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

True enough. She was a walking example. If she hadn’t dragged herself back from the abyss. An exhausted yawn split her thought.

‘I have to move faster, ‘ she said to herself as much as him. ‘If I keep slowing down, I’ll stop for good.’

‘You can stop any time you need to, you know that.’

If only life were that simple. That simply wasn’t true sometimes. As she and his mother knew only too well. ‘I’ll be here as long as you are.’

‘Still competitive?’

There was no way she was going to abandon him another time he needed her. But there was no way she was going to tell him that either. She forced her body to double its pace.

‘You got me.’

CHAPTER SIX

BETH had long given up trying to control the violent shaking of her frozen body, but the advancing ice-age finally showed in the loud chattering of her teeth. Not surprising, given she’d lost Marc’s fleecy sweatshirt to the dark depths of the ocean during the refloating. It meant she only had her flimsy blouse to keep her top half warm. And nothing on the bottom.

Marc had eventually accepted she wasn’t going to go back to the car and leave him alone with the dying whale, but he didn’t like it. Exhaustion had even wiped the frown off his face. But her loudly clattering teeth seemed to break the last of his tolerance.

‘Beth, you’re freezing.’

Both their bodies were well into survival mode now, her own barely conscious of what was going on around it. Neither of them could do more than lean on the whale for support and drag arm-after-painful-arm from the water to slosh onto the animal to keep it wet.

‘You have to get out of the water,’ he said. ‘You need to warm up.’

Her chill caused her voice to vibrate. It hurt even to speak, so tight was her chest. ‘It’s warmer in the water than out of it. And I’m not leaving you, Marc. You’d have to work twice as hard and you have nearly nothing left now.’

‘I’ll feel better knowing you’re safe and dry.’

‘I’m not leaving.’

She couldn’t see his glare in the darkness but she could feel it.

‘Fine,’ he finally growled. ‘Give me a second.’

He spread his dripping towel out on the whale’s hide and splashed slowly ashore. Beth lost him in the darkness after he passed her. It seemed like a lifetime, alone in the dark with the whale, but he finally returned.

‘Take this,’ he said bluntly, thrusting the last muesli bar at her.

Too exhausted to eat, she tucked it into the hip of her knickers. Too exhausted to protest, he just watched her do it.

‘Now this,’ he said, and thrust something else at her.

Beth reeled back and almost lost her footing, catching herself at the last second against the whale’s cold body. Her mind lurched out a preventative no! a split second before her body hummed an eager yessss!

‘It’s whisky. Dry, but it will warm you up a bit.’ He raised the silver flask right in her face and it glinted in the moonlight.

Her stomach roiled. Her blood raced. Her body screamed with excitement.

‘Get it away from me.’ She didn’t mean to shove him so roughly, didn’t even know where she found the energy, but the flask fell from his hands into the salt water. He scrabbled to pick it up, frowning in the moonlight.

‘Take it, Beth. You need to have something.’

‘I’ve been drinking water.’

‘That’ll keep you alive but it won’t stop you getting hypothermia. If you won’t get out of the water, then it has to be this.’

‘I don’t drink.’

Her ridiculously weak protest actually made him laugh. ‘Well, you’re going to have to make an exception, Princess. Survival comes first.’

He shook the water off the flask and held it out to her again.

Her chest heaved and her eyes locked on it. She could just reach out and—

‘I can’t, Marc …’ I can’t break down in front of you.

‘It won’t kill you.’ He unstoppered the flask and took a healthy swallow, wiping his hand across his sticky lips when he finished to make his point. Beth had never felt more like a vampire. She wanted to hurl herself at those lips and suck and suck.

Shamed tears sprang into her eyes. ‘Please, Marc. I can’t.’

I can’t show you what I really am …

His eyes narrowed but he was relentless. ‘It’s this or the car, Beth. Your choice.’

What was a bit more salt on her already crusty face? She ignored the two tears that raced each other down her cheeks. ‘Do you want to see me beg, Marc?’

His frown practically bisected his face. ‘I want you to be warm, Beth. I want you to drink.’

She forced her back straighter. ‘And I won’t.’

‘For crying out loud, woman! Why are you so difficult?’

