First Love, Second Chance

Knowing she’d done it for Marc had never really helped. Having the approval of both their parents had never really helped. But physical separation combined with a sixteen-year-old’s natural talent for selective memory had made it possible to move on.

After a while.

The whites of Marc’s eyes glowed in the moonlight. ‘You didn’t have to marry him just because you slept with him.’

She knew he’d see the truth in the sadness of her smile. ‘I’ve always accepted the consequences of my actions. Regardless of what else you think of me, that hasn’t changed. I chose to do something contrary to the values my parents taught me. My church.’

Marc shook his head. ‘McKinley was a jerk. It always surprised me that he married you at all. That he didn’t stop chasing you once he.’

His words dried up and Beth swallowed the hurt. ‘Once he had what he wanted? Go ahead, say it. Everyone else did.’ Marc frowned. She straightened her shoulders. ‘I hadn’t planned to sleep with him but once I did, turns out I was a. natural student.’

The irony wasn’t lost on her. She’d spent all year trying to come to terms with the blossoming feelings that Marc was beginning to inspire in her, yet she’d barely touched him. But she’d slept with the boy she was physically immune to.

Or maybe that was why?

‘And he was naive enough to make that kind of life decision based on one girl?’ Marc asked.

She swallowed around the large lump in her chest. ‘We both were. Except that Damien grew up a lot in the following few years,’ she went on. ‘Discovered that other women could be good in bed, too. Extremely good, if you knew where to look. And my one piece of power vanished.’

And hadn’t he let her know it.

‘So you left him?’

Beth stared. ‘No. I didn’t. Not until two years ago.’

He gaped. ‘You cannot be serious.’

Heat chased up her icy skin. ‘My vows were serious. I was determined to make a go of it, certain he’d grow out of his … phase and maybe we could turn things around.’ Determined not to lose any more face with her family. Her few remaining friends. Having screwed up so much in her life. ‘Then, somehow, years went by. Empty, pointless—’ passionless ‘—years.’

Only it wasn’t somehow. She knew exactly how, but she wasn’t about to go there. Not with Marc. Telling a room full of strangers was one thing. Telling the man who’d been your closest friend.

He growled, his eyes darkened. ‘Hell, Beth.’

Her laugh was bitter. ‘I thought you’d be thrilled I reaped what I sowed.’

He blew air out from between his lips in a fair imitation of their whale. ‘Look, Beth. Yes, at the time I was pretty much gutted that you chose that moron over our friendship. But I never would have wished that on you. No matter how angry I was. I …’ His eyes flitted away. ‘I cared for you. You deserved better.’

She straightened up, not ready to hear him defend her. Not ready to hear how short a time he’d been impacted. Not ready for all her angst to be for nothing. ‘I think I got exactly what I deserved. Like I said, I always was prepared to accept the consequences of my actions.’

‘For years? Wasn’t that a little extreme?’

She stared at him warily. Better he thought her a martyr. ‘Some lessons take longer to learn than others.’

She shrugged off the comment and the conversation. ‘So … what did you do after we went our separate ways?’

Marc made busy with the sloshing. ‘Kept a low profile.’

Super-low. He might as well not have existed. Which was pretty much what she’d asked of him.

He’d walk through fire if you asked him to …

‘The national skills shortage hit during my summer job up north, right after graduation, and suddenly I was pulling in a small fortune for an eighteen-year-old. It set me up beautifully to buy an old charter boat the next year and refurbish it during the off-season. Now I have three.’

‘So it worked out okay, then—even though you didn’t make it to uni?’ Relief washed through her.

His smile wasn’t kind. ‘Trying to decide how high up the list you need to put me?’

Her make-good list. If she was going to finish the job she’d come for, she had to be thorough. Confession time. She found his eyes and held them, took a deep breath. ‘Top half.’

‘Sorry?’

She cleared her thick throat. ‘You asked earlier which half of my list you were in. I just wanted you to know you were in the top half.’ She clenched her hands. ‘High in the top half.’

His next words were cautious. Almost unwillingly voiced. ‘You seriously have a list?’

She nodded.

His brows dropped. ‘Why?’

