by C. K. Martin
‘I’m sure you’d get bored after awhile.’
‘Well I’d love to test that theory. This view and unlimited Empanadillas and hams. I think I’d be up for that challenge.’
‘Sadly it’s a long way from my kitchen to here if you turned out to be right.’
‘You wouldn’t make the special trip, just for me?’ Kate leaned back on her elbows and grinned. The soft light of the sunset made shadows play across her face. She really was beautiful. Hayley wished she could say she wasn’t, but there was no denying it. She wanted to reach out and touch her. Thoughts of their kisses replayed in her mind. It was so unfair that her heart refused to play along with what her brain knew she must do.
‘Not even for you.’ Hayley laughed.
‘For anyone else?’ It was a deliberate question and Kate stared out over the horizon when she asked it. Hayley noticed the change in her breathing, the slight catch in the rise and fall of her chest as the words came out of her mouth. Hayley knew holding back was just as much of a struggle for her too.
‘No. No one else.’ Hayley didn’t want to lead Kate on, but she wouldn’t lie to her either. She saw the smile appear on Kate’s lips as she admitted there was no one else.
‘Not even Pablo?’ she teased with a grin.
‘Definitely not Pablo. He would eat it all in the car before we even got here. Besides, he’s a man, remember. Not exactly my kind of thing.’
‘I didn’t know if that was a definite.’
‘Really?’ Hayley was surprised. ‘Perhaps I was doing it wrong if you hadn’t worked that one out.’ The words were out of her mouth before she could think about them. A blush stole to the tops of her cheeks.
‘Oh, you were doing everything right.’ Kate let out a throaty chuckle. ‘Very right. But I don’t take anything for granted. People are all different.’
‘Well I can assure you there’s nothing too unusual about me. I’ve always been into girls. Women. Other than a few forced experiments when I was a teenager, I’ve never doubted that I was a lesbian.’
‘And everyone here knows?’
‘Probably not. Without anyone in my life, it’s kind of a moot point regardless. Pablo knows. I had to tell him because he kept trying to set me up with one of his brothers.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He was bummed because one of his sisters had just got married to a guy he didn’t like. He said I should’ve told him sooner so he could have tried to persuade her to date me instead.’
‘Oh my god,’ laughed Kate, reaching out and taking the last piece of chorizo. ‘That guy is crazy.’
‘He is. But he’s fun to have around.’ Hayley looked out and saw the sun was about to dip beneath the horizon. ‘What about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘Are you gay? Bi? Something else?’ it was the something else that worried Hayley. Not that it mattered, she reminded herself. They weren’t setting out the rules of dating here.
‘Oh, I don’t do labels,’ Kate shrugged.
‘What does that mean exactly?’ Hayley paused. She thought she’d given the full list of options to choose from.
‘Exactly that. It doesn’t feel right to me to make it a thing.’
‘But isn’t it ‘a thing’?’ Hayley felt the confusion turn to suspicion.
‘Not really,’ Kate shrugged. ‘Calling myself something, giving myself a label won’t change my emotions. It won’t change the way I feel about someone. People always try to put you in a box. The biggest part of my travels have been realising that you don’t have to be. So now, I don’t do boxes. I don’t do labels.’
It sounded, Hayley conceded, almost plausible when she put it like that. But Hayley had been around the block a time or two and had seen things for herself. As far as she was concerned, if Kate didn’t want to label herself, then she was either still full of youthful defiance or there was a chance this was a new thing for her. Or, perhaps, it meant she was just open to anything, despite her assurances that the night with Hayley had been something special.
Hayley hated the thought she might be nothing more than an experiment. A fling in a far away country that was nothing more than a story to titillate a future husband with.
No, that was unfair. She didn’t know that. Still, it made her uneasy. She decided to change the topic. ‘So will you come back here again?’
‘The parque? Probably not, unless there’s a problem with the photos when I write my article. Why, would you come back with me if I did?’
‘Wouldn’t you want to bring anyone else?’ It was her turn for a leading question and Hayley hated herself for asking it, but she needed to know. In the same way Kate had needed to know about her. She wanted, desperately, for the answer to be no.
‘No Hayley, there is no one else I’d rather be here with.’
Kate reached out and took her hand. For a second Hayley’s body froze, torn between keeping it there and pulling away. Then Kate went back to looking at the final glow of the sun as it dipped beneath the edge of the world and Hayley allowed herself to breathe again. Kate’s hand felt familiar in hers.
Hayley fought the memory as it returned. Even though she was awake, the thought was as persistent as when she drifted off to sleep. The knowledge that the soft fingers beneath hers had touched her skin. Had explored every inch of her body. Had been slick with desire as they’d moved between her thighs and deep inside her.
Hayley cleared her throat at the thought, her body a betrayal. The heat had built low in her belly, despite her promises that she wouldn’t allow herself to feel it again. She looked at the silhouette of Kate’s body from the corner of her eye. Her breathing was deep and overly controlled; was she feeling the same memory? The last of the light bounced off perfect tanned shoulders, the shadows dipping inside the hollows of her collarbone where Hayley’s tongue had once performed a dance all of its own.
