Lovestruck

by Bronwyn Sell

  Don’t go there.

  ‘Hey, look.’ Josh pointed along the beach to where the watersports equipment was laid out for the day. ‘There are windsurfers. Old school!’ He looked up at a palm tree. ‘And there’s an easterly picking up.’

  It was a nor-easter but Amy had long ago learned it wasn’t cool to correct laypeople on meteorological errors. And a cross onshore wind would work just as well as an onshore. ‘Yes, you should definitely go windsurfing,’ she said. ‘And today might be your best chance—the wind’s supposed to drop tonight.’

  ‘Do you windsurf?’ he asked her, back to adorably eager.

  ‘No,’ Amy said quietly so Rosa couldn’t hear and give the game away—though she was busy whispering and giggling with Viggo. ‘Black sheep, I tell you. I meant it sounds cool for you. Go for it.’

  Carmen leaned forward, her hands clasped. ‘Amy’s always said she’d love to try windsurfing—she’s practically a wind doctor, you know. But she works such long hours at the uni that she never gets a chance.’

  Amy tightened her grip on the beer, which was warming up way quicker than the atmospheric conditions warranted. She saw what would happen next playing out as vividly as a movie. Josh would suggest he teach her and she would agree, helpless in the path of fate because actually she couldn’t think of a single thing she’d rather do than go windsurfing in her favourite place in the world with a guy who made her feel The Pull—under almost any other circumstances.

  At some point this week, she would get revenge on Carmen in an epic way.

  ‘I’ll trade you windsurfing lessons for dance lessons,’ Josh said. ‘I used to teach under-privileged kids back home in Perth.’

  Of course he did. ‘Cool,’ Amy said. ‘Sounds cool.’

  ‘And then,’ Carmen said, clapping in an exaggerated version of their mother’s ballet-mistress clap, ‘when you’re all wet and hot from that, Aims can teach you the lift!’

  Amy shot her a could-you-be-any-more-obvious? look.

  ‘Perfect,’ Josh said, holding up his beer. ‘Man, I love having sisters.’

  Amy clinked. ‘Yeah. Yeah, right back atcha, bro.’

  Somewhere behind them, a coconut thumped to the ground.

  Trip Review: Curlew Bay

  Rating:

  Review: The sun sets way too early! I had imagined long balmy sunny evenings! I asked one of the staff and she said that it’s dark by about seven even on the longest day in summer! Very disappointed. Will try Fiji next time.

  8

  Sophia

  Sophia laid a hand on her belly as she waited at reception for Harry. Nerves, really? This wedding disaster had rewired her brain. Wallowing wasn’t a thing she did. Who had time for that? Obsessing wasn’t a thing she did unless it had a purpose, like work or wedding prep. You made a plan, you actioned it, you moved on to your next plan. Sure, things got in your path, but you found a way around them. The important thing was never to lose momentum, which was exactly the mistake she’d made in coming up here. Outside, a coconut thudded to the earth. She jumped. Four days, dozens of falling coconuts and every time, she jumped.

  A couple of guests walked in from the pavilion, bringing with them the smell of baking bread. Sophia hurriedly swallowed. Her hangover wasn’t ready for the thought of bread yet, let alone the daily-changing and award-winning à la carte menu of modern Asian fusion and contemporary Australian cuisine. Why had she thought a boat trip was a good idea? Why had she thought any of this was a good idea?

  She should have cancelled her leave and returned to work a week ago. By now, she’d be too deep in defending a shareholder class action to obsess about her split with Jeremy.

  But had they officially split up?

  Damn.

  He’d told her he ‘needed space’. He hadn’t said he wanted to break up. Had she just interpreted it that way—because what self-respecting woman stays with a man who dumps her on the eve of her wedding?

  She’d been ignoring his calls and texts, and avoiding emails and her social media—because by now it should be wallpapered with happy-couple photos featuring sand, sun and cocktails, as she was reminded every time she opened her suitcase and saw the damn selfie stick. She hadn’t wanted to hear his rationale, to risk breaking down as he related all the reasons she was inadequate, which was absolutely a thing he’d do. He was blunt like that—and until the Great Jilting, she’d liked that about him. Maybe she didn’t want to believe it was really over. But what if he was calling to say he’d made an almighty error and wanted her back? Would she go?