Panic surged through her. What a stupid question not to have anticipated. She swallowed hard. ‘Self improvement.’

His frown looked like doubt. But he let it pass. ‘How high was I?’

Somewhere off in the dunes, a bird of prey shrieked out across the night. Her voice, when it came, was hushed. Quiet enough that he’d have to hear her heart pounding. ‘The top. Number one.’

It took a lot to shock Marc Duncannon. But she managed to pull it off. He had a few goes at answering before coherent words came out of his gaping mouth. ‘I’m the first person you’ve come to find?’

Shaking her head made thick cords of salty dark hair, still a tiny bit damp from her dunking earlier, swing around her face. It had to suffice as a screen. ‘Actually, you’re the last.’

‘But did you just say—’

‘Top of my list, yes, but the hardest. I left you till last.’

God. Would he realise what that meant? It was screamingly obvious, surely? The silence was almost material. Even the whale seemed to hold her breath. Emotion surged through his eyes like the waves battering them both. Hope, hurt, anger … Then, finally, nothing. A vacant, careful void.

‘You’ve held onto those memories all this time?’

Her stomach sank. ‘Haven’t you?’

He looked away and when his eyes returned to hers they were kindly. Too kindly. ‘No.’

No? Beth blinked.

‘Give yourself a break, Beth. We were kids.’

His unconcerned words struck like a sea snake. Bad enough to have sabotaged for nothing the only relationship of her life that meant something to her. Now she’d wasted years of angst, endured a mountain of guilt. and it had barely registered on his emotional radar.

‘Losing our friendship meant nothing?’

He sighed. ‘What do you want me to say, Beth? It cut deep at the time but everything worked out. Life goes on.’

Mortification streaked through her. She stared at his carefully neutral face. Maybe Janice had been right? Cut free of her, Marc had gone on to make a success of his life—not what he’d always told her he would do but then how many of her school mates had ever actually grown up to do what they imagined they’d do for the rest of their lives? She certainly hadn’t. While she was literally drowning in her regrets, Marc had rebounded and done a fine job of getting by without her.

Everything she’d been through. For nothing?

‘Beth?’

She shot her hand up and turned away from his indifference. She tossed her tattered whale-washer ashore and turned to wade out into the deep, dark water. The only place she could go. To let her heart weep in private. She pushed her legs angrily through the water for a few steps and let the angry ache fill her focus.

‘Beth!’

She wanted to keep walking, to show him he meant as little to her as, apparently, she did to him. But she just wasn’t that good a liar. She turned when the water was thigh high.

‘Not in the water, ‘ he urged. ‘Not at night. Go up on the beach.’

Screw you. ‘Why not?’

‘Sharks will be drawn by the dead calf. They’re more active at night. We shouldn’t go in deeper than our knees.’

She practically flew back to the shallows. Survival before dignity. Marc didn’t say anything further. It took her several minutes walking down the beach to reach a place she felt was sufficiently dark and safe. Safe from the dune snakes. Safe from the whale-eating sharks. Safe from Marc Duncannon and his awful neutrality.

She sank down onto the sand and let the tremors come.

Her life had changed direction that day behind the library and it had changed again eight years later and this man was central to both. A man who was so entirely unaffected by what had happened to them back at school.

Deep breathing helped. Plunging her bare toes into sand that was still warm from the day helped. Closing her eyes and imagining she was anywhere else but here helped.

Whatever it took to fool her body into thinking it wasn’t facing an unbearable amount of pressure. Something she wasn’t really used to having to face. As a rule, a drunk body didn’t care what was going on around it. And she’d been drunk for the better part of eight years. Even when she wasn’t.

In the early months of her marriage, she’d walked a careful line with Damien and his rapidly developing fondness for the bottle, keeping him just shy of the point where he liked to express his drunken feelings with his fists. But that line quickly got too hard to predict and so it was just easier to give in. To tumble behind him into the abyss where he was happiest and she was safest. The help she might have had evaporated. Friends. Her parents. They’d all stopped trying after her repeated assurances she was fine.

Why wouldn’t they? She was Beth. Beth didn’t make mistakes. But Beth—as it turned out—was a gifted and convincing liar.

