Lovestruck

by Bronwyn Sell

  He looked up at her, suspicious. ‘Have you been interrogating Amy?’

  Maybe the odd sneaky question. ‘I joined the dots. She told me about the first grandchild to marry getting it, and you seemed to have investigated renovating it.’ And he’d just confirmed it.

  ‘I invoke the go—’

  ‘She didn’t want to live here, your girlfriend?’ Sophia said hurriedly. ‘Fiancée?’

  ‘—anna.’

  ‘Did she fall in love with the idea of you?’

  He jolted like he’d been physically struck.

  Damn. Wrong thing to say. Sophia wasn’t supposed to have seen that text message from Lena.

  ‘Sophia,’ he said in a delicious warning growl, ‘you know how things derail when we disrespect the goanna. It sounds like Amy’s been saying a lot of things she shouldn’t.’

  ‘She really hasn’t. Joining dots is my thing.’

  ‘I thought being persuasive was your thing. And what was your other thing, lie-detecting?’

  ‘I told you, I have many things.’ And you’re deflecting. ‘So, what was her idea of you?’

  Harry sifted around in the crate. It contained what looked like plumbing equipment, packed in shredded paper. ‘I don’t know if it’s that simple,’ he said as he began unpacking. ‘We met at uni in Melbourne. She was doing her master’s on federal politics. I was doing mine on saltwater species conservation.’ He shrugged.

  Hell’s bells, did Sophia have to suck every word out of him? He was happy enough to talk about the resort, or his work, or her problems, or hypotheticals. But as soon as it got personal … ‘Sounds geographically incompatible.’

  ‘Huh. We used to joke about it, like it wasn’t a big deal.’

  ‘It’s easy to gloss over things like that when you’re young and in love.’

  ‘I guess.’ He audibly exhaled in that way people did when they were relaxing into a conversation. She crossed her fingers and shut her mouth. ‘I just figured things would turn out,’ he said eventually, before again falling silent.

  ‘Did you bring her up here?’ With her eyes, Sophia followed the distant path of a sea eagle as it rode the air currents over the cliffs above Juno Beach. The main building and cabins at the backpackers were hidden from view by a thick stand of trees, but she could make out a couple of paddleboarders and a jet ski in the water. ‘I couldn’t imagine anyone not wanting to make this work.’ To make it work with Harry.

  You hardly know the guy. That’s your fantasy talking.

  ‘Yeah, she loved the island, and we used to talk about all the careers she could feasibly have from here. Turned out she was talking about it as a what-if, while I was talking about it as a when. And I was slow picking up on that. Like, eight years slow. She loved the idea of living here but she assumed that we never would. I assumed one thing, she assumed another, we both assumed it would magically work out. Basic beginner error. I guess we were in denial.’

  Finally he spoke. Maybe it was because he felt comfortable in the environment. Maybe he was distracted by his task. Either way, she’d take it. ‘I reckon those fundamental differences are the ones we’re most likely to stay in denial of, because they’re the hardest to solve. And everything’s clearer in hindsight, right?’ What clarity would hindsight bring to her current situation? And if you knew that now, it wouldn’t be hindsight, would it?

  ‘The things I wish I’d known then … Really, we should have looked at our thesis abstracts that first day at uni and figured out that it would never compute.’

  ‘Love doesn’t work like that, unfortunately,’ Sophia said, picking up a stick and flicking dried bird poo off the veranda railing. ‘Falling in love is the very embodiment of optimism. How easy would life be if we only ever fell for a person who was logistically compatible, on top of all the other compatibilities?’

  ‘Logistically compatible,’ he echoed with a laugh. ‘Should be the first box on the form.’

  Oh, that laugh. It refuelled her, like it was something she’d profoundly missed over a period of years. The corners of her mouth tugged, like a smile was its default position, which it so wasn’t. She knew her default expression was stern, both from candid photos and from random strangers on the street telling her to cheer up. But why not give into the smile? The homestead might be smellier and tattier than in her fantasy, and the guy was obviously logistically incompatible, thus failing the first hurdle, but just being here with him was giving her a high, as if the air were clearer—as long as she breathed it through her mouth. This week, she’d take the highs wherever she could get them. And right now, Operation Get Your Shit Together was going remarkably well. Neck-and-neck with Operation Distraction, in fact.