Hayley forced her eyes away and back to the horizon, but not before Kate’s gaze caught and held her own.
As the day turned to dusk around them, she felt as though she was trapped between two worlds. In more ways than one.
Chapter Eight
Kate listened to the soft groan of the building as she lay in the darkness. She stared up at the ceiling, aware even of her own breathing.
The silence told her it was late. The early hours of morning at least. Sleep had escaped her.
It had been nearly ten when Hayley dropped her back at the hostel. She had invited her in, admittedly under the guise of seeing Pablo, but Hayley had declined. It had been a wonderful evening. Kate hadn’t wanted it to end. She’d been disappointed when they’d made it back to the park entrance and the gate was still unlocked as promised. She’d been looking forward to the fun of getting Hayley to climb the fence and behave recklessly for once.
Despite her refusal to come inside, she suspected Hayley didn’t want the day to end either. The two of them had sat in silence for a while, as Kate had summoned the willpower to get out of the car and walk away alone. In the darkness it was hard to see each other clearly, but the weight of words going unsaid between them meant it didn’t matter.
Kate let out a groan and hit herself on the forehead with her palm. She must be crazy.
She couldn’t remember feeling like this for such a long time. It was almost like being a teenager again and developing a crush. Except, somehow it was worse.
At least with a teenage crush, you knew where you stood. Usually somewhere on the line of never gonna happen. With Hayley, it felt like it was possible, like the two of them could have something real. But Hayley was determined to keep her distance. The one night they had spent together there had been no holding back, but since then there had been nothing but.
It felt like she didn’t know her and yet on some level, had always known her.
She was just being stupid and dramatic now, she decided, reaching out and flicking on the light. She blinked and squinted as her eyes adjusted. If sleep was going to be elusive and if Hayle
y felt like a mystery, then she should do something about it to make her less of an enigma.
Kate grabbed her phone and opened up the internet browser. She typed ‘Hayley Jones’ into the search engine and then realised how many there must be when over twenty million hits returned. She was going to have to be savvier than that.
But no matter how many times she typed in the name with another identifying term, nothing came back.
This was unusual. She was the master of the internet. Google was her bitch. Tonight, however, it was letting her down.
She switched over to Facebook, opening it in stalker mode just in case. She didn’t need to do that so much anymore. There were fewer drunken nights trying to work out what other people were doing when she wasn’t with them.
Kate began to type as she thought back to those times. Hayley thought she was young and inexperienced, that much was obvious. That because she was happy and outgoing, she could never have been through anything painful. Kate knew she could argue otherwise, but then she would have to explain things. Explaining things to others meant opening up old wounds. The wounds that felt healed until the midnight hours like this one.
After all, Kate hadn’t been entirely honest about her reasons for taking a gap year after university. The job decision had been a part of it, that had been the truth, but it certainly wasn’t the biggest part of the urge to run. She’d secured a place to do her Masters degree and knew she could defer for a year if she had to. No, it was her relationship that had made her pack her bags and leave behind everything she had ever known.
Kazue had been a year older. A fellow student, her brain full of advanced economics. They had so little in common, but they just clicked. Kate had been convinced that it was forever. She’d even decided to come out to her parents on the strength of their relationship.
But two years in, as Kate had been studying for her final undergrad exams, the cracks were beginning to show. They were both to blame, she knew that. When she was studying, she became hyper-focused. She had always been a model student. Under the most pressure in her life, she had developed an almost fanatical routine. She saw less and less of Kazue. Even when they were in the same room, it was as if she wasn’t really there.
The fights had started. Kate had told her she just needed to be patient. That the exams would be over soon and then things would be able to go back to the way they were before. Couldn’t Kazue see what a stressful time this was for her? How hard would it be to cut her some slack?
Two days before her final exam, Kate had revised late into the evening. At eleven-thirty she had realised, perhaps for the first time since exams began, that she felt alone. The confidence in her ability to pull off the final exam with the results she needed had waned. Emotionally, she felt adrift and panicked. She needed reassurance. Comfort.
She had repeatedly turned name and facts over in her head as she walked to the shared house that Kazue shared with her friends, all of them other postgrad economics students. It would be late, but she didn’t think she’d mind. After all, hadn’t Kazue been complaining for weeks now about the lack of sex? It would be just the thing to get her mind off the exam and also make it up to Kazue for being such a pain while she’d been studying.
The front door was open, as it always was until the last of the housemates went to bed. A big old Queenslander house, it creaked as she opened the door and stepped onto the hardwood floors. She waved at one of Kazue’s friends through the kitchen doorway, failing to notice the look of panic on her face as she darted up the stairs to Kazue’s room.
Despite the intervening years, Kate still felt sick at reliving the memory. It was as vivid now as the night it had happened. It was her first broken heart, and boy was it broken in an epic fashion.
She’d allowed barely a second between tapping on the door and opening. They’d been together for long enough that it never crossed her mind to wait before letting herself into the room. It was still early enough that she’d expected Kazue to be awake, even if she had gone to bed for the evening.
