First Love, Second Chance: Friends to Forever / Second Chance with the Rebel / It Started with a Crush...

His thick voice was strained and it drew her eyes up to his. ‘That’s not a question you can ask me, Beth.’

She lifted her head. But the move cost her. She winced as her over-taxed muscles reacted sharply to the move. ‘Why not?’

‘Because of what you said afterwards. What you made me promise as you pushed me away.’

Don’t ever touch me again. Don’t speak to me again.

She closed her eyes. ‘I was angry. And confused. It never occurred to me that you would actually honour that. ‘ But he had. All damned year.

‘Confused how?’ His tired eyes took on a sharper edge.

‘Because I … ‘ Lord, how to get out of this one. ‘Because it was us. Kissing. It threw me.’

He straightened. ‘Because you hated it? Or because you liked it?’

For all her faults, she’d never been a liar. Not to Marc. But she was proficient at hedging. ‘Are you seriously asking me to rate your kissing prowess?’

‘Do I look like I have any doubts about that?’

Her mouth twisted. ‘No. You always were infuriatingly confident.’

His expression changed in a blink and then was gone. Maybe the moonlight was playing tricks on her, making her see vulnerability that couldn’t possibly be there. Not in that body. Not in this man.

‘It matters to me, Beth. Whether you hated it. Whether I actually damaged our friendship, too.’

Too. Misery came surging back in at the reminder that she’d said the words that destroyed their friendship. Even if she hadn’t set out to. She was only going to ask him to back off for a while. But he’d kissed her and she’d panicked. Those soft lips pressing against hers, forcing hers wider. The hands that had plunged into her hair to hold her captive sent electric sparks through her body and threw her into confusion. The press of his eager body into hers had made her want things she shouldn’t want. The desperate, intense pain in his eyes echoing hers. The thick smoke-like energy he’d been pumping out all around them.

Did she like it?

Enough to rip his heart out with her reflexive over-reaction. She took a breath. Held his eyes. Held her breath. ‘I didn’t hate it.’

This was where he’d kiss her in a movie. The water. The cold. The intimacy. The moonlight. And her admission practically cried out for his mouth on hers.

Instead, he nudged her head back down to his shoulder and rested his cheek against her wet hair. She felt his low words against her ear, vibrating in his throat. ‘Thank you, Beth. Deep down, I worried I’d struck the death blow.’

No. That honour remains with me. Snapping on the heels of that thought came another. He’d wondered about his part in that kiss? That wasn’t the admission of a man who’d never given it another thought.

Beth lifted her face to study his. A particularly full wave washed over them and buffeted Beth against him with its chilly brush. Waiting for a kiss was stupidly naive and impossibly romantic. Her heart squeezed hard. Had she been so starved for affection in her loveless marriage that she was finding it now in impossible places? Marc was just moved by their circumstance and harking back to better times. That was all.

Since there was to be no kissing, she needed, really badly, to get off him. But her body had practically seized up in the foetal position and straightening her limbs was a new kind of agony. Just when she thought she’d already met all the cousins in the Pain family.

‘Easy, Beth. You need to walk off the ache. Your muscles will be eating themselves.’

Pretty apt, really. Starting with the giant thumping one in her chest cavity. Crawling into Marc’s lap had not been part of her plan as she drove up the coastal highway this morning, but now that she had it was hard to imagine ever getting the sensation out of her mind. Her heart.

But she had to.

Her back screamed as she pushed against Marc’s chest and twisted up onto her knees, between his. She gave herself a moment to adjust.

‘Just one more thing … ‘ he said before she could rise much further.

Those powerful abdominal muscles she’d spied back at the car did their job and pulled his torso up out of the splash and hard into hers. His lips slid warmly, firmly against her mouth and he took advantage of her shocked gasp to work them open, hot and blazing against her numb flesh. Her lips drank heat from him and came tingling back to life, startled and wary. His hands forked up into her wet hair and held her face while he teased and taunted her blissfully with his tongue, letting her breathe his air as though he were giving her the kiss of life.

Which, in a way, he was.

Relief and a decade of desire surged through her. Forgiveness tasted an awful lot like this.