Old Beth and new Beth struggled violently inside her. Old Beth just wanted to throw her alcoholism in his face to punish him for forcing her hand like this. For putting her in the position of having to defend herself. To expose herself. To him, of all people. The man she’d already let down in a hundred ways. The man whose good opinion seemed to matter to her more than anyone else did. New Beth understood that using it as a weapon would only hurt him horribly and, ultimately, disappoint him more.

She knew she couldn’t say nothing, either. But saying something didn’t have to mean she was beaten. She could trust him with the information. Like she’d trusted her AA sponsor with all her deepest secrets. Couldn’t she? Never mind the fact that he’d just told her his mother was an addict and made it painfully clear how much that disgusted him. This was Marc. He’d see she had her addiction under control. He’d see how hard she was working. He’d understand. He always had.

She laughed, low and pained. God, now she was lying to herself! Who was she kidding? This was Marc. She deserved his disgust for what she’d done and how she’d been.

She stared at the determination in his face. He meant it when he said drink or car. A numb kind of fatalism came over her. Whatever he did—however he reacted—it couldn’t be worse than the wondering. Than fearing what might happen if she was revealed to the world. To him.

But her heart still hammered and it pounded into the miserable ache that filled her chest. Why was it easier to trust a total stranger with the truth than the man who’d been her closest friend?

It was hard to tell where the cold-trembles stopped and the terror-trembles started, but she thrust out her violently shaking hand towards him and raised defiant eyes and said the words aloud she’d been saying twice a week for two years.

‘Hi. I’m Elizabeth and I’m an alcoholic.’

* * *

Marc’s stomach tightened right before it dropped into a forty-storey free fall. His breath seized up and his skin prickled cold all over. He dropped his towel on the whale and turned away from Beth without so much as looking at her trembling outstretched hand. He marched off into the darkness, ignoring the shocked mortification on her face. He couldn’t trust himself not to.

I’m Elizabeth and I’m an alcoholic.

His heart hammered. People made those jokes all the time, but the degraded, pained tone in her voice and the bleached courage in her eyes told him she wasn’t kidding.

Beth was an alcoholic.

His Beth.

He kept walking, ignoring the fact he couldn’t see what was two feet in front of him in the sand and his feet were dangerously bare. A deep, savage ache drove him forwards. That Beth—Beth—could be afflicted like his mother. That it could happen to two people he loved. What was he—some kind of jinx? All the people he cared about ended up dead or.

The living dead.

He clutched the flask—a piece of his father—close to him. Beth’s eyes had shifted back and forth on it as if it were made of excrement one moment and pure ambrosia the next. He knew that look only too well. It was the way his mother used to look when she hurried past a pharmacy all stiff and tall. Just before her body caved in on itself and she’d turn back for the entrance with a hard mouth and dark eyes, dragging him along into hell.

Beth wanted this whisky. Badly.

His fingers flexed more tightly around it. Growing up, she’d been his role model. Sensible. Smart. Courageous. Everything he valued most in a friend. Everything he’d searched for in himself. Yet sensible, smart, brave Beth had ended up addicted to alcohol. If she could succumb.

But she was fighting it. Some deep, honest part of him shouted that through the darkness. She wanted it but said no. His chest ached for the pain that had contorted her face. For the extra agony that this night must be for her. As if the cold and pain weren’t bad enough.

He recognised it, even if he didn’t understand it.

That thought brought him up short. Maybe she could explain. Help him understand. He owed her the chance, surely? He pivoted on his bare feet and followed the silver moonlight trail back to where he could vaguely see the shadow of a whale and a slender woman silhouetted against the rising moon.

Beth lifted bleak eyes to him. It hurt that he’d put that look there. He bent to re-drench his towel and took several deep breaths before trusting himself to speak.

‘How long?’

There were probably more intelligent, sensitive questions to ask right at that moment but, more than anything, he needed to know how long she’d been struggling. Half of him hated it. The other half hated that she’d gone through it without him. She glanced away at the moon and then didn’t quite find his eyes again. She was terrified. But hiding it. Something deep and painful welled up inside him, cut into the already sensitive flesh around his heart. He was hurting her.

