Burning Moon (17 page)

“Do you trust me?” Damien finally broke the long silence.

My eyes came up and met his and he smiled at me…God I was so in love with this man. A man that was asking me to jump off a cliff with him.

“Sure.” I half swallowed the word down, hoping that he hadn't heard it. I took a tiny step forward and put my hand into his. The second our hands touched he intertwined his fingers with mine and locked them together. We walked up to the edge of the cliff and a cheer rose up from the waters below.

I couldn't believe I was about to do this. This was the single most mad, insane, frightening thing I'd ever done in my life.

“When in Thailand…” Damien whispered. My heart jumped into my already constricted throat and adrenaline started to surge.

“AND one, two, three, go!” I closed my eyes and suddenly the ground was no longer under my feet. The air rushed past me so fast that it stung my body like a million needles. I could hear myself screaming, even though I wasn't aware of doing it. I closed my eyes tightly, gripped on to Damien's hand for dear life, and waited for the plummeting feeling to stop…

WHOOSH.

My body was consumed by water and I slipped farther and farther down until I finally lost momentum and came to a halt. I cautiously opened my eyes. I was submerged in the clearest, warmest water. I looked up and could see the blurry outline of the cliff through the ripples on the surface. I'd just leapt off a cliff and I felt so fucking alive in that moment. More alive than I'd ever felt. I felt like a superhero. I stayed under for a while, enjoying the feeling of being suspended in the warm quiet. The calm after the storm, the quiet after the chaos. But then a hand came toward me and I gripped it. Damien and I swam up to the surface together.

My eardrums almost burst when the cheers and screams assaulted them. I looked at Damien and my face felt like it was going to rip open from my smile.

“That was the fucking coolest thing I've ever done in my life.” The words just flew out and they were followed by another massive cheer.

We all swam to the edge and climbed out. Once on dry land we hugged and compared notes and I felt so close to these total strangers. I felt connected to something that was so much greater than me. It was both a happy and sad thought; this all had to end at some point. This utopian life we'd all been living.

We made our way back to the party in high spirits and everyone swore that their hangovers were all but a distant memory. The smell of food filled the air, and I walked straight over to the nearest barbeque—what's with Thailand and this desire to serve every food imaginable on a stick? But I grabbed a few things. Not the prawns, though, I have a no-eating-animals-with-their-heads-still-on policy.

Damien disappeared for a moment and it gave me the opportunity to grab some quiet time. I sat on the sand eating my meaty stick and looked around. A few days ago I would never have imagined myself in a place like this, not to mention enjoying it and not wanting it to end. And I certainly never imagined that I would be in love with someone else, the strange guy I'd met on my honeymoon.

“Come, Lilly, let's swim.” Damien came up behind me and planted a kiss on the back of my neck. But he didn't wait for me to respond; instead he put his hands under my arms and pulled me to my feet. I shrieked as he picked me up in his arms and ran toward the water.

The water was warm.

The sun was bright.

And I drank in my surroundings.

“This is the most beautiful place in the world,” I said.

“Wait until you see some of the temples in the jungles of Malaysia.”

“I'd like to see them one day.”

“Not one day, next week.”

I looked at Damien, confused. “What do you mean, next week?”

“Well, we're all off to Malaysia next week.” He was still happily splashing in the water.

“We?”

“Yeah, sure. Me, you, Jess, and Sharon.”

My stomach plummeted.

“I'm going home tomorrow…” I said tentatively. “My flight is booked.”

Damien suddenly stopped and the color drained from his face in one swift motion. “But I thought…” His eyes betrayed his feelings. “I assumed that you would be coming with me. Aren't you?”

My heart started racing and a desert formed in my mouth.

“I, I hadn't thought about it.”

“Well think about it now.” He sounded anxious.

“But I have a life. I…I…” I was stammering. My tongue felt twice its usual size and it made the words stick.

“But I thought, because you didn't get married, and you came on your honeymoon alone, I thought you wouldn't be in a rush to get back.”

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. “I have work, though. Family. Friends. I can't just up and leave.”

“It's not forever. It's only a year.”

“A year! That's a long time.”

Damien suddenly swam away from me.

“Where are you going?”

He disappeared under the water. This was no time to be running away from the conversation, and suddenly I was pissed off. I folded my arms and waited for him to resurface.

“Sorry, I just needed a moment of silence to think,” he said, standing up and running his hands through his wet hair. God, he was beautiful.

“You're only twenty-four, Lilly. You have your whole life ahead of you to work. One year isn't going to kill you. It will be an adventure. I mean, you just jumped off a cliff with me.”

“Just because I jumped off a cliff doesn't mean I'm prepared to jump and leave my whole life behind.”

It suddenly dawned on me that Damien might have seen the whole
Trust me, jump with me
thing as some kind of metaphor for our relationship.

“Come on, Lilly. Didn't it feel good to let go like that?” He sounded like he was pleading.

