Finally, after a morning in my depressing office answering emails that bored me shitless, I left the office, packed my BMW with the essentials, and drove to Malibu. It was late in the season, and there weren’t as many people at Zuma Beach as there would normally be, but there were still plenty of swimmers, surfers, and sun-soakers. There wasn’t much wind today, and the waves were calm. Still, there were a few people in Katie’s Surf Shop, either getting ready to go out on the waves or coming back in.
“Noah!” Katie herself was standing behind the counter, and when she spotted me she immediately dumped the customer she was talking to and came around toward me. She was in her late thirties, and her hair was cut in a short cut that was convenient for all the surfing she did. She was wearing board shorts and a sports bra. She flung herself at me, throwing her arms around my neck.
“Oof,” I said. Katie wasn’t a big woman, but she was solid athletic muscle, like a lead weight. “Hi, Katie.” When she gave me a smacking kiss on the cheek, I said, “Watch it. You’re giving me ideas.”
“You wish, baby.” Katie was, as she liked to put it, gayer than gay—she had a T-shirt with those words on it—so we could say this kind of stuff without confusing each other. “What are you doing here on a Wednesday afternoon, hot stuff?”
“I need to clear my head.”
She nodded. “This is the place for it. Suit up. I’ve got gear for you.”
I went into a change room and put on my bathing suit, then added my wet suit, because the ocean was freaking cold in late October. When I came out, Katie had a board for me. I should probably own my own board—something custom made, high tech, and really expensive. Instead, I rented one every time.
In no time, I was out on the waves. The sky was cloudy, the water just rough enough. There were a few other surfers out, few enough that we kept a lot of space from each other. The salt air slapped my exposed skin, hitting my lungs like a drug.
I was hardly a pro surfer. Surfing is fucking hard, and the only guys who get great at it are the ones who do it all the time. I surfed only occasionally, every few weeks or so, which meant I was past the beginner stage but that was about it. What I liked about surfing wasn’t that I was some kind of genius at it, but that it inevitably tired me out so hard I could barely move. When you were overthinking things, it was the perfect remedy.
When I came out of the water, Katie was waiting for me. She gestured to one of her employees to take my board, then pointed to two lounge chairs planted in the sand in front of her surf shop. “Sit,” she said.
I unzipped my wet suit, peeled it off me, grabbed a towel, and did as I was told.
“Tell me what’s got you in knots,” she said, sitting next to me.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t need to listen to my stupid shit.”
“How long have we known each other?” She poked me with a finger. “I owe you big, Noah. Spill.”
I was going to refuse again, and then I realized that Katie might be the perfect person to ask for advice. I scratched the beard on my jaw slowly. “I had an experience last week,” I said.
“Oh yeah? What kind of experience?”
It was embarrassing. Ah, fuck it. “You’re a woman,” I said.
“Yes.”
“And you have sex with women.”
“Also yes.”
“Have you ever had a woman want sex—like, really want it—then bolt right afterward?”
Katie thought this over. “I need more details.”
“We met,” I said. “We hit it off. She’s hot. The sexual attraction was off the charts. She’s single, I’m single. She likes sex, I like sex. All systems go.”
Katie nodded, frowning. “Okay, sounds good. So you fucked.”
“We didn’t even get that far. We went to my place, we talked, and I went down on her.” Normally I wouldn’t repeat details like this—not to anyone. But I needed advice here, and I knew Katie was a vault. “It was fucking amazing. We were both into it. She came. And then, the next thing I knew, she was grabbing her purse and her shoes and calling an Uber like my house was on fire.”
“And she hasn’t called you?”
I shook my head.
“Have you called her?”
“Should I? I don’t want to be the creep here. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. That’s why I’m asking for advice.”
Katie watched the people going by on the beach, the waves crashing in. She gave my problem serious thought, because she was a good person. “I dated a girl once,” she said finally. “She’d spent her teens and the first half of her twenties dating men, because she thought she was supposed to. Then she finally figured out who she was. She told me that when she started having sex with women, it scared the shit out of her. Not because she thought it was wrong, but because until then, she hadn’t known what sex was supposed to feel like. She had finally started doing it right, after years of doing it wrong—at least, wrong for her.”
“I don’t follow,” I said. “Either you’re saying that the woman I met has been living as a lesbian until she met me, or her problem is that I’m too good at sex. Though to be honest, I’m not gonna argue the second one.”
Katie shook her head. “I’m saying that sex and intimacy are two different things. Your girl may know sex, but it could have been the intimacy that freaked her out.”
My girl. Emma Riley certainly wasn’t my girl—she’d taken off and hadn’t called me again. But whatever had happened between us was unfinished. It felt like a conversation that had been stopped mid-sentence.
“I don’t do intimacy,” I reminded Katie.
“Noah Pearson, the infamous man-slut.” Katie’s voice was dry, disbelieving. “Or so you’d like the world to believe. I’m not one of your Hollywood models, Noah. I know you better than that. And you may not do intimacy, but you did that night. Enough to freak this hot woman out and send her running.”
I scratched my jaw again. Jesus, why had I asked for advice? The whole thing felt uncomfortable, like I had ants on my skin. I didn’t like people knowing too much about me. I wanted them to see what they wanted to see—flaky playboy, man-slut, California airhead—and move on. It was fine with me that the people I met didn’t bother to go any deeper. It was better that way.
Still, I thanked Katie, packed my stuff, and got back on the Pacific Coast Highway. As I drove, I wondered if Katie was right. There had been something different about what happened between Emma and me. We’d wanted some no-strings-attached sex, yes. But we were also two people who somehow understood each other.
Or maybe that was just my imagination, and she had already forgotten about me.
If she had, maybe I deserved it.
But I wondered what would happen if she was reminded of me again.
Seven
Emma
* * *
“Emma. Emma.”
I looked up from my laptop, bringing my assistant, Natalie, into focus. “Um? What?”
Natalie’s gaze was fixed on me like a laser. She held up a piece of paper in her hand. “The agenda for the meeting, remember? The one that you asked me to come in here and go over with you.”