  And this was why she should walk out to the jetty, jump on the next boat to Hamilton Island and the first flight to Sydney, and stroll straight into her office as if nothing had happened. This was why she made a point of never leaving herself time to think.

  Because the pathetic, short answer was that she probably would go back.

  Coming to the island alone and in limbo was a mistake. Waiting on a random guy with her stomach flip-flopping was even worse. She’d even agonised about what to wear. She’d tried on half a dozen dresses, but they’d seemed silly and carefree, clothes that belonged in her alternative universe. There goes the poor, deluded woman who came on honeymoon with an imaginary husband. Today was more about mucking in than swanning about. She’d settled on white capris with a pale-blue shirt knotted at her waist and hot-pink slides on her feet. She’d spent a good ten minutes applying makeup to make her look non-made-up—the Harry eyeshadow palette had proved ideal. Then she’d hurriedly hung up all the discarded dresses and tidied the bathroom so Housekeeping wouldn’t report back to Harry that it looked like a teenager had been preparing for her first date. Paranoid, much?

  Yep, she needed to go home. Decision made. She’d leave a message for Harry, and go and pack. She spun to leave—and almost collided with a broad shoulder.

  ‘Easy, tiger,’ Harry said, catching her upper arms. ‘Emergency legal callout?’

  ‘Yeah, I, uh …’ And right there, with her arms cupped in his warm palms and a smile lifting one side of his dusky lips, her resolve withered. ‘I thought I’d forgotten something. But I didn’t.’ She raised her tote, in a pathetic attempt to say, See, it was here all along.

  ‘Thought you must have seen a snake, with the speed you moved.’

  ‘Snake?’

  ‘Not that we have a lot of dangerous creatures here, except in the water.’

  ‘Er, what’s in the water?’

  ‘Nothing that’s as threatening to us as we are to them.’ He released her and held an arm out sideways, ushering her toward the exterior doors. ‘Do you dive?’

  ‘I did the open-water course in my uni holidays one summer,’ she said as they began to walk, ‘but my certification lapsed once I started working. Always meant to do it again.’

  ‘I’m a dive instructor, if you want to give it a go. My littlest brother usually runs the courses here but he’s away studying. We have all the gear.’

  ‘I saw that on your website, but I didn’t fancy studying for the theory test while on … honeymoon.’

  ‘Might be more rewarding than studying the resort folder.’ He stood aside and waited for a couple of guests to wander through the doors. ‘I grabbed some books for you, by the way,’ he said as they stepped outside into gentle warmth. ‘They’re in the ute. Don’t know what you’re into—you can always grab others from the reading nook. I shouldn’t be long in the water, but you might want some distraction while you’re waiting on the boat.’

  Distraction from her distraction?

  ‘Where are we going?’ Sophia said. For all she knew, he planned for them to dissect a beached whale. She looked at her white capris. Perhaps she should have established that before now.

  Harry pulled a set of keys from his pocket. She noted he was still barefoot. ‘We’ll drive down to Juno Beach and take the boat out to a little reef where I have some projects on the go.’

  ‘The marauding starfish?’

  ‘The very same.’ He paused at the
driver’s door of a dusty turquoise ute, the resort’s name and logo on the side. ‘Sure you’re up for this? There’s a casual little café at the backpackers at Juno Beach. I can drop you there if you’d rather chill out. I should only be an hour or so.’

  ‘I’m good, thanks,’ she said, walking around to the passenger door. A black butterfly danced through the air in front of her. This felt disturbingly like a date. A date with another man while on honeymoon. But she had to fill her mind with something that wasn’t the question of whether her ex-fiancé was her ex-everything or had merely downgraded himself to boyfriend. And to figure that out, she’d have to talk to him, and she … didn’t wanna. Not yet.

