Act II of Nyra’s Journey
New Adult Romance
Date Published: November 2022
Publisher: PhoenixPhyre
He’s nothing like her hopeful dream—and everything she
wants.
Nyra’s transition from college grad scrambling for her first career
job to full independence is as on track as it can be, these days. With her
new marketing job is going well, even if she’s still living at
home,Nyra’s pretty sure the light at the end of the tunnel is not an
onrushing train.
Still, she gets bored, sometimes. A whimsical decision to take up surfing
brings her together with Tai Abrega, a professional surfer and shaper so
delicious Nyra’s imagination hasn’t even gotten around to
fantasizing about a man like him, yet. Surfing awakens a latent, mystical
connection with the sea along with a driven passion for the man
himself.
But embracing one possibility often demands abandoning another. How can
Nyra fit Tai and the seductive siren song of freedom into her
“safer” vision of perfect? Can she blend her conventional world
with his freespirited lifestyle, or is she doomed to disappointment and
heartbreak? New Adult fans of It Ends with Us and Finding Perfect are sure
to enjoy this upbeat tale of hope.
The Year of Maybe Act II of Nyra’s Journey continues the story begun
in Best-Case Scenario.
EXCERPT
The darkness inside is almost a physical thing as Tai opens the back door to the shop. Nyra steps in as artificial dawn ripples down from the overhead lights. She’s alone with him now, in his mysterious, secret world.
A row of perhaps three dozen finished surfboards wrapped in plastic fill a rack on the left wall, just inside the door. Brand new, shiny—and ready for shipping. The wall on her right is occupied by a haphazard jumble of dull, clunky white things, faintly reminiscent of surfboards, but…
“Blanks,” Tai explains, following her eyes. “That’s what surfboards look like before they grow up to become surfboards.” He picks through them, selecting one about seven feet long. “We’ll use this one.”
She gets it now. The energy she feels is Tai’s anticipation. He’s excited. Without asking or needing to know anything more about him, she knows beyond a whisker of doubt that he was born to do this. Tai flips the lights on in the shaping room and drops the blank on a padded, two-legged stand. It’s set in concrete, obviously constructed for shaping delicate blanks into surfboards. He picks up two dust masks, donning one, handing the other to Nyra.
“If you don’t mind, stand there.” Tai points at the doorway. He plugs his planer into an outlet and tests the connection with a couple quick flicks of the trigger. The symphony of the planer blade biting into urethane foam is a plaintive scream spawning an excited twist in her gut and the corners of her lips curl up beneath her mask as her heart beats faster. An act of pure creation—and a sense of somehow being part of it.
Foam dust pours from the diverter, coating Tai’s arm in urethane snow as he walks the length of the blank. He reverses direction in fluid, graceful movements. It’s like his dance with the waves, Nyra thinks. Like this morning, as he carved up Windansea. Only now it’s like he’s making love to the blank, creating an almost living thing.
This unfamiliar dance, this symphony she’s never heard before, seeps into her blood. Arousing, sensual—almost sexual. They’d cut their surf session short, as Nyra’s intimidation became evident, but mostly because Tai had to shape another board. Nyra has tagged along, ostensibly to see how surfboards are made.
After one full pass over the bottom of the blank, Tai sets the planer down on a shelf built into the wall of the shaping room. “That removes the cure crust,” he explains, his voice muffled through his dust mask. “Fortunately, blanks today come out of the mold so close to tolerance, it only takes one pass with the planer. But for this client, I need to add a little more tail rocker.”
“Tail rocker?”
Tai holds the blank up so Nyra’s viewing it from the side. His finger skims the freshly exposed foam. “See the curve along the bottom?”
Nyra nods, suppressing a shiver as she imagines his finger skimming the exposed skin of her neck, rather than the blank he’s shaping.
“That’s called rocker. Rocker and vee combine to determine how maneuverable the board is, how well it paddles, and how fast it is down the line. The guy I’m shaping for today is one of our team riders and he likes extra tail rocker and vee in the last couple feet of his boards for maneuverability.”
“Vee?”
“I’ll show you later,” Tai promises. He flips the board over on the padded shaping stand, retrieves his planer from the bench, and thumbs the trigger to start on the deck.
Nyra slips two fingers under her dust mask to rub her nose. Itchy. Even here by the door, little flecks of pristine white foam are already dusting her arm like snow. It makes her skin look darker. Probably in my hair too, she guesses.
The faded board shorts and sleeveless t-shirt Tai’s wearing leave powerful legs and arms exposed, a study of sinewy, rippling movement. Not for the first time, she wonders if that’s his entire wardrobe. He can pull it off if anyone can.
As Nyra watches him work, curiosity and sensuality get tangled up in her head. When Tai uses the template to draw the outline of the board on the blank, the subdued whisper of pencil evokes another shiver. Immersed in his world, experiencing him in his element—craftsmanship, blended with artistry.
For the first time, Nyra makes the connection between the subliminal sexuality of the sea, surfing, and surfboards. It’s getting warm in here, she thinks. The August sun beating down on the roof?
Tai removes the excess foam from the blank with a crosscut handsaw, and Nyra’s eyes pinball between what he’s doing and how he looks doing it. There’s a delicious guilty joy to the focused attention she feels. Watching the play of muscles beneath his skin, she imagines using the excuse of brushing the foam from his arms as cover for touching him—for caressing him.
