by Bronwyn Sell
So now she and Josh stood face-to-face, his palms burning handprints across her hips, his thumbs meeting at the tie of her boardies. Was it her imagination, or was his breath ragged? Without any spotters, this felt way quieter and more intimate. If his thumbs slid down a couple of inches …
‘Ready?’ Josh said.
Focus. Amy closed her hands around his wrists. ‘Ready.’
They both bent their knees and he hoisted her straight up and tilted her until she was near-horizontal. He adjusted his stance and they wobbled. Her abs braced. She clung to his wrists. ‘I can’t let go and balance until we’re steady.’
He brought her down gracelessly, his nose jamming into her cleavage on the way past.
‘Sorry, Aims, that was …’
‘It’s fine. Just try not to brace your legs so obviously. You’ll look like you’re lifting weights at the Olympics.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘When you take my weight, you’re overcompensating with your thighs.’ Thighs thigh thighs. ‘I can feel it. At least, I think you’re overcompensating.’ She hoped he was overcompensating. Poor guy—what a position to put him in. ‘You’re making me look like a hundred-kilo dumbbell. You have to keep tall and straight and trust your core strength to give you the balance.’ She hovered her hands over his abs to illustrate her point. Her mother would just dive right in. ‘It should look smooth and effortless, like you’re catching a large paper dart, not a small jumbo jet. Or we can always try something less intima— less intense. Return to the over-the-back roll, maybe, though it won’t fit the music as well. This is a difficult move.’
‘Nah, we can do this,’ he said quickly. Damn. She’d given him an out and he’d taken it as a challenge. ‘Let’s do it standing a few more times. I’ll get it.’
A few times turned into half a dozen, both of them silent in concentration aside from the odd instruction or tweak and their heavy breathing, which Amy was increasingly conscious of. And still he couldn’t steady his weight enough for her to release his wrists and fly. Maybe they would need all the time Carmen had allocated.
‘I don’t know why I’m not getting this,’ he said, jamming his fingers into his hair. ‘I’ve managed it before.’
‘It’s probably psychological. Not having a spotter can affect your confidence.’
‘I guess.’
It was probably psychological for her too, but for different reasons. She’d broken her golden rule, and being alone with him was every bit as unnerving as she’d feared. But she’d got this far. Her infatuation would wear off, she just had to ride it out. She was a grown woman with loads of self-control.
Their half a dozen attempts turned into a dozen, until sweat pooled in her cleavage and threatened to drip onto his face as he lifted her. Even feeling the muscles in his wrists contract as he lifted was sexy, let alone imagining his abs and thighs and biceps bracing, let alone feeling every one of his fingertips across her overheated hips.
Mind over muscles, Lowery.
For the last few attempts, she managed to release his wrists but she couldn’t bring herself to trust him enough to really pull it off. It was doomed to look amateur. Carmen would disown her.
‘Right, I think I’m good with doing it from standing,’ he said at last, lowering her. ‘Shall we try it with the run-up?’ He rolled his shoulders back then brought one arm across his torso for a stretch, followed by the other. ‘This really is a full-body workout, though you literally are a paper plane.’
‘Good save.’
She backtracked a few metres and lined up, rubbing her hands down her thighs. Just like running up to the vault in gym.
‘Nervous?’ he said.
‘Not at all,’ she lied. Not for the reasons you’re thinking. ‘We got this.’
He settled into a wide-legged stance, still looking way too much like a TV wrestler. This time, she wouldn’t be catching his wrists first. There’d be no chance to steady before committing. She’d have to fly, and he’d have to catch her.
She sprang up and ran, everything blurring but his face, all glowering and intense. She commanded herself to jump but only managed a pathetic little skip. She pulled back just as his hands connected with her hips.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, backing away. ‘I need a break.’
‘Good idea. Swim?’
‘Yes.’