He lifted his face and stared into her glassy eyes. ‘This is how I would do it if I had my time over,’ he said softly and then lowered his mouth again.

Whether he was making a point or making good on a ghost from his past, Beth didn’t care. His mouth on hers felt as if it belonged there. Her nipples, already beaded from the icy ocean, suddenly remembered they had nerve endings and they sang out in two-part harmony from the pleasure of being crushed against solid granite. Heat soaked out from the contact even through his wetsuit.

Marc seemed to notice too, because he groaned against her mouth and let one hand slide down to where small waves lapped against her underwear, worked under her blouse and then surged back up, scorching against her frozen spine.

It was the only other place that her skin met his. Other than his amazing, soft, talented mouth. Maybe she just hadn’t kissed enough men, but she couldn’t imagine how a kiss could possibly be better. Or more right. It was every bit as confronting as their last one.

Only this time she was equal to it.

It was a weird kind of rush, kissing a total stranger and your oldest friend. The man who knew everything about you. And nothing at all. Exactly as that unwelcome thought shoved its way to the front of her mind, she felt Marc stiffen beneath her. He ripped his lips away and turned his head. Disbelief painted his features.

‘Stop …’

A rock lodged in Beth’s chest. He tugged his hand out from under her shirt and resolutely pressed her away from him. She twisted sideways against the pain of his rejection and found herself on hands and knees in the shallows, undignified and lost. How must she look to him?

But he wasn’t looking at her as he scrambled to his feet.

Beth followed the direction of his eyes up the beach, where a dark mass lurched and twisted on the shore near the calf.

‘She’s re-stranded, ‘ he said, stumbling away a few steps, his voice thick from their kissing. Or from the agony of having failed to save the whale.

When he turned and reached out his hand, she waved him off. ‘I can’t, Marc. I hurt too much. You go. I’m going to need a second.’

It was a measure of their past friendship that he didn’t falter and worry about helping her up. If anyone had ever respected her independence, it was Marc. Just another way he used to show his belief in her.

Pain came in all shapes and sizes. As Marc found the strength to run up the beach towards the beleaguered whale, stooping to grab his whale-washer from the shore, Beth knew she’d have to too.

They were in this together. Ready or not. And she was not about to let him down for a second time. Not when he was the only man she’d ever known who had ever believed in her.

She cried out as she straightened her tortured spine, an anguished mix of pain and frustration and self-recrimination. Then she lurched up the beach after him, the golden glow of his kiss feeding her the necessary strength.

Just.

CHAPTER FIVE

THEY hadn’t spoken in an hour.

Not because they were angry with each other, Marc knew. Not because there was weirdness after their kiss, which had happened so naturally. And not only because their spirits were broken by the return of the whale they’d worked so hard to save. It was just that they were both putting all their energy into the endless drag-and-slosh—slower, shorter, choppier. Eternal. At least there was no blazing sun to contest with now.

The whale could see her calf from her new beach position and Marc wondered if the stillness of her body meant she knew it had died. Attributing human qualities to it was as pointless as it was hard not to. Beth’s eyes followed his to the whale’s small round ones.

‘Why do they do it—strand themselves?’

Marc shook his head. ‘No one knows for sure.’

She blinked her fatigue. ‘Do they want to die?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Can’t they see the land?’

‘Some blame our electromagnetic technologies which throw their guidance systems out of whack. Others say their inner ears are damaged by under-sea quakes which mess with their ability to navigate.’

‘What do you think?’

‘I don’t know. I just know what it does to them.’

Beth stroked the whale’s cool skin. ‘I think she came back for her baby.’

Marc nodded. ‘Could be. I’ve seen mothers and calves together in the deep water creches, the bond is definitely strong enough.’

‘Maybe she just wanted closure.’

Beth’s dark head tipped back, rolling gently on her shoulders to ease the ache. His eyes followed hers upwards. It seemed bizarre to notice, through the death and the pain and the blistering cold, how pretty the night was. It truly was a beautiful Australian night. More stars than he’d ever seen in his life—that was what he’d thought when he’d first moved to the deep south of the state. The Milky Way in all its blanketing glory. It was kind of nice to see someone else appreciate it.

