Chasing Forever Down (Great White Surf Saga, #1) [Wattpad Featured Story] | ✔

Chapter 16: The Brooks Brothers

Salvation! I spin around the instant I hear his voice, and in the process of grabbing A.J.'s arm to get his attention, his horse piss beer spills across the wooden floor of the deck.

"Thank God!" he says as he drops the beer can into a nearby trash bag. "I've been walking this deck all night, looking at all these skanks and idiots. About damn time you got here. C'mon."

He pulls me right back toward the steps that Linzi and I just left behind, but we don't head back into the sand. Instead, we round the house and walk out to the group of people sitting around a blazing bonfire.

"This is where the real deal people are," A.J. says. He steps over a log and motions for me to sit on it next to him. I glance around and see a few familiar faces – Hooligans. A.J. grabs a beer bottle and chugs a fourth of it.

Kale walks around from the fire and sits on the other side of me. A blue Hawaiian lei hangs around his neck. "You're kidding, right? Gonzalez? You know he ain't nothing but trouble," he says. He looks over at A.J. with this goofy smile.

"A.J.'s my best friend," I inform him. "And he hasn't been in any trouble since I've been here."

Kale wraps his arm around me and leans in to keep anyone else from hearing him. "At the rate he's going tonight, he'll be drunk and in trouble before the hour's up."

I shrug away his assumption, along with his arm, and if it wasn't for the fact that he's actually quite charming, I'd have ruled him off as a creeper the first day I met him. His face runs pale, and before I can apologize for possibly offending him, I follow his gaze and see the Hooligan jackass himself – Dominic.

And he's looking at me.

"You really need to keep better company," he says, like it's any of his business who I'm friends with. "A.J. was bad enough, but Kale too? Really?"

He's had a few too many drinks, not that it really matters in his case. I lock my arm with A.J.'s just in case he's thinking of doing something stupid. Dominic has a good five inches and probably twenty pounds of muscle on A.J. But I think A.J. could take him. Still – it's not a fight I want to witness. I've already seen one Hooligan brawl. I don't want to see A.J. on the opposing side.

Dominic stumbles a little, and I secretly wish he'd tumble ass first into the fire then run off to the ocean like a drunken firefly. He so doesn't deserve a sponsorship from anyone, especially Great White Surf. Shark would die a second death if he knew his store was at risk of being dragged through Horn Island's muddy shoreline by this guy.

"I need another beer," Dominic mutters.

He reaches toward A.J.'s half-empty bottle. A.J. swings it back, slinging beer across the sand and himself, and poses like he's about to score a winning homerun.

"I will bust this over your head just like last time, motherfucker," A.J. says as clearly as the Crescent Cove waves wash over the sand.

Tension swallows our breathing air for a moment, then releases a deep breath when Dominic sits with some girls on the other side of the fire. I start to tell A.J. that we should go back inside, but Topher interrupts, telling us to come back on deck. He talks with his hands, and that blue bottle of Ocean Blast Energy sloshes with his every movement. I've yet to see another person in the cove drinking that stuff. I've rarely seen Topher without it. And he definitely doesn't need it.

A local punk rock band, Sapphires and Sunsets, is in the middle of introductions when we walk back up the wooden steps. Summer Snow Alex is on bass, and I recognize the lead singer as Jace, the Hooligan who so profoundly stated "Fuck Dominic!" regarding Kale's honorary status.