I give him the stink eye.
“It’s called tough love.”
“Tough love? Tough shit is more like it. Fine, you win.”
“You and Pac set for Paris 33-O?” I ask. “Flights? Transfers to Hossegor?”
“Affirmative. You think I’d miss you standing on the podium, golden girl?”
And with a cheek peck, I head to the back gate to catch the 7:30 p.m. half-hour hop to L.A. for my 10:00 p.m. to Sydney.
“Steak at Nate’s when you get back,” Jax says as I reach the back gate. I turn, lock my arms out and up over my head, executing a semaphore signal for OK before I blow him a kiss and vamoose.
When I drive up the coastal road past the manicured front yards and mission-style homes to my rental, the vipery face of Nixon’s Ferrari is there to greet me. Behind the sloping windshield, Nixon is all sunglasses and droopy curls. I pull up next to him, front grills in opposite directions, the way cops do on patrol when they want to talk face-to-face. Nixon rolls down his window and smiles. The Ferrari rides so low that I have to talk down to him, my eyes at such an angle that I see a gift in the passenger seat and the skulls and rainbows on his Everything’s Shitty brand T-shirt.
“Didn’t expect to see you here,” I say, caught off guard but also a bit delighted.
“Hope I’m not creeping you out,” he says, his face ringing with apologetic ticks, “but my mobile said you were on your way home. I have something for you, and you said you’d be gone for a while, so . . .”
I thought I turned that app off, I say to myself.
“Is it a problem? I can go, really. I’m sorry.”
“No. It’s totally cool.”
Nixon plucks a small turquoise box off the dash, reaches through his window, and hands it up to me.
“You forgot this,” he says.
I know what’s inside: the itsy-bitsy sterling pineapple charm Penelope gave to the bridesmaids to honor her Hawaii honeymoon.
“Duh,” I say. “I am such a goof. I don’t know how I forgot it—twice. Thank you so much.”
Nixon rests his skinny arm up on the car’s doorsill in the cocky manner of a guy on the make, but he’s too innocent to pull it off with any kind of attitude.
“Sydney, huh?” he says, big and puffed-up.
“Yeah. Have to get an Uber soon.”
Nixon’s apprehensive when I say this, and his arm slips away like he’s putting me out.
“I better run then.”
“No, it’s cool,” I say, “I’ve got another few minutes.”
Nixon reaches across to the passenger seat.
“This is for you,” he says, handing me a thin, gift-wrapped package with birthday balloons and a fat red ribbon.
“But my birthday’s in March.”
“Yeah, sorry. It was the only paper I could find in the house. Hope that’s cool.”
I unravel the ribbon and swipe my finger under the paper to pop the tape.
Even before I flip the book over I can tell it’s used, its pages yellowy at the edges, the back cover dog-eared. I’m both curious and mildly amused that he would give me a secondhand book as a gift. Tiger Force, Ocean Calm: The Healing Secrets of Ki-Kou Chinese Breathing Techniques, the title reads. On the cover is a 1940s-ish woodblock illustration of a tiger sitting on a cliff overlooking the ocean.
“Sorry to go old-school,” Nixon says. “But it’s impossible to get on an e-reader. Not that you need it or anything—but it’s good to consult, you know, on those days when you want an extra edge. It helped me recenter my chi.”
“A lot of people are buying paper books lately,” I say, paging through. “There’s something kind of charming about them, like how the pages feel as they flicker against my thumb.”
When I demonstrate this, pages part, and I find a dried wildflower in the book’s crease, its petals still holding brilliant violets and blues.
“Did this come with it?”
“No,” Nixon says. “That was my idea. It’s a Canterbury Bell. When I was little, my mom, Pen, and I would hike the Anza-Borrego hills and collect them during the spring bloom. We stuck tons in my dad’s law books. They work great because they’re really thick and heavy.”
I know his father is a lawyer, and the thought of it brings me back to my own legal issues, so as Nixon talks, I only half hear him.
“He complains to my mom about them when he wants to reference a case and they fall out onto the floor.”
I catch myself and refocus.
“Well, wow,” I say. “It’s really beautiful.”
“The flower is one I definitely picked. Just so you know.”
“That’s so thoughtful. I mean both the book and the flower.”
“So you like it?”
“Of course,” I say with a big thumbs-up.
Nixon smiles the way a child does after parental praise, his teeth glinting in the sun, and returns the gesture.
“I better let you go. Super luck Down Under. Hope your training goes aces.”
“Thanks. And I’ll be sure to read up on these breathing techniques on the plane—fourteen and a half hours. Oh my God.”
“Just so you know, there’s a rumor that Master Li Tsu Zhang, the book’s author, is going to be on Bobby Flay’s talk show. So learn the techniques now, because the competition could get wind of it, and then . . .”
I smile.
“Thanks for the heads-up.”
The sun is now low, casting skinny shadows across the asphalt from the towering palms. With a push of his fingertip, Nixon fires up his Ferrari and gooses the gas so all its four-hundred-horse sexy squeals above the engine’s throaty growl. He rolls off, his car purring and glimmering like an alien spacecraft, and slips past the mission-style homes. Half a minute later, he reaches the road’s bend and slips away. After he disappears, I realize a couple of things: beneath that mop of curls and spin-the-bottle smile, deep inside his skinny body, there’s a big heart waiting to get out, and if my sixth sense is correct, he’s got a crush going on, which at some point I’ll have to deal with.
13
Call it intuition, a twitch in my bones, but I have a funny feeling about this trip. A whole lot of bad juju is about, and if yesterday’s fatal attack is any indication, the next few weeks are going to be—pardon my French—a 3-D shit show.
Just a few hours off the plane, and I’m slogging three meters underwater. I feel as if my lungs will burst and I’ll drop the thirty-pound bumper plate cleaved to my boobs before I make it the full fifty meters to the pool’s opposite end. This is Bondi Icebergs, a swim club with a white-walled ocean pool built on top of the shoreline rocks at the south end of Bondi Beach. Pressure builds in my throat while sixty-seven-degree ocean waves charge against the pool’s outer face and rain down on me, bristling across the water’s surface in rhythmic sheets. Swimmers on their daily routines ply the lanes next to me. I follow the black lane lines and part a school of minnows tossed in from the ocean, the balls of my feet scraping against the sandpapery bottom. Soon the pool’s back wall comes into focus, and my ears pick up a muddy underwater voice saying, You got it—! When I reach the end, I drop the weight and dart to the surface,