Beth arched her head back so far she almost stumbled. He twitched to race to her—even knowing he’d never get there—but caught himself just as she did.

‘We’re so small,’ she murmured, regaining balance, her face still turned heavenward. ‘Do you think that there’s a Marc and a Beth and a whale somewhere out there fighting for life, just like we are?’

Marc followed her glance up to the sky. ‘I guess … statistically. Could be.’

Her thoughts were as far away as those stars.

‘It seems impossible that life could only exist on one planet out of a million twinkling lights.’

‘You aren’t seeing the planets. Only the suns in solar systems full of other planets.’

She turned cold-drugged eyes on him and considered what he’d said for an age. Marc frowned. Her speech was getting slurred, her lids heavy. He’d have to get her out of the icy water soon. She was turning hypothermic. And talking about space.

‘We’re such an insignificant part of an insignificant part of something so big, ‘ she murmured. ‘Why do we even worry about things that go wrong? Or things that go right. Our whole drama-filled lives are barely a blink of the universe’s eye. We make no difference.’

Marc stopped sloshing. ‘It makes a difference here and now. And life is not about how long it is. It’s about how full it is.’

‘Full?’

‘Full of love. Joy.’ He looked back at the whale. ‘Compassion.’

She lowered her face to look at him. ‘Even if it’s only a blink?’

‘I’d rather have a moment of utter beauty than a hundred years of blandness. Wouldn’t you?’

Her eyes blinked heavily. ‘You would have made a good astronaut, ‘ she mumbled.

Marc frowned.

‘Fourth grade. You wanted to be a space-man. You thought there was a space princess you were supposed to save.’ Her teeth chattered.

A numb smile dawned. ‘I haven’t thought about that for years. I can’t believe you remember it.’

She returned her focus to him. ‘I remember everything.’

She’d driven him crazy in the playground, insisting on being the astronaut and refusing to be the princess. Was that the beginning of her tomboy ways? An insane glow birthed deep inside him that she’d held on to those memories. It suggested she hadn’t stopped caring when she’d pulled the pin on their friendship. She’d just stopped being there.

His smile withered.

‘So tell me about your mum, ‘ she murmured.

His gut instantly tightened as she forced her eyes to focus on him.

‘What happened between the two of you?’

His heart started to thump. Hard. ‘Didn’t we already cover this?’

‘Nope. I asked, you hedged.’

‘Doesn’t that tell you anything?’

‘It tells me you don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Bingo.’ He glared at her. ‘But I’m sure that’s no deterrent to you.’

The more defensive he got, the more interested she got. It seemed to slap her out of her growing stupor. ‘Not particularly.’

He threw his shoulders back and shot her his best glare. Subtlety was wasted on Beth. ‘If you give me a few minutes I’ll see if I can find a stick for you to poke around in that open wound.’

Her face was a wreck. Grey beneath the windburn, shadows beneath her eyes. But she still found energy to fight him on this. ‘I’m more interested in why you have an open wound in the first place.’

Because my mother is a nightmare.

‘Family stuff happens, Beth. I’m sure your relationship with your parents isn’t perfect.’

She got that haunted look from earlier. ‘Far from it. I’ve disappointed them in a hundred different ways. But I still see them. What happened with Janice?’

‘You don’t remember? How she could be?’

She tilted her head in that hard to resist way. He’d never felt less like indulging her. He didn’t discuss his mother. Period.

So why was he?

‘I always assumed it was because she lost your father,’ she said. ‘That it kind of. ruined her.’

He stared. ‘That’s actually a fairly apt description.’

Beth frowned, stopped sloshing. Her teeth chattered spasmodically between sentences. ‘I remember how hard she was on you. And on me. I remember how hard you worked at school and at the café to do well for her. But she barely noticed.’

His heart beat hard enough to feel through his wetsuit. He crossed his arms to help disguise it. ‘What do you remember about her personally? Physically?’

Beth’s frown intensified. ‘Um …’ She was tall, slim. Too slim, actually. Kind of …’ Her eyes widened and her words dried up momentarily. When she started again she had a tremor in her voice that seemed like a whole lot more than temperature-related. ‘Kind of hollow. I always felt she was a bit empty.’