  From the other side of the house, something bleated.

  ‘Sheep?’ she said.

  ‘Goats. A few old feral billies we corralled up here.’ He strode through the long grass to the far side of the house and she followed along on the wraparound veranda, treading carefully on the creaky boards. Beyond a water tank on stilts, a rusty tin shed sat in the shade of a big pine, the whole lot surrounded by a tall wire fence. A big, shaggy goat limped toward Harry, bleating. Three others lounged in the shade, one shakily getting to its feet. Harry ripped up some grass and held it through the wire, though the goat had plenty on its side. As it chewed, he scratched its head with a stick. ‘The bachelor pad. Retirement village, these days. These guys were the final hold-outs after the last big cull about eight years ago. Me, Cody and Reg rounded them up and separated the males from the females so they could live out a happy retirement without messing up the native habitat. The girls have all died out, and these fellas are the last ones standing. Well, mostly they sit, talking bollocks.’

  She laughed. She did that a lot around Harry. Jeremy used to make her laugh like that, but maybe not so much lately, with the wedding to organise. ‘They remind me of my granddad and his mates, especially the hairy ears and the wet-wool smell.’

  ‘They’re a bit of history, these guys,’ Harry said, returning to the picnic table. She followed along the veranda. ‘They reckon some sailors dropped a bunch off here in the 1800s as a food source, in case of shipwrecks. Apparently, they weren’t that keen on goanna steaks. Fortunate for the goannas, if not the rest of the ecosystem.’

  He resumed unpacking, examining each piece as he pulled it out. Maybe part of his appeal was that he seemed so physically capable. How cavewoman of her.

  ‘So all that effort to try to make it work—the relationship, not the goats,’ she said, perching warily on the poo-cleared railing, ‘that was you fighting the rip?’

  He looked up. ‘We’re back to that, are we?’

  ‘It might help me come to terms with my situation.’ Not quite a lie. Talking to him was about catharsis as much as curiosity.

  He slowly shook his head, but there was a smile, too. Those pages were definitely unsticking. He returned to the crate. ‘Hard to believe now but I spent most of my twenties doing my time in Canberra waiting for her to come round to living up here.’

  ‘Canberra?’ The railing seemed to be holding. Sophia wiggled to get comfortable, leaning her spine against a post. ‘But you’re a marine scientist. How did that work?’

  ‘It didn’t. And I specialise in reef conservation. I have nothing against Canberra, and there are loads of advisory jobs there, but I didn’t like pushing paper around and living a theoretical life. I like getting my feet wet so, yeah. After years of compromise—on my part, at least—I finally woke up to the reality that it was never going to work. And I realised that maybe I didn’t love her as much as I should, because aren’t you supposed to be willing to make a big romantic gesture and walk away from everything for love? The fact that I couldn’t do it, couldn’t walk away from the island—what did that say about our relationship? About me?’

  Good grief, he was a true romantic, on top of everything else? And how heroic was it that he’d tried so hard? ‘Like you say, it’s probably not that simple. All that practical stu
ff like logistics and geography is easier to overlook when you’re young and idealistic. And incompatible careers are hard too.’

  ‘Stupid thing is, that’s my parents’ story too, give or take. Why they thought that would work, I don’t know. Why I thought it would work for me …’

  ‘They settled here?’

  ‘Yeah. They were living in Sydney after uni, and then Mum got a job as a GP in Airlie Beach so they moved here and Mum commuted while Dad was our stay-at-home parent, jumping in and helping with the resort when he could. But me and Cody were pretty wild, and then they got twins. Four lemmings under five all trying to walk off cliffs. Except less predictable than lemmings. He was an awesome dad back then but …’

  She noted the past tense, registered the unfinished ‘but’. ‘Where does he live now?’ she asked when it was clear Harry wasn’t going to continue.