He yanked his T-shirt off, one-handed. His chest looked like it’d already been dunked. So did her boardies, in some inelegant places. She whipped off her tank, charged into the water and dived, though if he was going to notice her sweatiness, he would have by now. She launched into a punishing butterfly until she was treading in deep water, and then floated into a starfish. She was pretty sure the sea was warmer than the air.
‘There you go again,’ he said, stroking up, ‘showing off about your buoyancy.’
‘Mika probably has some floaties you can borrow.’
He laughed. ‘I’m going to swim out to that buoy.’
‘Take your time.’
She only needed to survive the next hour without making a fool of herself. And then the hour after that, and the hour after that. And every hour would get easier, like starting a new dietary regime.
Until it became second nature not to jump her stepbrother.
Trip Review: Curlew Bay
Rating:
Review: It was really humid and my hair was really limp for the whole week, even after I blow-dried it. I had to tie it up and I look horrible in all the photos.
23
Sophia
Sophia forced herself to concentrate on the winding stony road and not the views that unfolded at every turn, until she reached the arm of a bay with an old jetty jutting out into darker water. A small pale-grey naval vessel was tied up alongside. Now she could see why Amy had been so casual with directions. Just keep driving until you run out of road.
Harry was already sitting on the jetty, which was not surprising seeing as she’d taken it slowly. She was used to driving country roads but this was more or less off-roading, and she hadn’t been able to resist stopping to snap a few photos, though her phone camera didn’t do the views justice. He was working on a laptop, his back against a wooden piling, those lovely legs stretched out in front and crossed at the ankles. A crate sat on the planks next to him. He glanced up as she approached, slipped the computer into a case, hauled his backpack up and stood.
She rolled down her window and watched for the moment he realised it was her behind the wheel and not Amy—yep, there—a tip of his head, a tweak of his lips. A pleasant surprise or not? The butterflies churned and she breathed deeply, enjoying the warm, prickly awakening, even if there was no promise of more to come. Yes, this was the first time she’d seen him since she’d kissed him but where was the sense in being embarrassed? He had kissed her back.
She pulled up into a gravel turning circle next to a long, low wooden building, her body fizzing head to toe at the memory of those lips on hers, those arms around her. It was that feeling you got straight after a hard workout when endorphins flooded your system, the reward for the pain and effort.
He strode to the tray of the ute, holding eye contact with a half-smile that carried a meaning she couldn’t decode, pulled back the cover and dropped the pack in with a thud. From somewhere behind the building—a barracks?—multiple power tools screamed and buzzed in disharmony.
He returned for the crate. ‘Please tell me Nan hasn’t employed you,’ he called, his voice straining as he lowered the box into the tray.
Sophia twisted in her seat to maximise the cheap thrill of looking at him, all casually sexy in his T-shirt and shorts with a few days’ growth on his jaw. ‘I haven’t spoken to her since the bachelors party.’ That morning didn’t count. It was entirely possible she’d imagined the woman’s presence.
‘Good. Keep it that way.’ He pulled the cover back over the tray and secured it.
Hmm. Amy had mentioned their grandmother’s habit of employing potential partners for her f
amily, but was the prospect of Sophia’s recruitment really that distasteful?
‘Picking you up wasn’t my idea, for the record,’ she said, as he sat in the passenger seat, sliding it backward. ‘I suspect it was a brazen set-up.’
‘I’m shocked. By which of my relatives?’
‘Your nan or Carmen. Possibly both.’
‘Of course.’
‘I mean, it wasn’t that I didn’t want to come. I just wasn’t sure you’d want to see me. You exited pretty quickly after our, you know.’ You can’t say ‘kiss’? How old are you, fifteen? What happened to not being embarrassed?
‘I’m glad you came,’ he said, too neutrally to settle the question of whether he genuinely wanted to see her, which her fifteen-year-old self would really like to settle, especially after the brief note he’d left to say he’d be away longer than anticipated. An ‘emergency’. She’d spent far too long forensically examining it, finding only an indecipherable balance between warm and offhand.
