Lovestruck

by Bronwyn Sell

  ‘I can’t think of the last time I was up at this hour, whatever this hour is,’ she said, stacking her hands behind her head and lying back on them, ‘except for pulling all-nighters at work.’

  ‘And all this time, look what we’ve been missing out on,’ Harry said. ‘Maybe humankind has it all wrong with this up-with-the-sun thing.’

  ‘Down with the sun!’ She raised her fist, punching the stars. ‘I always get my best ideas at night. Except when that idea is a round of tequila, which is a terrible idea at any time.’

  He laughed, a deep throaty chuckle she was getting far too used to. ‘Word.’

  She breathed in a salty, briny scent woven with something sweeter and spliced with the insect repellent they’d sprayed on. Maybe there was something to this living-for-the-moment thing. Except that as soon as you thought, Wow, look at me, living for the moment, you were acknowledging the past and the future, and you couldn’t help going there, just a little bit.

  ‘Say “goanna”,’ she said.

  ‘Goanna.’ She could hear the smile in his voice, picture those dusky lips stretching wide.

  ‘Thank you for inviting me tonight.’ It had been a restorative day all round.

  ‘I didn’t invite you.’ Still with the audible smile.

  She pushed up onto her forearms. ‘Great snakes, you didn’t. I’ll have to find your brother and thank him. He wouldn’t take no for an answer when he came by my villa.’

  ‘I’ll tell him you said thanks.’

  She rolled onto her side, facing Harry, and propped her head up on one hand. He was staring straight up. She couldn’t make out his freckles, but it was enough to know they were there. ‘I hope you don’t mind that I crashed the bachelors party.’

  ‘I’m glad you did. And I’m glad you enjoyed it. I should have invited you myself, but I was being … dim.’

  She sighed and flopped back down, inhaling and exhaling along with the rush of the waves washing in and out. ‘For the first time since I got here, I’m feeling it—that bliss of being in paradise. I’ve arrived, finally. I’m not seeing all this through a lens anymore, and I didn’t realise I was until today. Yesterday,’ she corrected.

  ‘Go, you.’

  ‘Damn it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Thinking about how I’m feeling all serene made me remember the reasons I shouldn’t be serene.’

  He chuckled. ‘Can I offer some advice?’

  ‘You’ve been offering advice since we met.’ Since we met. Like meeting each other was a significant life event.

  ‘Have I? Bloody hell. Last piece of advice, I promise. How do you escape a rip? Or more to the point, what’s the number-one thing you don’t do to escape a rip?’

  ‘Sorry, what now?’

  ‘Come with me on this. What’s the worst thing you can do if you’re caught in a rip?’

  ‘Uh, swim against it?’ Wasn’t that what they’d said at school?

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Yay me! Was that your advice?’

  He slapped his leg and examined his hand for a bug. ‘Give or take. Because if you try to take on the rip head-on, what happens?’

  ‘You wear yourself out without getting anywhere?’

  ‘Correct again. So what do you do instead?’

  ‘You go out with the current but work your way to the side of the rip, so you can slip out into calmer water, and then turn and head to shore—or you signal for help. Both, actually. Well, I guess you would signal before you tried to swim out of it.’

  ‘Yeah. Even if you have to initially travel in the opposite direction from the one you ultimately want to go in. And, yes, you definitely ask for help. Because believe me, that surfer out there doesn’t mind missing a few waves to step in and be the hero.’

  She sat up straight. ‘Waaait, is this a metaphor?’ she said in a faux epiphany.

  ‘Correct again! You’re good at this.’

  ‘It’s all my years of pub quizzes.’ Don’t say pub quiz. ‘So you’re saying that I shouldn’t fight against this thing, but ride it out and gradually work my way into calmer waters.’

  ‘Maybe. Even if it takes longer than you’d like.’

  ‘Is it un-Australian to admit I’ve never been caught in a rip?’ she said, settling back down again. ‘I don’t even know how to spot one. I mean, I know in theory what I’m supposed to look for, but I get to a beach and my sisters are all, Oooh, we’d better stick between the flags because of that rip right there in front of us, and I’m looking right where they’re looking and I can’t see anything but water, just like all the other water.’

