“People that are cool don’t really need to play cool, do they?”

Jay was used to women that hung around and waited for him, women that made it clear they were available, women that laughed at his jokes even if they weren’t funny. He was not used to women like Lara.

“All right,” he said, “I get your point. Tell me. If I’m cool, what do I say next?”

“I guess, next you ask me if I’m doing anything right now,” she said. “And then I tell you I’m not. And you ask if I want to go finish your joint, which you clearly have because you’re high and smell like bud.”

Jay laughed, caught. “Are you doing anything right now?”

“No.”

“Do you want to go somewhere and finish my joint? I’m high and I smell like bud.”

Lara laughed. “Let’s go to my place.”

And so they did. Lara lived in a studio apartment in a complex a quarter of a mile inland at the foot of the mountains. Her place had a view of the water on a clear night. The two of them stood on her tiny balcony, nestled between two houseplants, sharing a beer and a roach, and looking at the moon over the sea.

When Lara said, apropos of absolutely nothing, “How many people have you slept with?” Jay was so disarmed he told the truth. “Seventeen.”

“Eight, for me,” she said, looking forward, toward the horizon. “Although, I guess it kind of depends on what we are defining as sex.”

He was surprised by her. Where was the shyness? The coyness? Jay was smart enough to know that these traits weren’t necessarily natural for women, but he was also bright enough to know that they were learned. That most women knew they were supposed to perform them as a form of social contract. But Lara wasn’t going to do that.

“Let’s say we define it as an orgasm,” Jay said.

Lara laughed at him. Actually laughed at him. “Well, then, three,” she said, breathing out the smoke of the joint, passing it back to Jay. “Men don’t give women as many orgasms as they think they do.”

“I guarantee I would give you one,” he said, as he put the joint to his lips.

This time she didn’t laugh. She looked at him, considered him. “What makes you so sure I’d let you?”

He smiled and then pulled back, moving away from her, letting her feel his absence. “Look, if you don’t want to feel an orgasm that starts in your toes and shakes your whole body, it’s no skin off my back.”

“Oh, this is impressive, actually,” Lara said, playing with the label on the beer bottle. “How you’ve managed to make sleeping with me seem like a favor. Let’s be explicitly clear about something, Riva. You wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t interested. But you’re lucky I’m interested. It’s not the other way around. I don’t care who your daddy is.”

Jay figured it was then. That moment. When he fell in love with her. But there were other moments, too, that night. Moments it could have been.

Did he fall in love with her when she took her clothes off right there on the balcony? Maybe it was when she touched his face, and she looked directly into his eyes, and moved on top of him.

Maybe he fell for her as they interlocked themselves together, legs pretzeled, bodies pulled tight until there was no space left between them. They moved together like they knew exactly what they were doing. No fumbles, no mistakes, no awkward moments. And Jay thought, maybe that was love.

Or maybe he fell in love with her later, when it was pitch dark out, and the two of them were pretending to be asleep but each knew the other one was also awake. She had lain there bare, no gesture toward covering up. And her skin was the only thing he could see in the dark.

It was then that he took a deep breath and, for the first time, told someone else his big new secret. The one that was eating him alive.

“I was just diagnosed with a heart problem,” he said to her. “It’s called dilated cardiomyopathy.”

This was the first time he’d ever said the phrase out loud since he’d heard it from the doctor the week before. It sounded so strange coming out of his mouth that he wondered if he’d mispronounced it. The word repeated, over and over in his mind, until it sounded like nonsense. That couldn’t be right, could it? Cardiomyopathy? But it was. He’d pronounced it just like the doctor had.

He’d been having chest pains for weeks. He’d noticed them starting shortly after he got thrown off his board and then caught in a two-wave hold down in Baja. He’d been underwater so long he thought he might die. He struggled and struggled against the current, trying to decipher up from down. He pushed himself against the weight of the water, desperate to reach the sky. But he just kept tumbling and tumbling, pulled by the riptide. And suddenly, he broke through the surface and there it was: air.

Ever since, these pains appeared from time to time, as a tightening that took him by surprise, arriving out of nowhere and stunning him silent and then passing on, leaving as quickly as they came.

The doctor wasn’t sure what was causing them until suddenly the doctor became very sure indeed.

Lara put her hand on his chest, moved her warm body closer to his, and said, “What does that mean?”

It meant that Jay’s left ventricle had been weakened and would not always function the way it should. It meant that anything that might cause overexertion and adrenaline, especially something like being thrown underwater, was no longer in his best interest. Putting his heart into overdrive by almost drowning had triggered it, but the underlying condition was hereditary, given to him by all of the people who came before him, lying in wait in his blood.

Jay spared Lara any more of the details, but told her the worst part. “I should stop surfing. It could kill me.” His glory, his money, his partnership with his brother … One little defect in his body would take it all.

But on hearing that, Lara said, “OK, so you’ll find something else to be.” She had made it seem so simple.

Yes, Jay thought, that was when he’d fallen in love with her. When she made what had felt like a fatal blow seem easily overcome. When she’d cracked open his bleak future and shown him the light shining in.

When Jay woke up the next morning, he’d found a note from Lara saying that she’d had to go to work. He didn’t have her number. Since that day, he’d been down to the Sandcastle three times, trying to find her.

• • •

“I wasn’t sure how it worked,” Lara said, handing him his chocolate cake. “With the invites, I mean.”

Jay shook his head. “No invites. It’s a pretty simple system: If you know about the party and you know where Nina’s place is, you’re invited.”

“Well, I don’t actually,” Lara said. “Know where her place is.”

“Oh,” Jay said. “Well, luckily you know me.”

He wrote down his sister’s address on a napkin and handed it to her. She took it and looked at it.

“It is OK,” she asked, nodding toward the other server, “if I bring Chad?”

She was into Chad? Jay started burning up from the inside, on the verge of humiliation and heartbreak. The drop was so long, so treacherous, when you started from this high up.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “Yeah, sure.”