He gave her a down-and-up look that did things to her thirty-seven-year-old self. ‘You look like you’ve hit your island stride,’ he said.
Meaning she looked as flushed as she felt? ‘If you’re saying I’m a little less pathetic and a lot less drunk, then I guess I have. If you mean I haven’t washed my hair in I-don’t-know-how-long, then yes, that too.’
‘Have you spoken to your ex?’
She groaned. ‘And here we were having a lovely time.’
‘I’m guessing that’s a no.’
‘I invoke the goanna.’
He laughed. ‘I kept bloody seeing those things on the mainland. I don’t usually see any. Thought of you and your overthinking, every time.’
‘Look, I’ve made progress but not that much progress.’ She’d literally been taking things one day at a time, which was a novelty. Several times each day, she’d get antsy and angsty and promise herself she’d leave the following day, but she hadn’t yet got to the point of booking the flight. And then suddenly it’d almost been time for Harry to return and she’d decided to hold out for just a day or two longer. ‘It’s healthy to leave him to squirm, right?’
‘Healthy for you or him?’
‘Me, of course. Both of us, if we’re still an us. That’s if he’s even squirming. For all I know he’s run off with his physio and is just leaving messages to ask where I hid his passport.’
‘You hid his passport?’
‘No.’ She playfully whacked Harry’s shoulder with the back of her hand. ‘I didn’t have time to think about sabotage. But, wow, you know what? The thought of him with another woman just now? It didn’t make me want to vomit like it might have a few days ago. Progress, see?’
‘Go you.’ He clipped his seatbelt as she circled the turning bay and headed back the way she’d come. She liked that he didn’t assume he’d take over the driving, even though it was his car. Jeremy would have expected to take over.
‘Did you resolve your emergency?’ she said.
‘My what?’
‘Your note. You said you’d been called away.’
‘Yeah, yeah, it’s all good now.’
A lie. So he had left at least partly to get away from her after she’d pounced on him. And was that for her sake or his? Was her attraction to him even real, or was it some survival mechanism—an instinct to move on, to seek happiness, to procreate while she still could? Would she still be drawn to him so strongly if they’d met in Sydney, if she was happily working and he was … what? She couldn’t picture him with a city job. There had to be plenty of marine scientists working in Sydney but she couldn’t see him there. This fantasy of the chilled-out island guy, crown prince of his domain, was working for her, even if the reality of him had reached out to meet the fantasy halfway since he’d left, thanks to her interactions with his family. They obviously adored and admired him—even Cody, who’d grumbled that Harry always needed to be the hero and thought he was better than the rest of them and was a chicken when it came to women. It had come as a relief to discover that the guy maybe had a few flaws.
‘How was the date with Katie?’ she said with a faked lightness.
He made a tsking noise. ‘Who told you that?’
So it was true. ‘Cody.’
‘Of course he did.’
‘So?’
‘It was good.’
She waited but got nothing. Good in that they’d been screwing for days? Or good as in not great, and thus disappointing? Sophia suspected the latter but that could simply be confirmation bias.
Past the bay, the road turned north, veering around a mangrove-filled inlet. ‘Carmen said you need to stop by the homestead?’ she said.
‘Yeah, but I have a bit of work to do there, so let’s go to the resort and drop you off first. I can double back.’
‘I don’t mind. I honestly have nothing better to do. Yoga and breakfast are the highlights of my day.’ She stopped short of admitting she was curious to look inside the old Queenslander, knowing now from Amy what connotations it carried for the family—and presumably, for Harry. She’d contemplated stopping for a sneaky look on the way to the jetty but had already been running behind schedule. And yes, she’d been a little impatient to see him again. ‘And I don’t mean for that to sound so pathetic. I’m killing the yoga, and the breakfasts here are everything you could wish for in a breakfast.’ He didn’t respond but she was fairly confident he was looking her way. ‘I’m not planning to get you alone and accost you, if that’s what you’re afraid of.’ Might as well harness the elephant in the room and go for a ride. What did she have to lose? Like he said, people acted outside themselves on holiday, and maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. Holiday Sophia was whimsical and spontaneous and lived for the moment.