  He was quiet a few seconds. ‘I can’t even work out the significance of that in relation to my break-up metaphor.’

  ‘My point is—I think, I’m making this up as I go along—if you get stuck in a rip, is it as easy to get out as it sounds? Like, if you’re driving a car and it fishtails, you’re supposed to steer in the direction of the skid, or something. But I’ve been driving a car when it fishtailed and that didn’t work out at all. That steering wheel was doing exactly what it wanted to do, tossing back and forth like windscreen wipers. I didn’t have a hope of keeping a grip on it. I didn’t even know what direction the car was trying to go. In the end, I took my hands off the wheel and put them around my head.’ She shuddered.

  ‘Shit, really?’

  ‘No harm done, except to my mum’s car and some fencing wire and my driving confidence. I was a teenager, so rite of passage, I guess.’

  ‘Well, to stick with my metaphor, I’ve been caught in a rip a couple of times.’

  ‘Metaphorical or literal?’

  ‘Both, but I’m talking about the literal one. So, yeah, the theory works, though the current is way stronger than you imagine, and the waves are slapping you in the face, and you’re panicking, and you have no idea where the edge of the rip is. It’s not this calm situation where you’re all, Yeah, I got this, I know what to do. But the thing that’s most difficult to fight is your own instinct. Your lizard brain wants you to head straight back to shore ASAP by the most direct route, and your body starts to panic all over again when you resist that urge.’

  Sophia shut her eyes tight. ‘Okay, no,’ she said, after a pause, ‘it’s far too late for me to untangle that metaphor in relation to my situation. You tell me. What does my lizard brain think about being ditched at the altar, more or less?’

  ‘Yeah, so my metaphor sucks. For a beautiful second there, it was crystal-clear in my head. Who’s your best friend?’

  ‘Wild tangent but I’ll allow it. Uh, my younger sister. But don’t tell my older sister I said that.’ Like she’d be introducing him to the family any day now.

  ‘And what advice would you give her, if she was the one who’d been, you know?’

  ‘Dumped. Jilted. Ditched. You can say it. I’d give her the same advice she gave me. Give it time. Don’t overthink it. Be kind to yourself. All the regular stuff.’

  He gave a self-satisfied my-work-here-is-done sigh and lay back on the lounger, fingers linked behind his neck.

  ‘You are so Zen,’ she said, ‘except when you’re around your brother. Then you’re the anti-Zen.’

  ‘I know. He winds me up.’

  ‘Couldn’t tell. So how did you get out of your metaphorical rip, your relationship rip?’ She had to have earned a little quid pro quo by now.

  Silence. She counted it in crashes of little waves on the sand. One, two, three, four … ‘The wrong way,’ he said, after number seven. ‘I fought it. Tried to talk her around, tried to find compromises. I wasted a lot of time fighting it—years—and if anything, it made the eventual break-up harder. If I’d just gone with the current from the start …’

  ‘But then, if you hadn’t fought it, you might be lying here beating yourself up about how you didn’t try hard enough.’

  ‘Huh,’ he said thoughtfully.

  They fell silent. Nine wave crashes.

  ‘Thank you for being my surfer today,’ she s
aid, ‘even if you didn’t invite me tonight.’

  ‘My pleasure. I mean it.’

  She rolled over to face him again. ‘Today hasn’t been too wacky for you?’

  He groaned. ‘I was waiting for that to come up. In my defence, rescuing a naked woman from a chopper-load of sightseers is not my regular day at the office.’

  ‘You’re right, it was a wacky day. Surreal, even. It seems like only a couple of weeks ago I was at my own bachelorette party. No, wait, that’s because I was.’

  ‘Goanna. No, hang on.’ He raised a finger. ‘Un-goanna for a sec. Your ex is a loser and doesn’t deserve you. For the record.’ He lowered the finger. ‘Goanna.’

  This time she counted the silence in the breaths silently raising and lowering his chest. She made it to five.

  ‘Un-goanna,’ she said. ‘You know when you said “your ex” just now, I immediately pictured my previous boyfriend, the long-ago one before Jeremy. Just out of interest. Goanna.’