  ‘Auckland. That’s where he grew up, where his family still is. He’s an architect.’ Every line Harry spoke finished emphatically, in an end-of-story way. Still, she sensed she could draw him out while he concentrated on unpacking and assembling. He was too polite not to answer her questions.

  ‘I’m guessing there wouldn’t have been much work for him up here?’

  ‘Nah. The Beach was pretty sleepy back then. No flash holiday houses like now. He did stuff like redesign all our resort interiors, and had a few other jobs around the state, but once us kids were all at school, he hit a bad patch. He was living the dream,’ he said, nodding at the view, ‘but it wasn’t his dream. This doesn’t suit everyone.’ Again with that note of resolution.

  ‘He left?’

  ‘When I was fourteen. Mum was pretty broken up, but it wasn’t like it was unprecedented. The family curse, you know.’

  ‘I don’t, actually.’ She did, actually.

  ‘Nan reckons it dates back to great-great-whatever-grandmother Lois, that before her husband died he cast a love curse on her and her descendants. Dunno if I believe that, but I did try and replicate my parents’ ill-fated experience.’

  ‘Do you go to Auckland much?’

  ‘Nah. Dad travels a lot. He’s found a niche in designing small spaces—luxury boats, apartments in big, built-up cities. We catch up with him when he’s on stopover in Australia. He’s a good dude to have a beer with.’

  ‘But?’ she prompted.

  ‘We sort of fell out of touch,’ he said, his voice echoing as he examined a piece of plastic piping. ‘Strange thing to say about your dad, I know, like he’s an old school friend, but it’s hard to have a real relationship when your lives don’t have much of a crossover.’

  ‘Fourteen has to be a rough age to effectively lose your dad, especially after he’s been so hands-on.’

  ‘I was a pretty grown-up fourteen. Eldest kid, you know. Mum went part-time at the clinic at the Beach and set up the spa so she could be here more often, and I was old enough to help keep Cody and the twins from going over the cliff. We were pretty lucky really. Anyway,’ he said, a clear declaration that that line of questioning was complete.

  And the prosecution would rest on that point, for now. It had proved a successful intelligence-gathering session, though there was one matter outstanding. ‘Katie must score highly in logistical compatibility?’

  He gave a wry grin. ‘She does.’

  ‘And the spark?’

  He looked up at Sophia. ‘Not so much. I’m guessing she felt the same way.’

  ‘It’s the idea of her, is it?’

  ‘Ha.’ He brushed shredded paper off a metal pipe. ‘What you said before about Rachel being in love with the idea of me? I don’t know if that was true, with her, and I’d like to think she knew me pretty well. But that does seem to happen with other women, more often than you might think.’

  Like with Sophia? Was this his cautionary tale? Was this why he’d suddenly become so talkative? She lifted her focus back to the view—the scenic one. It had to span 270 degrees, and every degree glittered. He raised an excellent point. Even if something happened between the two of them—something more than a kiss in the early hours—the years they’d spend trying to make it work were years she couldn’t afford to waste starting over, and he obviously didn’t want to go through it all again either. They might have a spark that was off the charts—though she could only speak for herself—but their logistical compatibility barely registered. The Harry and Sophia Compatibility bar graph overlaid itself onto the hazy mainland along the horizon, the spark bar soaring into the sky, the logistical compatibility bar dipping below the baseline into the ocean. The Harry and Katie graph would be the inverse, which was somewhat gratifying.

  He started laughing, a deep belly laugh. The graph disappeared.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  He pointed to the bush bordering one side of the clearing. ‘A goanna.’

  She spotted the rear end of a huge greyish-brown lizard as it scampered side to side into the undergrowth. She laughed too.

  ‘Why do we keep doing this, bringing up the past?’ he said, grabbing the assembled parts and heading around the far side of the veranda again.

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s me,’ she said, following him. ‘I showed up here with my sob story and my baggage—literally.’ And I keep interrogating you because I have this compulsion to turn your brain inside-out and pick through it, like a zombie that feeds on memories. She sidestepped a dead cockatoo—the source of the smell? Yes, the veranda was smelly and filthy but the planks seemed intact. She jumped a little on the spot. And that gave her an idea. ‘How long do you think it’ll take to do whatever it is you’re doing?’