That laugh again, sparking more delicious warmth inside her. There went the theory that time apart would cool things off at her end. ‘I’m definitely not afraid of that,’ he said, ‘but good to know.’
Not afraid because he was confident it wouldn’t happen, or not afraid because he would easily brush her off, or not afraid because he’d welcome it?
And here she was right back at teenage obsession.
‘I have a book I can read if you prove too dull,’ she said, though she’d find him enthralling if he were doing his taxes. Chewing on a pencil, subconsciously ruffling his hair as he scratched his head, little frown lines between his eyes …
It doesn’t matter where you get your appetite, so long as you eat at home, her sister used to say—before her divorce. And now, Sophia was free to dine out whenever, wherever and with whomever she wished. And though that thought was faintly liberating, it was still mostly depressing.
They chatted about random stuff until they pulled up to the homestead. It was more rundown than in her ever-evolving fantasies about chardonnay and Adirondack chairs, which were the only things that switched off her brain at night so she could drift off to sleep. But there was nothing rundown about that view. Between the sky and the water, it had every shade of blue covered—the white sand of the beach billowing out into turquoise over what she guessed was coral, royal blue marking the deeper water, sapphire where the sun played with it, a navy splotch where a small cloud cast a shadow, teal where it slipped under a stand of overhanging trees near the cliff, with the sky running from powder blue to cobalt. And what did you call the mix of colours in the shallows? Ice blue, definitely, but something deeper. Electric blue? Aqua? Azure? What colour even was azure? Even the national park on the mainland in the distance was tinted blue by a light haze of rain. You could hold up a blue paint colour chart and tick off all the variations, like with Harry and his shades of brown and charcoal and rose.
This would be the place she’d return to in her mind every time she felt down in the months to come.
‘So,’ she said as they got out of the car, ‘this gift from your grandmother for the first grandchild to marry, is it a reward or a punishment? This place needs a lot of work.’
‘You know about that?’
‘Amy told me.’
‘Has my family left you in peace at any time in the last few days?’
Why did he sound so wary? ‘They’ve been lovely. Amy said that the homestead comes with the funds to do it up?’
‘In theory. A few years ago—quite a few years ago—when Nan made that promise, the island could have spared some money.’ He opened up the tray and searched for something, his voice muffling. ‘Now? Not so much.’
‘The cyclone?’
He brought out a toolbox then heaved the crate out and started walking with it. ‘We lost a lot of income while we cleaned up, and we spent a ton of money making the resort sustainable, which is good practice in the long-term, but that stuff’s mostly invisible so it doesn’t always give guests the wow factor. And we’ve had to ride out some tourism downturns. So yeah, the homestead is not the gift it might once have been. For the moment, we have to spend money that makes money. I’d just be happy to have a boat that doesn’t leave me stranded on tropical islands with handsome collections of books.’
She detected a side-eye in her direction and suppressed a smile. ‘Did they accept your late application?’
‘Yeah, but the woman said they had heaps more applicants than expected and mine didn’t hit a priority category, so I should keep applying elsewhere. Same story everywhere.’
‘Ah, I’m sorry.’ She climbed the nearest steps to the veranda, which wrapped around three sides of the house. ‘This place is gorgeous, or it could be. It has a nice feel to it. Serene.’
‘Always has felt like that. Well, not always, I guess, considering its history, but definitely in my lifetime. I love it up here.’
‘And that view.’ She stood in the middle of the front veranda. Yep, this was the very spot of her fantasy, with the additional dimension of the stench of bird crap and rotting animal. She could almost feel Harry’s presence behind her, his arms ready to close around her even as he was lowering the crate onto a weather-beaten picnic bench on the overgrown lawn below. ‘I also understand that at one point the first grandchild to marry was going to be you?’