Marc stared. She’d just nailed Janice. And those were still the early years.

‘I’m sorry, ‘ she whispered, as if finally realising she was stomping through his most fragile feelings.

‘Don’t be. That’s pretty astute. After we. went our separate ways, she got worse. Harder. Angrier. The more I tried to please her, the less pleased she seemed. She’d swing between explosions of emotion and this empty nothing. A vacant stare.’

Beth swallowed hard enough to see from clear across the whale. She’d completely stopped sloshing. Her pale skin was tinged with green.

‘She’d always been present-absent. Since my dad died. But it got worse. To the point she’d forget to eat, to lock the house up, to feed the cat. He moved in with the over-the-road neighbours.’

A tight shame curled itself into his throat.

‘It took me another two years before I discovered she was hooked on her depression medication,’ he said, swiping his towel in the ocean ferociously. ‘And that she had been since my dad died.’

The earth shifted violently under Beth’s feet and it had nothing to do with the lurching roll of the whale. A high-pitched whooshing sound started up in her ears.

‘Your mum was addicted to painkillers?’

‘Is. Present tense.’

Oh, God. The unveiled disgust on his face might as well have been for her. The description of Janice ten years ago might as well be her two years before. Beth’s voice shook and she forced herself to resume sloshing to cover it up. ‘And that’s why you don’t see her?’

‘I have no interest in seeing her.’ He dropped his stiff posture and almost sagged against the whale as he bent to soak his towel again. ‘Working on the trawlers was more than a financial godsend; it gave me space to breathe. Perspective. And an education. I watched some of those blokes popping all manner of pills to stay awake. Improve the haul. I saw what it did to them over a season. When I got back and saw through educated eyes how she was, I was horrified.’ Those eyes grew haunted. ‘She was my mum, you know?’

Beth nodded, her fear-frozen tongue incapable of speech.

‘All Dad’s insurance money, all the money I’d been sending home from up north. She blew most of it on pills. She was no further ahead financially than when I left.’

Beth wanted to empathise. She wanted to comfort. But it was so hard when he might as well have been describing her. Suddenly Janice’s desperate taloned grip on Beth’s forearm all those years ago made a sickening sense. ‘What did you do?’

His sad eyes shadowed further. ‘I tried for three years. I gave her money, she swallowed it. I signed her up to support groups and she left them. I hid her Xexal and she’d tear the house up looking for it. Or magically find some more. I threatened to leave … ‘ he shook his head ‘… and she threw my belongings into the street. One day I just didn’t take them back inside.’

‘You moved out.’

‘It was all I had left to fight back with. She was hellbent on self-destruction and I wasn’t going to watch that.’ He shuddered. ‘I thought losing me might have been enough.’

But it wasn’t.

‘Do you see her at all?’ Beth whispered.

‘Not for four years. The one useful thing I did do was buy out her mortgage. She can’t sell the house without me so I know she has somewhere to sleep, at least. And I get meals delivered to her now instead of sending her cash, so I know she has food. For the rest.’ His shrug was pure agony.

Compassion and misery filled Beth at once. For Marc, who loved his mother no matter how difficult she’d been. For Janice, who lost the love of her life when Bruce Duncannon had a cardiac arrest and who had never truly coped as a single parent. And for herself, whose path wouldn’t have been so very different if not for the blazing memory one Sunday morning of a young boy who’d always believed in her.

A powerful love.

‘Would you ever try again?’ She felt compelled to ask. Knowing if she was in Janice’s shoes she’d want someone not to give up on her. Deep down inside. No matter how much she protested. The way her parents had hung in there for her. Despite everything.

Marc lifted his gaze. His brows folded. His eyes darkened. ‘Too much would have to change. I’ve accepted that the only time I’ll see my mother again is if she’s in hospital, in a psych ward or in the ground.’

The gaping void in his heart suddenly made shattering sense. She remembered what it was like living with Damien in the early days, before she’d succumbed to the bottle. She could only imagine what it must have been like for a child living with that. Then the man, watching someone he loved self-destruct.