By the time they’d realised she wasn’t fine, she was well and truly sunk. After a while, she didn’t even hate it. The abyss was a pleasantly blur-edged place to lose your youth. And she’d learned how possible it was to function in normal society while artificially numb.

And then one day she’d woken up and looked around at the empty half of her bed, the total strangers dossed down in her living room and she’d seen, with awful clarity, the faces of all the normal people she’d thought she was cleverly keeping her drunkenness from. Their averted eyes. Worse—their pity.

For no real reason, she’d thought about Marc that morning. About the boy who’d had such faith in her. The boy she’d lived her life for as a teen. The boy she’d finally forced from her dreams—her marriage—after his memory had steadfastly refused to leave. And she’d realised she hadn’t thought about him in years.

She’d sat crying in the shower long after the hot water ran icy cold.

Those convulsive shivers had been nothing on what was to come. The spasmodic wretchedness of weaning herself off the liquor, alone in her father’s old warehouse, surrounded by the tormented images she’d painted in her darkest days. The destructive try-and-fail spiral that had made her feel increasingly bad about herself. Increasingly desperate for the unconditional acceptance a bottle offered. The only thing that had kept her going was painting.

Then one night she’d stumbled—drunk, to her eternal shame—into an AA meeting and found a room full of survivors who’d given her compassion and empathy and a path out of the abyss, not judgement.

Those strangers had saved her life.

Long before any make-good list, she held onto Marc’s name as a ward against ever again forgetting someone who had represented such goodness in her life. She’d scrawled his name down on a scrap of paper that day she’d tumbled from the shower and she’d carried it in her wallet ever since, in lieu of the photos she’d thrown out years before in a fit of drunken heartbreak because looking at him had hurt too much.

She’d known that facing him today wouldn’t be easy. But it had never—ever—occurred to her that he simply wouldn’t care any more. If he ever actually had.

‘Beth? Are you done?’ His voice called her back from the darkness, just as it had two years ago that morning in the shower. ‘I need you.’

There was urgency in his voice she couldn’t ignore. And, in the face of what the whale needed, her decade-old issues could wait a few hours more. She quickly did what she’d come to do and then staggered, too sore and tired to run, back down the beach towards him.

The whale was thrashing violently in the water, the nasty arrow-head gash on its tail sawing back and forth, its whole body twisting.

‘Is she having a seizure?’ she cried as she neared.

‘She can feel the tide,’ Marc called. ‘She’s trying to move herself. We have to do it now.’

‘You can’t be serious?’ He wanted to get into the water with a crazed half-ton animal? Immobile with exhaustion was one thing …

‘She’s too far on-beach. She won’t be able to pull herself out. We have to help her.’

He had a loop of rope laid over his forearm and he was making darting efforts in between the wild thrashes of the whale, trying to snag the eyelet of the strap they’d managed to drag beneath her hours ago. But every time he got close, the insensible sea-mammoth twisted in his direction and he had to leap away, stumbling into the water.

With one mighty lurch, Marc plunged his arm into the water on the whale’s offside and jumped back, bringing the strap with him. It took only a moment to push the rope through the eyelet like a sewing needle. Then he pulled half of it through and tossed it high over the whale to splash into the water next to Beth.

She knew what he needed her to do.

The whale had slowed its frantic efforts now, perhaps realising that it wasn’t going to be able to do this alone. Beth made three attempts, feeling blindly along the sand in the dark shallows for her end of the strap, squinting against the salt water that splashed up into her eyes. Her careless groping meant Marc’s entire sweatshirt was soaked in cold water, but she didn’t care. She wouldn’t be needing it for long now that they were going to free the whale, and her own temporary discomfort wasn’t a patch on what this animal was going through.

On her fourth attempt, she emerged victorious. She clutched the strap tightly in one hand and felt around for Marc’s rope. When she found it, not yet soaked, still floating on the surface, she shoved it with trembling hands through the eyelet and then walked backwards away from the whale, pulling the rope taut. Marc did the same.

The strap slowly emerged and rose, flexing and dripping, above the water line as it tightened around the whale’s rounded belly.

