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She sighed. Pushed her shoulders back. ‘Keeping it bound and gagged gives it too much power. Maybe it’s time I started to lighten up about it all. ‘ Take some of the control back. ‘Get back to a normal life.’
‘Fair enough. What will you do now?’ he asked. ‘To make a living? To have that normal life?’
It was a good question. Her dark years were behind her. Her list was done. She had the rest of her future to think about. She blew out the residual tension from their previous question. ‘I have no idea … The past two years has been all about recovery. It’s been a day by day kind of thing.’ She stared at him, blank. ‘I suppose running a bottle shop is out of the question?’
His glare was colder than the water.
‘Sorry. Bad joke.’ Bleakness filled her. ‘I feel like all I’ve done is drink and then not drink.’
‘You have a decade to catch up on.’ He looked hard at her. ‘What about uni? It’s never too late.’
Beth frowned. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Mature aged students are perfectly common now.’
Taverns, parties, temptation. ‘I don’t think I’d be a good fit on campus.’
His mouth tightened as he realised. ‘Online, then?’
Something she could study in the comfort of her own cavernous warehouse. In the silence of her own lonely hours. ‘What would I study?’
‘What do you enjoy?’
She blinked at him.
‘What about your painting?’
She shook her head. ‘That’s something I do for therapy. It won’t earn me a living.’
‘Why not? Maybe you could help others like you helped yourself. Give back.’
Her head came up. Giving back rang all kinds of karmic bells. Art therapy. She hadn’t known such a thing existed until she’d needed it. But it did. And it worked.
Marc shrugged. ‘There’d be no shortage of people needing assistance.’
Purpose suddenly glowed, bright and promising on her horizon. She could give back. Lord knew she’d had her fair share of assistance from others who gave their time. She chewed her lip. ‘I could. That could work. Something simple that will help people.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘You don’t want to rule the country any more?’
Alcoholism had taken more from her than just years. ‘If I can just rule me I’ll be happy.’
He stared at her long and hard. Compassion filled his eyes. His voice was low and sad. ‘You’ll get there, Beth. I believe in you.’
A deep sorrow washed through her. ‘You always did.’
Silence fell. Beth shook her head to chase off the blues she could feel settling.
‘What would you change?’ Marc’s voice came out of the dim morning light, tossing her earlier words back at her. ‘If you had the opportunity to do ten years ago over again. What would you do differently?’
Ah. This one she’d pondered plenty and she’d refined it during some of their long silences in the water. She bent to re-soak the blanket and thanked God that she had no sleeve on which to be displaying her heart. ‘I wouldn’t have put so much importance on what others said. I definitely wouldn’t have encouraged Damien’s advances.’
She kept her eyes away from his as she stretched the blanket out across the whale’s back. ‘I wouldn’t have listened to …’ Your mother. But now, more than ever, she couldn’t say that. There was already so much lost between them. Vindicating herself would condemn them. ‘I wouldn’t have shut you out of my life.’
‘You didn’t.’
She looked up. ‘I did.’
He shook his head. ‘I mean you didn’t succeed. I kept a low profile but that didn’t mean I wasn’t aware of everything you did. Where you went. Right up until school ended and I lost you, I was watching.’
Watching. Beth stared. She bled for the near-man who’d been so hurt but still so very loyal. Maybe despite himself. Her voice was tiny. ‘I thought you were gone.’ Present-absent in the way only a teen could be.
‘No. I was still there.’
Her chest tightened. ‘Why?’
He considered her from under lashes crusted with salt. ‘We were friends. Friends don’t abandon each other.’
Beth’s cheeks flamed.
‘I wasn’t having a dig, Beth.’
She shook her head. ‘I know. But it doesn’t change what happened.’ She stared at him. ‘You deserved better.’
You still do. Her tight heart pushed rich pulses of blood around her body and they throbbed past her ears. Her eyes stuck fast to his. She made her decision.
‘I need to tell you something. About my last days drinking.’ She took a second to gather courage by trailing down to the whale’s exposed tail and draping the soaked blanket over it. Water cascaded over the vicious arrow-head wound.