Just like she’d hurt him. Except this didn’t feel like justice.

Wide, stricken eyes returned to his. ‘Eight years drunk. Two years sober. I’m recovering.’

Was there even such a state? Wasn’t someone alcoholic for ever—just a sober alcoholic? Her focus kept returning to the flask. Shifty, sideways glances. He wanted to empty the contents into the sea but, the way she was looking, she might just plunge into the water and try to guzzle the salt water. A deep hunger blazed in her eyes. It elbowed its way in amongst the self-disgust. It reminded him of the look in her eyes that day behind the library.

‘Did you start at school?’ he asked.

She shook her dank locks. ‘About a year after I got married.’

Marc winced. Did she start the moment she hit legal age? ‘Why?’

Her eyes widened and tears grew in them. ‘Things got. hard.’

‘Life gets hard for everyone.’ Not everyone turned to the bottle. Alcohol. Pills. It was all the same—a cop-out.

‘I know. I’m not special. But I made that choice and now I’m living with the consequences.’

At least Beth accepted that she was at fault. He’d heard every excuse under the sun from his mother. She had headaches, she wasn’t sleeping, one medication made her crave another. It was never truly her fault.

His mouth tightened. Beth’s eyes kept flicking back to the flask he held down at his side. She lifted a hand and pressed it to her sternum as though a ball of pain resided there and crushing it helped. Something old and long-buried made him turn and hurl the flask as far out to sea as he could. Its shape and weight gave it a heap of extra flight.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ Beth cried out and lurched towards its airborne arc.

Christ. Did she want a drink that badly? ‘I’m removing temptation.’

‘That was your father’s!’

Surprise socked him between the ribs. That she cared at all. To think of that. His mother never would have thought of him through her haze. She’d have been braving the sharks to retrieve her pills. Not like the old days when he was the centre of her world. The dual centre, shared with his father. His frown doubled. ‘It’s just a thing, Beth. It’s not him.’

‘You could have just put it back in your bag!’

‘Would it have been safe there?’

Her back straightened up hard, even though it must have hurt her to do it. Raw hurt saturated her voice. ‘It’s been safe in there all day.’

What could he say to that? He should have known an addict would sniff out the nearest fix.

Beth’s breathing returned in big heaves, punctuated by bursts of compulsive shaking that rattled her bones. ‘Now you’ll freeze,’ she accused.

‘I’ll get by. I have more insulation than you.’ He folded his arms, spread his legs. Classic Marc. ‘But we aren’t talking about me. We’re talking about you.’

‘Oh, I must have missed the point where your inquisition turned into a conversation.’

His mouth tightened. But her words had an effect. He forced himself to take a step back, to ease his body language. This was clearly hard enough for her. ‘I’d like to hear about it, Beth. To understand it.’ Though he had to force himself to say so calmly.

‘So you can decide how disgusted you should be? Or how much like your mother I am?’

He stiffened. ‘We’re going to be out here a long time yet, Beth. Did you really expect to drop a bombshell like that and then just go back to talking about the weather?’

No, she didn’t. Then again, she hadn’t planned to mention it at all—not to him—and, as it turned out, her instincts were spot on. She stared at him warily where once she would have blazed unconditional trust up at him. ‘It took me six months from the day I closed the door of Damien’s house behind me until the day I could stand up in AA and announce I’d been sober for a month.’ She sloshed his side of the whale because he’d frozen in position. ‘Then two. Then five. Then ten.’ She shuddered in a breath. ‘Two years of my life trying to undo what I’ve done. I’ve judged myself enough for everyone in that time.’

I really don’t need it from you.

He flushed, which was a miracle enough, given the temperature. Then he cleared his throat. ‘Please, Beth. No judgement.’

Uh-huh, sure. She drowned in his steady, silent regard but finally sighed, ‘What would you like to know?’

His pause was eternity. ‘All of it.’

Fair enough. She’d opened this door with her dramatic declaration. She might as well fling it wide and see what rumbled out. It couldn’t be any worse than the raw disgust he’d failed to hide. She took a moment gathering her thoughts. Her aching exterior merged with her interior perfectly. She couldn’t tell him all of it but there was still plenty left.