‘We need to walk behind her, Beth. It’ll pull the ends together and tighten around her flank.’

Behind her? But that meant. She lifted wide eyes to him.

He was silent for long seconds. ‘I know. But, sharks are survivors, too. We’ll have to hope they’re more interested in the dead calf than in its dangerously thrashing mother.’

Was that likely? Beth’s skin burst into terrified gooseflesh all over.

His loud voice carried over the sound of the whale’s writhing. ‘I don’t see that we have much choice, Beth.’

‘There’s always a choice, Marc!’ she yelled back. AA had taught her that. They could both walk away from this animal and leave her to nature. Maybe it was meant to be.

He knew which way her mind was going. ‘Is that a choice you could make, Beth? Because I couldn’t.’

No. When it came down to it, neither could she.

He called out again. ‘We’ll try and twist her your way so you’re pulling in the shallows. I’ll take the deep end.’

‘Oh, great, so I’ll get to watch you be eaten by sharks instead. That’ll be nice!’

She gritted her teeth and plunged into the deeper water. The adrenalin did its job and fed her a steady stream of power. They didn’t waste any time, pulling their ropes hard and closing in until they stood side by side—mountain by waif—up to Beth’s waist in water. It was a lot by her standards but not much for a whale. Hopefully, it would be enough. The manoeuvre pulled the snatch strap tight around the whale’s bulging mid-section. Marc moved them slightly to one side so that their rope wouldn’t impede the thrust of her powerful tail.

‘Ready, Beth?’

She wasn’t. She never would be. But it seemed life was determined to plunge her back into the real world with a vengeance. She found his eyes, drew strength from them and nodded.

‘Pull!’

She put her entire, insignificant weight behind her and leaned back hard on her rope. Marc immediately made more progress, his side of the rope vibrating above the waterline enough to give off a dripping, high-pitched whine. The whale groaned in harmony.

Beth’s already damaged hands screamed as her end of the rope bit into them and she stumbled forward at the pain, losing purchase and crying out.

‘Wait!’

Marc let his rope loosen and the whale heaved a sigh. Beth quickly stripped off Marc’s drenched sweatshirt and wrapped it around her hands to protect them and then pulled her rope tight again. The salt water sluiced into open blisters, stinging badly.

‘Okay … go!’

They heaved again and the whale slid slightly sideways, adding her remaining strength to their far less significant pulling power. But it was movement. And, after thirteen hours in the sand, that was not a small achievement.

‘She’s moving!’ Beth squeezed out unnecessarily. No way would Marc not have noticed. ‘Keep going!’

Adrenalin roared now through her body, warming her and giving her a capacity she never would have believed she had. She leaned hard on the rope and pulled with all her remaining strength, twisting her body and virtually walking—inch by inch—out into deeper water, up around her armpits, towing the enormous beast.

Marc was right there beside her, his neoprene muscles bulging with the force of every pull. Neither of them was suffering quietly and their roars of effort merged with the whale’s to disturb sleeping creatures for a kilometre. The whale suddenly twisted so that she was side-on to the beach, her tail now fully submerged, her body more torpedo-shaped in the water than it had been on the sand. Still rounded where the strap held her firmly. Beth and Marc changed their positions, widened out so that they could contribute to the whale’s slow sideways thrash into deeper water. If the sharks wanted either of them they’d be easy pickings right now. The water lapped at Beth’s breasts.

The whale battered her tail violently, slamming on the water for added purchase. But the miracle of buoyancy meant it was easier to tow half a ton of whale flesh. They did—slowly, painfully. And then—

‘Beth, run!’

Marc dropped his rope and surged away from the manic animal. Beth stumbled and went under as her rope suddenly went slack and Marc hauled her up after him, her throbbing legs pushing against the pressure of the deep water.

The whale twisted and surged and turned the quiet shallows into a spa of froth and bubbles. The rope zinged out of its eyelets with an audible crack and the snatch strap dropped harmlessly away. In the time it took Beth to suck in a painful breath, the whale was free, half submerged, then fully submerged. And then—finally—it sank like an exuberant submarine, surfaced once to grab a euphoric lungful of air and then disappeared silently under the deep, dark surface.