She was definitely already in bed. On it, at least. But she wasn’t alone.
Seconds had lasted forever in that moment. The look of horror on the other girl’s face at being interrupted was actually worse than the one Kazue wore at being discovered cheating. The girl was vaguely familiar. Kate was sure she’d seen her at the house before. Perhaps a friend of one of the other girls who lived there. She didn’t know. She didn’t care.
In that moment, she knew the life she had been planning on living, on returning to once exams were over, no longer existed. Her future changed in an instant.
Kazue had pushed herself off the other girl. ‘Kate, wait-’
‘If you tell me this isn’t what it looks like I swear to god I’ll kill you.’
‘I’m sorry, I should have told you.’
‘Told me?’ It was then the realisation that this might not be the first time hit her. That it wasn’t her neglect that had driven Kazue to this one moment of weakness. The cracks she had been willing to blame on herself, on her fanatic studying, may not have been entirely because of her. ‘How long?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Not to you perhaps. I can’t believe this is happening.’ Kate had put her hands over her ears, as if she could drown out the sound and make reality disappear with it.
‘We should talk. Let’s go downstairs okay?’ Kazue had taken her hands into her own and Kate realised that she looked absurd, pleading naked in front of her. She looked across to the girl in the bed, who at least had the decency to cover herself in Kazue’s sheets.
Sheets they’d bought together during a trip to a local market.
Kate thought she was going to be sick.
Yet the stranger in the bed was silent. There were no bitter recriminations. No shock. No surprise that someone had walked in on them. She knew. Knew that Kazue had a girlfriend and that girlfriend had caught them together.
It was a good thing that Kazue herself stood between the two of them. Kate had wanted to walk over to her and slap her. Hit her. Let her feel the physical pain of knowing that she had destroyed someone else’s life.
Now, in a hostel thousands of kilometres away, Kate recalled the feeling with a rawness that told her that if she saw the girl now, across a crowded street or room, she would still want to hurt her. Her face was burned into her brain. It had never left.
Somehow, she’d managed to ace that final exam. With her education over, she had sat, unfeeling, as she packed up her bags ready to return home. She’d originally planned to spend the time after finals with Kazue. They would live together until they both knew for certain where next would be. Up until that night, it had never even crossed Kate’s mind that they would end up in different places. She’d been willing to do anything, be anywhere, as long as they were together.
She’d been foolish. She knew that now. But love was a powerful thing. The scars on her heart told her that it had been love.
At home, her parents hadn’t understood the tears that happened spontaneously and for no apparent reason. She wasn’t foolish enough to pretend they weren’t at least partly happy that the relationship was over. They’d never been openly hostile, but she knew them well enough. Being a woman was bad enough, but Kazue’s pretty Asian skin was another nail in the coffin as far as they were concerned. Kate was a pretty girl. Now that the foolishness was out of her head, she could settle down and find herself a nice Outback Jack.
A college fling. That was all it was to them. It became easier just to ignore their beliefs while she concentrated on the slightly more important thing of what the hell she was going to do next. How she could begin to pick up her life.
How she was going to make it a brand new one.
That was where the no labels approach was born. It had made things easier during that time, caused less pained discussions. Then it had stuck. It was about not tying herself down. It was about allowing herself to be free again.
After four weeks at home
, the crying happened less often. Kazue had been in touch twice. The first time, motivated by guilt, was to see how she was doing. Kate had wanted to know if the girl in her bed was now a permanent fixture in amongst her sheets, but she had somehow stopped herself from asking.
The second time, it was to return some things that belonged to Kate. It wasn’t much, but Kazue needed to know if she wanted to collect them. Kate hadn’t wanted to, but they were parts of her life. Kazue wouldn’t keep them. She had gone to the house to collect them, both relieved and angry when Kazue wasn’t there and one of her friends - the one who had been at the kitchen table that night - apologetically handed them over.
She put down her phone and stared at the hostel ceiling again. Hayley, it appeared, was a difficult woman to find. To all intents and purposes, she seemed to live off the grid. That was unusual. And particularly unhelpful in giving her mind something useful to focus on.
Since the night that had upended her life, Hayley was the first person she’d met who she was interested in enough to chase. Of course, it would feel foolish to admit that to her out loud. The odd kiss here and there as she moved from town to town didn’t count. It had never even gone further than a kiss.
As soon as things started to pick up pace, memories of Kazue’s mouth, her lips on her skin, her fingertips running over her body, always returned with painful humiliation. It was a serious mood killer. Kate could never get over it. She’d grown used to making excuses and quickly running away.
With Hayley, it had been different. The memory had appeared, as she had expected it to. But then Hayley had tugged on her bottom lip with her teeth and she’d seen something in her eyes that told her this was a new start for both of them.
There are just some moments when everything makes sense.
Feeling Hayley pull her body down onto the bed was one of them.
This bed.
Kate gritted her teeth with longing at the memory. She would do anything for Hayley to be in here now, rather than being an elusive ghost.