  He yanked open a wooden door under the veranda. ‘Longer than I thought. These parts are going to require more creative assembly than I’d planned. The hardware store didn’t have a lot of options. Do you want to get back? I can get Lena to pick me up later.’

  ‘No, I’m happy to hang out here. But I need to go and grab some things from the resort. I’ll be back shortly.’

  She walked back along the deck, inhaling the view with her eyes.

  Happy. That was it exactly. She was happy. Happy being in this gorgeous place with warmth seeping into her skin, and Harry’s easy company, and a spark she would enjoy while it lasted. Happy to laugh along with him. Happy to not second-guess or angst about the future, long-term, since there clearly couldn’t be one between them.

  But there could be a perfectly pleasant present, and maybe even an interesting immediate future.

  Trip Review: Curlew Bay

  Rating:

  Review: The birds are too noisy. Got woken before dawn every morning. And there was a kookaburra who kept sitting on my outdoor table. So unhygienic.

  24

  Amy

  Amy had managed to drag a quick dip out into a lengthy swim, a snack break, and then a nap in a cave in the cliffs as a shower passed through. Josh read a book on his phone, compulsively swiping away a lock of salty hair that kept flopping into his eyes. (Okay, so she was doing less napping and more spying.)

  When the skies cleared, she stretched and sat up. ‘Let’s practise the steps following the lift, up until we split to pull up other people to dance.’ She reapplied her sunscreen and tied her hair into a top knot. At least she could rely on Carmen to pick them up on time.

  ‘So,’ she said, as they reached the hard sand, ‘you’ll bring me down from the lift with the greatest of ease.’ She started the audio track on her phone and took her position in front of him. ‘And then it’s a straightforward samba until the music fades.’ She pulled him around in a classic closed hold, trying not to think about the places they were connected by nothing but skin—her fingers on his shoulder, his palm on her shoulder blade, her hand in his. He bit his lip in concentration, which was so darn cute. ‘And that’s about it,’ she said, swaying to a halt. ‘Except you’ll lead. Easy.’ And you’re supposed to look at me like you’re in love, but we’ll let that go.

  ‘I love the way you dance,’ he said, still holding her. ‘It’s so d
ifferent from the way Carmen does the same moves.’ He looked down her body as if she were still moving.

  ‘Yeah, she’s more classical.’ More elegant, as people had said about a gazillion times.

  ‘And you’re … twerky.’

  She stepped away, forcing him to release her, but still close enough that she had to tilt her head to look into his eyes. ‘Twerky?’

  He grinned. Yeesh, that smile. ‘Well, what do you call it, the way you move, your style, or whatever?’

  ‘I don’t think it has a name. It’s a blend. I was never into the classical stuff. I just looked plain wrong, obviously.’

  His brow creased. ‘You say that like I should know what you mean.’

  ‘Oh, it’s hard to explain to a non-dancer,’ she said, waving it away. She wasn’t about to unload her recovering body issues onto a guy who was her stepbrother to be and also her current crush.

  ‘I’d pay good money to see you in a tutu.’

  She forced a laugh.

  ‘No joke! You move with such confidence, such conviction, like you’re really comfortable in your skin, and completely unaware of how stunning you are. I like it. It’s … sexy.’

  Stunning? Sexy? That was definitely crossing a line. His expression fell from cheeky to deathly serious and a little unsure. The way he was looking into her eyes—that crossing was deliberate. He hadn’t accidentally veered over the boundary and hurriedly corrected. He’d seen the line there and put out a foot and stepped right over it and he was still there, on the other side, waiting.

  She stared into his eyes and he stared right back. Was his chest rising more forcefully than before? She stepped in, a little shaky, and he did the same, and suddenly his lips were on hers, or hers were on his—she wasn’t sure who’d kissed whom but they were definitely both kissing back. She slid her hands to the back of his neck and clung on as the kiss intensified, desperate and grasping, like there was a timer on it. He wrapped his arms around her, his palms on her lower back, and pulled her in tight.