The back door to the shop opens abruptly, bathing Nyra in midmorning sunlight. A man she doesn’t know is backlit in the doorway, looking directly at her.
“You in here, Tai?” he calls.
Tai joins her in the doorway and waves with the SureForm he’s using to true up the outline of the board he’s just cut out. “Hey, Pepper. I’d like you to meet Nyra.”
An unruly tangle of hair streaked with gray and a weathered face. Pepper looks like he’s spent the last thirty years in a pickle barrel. The age in his face isn’t mirrored in his frame. He’s lean, strong and moves with graceful, almost feline movements.
“Howzit, Nyra?”
“Hi, Pepper.” Nyra pushes her dust mask down and takes the hand he offers. It’s work-rough, but the grip is gentle, almost loving. “I hope I’m not intruding.”
He shakes his head. “Nah. Welcome to my shop. Come to watch Tai shape?”
Nyra nods. “He’s teaching me to surf this summer, and I was…curious.”
Pepper’s lips twist in a knowing smile. “Good. You go out today?”
“For a while,” Nyra says. “A little big for me.”
“Plenty to work with,” he agrees. He turns to Tai. “Mattie’s new stick?”
“Yeah,” Tai says. He waves at the half-finished blank, now recognizably a surfboard in the rough.
Pepper walks into the shaping room and raises the tail off the shaping stand about a foot, looking down the curve of the outline on both sides. “Sano. Be ready for the airbrushing today?”
“Yeah. I’ll let you know.”
“Perfect. I’m going to go ahead and open the shop.” It’s early, but…” He smiles, shrugs, and leaves them alone.
Tai pulls his dust mask back up and winks at Nyra and switches from fluorescent white light to UVA, then flips the blank deck up.
Three more passes down both sides, and he’s cut three rail bevels into the foam with his planer. He flips the board back over, adjusts the depth of his planer blade, and takes a couple less aggressive passes in the tail.
“Is that the tail rocker you were talking about?”
“Yep. And the vee.” Tai picks up a straight edge and lays it at right angles to the stringer running down the center of the board. “See how the bottom angles just a little from the middle to the outside edge? That’s called vee. Makes the board easier to turn.”
Tai switches to a padded sanding block. Long, loving passes, more caress than anything take down the uneven lines left by the planer. That’s why the black light! she realizes. The flaws stand out better.
The longer she watches Tai work, the more sensual—okay, sexual—it all feels to her. Imagining Tai giving her that same focused attention leaves her underarms damp and her skin feeling prickly. The foam dust, she thinks. Maybe…
“I’m shaping this one for the Islands,” Tai tells her, breaking the silence. “It’ll be perfect for V-land and Rocky Point.”
“You shape for specific breaks?”
“Not usually. But for team riders?” He shrugs. “Mattie has some very specific ideas about how his boards should work.”
“So Pepper has a team, I guess. And Mattie is one of them?”
Tai nods and pushes his dust mask up for a swig from the water bottle he brought with him. He offers her a sip, and she takes it, her fingers caressing his as she takes the bottle from him. Their eyes meet and stick as she hands it back.
He pulls his mask back down and picks up the sanding block. In another fifteen minutes, he’s finished blending the rail bands around the deck into the rails. He turns the board this way and that, sighting down from the nose.
Another hour transforms the blank into a finished shape, ready for airbrushing, a glass job, and fins. Resting deck up on the shaping stand, it screams speed.
As Tai sweeps up most of the foam dust toward the back of the shaping room, Nyra studies the board he’s shaped. “So, that’s how boards are made?”
Tai shakes his head and leans the broom into the corner. “Not most of ‘em, anymore. Machines shape most of them to much finer tolerances than can be achieved by hand, other than finish sanding.”
“Then why—”
“Shape by hand?” Tai finishes for her.
Nyra nods.
“There’ll always be a demand for hand-shaped boards,” Tai says. “Purists love ‘em, for starters. And we mostly learn what works by tinkering with existing shapes, changing one element at a time, then testing them out in the surf.”
“Couldn’t you do that faster by computer?”
Tai laughs. “Maybe. But developing software to run the simulations and manage all the infinite variables?” He shakes his head. “And think about it. The way each surfer rides is as unique as their fingerprint. Like each wave we ride, each surfer is one of a kind.”
Nyra feels a ripple of sensation start just below her heart and shiver its way through her body. God, I want him!
About the Author
Dirk’s path to authorship wasn’t quite an accident, but almost.
Through his two previous careers, first as a Marine officer and subsequently
as a corporate trainer, Dirk started way more stories than he
finished.
But when his employer filed for Chapter 11 in the backwash of the 2008
financial melt-down, he found himself cordially invited to leave and not
return. Out of work and excuses, he focused on finishing his first novel,
West of Tomorrow, while looking for another career position.
Since then, Dirk has written and published Best-Case Scenario, Act I of
Nyra’s Journey a collection of short fiction entitled, Through the
Windshield as well as Tier Zero and Eryinath-5, The Dancer Nebula, Vols. I
& II of the Knolan Cycle.
The Year of Maybe, sequel to Best Case Scenario, is due out in Novemeber
2022.
Dirk also contributes to Medium, blogs on his website, and will accept
editing work, by special request. Besides his work as a writer, he is an
accomplished snow skier, woodworker, photographer and a compulsive gym
rat.
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