  They fell silent as the ute left the concreted area around the resort and shuddered onto a gravel track. She knew from the map that it meandered from the resort in the north to the lighthouse in the south, via the backpackers halfway down the island. She leaned forward, tracing with her eyes the arc of cobalt sky from one edge of the dome all the way to the other. Her neck cricked. Flip a sky like that upside-down and you could dive into it.

  From a rusted tin shelter, a leathery man with a thick grey beard waved a wrench at Harry. A caretaker? Harry waved back. Sophia watched the guy until he was out of sight, bent over what looked like a solar panel. Like Harry, he had the air of having sprouted from the island itself. Harry at seventy? What would it be like to live here that long? Would the isolation and simplicity make you Zen or drive you mad?

  But how good would it be to stay here and never have to return to the fallout from her non-wedding? Her nup-tials. She could live off her share of the equity in their Newtown terrace for years. Decades. Be the trust-fund baby she was always accused of being—not that she’d taken a cent from her parents since uni. That’d give the gossip pages new material. Sausage Heiress Chickens Out. She covertly glanced at Harry. Sausage Heiress Meats her Match.

  ‘This might sound like a strange question,’ she said, ‘but are there any jobs going on the island?’

  He kept looking straight ahead, navigating around a chicken coop and a veggie garden, but his mouth twitched at one corner.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What was that look?’

  ‘What look?’

  ‘That look like you were just waiting for me to say that.’

  Another odd mouth movement. She twisted in her seat to better assess him. ‘I assure you the idea only came to me a minute ago,’ she said.

  ‘Because nothing says “I’m totally fine” like running away to a tropical island.’

  ‘It’s not necessarily about that.’ It was absolutely about that. ‘It’s about trying new things, taking a risk, pushing the boundaries. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?’

  ‘You’ll last until it gets boring, which might be in a few days or a few weeks or a few months.’

  ‘You underestimate my determination. I’m not a whimsical person.’

  ‘So,’ he said, his lips tweaking again, ‘coming out with me today?’

  ‘That was merely quick decision-making after rapidly weighing up all the factors and options.’

  ‘And a big-city lawyer asking for a job on a remote island when you’ve hardly seen past the four walls of your villa?’

  Hmm.

  He looked across at her, still with that hint of a smile. ‘I suggest you go home and think about this for, you know, a year. At least.’

  ‘A spontaneous decision is not necessarily a bad one. In fact, quite the opposite.’ Ha—as if she believed that. Sophia Wicks, BCom (Hons), LLB (Hons), LLM, GDLP, Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of New South Wales and the High Court of Australia. She’d spent so many years thinking up counterarguments, it was second nature to reach for the contradictory response. Sometimes she forgot what her personal opinions were.

  ‘I doubt we could afford you.’

  ‘I could volunteer.’

  He did that infuriating smiley thing again. What was going on in that perfectly tinted and contoured head?

  ‘What is with that look?’

  ‘Ms Wi— Sophia. I believe that right in this moment your intentions are genuine. But I’m gonna go ahead and take a wild guess that this isn’t so much about wanting a new life as running from the old one.’

  ‘Maybe Fate busted up my wedding and brought me here to forge a new path.’ Again, not her speaking at all. This was Sophia Wicks, appearing for the plaintiff. That Sophia Wicks was paid very well to lay out and defend arguments that best served her clients, no matter her own views.

  He changed into a lower gear as the track steepened, now book-ended by thick scrub—eucalyptus, pines, other trees she couldn’t name. She lowered her window and leaned out of the window, while trying not to look like a dog. Warm air buffeted her face and she drew it deep into her lungs, like with the asthma inhaler she’d had as a kid.

  Harry switched off the air-con. ‘You think if you run away, things will blow over,’ he said, lowering his window too. ‘And maybe they will for everyone else, everyone whose lives haven’t been tipped upside-down, but not for you. This will always be waiting for you, and the longer you hide from it, the bigger it’ll feel. Up here, it’s too easy to obsess about stuff. When you go back, the first few days will be crap. The next few maybe a little less crap. The few after that? They could go either way. And then your life slowly restarts. You have better times and worse times but after a few weeks, it’s slightly easier. In three months, you’re sorted—give or take—and back on your feet, bar the odd slip. In six months, you’re wondering what the big deal was, and why you tried so hard for so long to make it work. Within a year, you’re in love with someone else and thinking thank Christ I never married that loser.’