But she herself was that hollow. An addict. Never truly recovered, always working at it. As if Marc didn’t already have enough reasons to hate her, this would be too much.

‘Go ahead and say it, Beth. I can see your mind working.’

Startled, her eyes shot up. She couldn’t say what she truly wanted to say. But she found something. ‘What about yourself—did you ever seek help for yourself?’

The frown came back. ‘I don’t need help.’

‘You’re her son. There’s—’ She caught herself just before she gave away too much. ‘I’m sure there’s assistance out there for you, too.’ She knew there was. Her parents had accessed it.

The frown grew muddled. ‘To help me do what?’

Beth lifted her shoulders and let them slump. ‘Understand her.’

His expression grew thunderous. ‘You think I lack understanding? Having lived with this situation since I was nine years old?’

Beth wanted to beg him to reconsider. To be there for his mother, since no one else was. But she burned for the little boy he must have been too. ‘If not understanding, then … objectivity? You had it briefly when you returned from up north and look how clearly it helped you to see.’

‘Objectivity did nothing more than make me realise what a junkie my mother had become.’

Beth winced at the derogatory term. She’d had similar words ascribed to her over the years. Five years ago, they struck her shielded centre and were absorbed into a soggy mass of indifference. These days they cut.

Disappointment stained his eyes. ‘I really thought you’d have understood, Beth. I wasn’t oblivious back in school. I know you stopped coming around because of her.’

I stopped a heck of a lot more because of her. She’d started pulling back from their friendship because Janice had begged her to. And that withdrawal led to everything else that followed.

‘I just … She’s your mother, Marc, and all you have left. I know it’s hard but I just don’t want to see you throw it away—’

‘Throw it away?’ he thundered. ‘I bled over that decision, Beth, even worse than when you—’ He stopped short and snapped his mouth shut, glaring at her through the darkness. ‘She’s an addict. You have no idea what it is like to live with someone who is controlled by their compulsion. The kind of damage it does to everyone around them. How the poison spreads.’

Tears pricked dangerously in Beth’s eyes, welling and meeting the salt that still clung to her lashes. It dissolved and filled her eyes with a stinging mix that she had to blink to displace. He was talking about her. He just didn’t know it. She turned her face away on the pretext of re-wetting her shredded rag. Behind her, pain saturated every word.

‘I have no interest in ever putting myself in that position again, ‘ Marc vowed.

She knew plenty about being an addict but what did she understand about living with one? Her response to Damien’s addiction had been to cave in and join him. Hardly a battle. Walking away from Janice must have been brutal for Marc—on all fronts—but it meant he kept his sanity. He survived. He controlled the spread of the poison.

Misery washed through her.

She lifted damp eyes back to his. Nodded. ‘I understand, Marc. I do understand.’ Only too well. Her eyelids dipped heavily. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you,’ she risked after a long silence, forcing her lids open.

Marc was silent for the longest time but finally spoke. ‘I’m sorry you weren’t too. I could have used a friend.’

Did he not even have one to turn to? ‘When did you walk out?’

‘Christmas Eve four years ago.’

She’d spent most Christmas Eves trying to act straight while her over-protective parents threw anxious glances between her and Damien, who’d done his best to appear attentive. Meanwhile Marc had been carrying suitcases away from his mother’s house. Lord, what a contrast. ‘Who did you … Were you alone—at the time?’

‘Are you asking whether I was single?’

She was so tired she could have been asking anything. ‘I’m asking whether you were alone.’ Worrying he’d had no one only made it worse.

He nodded. ‘I was.’

No father. No extended family in Australia. No friends. No girlfriend. Just a long-time addict mother. She closed her eyes for the pain she could hear in his voice all these years later. As a boy, Marc’s defence of his mother was legendary. He held on to love for a long time.

‘I went back out onto the trawlers for another couple of seasons. More than they recommend, but I felt I had nothing to hang around the city for. That decision turned my life around.’

‘You’re still such a glass half-full person, aren’t you?’ She’d clung to the concept when things were at their lowest ebb. ‘I remember that about you.’

He paused the sloshing. ‘We’re responsible for our happiness just as much as our actions. No one else is going to do that for you.’