Beth screamed her joy as she ploughed through the water, and then she lurched sideways as something harder and warmer than the whale slammed into her. Marc swung her in a full three-sixty, hoisting her up in his arms and hauling her backwards out of the waist-deep water, whooping his elation. But their momentum and fatigued legs couldn’t hold them and they stumbled down together into the shallows, Marc sinking to his knees and bringing Beth with him.

Tears of pain and exhaustion streamed freely down her face and she pushed uselessly against his body to right herself. But the natural chemicals fuelling her body drained as fast as they had come and left her shattered and shaking. The strength she’d miraculously found just moments ago fled. She sagged back against Marc’s strength, useless.

He collapsed unceremoniously onto his bottom in the ankle-high surf and he dragged an insensible Beth between his wetsuit-clad legs. His hands pulled her more tightly against him. She crawled up into his rubbery shoulder.

‘We did it,’ he repeated hypnotically, as though reassuring a child, stroking her dripping hair and pressing her hard into him. As though she belonged there. Beth squeezed her streaming eyes shut and soaked up the gorgeous feeling of being this close to him. After so many years. She nuzzled in closer. A bad idea, no doubt, but impossible not to. Every accidental touch they’d shared as kids flashed through her mind and she saw, clear as day, how she had evolved from comfortable touching to flirtatious touching and finally experimental touching. Stretching boundaries. Testing boundaries. Testing him.

Their gasping breath was the only thing now disrupting the silence. Marc’s murmurs softened further and started up a senseless whisper against her ear. Not even real words, just sounds. But they did their job; she sagged harder against him and let the trembles come. Elation this time instead of fear or anxiety or—worse—the DTs. A much better kind of tremor.

But they transported her exhausted mind immediately back to a perfect spring day behind the library when Marc had kissed her for the first and only time. His body wasn’t this hard then, or his shoulders this broad, but he’d been on the verge of filling out to the potential she’d always known he had. She’d clung to him then just like this; as if he was saving her life with the hard press of his mouth on hers. The touch of his tongue against hers. And she’d shaken afterwards exactly the same. Except that time she’d been completely alone. The kiss was the last time they’d so much as looked at each other.

The cold water soaking into her body offered a splash of reality. That was a lifetime ago. Before the alcohol. Before she’d abandoned him.

He doesn’t care, she reminded herself. She straightened slightly and went to pull away.

He resisted her pull. ‘God, I’ve missed you, Beth.’

The words were so simple, so brutally whispered hard up against her ear, she wondered if he’d even meant to say them aloud. But he had, and his words screamed for acknowledgement. She let her body sag back into him and wriggled up until her face rested in the crook of his neck, her arm slung around his neck.

He wrapped his arms more firmly around her and just held her, cold and shaking, against his body. Rocking in the icy surf.

It didn’t matter that she’d never been with him like this before—that she’d never let herself be vulnerable like this with anyone—it felt very, very right.

‘I’m so glad you were here,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t have even begun to manage this alone.’

He chuckled but even that seemed to hurt his aching body. It morphed into an amused groan. ‘If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have been here in the first place.’

She lifted her head and looked at him seriously. Eye to eye. Their faces so close. Water still dripped down her skin. ‘I could say the same.’

If not for her treatment of him in that all important final year of school, would he have gone on to study at uni like they’d planned? Would he have been living somewhere other than the remote south coast of the state running a charter company?

‘It is what it is, Beth. You can’t control everything.’

‘Why not?’ she sighed against the warm skin of his throat. Too tired to move and not particularly inclined to. ‘Whose great idea was that? That we have no say in our destiny?’

‘I didn’t say that. Just that sometimes things just. happen. You can’t hold yourself responsible for everything that occurs.’

She crawled in more comfortably. He took her full weight. ‘That sounds an awful lot like you’re accepting my apology, ‘ she whispered.

His broad chest rose and fell beneath her torn-up hands. She held her breath.

‘We were both kids, ‘ he mumbled against her wet hair. ‘We both did things we regret.’

She lifted her head to stare quizzically at him. ‘What do you regret?’

His eyes darkened. Then blanked carefully over. ‘I regret a lot of things.’