  ‘Jeremy,’ he repeated quietly. ‘You think you guys are still together?’

  ‘I don’t think we are. But it occurred to me just this morning—yesterday morning—that he only said he was having second thoughts about the wedding and that he needed time to think. Obviously, I took that as code for You’re dumped. But, thinking back on it, he was definitely talking more about not wanting to go through with the wedding than not wanting to be with me.’

  ‘Was it going to be big society event, this wedding?’

  ‘Bigger than I’d intended. My parents are great, but they love a party, and they wanted to invite everyone they know, including the bloody prime minister, possibly out of sheer relief that I’d finally found someone who’d have me.’ As she spoke, she allowed her gaze the harmless pleasure of meandering down and up Harry’s prone body, loitering where it pleased, like on those outdoorsy arms and legs. It wasn’t her fault that this wasn’t the body she was supposed to be admiring tonight. ‘I can understand why he freaked out. Jeremy, I mean, not the PM. The PM didn’t freak out, to my knowledge, but did politely decline, thank God. I don’t know—maybe if we’d eloped and got married here, on the beach, just the two of us …? Jeremy and me, I mean, not me and the PM.’

  ‘Have you spoken to him since he …?’

  ‘No. It was chaos straightaway. He went back inside my parents’ house—we were out on the terrace when he told me—and made the announcement, and my family and friends came out to find me, and he went to his sister’s place and stayed there until I flew out here, as far as I know. I didn’t even want to look at his face, I was so angry and humiliated. He’s been leaving messages for me but I’m too … scared? In denial? Proud? I don’t know. Too something to check them. He knows the mobile reception up here is patchy. We were ridiculously excited about the idea of going off the grid. So that buys me time.’

  ‘Okay,’ Harry said, in a noncommittal way.

  ‘You think I should check the messages.’

  ‘Your call.’

  ‘You do. You think I should check them.’

  He rolled so they were face-to-face, like a couple chatting in bed, except for the gully of sand between them. ‘It might help you move on, in your head. Or maybe he has an excellent reason for doing what he did and you’ll forgive him and run off and elope together.’

  And she still couldn’t work out if the idea of Jeremy wanting her back (a) thrilled her, (b) terrified her, or (c) landed on some in-between emotion. And if it was (c), was it worth fighting the current for?

  Gah, too many metaphors for this time of the morning.

  She made a pillow with her hands and rested the side of her face on it. Her ring dug into her cheekbone and she twisted the stone aside. ‘I think I might be worried that listening to them would confuse me even more.’

  ‘You don’t seem confused about this.’

  ‘I don’t? How do I seem?’

  ‘Grieving. Lost, maybe. You said yourself, you had your future all planned out and you were ready to dive right on in.’

  ‘What, you didn’t buy my line about being driven by spontaneity and whimsy?’ She waited for his chuckle—her micro-reward—and continued. ‘I guess mostly I’m anxious. I’m meant to be on the next step of my journey, not starting over. I’m scared I’ll spend the next five years searching for something that will never come and then it’ll be too late.’

  ‘We so fucked up.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My fault. I broke the goanna to say your ex—your whatever—was an idiot and then we hurtled on into the future and the past and now we’re talking about plans and next steps and five years from now.’

  ‘You said he was a loser, I recall.’

  ‘That too. Look around. Right here, right now, is there a single thing to be anxious about?’

  She didn’t bother looking around—looking at his face was research enough. ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘And there won’t be, just as long as you’re on the island. This is your escape, so use it. Escape.’

  ‘That’s awesome in theory, but when I step off the plane in Sydney, I’ll land straight back in this whole mess, and if I haven’t got a solution mapped out in my head by then …’ She shuddered. ‘I’ll be right back where I started, but one solo honeymoon poorer.’

  ‘Or maybe while you’re here, not thinking about it all, your brain will process it anyway. Like a meditation.’

  ‘Do you meditate?’

  ‘No. Is that not what’s supposed to happen?’