‘I hurt my family when I married Damien so young,’ she began, mostly a whisper but close enough that he could hear. ‘I hurt you. Turns out I hurt myself too. But at the time he was everything I thought I wanted—a holy grail, like some kind of hall pass of credibility. People treated me differently when I was with him and I … liked it. I’d been a pariah for so long …’

‘Because of me?’

The monotonous sound of the ocean began to mesmerize her. ‘No. Because of me. I chose you over all of them and their money.’ She pushed the words out through a critically tight chest. Between the cold and the anxiety, it was amazing she could breathe at all. ‘He found out pretty quickly that he didn’t like much about married life. The responsibility. The expectation. And I was so young and trying so hard to be what I thought a good wife would be. When he insisted on a drink, what else could I do?’ She took a deep breath. ‘I’d ask him what he wanted and bring a second.’

‘Misery loves company.’

So true in Damien’s case. ‘But then that point passed and it got so much worse.’

Marc stopped sloshing, his whole body wired. ‘Worse how? Did he hurt you?’

She straightened up, took a moment working out how to answer. ‘Sometimes.’ Shame washed through her. ‘I just blamed the drink. The more he drank the angrier he got, but the more I drank the less I cared.’

‘So your drinking was Damien’s fault?’

Her clumped hair screened her face as she shook her head. She’d never blamed her problems on anyone but herself and she wasn’t about to start now. No matter how tempting. ‘I made my own choices. It took me a long time to realise that, though.’

‘So what finally made you stop?’ The deepness of his voice rumbled in the night.

‘I realised I was halfway through my twenties and I’d done nothing with it. I had a job but not a career. I had a marriage but not a family. I had a husband I didn’t like and friends who only came over if I was buying. I had no interests.’ She shook her head. ‘I was a drunken bore with no achievements to my name, married to a man I didn’t love. So I packed an overnight bag and I left.’

That made her sound stronger than she’d actually been, cowering in the shower, sobbing, but the last thing she wanted from Marc was more pity. Or to lose any more face.

For long minutes the only sounds were the repetitive sloshing of water on the whale’s hide and the heaving of their lungs. And the tick-tick of Marc’s brain as he got his head around her speech.

‘What happened with McKinley?’

‘Nothing. He didn’t even try to stop me leaving. I wasn’t the only one that was miserable. We both made the mistake.’

‘You’ve cut all ties?’

‘He signed the divorce papers without even getting in touch. I haven’t seen him since.’ Although she did hear about him from time to time. Those stories were always peppered with sadness for the man he should have been and relief for the woman she’d so nearly become.

‘How hard was it—getting through the recovery?’

Was that more than just curiosity in his voice? Beth immediately thought of Janice. Sugar-coating wouldn’t help him. She straightened her tortured back and met his eyes. ‘You slog your guts out getting through the physical addiction and then you’re left with the emotional dependence.’ As hard as that was to admit. ‘But you can get through it. I did. Until, one day, you’ve been stronger than it for longer than you were addicted.’

Until curve-balls like today swing into your life.

‘You did it alone?’

‘My parents wanted to help, of course, but I. It was something I’d done to myself. I felt like I needed to undo it myself. To prove I could.’

‘So what got you through?’

You did. The memory of Marc. The idea of Marc. She chose her words carefully. ‘A dream of what I wanted to be.’ Who I wanted to be like. ‘And a strong AA sponsor.’

Marc was silent for a long time. He shook his head. ‘I feel like I should have been there for you. So you didn’t have to turn to a stranger. I should have been strong for you.’

Her heart split a little more for the loyalty he still couldn’t mask. Despite everything. ‘No, I had to be strong for me. Besides, it wouldn’t work if Tony was a friend. The emotional detachment is important.’

‘We’ve been pretty detached this past decade.’

It only took a few hours in his company for that to all dissolve. She lifted her eyes back to his and held them fast. ‘Do you feel detached now?’

His silence spoke volumes.

‘Will you be someone’s sponsor one day?’

That was a no-brainer. ‘Yes. When I’m strong enough.’

‘You seem pretty strong now. The way you speak of it. Like a survivor.’