She took a deep breath and then met his eyes again. ‘I forgot you, Marc. When I was deep in the hands of my addiction, I kind of. blocked you out. For years.’
His nostrils flared. His hands stilled.
‘After graduation I thought about you every day. Wondered how you were. What you were doing. Thought about what I had done. I thought about the connection we used to have, the stories we had in common. Every day I tried to recreate with my husband what I’d had with you, and it just wasn’t working. As I slipped further and further into numbness I think I just …’ She swallowed and took a shuddery breath. ‘Remembering you hurt. So I just stopped.’
Those beautiful hands tightened on his towel. Just as they’d tightened in her hair while he’d kissed her. Last night. All those years ago.
‘I can understand that.’ Hurt thickened his already gravelly voice.
She shook her head. Forced herself to continue. ‘One day I woke up and there you were, blazing and persistent at the front of my mind. Like a ghost with a mission. Except I was the ghost. And I realised I’d been. non-existent for so long. I remembered how you used to believe in me no matter what but, this time, instead of that making me sad, hurting, it made me determined.’
She turned her eyes back to his. ‘You gave me strength, Marc. I stopped drinking because of the memory of the boy who had so much belief in me. More than I’d ever had in myself. And because of the goodness in you that I’d always wished was mine. The strength of character.’
His eyes dropped away, which meant she could breathe.
‘I just wanted you to understand the part you played in pulling me out of the morass. I can’t thank you because you didn’t even know it was happening. But I can acknowledge it. And I think I understand it now. What it meant.’
She clamped nervous hands together. ‘Drinking helped me forget how I’d treated someone I loved. How the choices I made snowballed into a lousy life with a lousy husband and a lousy future. That I’d done that to myself. But the memory of my feelings for you saved me when everything was lost. When I was.’
His frown folded his handsome face and his jaw twitched with tension.
She drew in a massive breath for strength. ‘You filled my heart in high school, Marc, and I think you filled it right through my marriage, except I couldn’t bear to acknowledge it. One day I just … forced you out of my heart to protect myself.’ She laid a hand on the whale. ‘But then I crashed into the water with you yesterday and discovered you were still the same loyal, generous, brave person who I loved back then. You haven’t changed.’ She dipped her eyes, then forced them back up. Took a deep, deep breath. ‘My feelings haven’t changed.’
His silence screamed.
Mortification waited greedily in the wings but she held it back. ‘I don’t expect anything in return—’ much as she wished for it ‘—I just wanted you to know. That you’d changed my life. That you’d saved my life. That our stories are connected.’
His neoprene chest heaved up and down, his eyes blazed hot and hard into hers. The hundred variations of things he might say whispered through her head. Then he finally spoke and it was laced with agony.
‘I’m not a crutch, Beth.’
Her stomach plummeted. What? ‘No, I—’
Sudden shouting from the direction of Marc’s car split the quiet of the pre-morning. A dozen figures appeared at the dune tops, silhouetted against the dawning sun. They carried coils of rope slung over their shoulders and more blankets. Beth should have cried with relief that the cavalry had finally arrived but she wanted to scream at them for just five more minutes. It felt vitally important that she have just a bit more time alone with Marc.
She swung her eyes back to him.
His voice was hard. Hurried. ‘I can’t be the thing that sustains you, Beth. You can’t swap one fixation for another, put that kind of responsibility on me. I lived with that for years.’
His mother … She opened her mouth to try and explain again as people started streaming down the dunes towards them. Euphoria that assistance had finally arrived crashed headlong into the sudden shot of urgent adrenalin surging through her body. In that moment she felt the best she had all night.
And the absolute worst.
Marc lay his shredded, saturated towel along the whale’s broad back for one last time. Then he pinned her with his gaze. ‘Me accepting that you’re sorry for what happened a lifetime ago. Are you expecting that it will change anything? Other than for you?’
‘I …’ Was she? What did it really change, other than to mark the completion of her list? One more step in her road to healing.
