her. She took it and looked at it.

“It is OK,” she asked, nodding toward the other server, “if I bring Chad?”

She was into Chad? Jay started burning up from the inside, on the verge of humiliation and heartbreak. The drop was so long, so treacherous, when you started from this high up.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “Yeah, sure.”

“I’m not sleeping with him, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Lara said. “I prefer men who don’t spend four hours a day sunbathing with a foil reflector.”

Relief came to Jay like ice on a burn.

“He’s depressed because his even-more-orange girlfriend dumped him,” Lara continued. “Somebody at your party’s gotta have a thing for pretty boys, right? Can we pawn him off on someone?”

Jay smiled. “I think we will have a lot of options for getting Chad laid.”

Lara folded the napkin with the address and put it in her apron pocket. “Guess I’m going to a party tonight.”

Jay smiled, pleased. There it was. What he came for. When he left, he forgot to take the cake.

1959

June had been due with Jay on August 17, 1959. Smack in the middle of Mick’s tour for his debut album, Mick Riva: Main Man.

June and Mick had fought about the tour dates all through her first trimester. June had insisted Mick reschedule the second half of the tour. Mick had insisted what she was asking was virtually impossible.

“This is my chance,” Mick told her one afternoon as they stood out on the patio, watching the tide pull away. Nina was napping and they were trying to keep their voices down. “You don’t get to just reschedule your chance.”

“This is your child,” June said. “You cannot reschedule your child.”

“I’m not asking to reschedule my child, Junie, for crying out loud. I’m asking for you to understand what’s at stake here. What I’m building for our kids. What I’m building for this whole family. I can’t do all of this alone. I need your help. If I’m going to go out there and be great, I need you to be here, keeping things together, being strong. This life we want …” Mick sighed and calmed down. “It requires things from you, too.”

June sat down, resigned. This reasoning made sense to her, as much as she hated it. And so somewhere in the time that Jay went from the size of a lime to the size of a grapefruit, they found a compromise.

Mick could perform wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted, but when June called him home, he had to come.

They shook on it one night when they were going to bed and as they did, Mick pulled June’s arm toward him and pulled her on top of him. She laughed as he kissed her neck.

When Mick took off for his Vegas shows four days before June’s due date, he promised to head home the moment she called to say she was in labor. “And I’ll be home as soon as I can,” he said as he kissed Nina’s forehead and June’s cheek. He put a hand on June’s belly and then made his way out the door.

But when the time came—June’s mother called him an hour and ten minutes before his Saturday night show began—Mick didn’t run to the airport like he’d promised. He hung up the phone and stood there, backstage in his suit and tie, staring at the bulbs around the mirror.

It was his last Vegas stop on the tour. And impressing the guys at the Sands meant a lot of things. It meant he could get booked out for whole months at a time, which would mean some financial stability. This was his last booking for two