  ‘Confession: I cheat in meditation.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘In yoga, when we get to the meditation track at the end, we’re supposed to let go of conscious thought. If your mind wanders, come back to your breath. But I love thinking. Having five or ten minutes just to close my eyes and think is delicious. I mean, not so much at the moment, with everything that’s happened, but usually I secretly let in all the thoughts and I play with them, like in those movies where they have a giant holographic screen and they swipe all over it to bring data up and sort it.’ She gestured with her hands, half-expecting the stars above Harry’s head to rearrange. ‘And anyway, my brain’s not going to subconsciously process the logistics of breaking up, is it? All these months of wedding planning, and now we’ll have to go straight into all the banalities of ending a relationship—assuming it really is ending. I am so over logistics.’ She sighed heavily. ‘We have a property, bank accounts, a dog—though he brought her into the relationship, so I guess he’ll keep her. And I love that dog.’

  ‘There’s probably a precedent to sue for custody.’

  ‘She adores him. She’s never really been my dog, she just tolerates me until he shows up, and then she’s all, You may go now.’ Sophia gave a dismissive flick of her wrist. ‘I bet she’s thrilled to have him all to herself in bed—if she even does. So many ifs!’

  ‘I’m not talking about your brain processing the logistics,’ Harry said, ‘though all that can definitely wait. That’s just drawing up a to-do list and knocking things off. That’s head stuff. It’s the heart stuff you could begin to fix while you’re here, starting with listening to those messages.’

  ‘Don’t wanna.’

  He snorted. Since when had a snort been attractive? She had it bad. ‘Well, as long as you’ve considered it in such a mature and sensible manner.’

  ‘Do you always go so Yoda at whatever o’clock of the morning this is?’

  He groaned and rolled up to sitting, rubbing his face. ‘I have to be up at seven to catch the boat up to Airlie Beach.’

  Damn. She’d mentioned the time, and their cosy little time warp had spat them out, restarting the dreaded Fertility Countdown Timer. She could swear she felt a click in her ovaries as it kicked back in. ‘And what will we be doing in Airlie Beach?’ she said, only half-jokingly.

  He pushed to his feet, laughing, and happy-drug pheromones tingled in her veins, or in whichever biological highway pheromones traversed. The guy should come with Medicare fund
ing. ‘Do I look like your cruise director?’

  In my daydreams.

  ‘I,’ he continued, ‘will be sitting through a series of presentations on bushfire management in Prossy—Proserpine. You will be here, being Zen and living in the present.’

  She grabbed her purse and stood, brushing sand off her dress—the first of her honeymoon dresses to get an outing. She hoped Harry appreciated it, since there was no one else to. Sure, Cody had complimented her, but she got the feeling he wasn’t sparing with compliments where women were involved. ‘I could take notes for you.’

  ‘My powers of retention are unparalleled.’

  She wanted to ask what time he’d be back on the island, but even in her current state, she retained some pride.

  As they strolled back, having wheeled the loungers up above the high-tide mark, she breathed the fragrant velvety air deeply into her lungs. Yoga breathing was another thing she failed at—she usually just panted the whole time. She listened for Harry’s breathing, and tuned into it. Somehow, by listening she also caught his scent—more of the beeswaxy smell, less of the earth and salt. Body wash or cologne? And of course she couldn’t think about Harry and body wash without picturing him naked in the shower—and that image would see her through the rest of the night.

  Much too soon, they came to a halt at the steps to her veranda. ‘Straight to sleep now,’ he said, the dim outdoor lights reflecting in his dark eyes. ‘No past, no future.’

  ‘Live for the moment,’ she whispered, suddenly unable to find the volume button.

  He smiled. ‘Exactly.’

  This is your escape, so use it. Escape.

  Why was she just standing here? She was used to saying what she thought and getting what she wanted. You worked your arse off, you played your cards right and good things came—and the good thing she wanted most in this moment was standing in front of her.

  Why fight the current?

  She closed the gap between them and brushed his lips with hers, sending goosebumps needling across her own cheeks and down her chest. They stood frozen for a few seconds, their lips a millimetre apart, and she was pretty sure she’d never felt as nervous in her life, and then his hands were in her hair and he was returning the kiss, and more.