‘Because it doesn’t change anything for me, Beth.’ He cast her one final tired look and then dragged his exhausted legs out of the water.
The earth shifted under her feet. In all her imaginings, it had never occurred to her that Marc would accept her apology but that he might not truly forgive her. Realise the depth of her feelings but not value it. Each was meaningless without the other.
Her heart pounded. ‘I thought, maybe if you understood …’
‘I understand more than you know.’ His tired eyes rested on her. ‘It’s been ten years, Beth. Any feelings we had are nothing but a memory. We’re both different people now. If I helped you to get over—’
Could he still not say the word?
‘—everything, I’m glad.’ His eyes lifted. ‘But I’m not some kind of lucky charm to keep you sober. And telling me you were alcoholic doesn’t go any way to restoring the lost trust between us. Did you honestly expect it would?’
An awful realisation dawned with the sun that suddenly peeked its warmth above the sand dunes. She had expected that, yes. That her cosmic reward for finding him and confessing her shame—her many shames—would be a beginning as blazing and new as the sun climbing over the horizon. That the man who had played such an important role in her recovery would be given back to her and they could have a fresh start.
Strange hands were suddenly all over her, pulling her gently back from the water as two wetsuit-clad bodies slid into her place and plunged fresh blankets into the water. Beth ignored them and reached out to urgently snare Marc’s hand as he left the water, desperate not to become separated even for a moment. Something in her knew that if that happened she’d never find him again.
His eyes dropped to where her fingers twisted amongst his with white-knuckled urgency. When they lifted, they were tragic. ‘I can see that you’ve done it really tough since we parted, Beth, and that brings me no joy at all. But drunk Beth wasn’t the one who tore our friendship apart that day behind the library. Dumping me for someone better was a choice that you made stone cold sober.’
The awful, sinking reality hit her. No matter what her motivation, how honourable, she had ripped apart their friendship in cold blood. She’d let his mother drive a wedge between them, and then she’d let Damien exploit the gap. She’d done nothing to stop any of it. Then and now. She still couldn’t bring herself to tell him why she’d really let him walk away that day.
‘But you accepted my apology …’
‘I believe that you’re sorry.’ His words grew harder. Shorter.
‘But our friendship …?’
His eyes were flat and pained. And as unmovable as granite. ‘I’ve lived without it this long …’
Pain ripped through her as the first shards of light speared across the sky. Why had she expected more? Every part of her wanted to shut up tighter than a clam. Protect herself. But that had got her nowhere so far in life.
‘Wait!’ Her desperate voice broke, drawing him back as he turned towards two approaching men in Department of Conservation uniforms. ‘What happens now?’
Marc’s face was haggard, tragic as he shrugged. She loved every line. ‘I go home. You go home. I appreciate your help with the whale but, as far as I’m concerned, we’re not connected any more. Our story’s over.’
Not connected?
‘But … you kissed me.’
His eyes were tragic. ‘Yeah.’ He stared long and hard at his oldest friend. ‘You’d think I’d learn, huh?’
Beth stumbled backwards in the sand as he walked away.
A gentle female voice murmured near her ear—buzzing in her throbbing head—and supported her up the beach as others draped thick blankets around her shoulders. Her eyes streamed from the sudden onset of morning light after so many hours of darkness. Dawn should have brought a bright new beginning for their friendship, not this awful gaping chasm. This was like losing him all over again. The impossibility that he could literally not want her back in his life in any form. That he could forgive her past but not her present.
She sank down into the sand as someone thrust an energy bar and Thermos of tea at her. Voices throbbed in her spinning head and she let herself be tended to like a child as they tuttutted over the open blisters on her hands and the sunburn on her tight skin. Her head cranked around to follow Marc’s progress as he dragged his feet up the beach with the wildlife officials, deep in conversation.
Someone was asking her where she was staying and she felt her lips responding, identifying her motel. Then capable hands lifted her to her feet and supported her as they moved up the beach, up a different track to the one leading to Marc’s car. Her head cranked around to catch sight of him as he disappeared up the far dune.
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