Warmth spilled out from deep inside at his praise. She was still a sucker for it. ‘I have survived. But every day presents new challenges and I’m only just beginning to realise how sheltered I’ve been.’

Confusion stained his voice. ‘As a child?’

‘My parents shielded me from unpleasantness for the first half of my life and my drinking numbed me to it for the second. I’ve never really had to make a difficult decision or face a stressful situation. They were there for me. Or you were. I’ve always followed instructions or someone else’s lead. Or avoided painful situations completely. I still have a lot to learn about life.’

He regarded her steadily. Was he remembering all those years where she’d tagged along with him, his partner in crime? Or the way she’d cut him from her life when things got too tough behind the library? When the going gets tough, the tough go drinking.

‘You sought me out. That can’t have been easy.’

‘No. It wasn’t.’ But she had an unspoken and barely acknowledged incentive—seeing him again. He’d come to mean as much to her as alcohol. A yin to its powerful yang. That scrap of paper in her wallet a talisman. The painful ball in her chest made its presence felt. ‘But I’d chew my leg off to have a drink right now. Do you call that coping?’

He flinched at her raw honesty. Pain washed into his eyes. But hiding who she was wasn’t sustainable. He might as well see her, warts and all. For richer or poorer. In sickness and in health. Presently, sickness. But one day.

‘It’s been a rough night …’

The understatement of the century.

‘If the flask washed up at your feet right now, would you open it?’

Her chest started heaving at the image. As though his words magicked up the little vessel, filled to overflowing with the liquid escapism she’d relied on for years.

No pain. No shame. No past.

No future.

Sadness flooded through her. ‘Would you believe me if I said no?’

His deep silence brought their discussion to a natural close. She’d run out of story and courage. Her attention drifted back to how cold and how wet she was and she sagged against the whale as the after-effects of her monumental confession hit her body.

Marc frowned at her. ‘I’ll ask you one more time. Will you go back to the car?’

It hurt her to say no, but she’d promised herself she wouldn’t leave him down here alone. And if she gave in on just one thing. She shook her head. A particularly icy shock of wind chose that moment to surge across the beach. She gasped at the savage, frigid gust and her skin prickled up into sharp gooseflesh.

Marc swore and glared at her. ‘Don’t say I didn’t give you a choice … ‘ He grabbed up his decrepit towel and ploughed out of the water and around to her side of the whale. Then he stepped in behind her and wrapped his whole body around her like a living, breathing wind-breaker. Her body sang at the close, hard contact, the port in this storm his strong arms represented. A moment later, the slight warmth bleeding through his wetsuit also registered.

She sighed and convulsively shivered.

Marc swore and pulled away for an icy instant. She heard the zip of his wetsuit opening, the gentle brush of his fingers pulling her wet hair to the side, and then the blissful brand of his hot chest straight against her barely covered back. Skin on skin. Fire on ice. It soaked in like a top shelf brandy.

‘Christ, Beth. You’re glacial.’

He took her hands in his and crossed his arms around her, closing her more fully against his warmth. Her numbness leached away like ice melting and exposed a shelf of complicated emotions she’d been doing her best to muffle. She stiffened immediately.

‘Don’t argue, Beth. You had your chance. Let’s get back to it.’

Their two bodies formed a hypnotic rhythm—bend, scoop, slosh … bend, scoop, slosh—half the speed they’d been going before the sun had set. His towel dripped on Beth’s arms as she bent to refill the two-litre water bottle she was now using to wet the re-stranded whale. If not for the awful truths she’d just shared, their position would have been downright sexy. A half-naked man glued to a half-naked woman. As it was, it was just plain uncomfortable. For both of them.

And it went on for an eternity.

Despite the warmth seeping in from behind, Beth’s teeth started chattering again. Marc convinced her to pull her barely dry jeans on again as some protection from the wind and she took the brief on-shore break to wolf down the muesli bar she’d had tucked away. Her body immediately started converting the grain into desperately needed energy and warmed her briefly from the inside. It wasn’t a patch on the blazing warmth of Marc’s skin.

She was too cold to worry about pride as she slipped back into the surf and then tucked herself shamelessly back into his body. He received her with the practice of years, not hours.