Hey everyone! Today on Authors Tell all I have Amy Evans here with a skinny dipping scene with characters from CLICKS! A YA version of this scene appears in the book. :)
Diving
through moonlit waves, we rushed beyond the break to where the clicks and
whistles sounded loudest. The beach had been
closed for too long for my liking and I’d felt desperate to swim with the
dolphins again. We paused to get our bearings when I felt a bump on my hip that
made me jump.
I
laughed and shot water at Blake, sure it was he who had nudged me. But he was
too far to reach. He
splashed back and I felt the bump again.
Looking
down, I saw the bright dolphin with the albino skin. She’d come to find us, and
brought the large grey one that we’d seen last week. I could tell who he was because of the zigzag
scar on his dorsal fin.
The dolphins were in the best mood. They made bubbles big enough for us to swim
through. They bumped us together until
we kissed, and joined us on surface, flipping and jumping high every time we needed air. As we swam further from land, we found more
of the pod and began swimming faster and further out to sea.
Underwater, the differences between
various dolphins looked more obvious to me:
their slight distinctions in color and shape, their swimming styles,
distinct personalities. In
the beginning, I had held on to her fins to cover the long distances. Then I caught her slipstream like I had on
First Night, but this time I remembered to come up for air when I needed to.
When
we got so far that I couldn’t see the lights on land, I began to worry. As if
she knew how I was feeling, she made some noises, slipped underwater, and
started swimming back toward land. Blake and the dolphin he’d been swimming
with did the same thing.
Fifty
feet from land, she stopped suddenly, and I came up to breathe. Blake did the
same thing. We weren’t actually close
to Pinhold proper, but by the old
lighthouse. Built on a rocky ledge, it had been part of the Island until an
earthquake had pulled it away.
“I’ve
never been over here,” I said, almost reverently, surprised that breathing came
easy even after such a fast swim.
“Me,
either,” Blake said, shaking his head. “And I have tried,” he admitted.
Adamantly off limits, the riptides surrounding it were the worst around
Pinhold. Until this summer, the last two drowning deaths had happened right
there.
My
dolphin nudged me deeper into the water and led me closer to the structure,
stopping in front of what looked like a door. Blake caught my eye and motioned
that he saw it, too. He pointed to a small porthole window and we swam over
that way. We surfaced, took huge breaths and dunked under the
water. The space inside was filled with
small, blinking lights. Nothing moved, which came as a bit of a relief. Blake swam back toward the door and gave a
tug on the handle. Immediately, the
water flooded with light and an alarm blasted.
My
dolphin shook her head, as if trying to shut the noise out. Even with the
visible discomfort, she did not swim
away. She pushed in between Blake and me
and rubbed her fins against us until we got the hint. When we each grabbed one,
she took off at a terrifying speed, leaving the male dolphin at the lighthouse
as a look out.
In
a furious flash of fins and waves, Blake and I found landed ten feet from my
dock, treading water in the bay, out of breath.
Blake and the dolphin both appeared affected
as well. It felt like we’d just escaped
from a crime scene.
My
dolphin had saved me again and I felt the connection between us growing
stronger even as I watched her swim away.
My feelings for Blake had expanded exponentially as well.
“I’d
doubt my sanity right now if you were not with me,” I said, looking over at
him.
“I
still can’t believe we found that. It looked like some sort of lab to me,”
Blake said. I nodded in agreement.
“It
figures the Doc had a secret lair underwater,” I said, giggling a little bit. I
knew we needed to sort out what we had seen, but at the moment my brain
couldn’t handle it. On emotional and physical overload, I needed something to
ground me. I moved towards Blake,
desperate to touch him. Right then, nothing else was important.
His dark clothes hid nothing. Soaking wet, his black tee clung to every
muscle in his arms and chest. My own
tank and shorts clung to me like a wetsuit.
Every nerve in my body felt exposed between the tight fabric and Blake’s
heated gaze.
Fear
and flight had turned into a need for more adrenaline, a need to see and feel
more of Blake.
“Dare me?” I asked, pulling up the edge
of my tank. He ripped of his shirt in a flash of black and nodded at me.
“Definitely,” he said, watching, as I
slowly took off everything I had on top. He bit his lip, and put a hand on the
band of his board shorts, raising the stakes again.
I nodded. “On three,” I said, counting slowly. In the
exact same instant, we both took off our bottoms and threw our clothes on the
dock. We swam towards each other so fast that a big wave that crashed around us
as my lips finally met his. The breeze
and water couldn’t cool my heated skin; the only thing that brought any relief
was moving against him. I wrapped my legs around his waist seeking friction,
connection, just simply more of him. I knew he had enough strength and skill to
hold us both up. So I let him, and forgot about everything else.
Clicks – When you just know.
Born and bred to win, Cami’s family expects her to join a secret society called The Guard, marry one of the two identical twin boys next door, and stay on Pinhold Island for the rest of her life. But she has other plans: work beach patrol, win the Surf Carnival and get a sponsor so that she can leave Pinhold to compete in international surf rescue competitions and see the world.
Home to epic waves, black sand beaches, and the world-famous Surf Carnival, Pinhold Island is regularly voted the top surf spot in the country. People come from all over the world to ride the waves or just relax in the natural beauty and rejuvenating water. While visitors are jealous of the few hundred people who get to live there, sixteen year old Cami feels stifled and trapped by her small community and her family's expectations. Thanks to the intense link she shares with her twin brother Mica, she can't even be alone with her thoughts. As decedents of the ten families who originally settled on Pinhold, Cami and Mica are part of a new generation of extreme surf lifeguards who are expected to earn invitations into The Guard.
But a seemingly small injury knocks her out of the first event and turns her summer upside down. It's suddenly impossible for Cami to resist the magnetic attraction to Blake, one of the twins next door; the one she's never been interested in. Just as the Surf Carnival competition starts to heat up, the best swimmers start to drown. Pulled to the ocean floor, they're found barely alive , stuck in unexplainable comas. When Mica goes down too, Cami can no longer wait for those in charge to figure out how to help him. To save the lives of her brother and their friends, Cami must ignore what she sees and what she's told, and instead must learn to trust the clicks, her instincts, that help her find the truth in heart even when it goes against everything her brain thinks it knows.
Amy Evans is a wife, mother, ocean lover and storyteller. She's created multi-platform mobile apps, social media games, and interactive story worlds for HIPnTASTY, a company she co-founded in 2001. She loves dolphins, aliens and pugs, and sometimes writes for so long they all look like the same thing. Clicks is her debut novel about instincts, a Surf Carnival, an endless summer and the hottest beach patrol on the California coast. Clicks are truths you can feel, the sounds that the universe makes when it warns you that your world is about to change forever. If you listen to them, you get on the wave before it crests; control your path, surf into your destiny. If you ignore them, the wave crashes around you, and you try desperately not to drown.
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