  Ah. Ah. ‘Is this all about me, or is there some experience of your own tucked away in there?’

  His jaw worked, like his tongue was toying with his back teeth. ‘Everything except the last bit,’ he said finally.

  She looked up into the bottomless sky. ‘Which bit was that?’

  ‘The moving on with someone else. I’m not there yet.’

  ‘I see. Were you married to this woman? Or man? Or gender non-specific person?’

  ‘Woman. And no, though it was coming.’

  ‘A year to recover? I don’t want to waste a year feeling like this.’ She didn’t have a year to waste.

  ‘Then I suggest that you spend your time here wisely and then go back and exorcise him from your life. A guy who does that doesn’t deserve you.’

  ‘How do you know what he did?’ She tried to remember Harry’s words from earlier that morning—something about knowing enough to understand why she’d want to hide.

  Through the side of his sunglasses, she saw those long charcoal lashes double-blink. Sophia Wicks BCom (Hons) etc. wasn’t the type to shy away from hard questions. It was easy to forget that regular people didn’t spend their lives engaging in word-to-word combat.

  She crossed her arms. ‘You googled me.’

  ‘Not me, my grandmother. She was concerned.’

  Her happy bubble vaporised. ‘So letting me come today was about pity?’

  ‘Pity is a loaded word. Can’t a stranger just give a sh—’ He stopped abruptly. Reminding himself to keep a professional distance? ‘Can’t I give a damn about another person? Human to human?’

  With his eyes on the road—if you could call it a road—she brazenly studied him. There had to be more to it. Everyone had an agenda, and usually a hidden one. Was it dangerous of her to agree to go out in a boat with a stranger? The fact that this was an island, she was a guest and he was part of the family who owned the place had made it seem safe but she didn’t know this guy beyond his appealing smile and complementary colour scheme.

  Whimsy really didn’t suit her. She should have swallowed the financial penalty and cancelled the honeymoon—saved her leave for a happier time, once she and Jeremy had uncoupled assets, emotions, futures, dog, friends … What would become of
the Thursday night pub quiz at the Strawberry Alarm Clock up the road? They’d been going with the same friends since uni. Did one of them win custody of Thursday nights, and that group of friends? Would they both continue to go—crack awkward jokes about the wedding debacle, flirt with random people at the bar? What if Jeremy brought a girlfriend? What if he still considered Sophia his girlfriend?

  ‘Sophia? Hello?’ Harry waved a hand in front of her eyes.

  She’d been gaping at the side of his head for a good minute. She turned to the front. Suddenly, the day had lost its gloss.

  ‘I was just pointing out an osprey circling above the …’ he said, looking up. ‘Nah, it’s gone. We’re trying to discourage boaties from mooring in Gurrawang Bay over the breeding season, but short of installing a neon sign on the cliffs …’

  ‘Sorry, miles away.’

  ‘Not back in Sydney, I hope?’

  ‘Yep. At pub quiz.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Don’t ask. Tell me about your projects.’

  He glanced her way. ‘You want me to distract you.’

  ‘Bingo. You really have been here before, haven’t you?’

  He laughed, an easy, warm, summertime chuckle, not that it was technically summer. Island life fit him like a favourite T-shirt. He looked as if the car had been built around him, like when you made a bed while someone was lying in it. The folder in her room had said he had a master’s degree in marine biology—she’d reread the family profiles with a new interest after he’d left her villa—so he couldn’t have lived on the island all his life. When did his heart get broken?

  For the next ten minutes, he gallantly filled her mind by pointing out his preservation and conservation projects as they slipped between forests and clifftops and bays and clearings—the foundation stones of long-gone buildings, predator traps for the odd stowaway rat that slipped onto the island, the stony remains of a Ngaro fish trap that dated back thousands of years, part of the island’s colonial sheep station that he was restoring to native bush, a bay he’d cleared of lantana and was monitoring.