“Yeah, but that doesn’t always mean it’ll happen,” observed Bob, shaking his head but smiling, “at least, not lately.”
The setting sun was painting a picture-perfect end to the day in pink and azure clouds hanging high in the sky. We bobbed around in the water for a bit in silence, and then another one of the Great Whites slid silently past. It was time to get in.
“I guess that’s fair,” I replied. “Work has just been such a grind lately.”
We both leaned forward and began a lazy paddle back to the beach.
“I’m sure it has been. Well at least you look more relaxed today.”
It was true. After my talk with Jimmy I could finally see a way out, perhaps even a means to really break through. It would require a huge amount of work, but at least I could see a crack of opportunity to crawl through.
Bob, slightly ahead of me now, smiled back at me. I smiled at him too, and his grin widened.
“See you on the beach!” he called out and then turned abruptly. I was wondering what the heck he was smiling about when my board suddenly angled up, spilling me forward. In my daydreaming, I’d lost track of my water-sense.
“Thanks a…” was all I managed to get out before I swallowed a big mouthful of foamy saltwater and my world crashed into a watery tumult as a large wave broke over me.
Surfing at the end of the day had been legendary. The coming storms out in the Pacific had generated amazing incoming swells, and we’d spent the late afternoon riding twenty foot monsters to the delight of the crowds watching from the beach.
Bob had picked up a few female tourists, and taken them out for some tandem surfing, a sport he had almost single handedly resuscitated. We’d only just managed to disentangle ourselves from them by the end of the day, after I’d made it clear I wanted to make it a boys’ night out.
Darkness had fallen as we sat at a tiki–hut beach bar under an awning of palms fringing the powdery sands of the beach. Bob and Sid were already stoned, and I was well into my sixth beer, a large mouthful of which I had just spat out, projectile fashion, trying to hopelessly contain a burst of laughter.
An elderly woman, obviously a tourist, was walking past us as we slouched on our stools against the bar. Her breasts were undulating back and forth near her knees, complemented by a grotesquely protruding rear end, both spilling out of her modest bikini as they swung back and forth in a counterbalancing rhythm.
Sid had started up a new reality skin he’d created called Droopy. It grossly magnified the physical characteristics of women we looked at, scaled by the intensity of their attention towards us.
He’d just pointed out this new victim who was making her way towards the bar, and she had given us such a scowl that her tits had literally mushroomed out of her chest to bounce off the beach.
“Jesus, Sid, you’re killing me!” I choked out, wiping spittle from my mouth and desperately averting my eyes from the glare of the scowling matriarch.
She just made things that much worse, and was practically engulfed by her now gargantuanly distended mammary glands as she slowly dragged her expanding bottom through the sand.
“It’s the blob!” screeched Vicious, pointing with eyes wide in mock fear. “Run! Run away now!”
To make his point, Vicious ran helter-skelter into the jungle behind the bar.
I doubled over, howling with laughter and just not caring. The swollen, rolling subject of our consideration had now turned sharply on her heel, and was slugging off through the sand away from us, apparently not needing a drink anymore. As she retreated, she slowly returned to normal proportions.
“Oh,” I gasped, rubbing the tears from my eyes, giggling, “we should do this more often.”
“We do this every day, son. What you mean is,
Vicious returned to the bar, now that the coast was clear. He sat back down on his stool in his punkish best, with his black jeans rolled up to his knobby knees, sporting a ripped t–shirt, his eternally spiked black hair contrasting nicely with his pasty white complexion. The rest of us comfortably lounged in our swim shorts. Sid eyed me merrily, and then spat the remainder of a mouthful of beer onto me and laughed.
We all laughed.
“William!” someone screeched into my emergency audio channel.
Wally popped in beside me. “You’d better take this right away, she’s pissed.”
He took control of my body, and I detached quickly to respond to Brigitte.
“Yes my splinter winky?” I answered, my face radiating innocence as I dropped into my workspace to take the call. She stood scowling in front of me.
“William, I am working late finishing some interviews, and all of a sudden, my interviewee’s breasts start swelling and spilling out onto the table, which is totally distracting and embarrassing.”
Oh shoot, I had forgotten we were sharing realities.
“Ah geez, sorry about that, I was just having a little fun with the boys…” I started to say.
“You’re drunk,” she stated incriminatingly, “and you guys are pigs.”
“…come on…”
“Cochon!” she added, shaking her head.
“Brigitte, please,” I said defensively, “I’m only sharing realities because you asked. This isn’t a big deal…”
“William,” she cut in, “Willy…”
She paused, looking sadly at the floor. I waited.
“You know, I have barely seen you in weeks, months even,” she continued, “and you can’t even take the time to have breakfast with me, and here you are off with…ah…ca fait rien.”
I switched off my end of the shared reality, frustrated.
I hadn’t seen the boys in weeks, and I’d been doing my best to spend any spare time I had with Brigitte. It wasn’t my fault I needed to focus more and more on my moonlighting work. My early gains had quickly been gobbled up after Nancy had restricted my splinter limit, and my bank account was now fast turning into a blank account.
I felt trapped.
We fell into a mutually accusatory silence.
“Willy, I think we need to talk,” she said after studying me.
“I think so too,” was all I replied.
While Brigitte finished up with work, I flitted back to the boys. My mood was ruined, however, so I begged off and tried going back to work for a bit to lose myself.
Soon enough, Brigitte pinged me and appeared briefly in my workspace. Taking a resigned look around at what had replaced her, she took my hand and flittered us off to a quiet corner of the beach for our talk.
The day had settled into a heartbreakingly beautiful evening, and a crescent moonrise was casting a sparkling carpet over inky seas. Waves gently caressed the shore, and she held my hand tightly in hers, walking me through the wet sand at the water’s edge. We slowly left a trail of footprints behind us.
“Willy,” she pleaded, “my heart is breaking, Willy. I love you, but I can’t do this anymore. Please, let’s sit down and fix this. Just tell me what you need.”
“Brigitte, I love you too, but… I just don’t feel like we share the same goals anymore,” I replied. “I need to focus on my business right now.”
And then the pause, that hurtful space of silence between words that shifted worlds.
“Look, I don’t want to hurt you. I think the best thing could be for us to separate for a while so I can figure this out.”
She looked into my eyes while the tears welled in hers. Her feet left the ground, and she floated in front of me as I walked, holding both my hands now. Cast in the soft monochromatic moonlight, she hovered like a ghost before me.
“Willy,” she sobbed, “you want me to leave you?”
I can’t believe that I did it, but I slowly started to nod, looking steadily into her eyes.
Catching her breath sharply, she looked away, her body convulsing as she tried to stop the coming sobs. She