I couldn't believe what he was saying. But then I suppose I hadn't thought about what would happen after today. I hadn't once thought about the actual logistics of having a relationship with Damien. We hadn't discussed it. But we hadn't exactly planned this, either.

Tears welled up in my eyes. “I…I…” That bloody stammering again.

Damien stared at me as if he was trying to read my thoughts.

“Shit!” he said, and made a sudden and very hasty exit for the beach. I followed him. “I knew this would happen. It always happens.”

“Where're you going?” I was struggling to keep up, he was moving so fast.

“Somewhere where we don't have an audience.”

He walked across the beach to one of the tents and sat down inside. I followed.

“So let me get this straight.” I didn't like his tone now; it was cold and angry. “After last night, you're just going to go back home?”

“I could say the same for you.” I lashed out. “Why don't you come back with me?”

“That's totally impossible. I have a year's worth of flights booked. Friends I'm meeting in China, more friends in Japan. A friend's wedding in Russia. I have plans.”

“And I don't have plans?” I hissed back at him sarcastically. “My life is somehow inferior to yours just because it's not all jumpy and cool and spontaneous? That's very judgmental of you.”

Damien paused and the mood changed again.

“Just come with me, Lilly. I know you're not the dishwashing-for-money, backpacking type of girl, but I actually have lots of money, shitloads, in fact—we can do it in style. Not the dirty student way. We'll stay in nice hotels, I won't make you strip in nightclubs to earn travel money. We'll fly business class. It will be fun.” He grabbed a fistful of sand and let it run through his fingers. I could see he was hurting. “I can't offer you marriage and kids and stuff like that. I'm not saying that stuff won't ever come, but not in the near future, that's for sure. But what I can offer you is my love and the biggest adventure of our lives.”

My heart broke as I listened to him. I wanted nothing more than to go with him, but I had a whole life back home. How could I just pick up and leave? Rent, bills, job, friends, family. I couldn't just press pause for a year.

“I can't.” The words felt physically painful to say.

Damien looked away from me.

“So what was last night about? I thought it was…” He cut himself off and tossed a handful of sand against the tent wall. “Never mind. Clearly I was wrong.”

He started getting up and I felt the panic rise again. I grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him back.

“Wait. Stay. Let's talk about this.”

He sat down again. “What's there to talk about? I knew it was too good to be true. I meet a girl, a fucking amazing girl, and I've never felt this way about anyone before, and we wake up the next morning and realize that our lives are totally incompatible. We're on different paths and they are so far apart that…”

My tears came.

They ran down my cheeks as his words sunk in.

Damien leaned forward and wiped them away. He was so tender and loving that it only made the situation a million times worse.

“It's okay, Lilly. It's life. The timing is off for us. What can I say?”

“But I don't want it to be.” I wept.

“But you can't come with me and I can't come with you, so what can we do?”

The gravity of this situation was starting to sink in.

“But I love you, Damien.”

“I guess love's not enough.” He paused for the longest time, and I could sense something bad was coming. “As good as last night was, I kind of wish it hadn't happened. Because it's just taken this whole thing from disappointment to…” He paused again. “Heartbreak. The people I love always seem to go away.”

His words struck a chord and guilt flooded me. He'd opened himself up to me and his worst fears had been confirmed.

My crying intensified and Damien wrapped his arms around me. We held each other tightly. And I wondered if this would be the last time.

“I'm not sorry about last night.” I loosened myself from his grip and looked up at him. He stood up again and the sense of finality hit me like a bowling ball in the stomach.

Why couldn't I go?
Why couldn't I just say fuck it and go with him? But no matter how many times I mulled the thought over in my head the answer stayed the same. I just wasn't capable of leaving my whole life behind. Maybe I was a coward, maybe I was stupid, but that was my reality right now. I just couldn't.

“Do you want me to come with you to the boat? I know there are a lot of people leaving today…”

I looked out at the water. Large groups of people were starting to leave. “No. It's okay. I'll go with one of the groups.”

He smiled at me. “I'm sure they'll all be very honored to have a celebrity in their midst.”

I felt a stabbing in my chest.

A tightening in my throat.

Nausea.

And then lots of pain.

He knelt down next to me and kissed me. One last time. It was so soft and tender and so full of love. But it was also just a painful reminder of what I would be missing.

“Take care of yourself. Keep in touch over Facebook. I'll be back in a year and, well…who knows?”

“You'll probably have found some hot chick by then and forgotten all about me,” I offered jokingly, even though the thought had just ripped a hole through my brain.

He looked very serious suddenly. “That is very doubtful.
Very.
You're going to take a very long time to get over, Lilly.”

And then he was walking away from me across the beach.

I sat there for a while, shell-shocked at what had just happened.

Devastated.

My heart had been ripped out of my chest and was lying next to me in the sand, and I had no idea how I would ever,
ever
, get it back.

I felt like a shoe.

An old, decrepit shoe.

A rejected, redundant, superfluous shoe that had been tossed out into a cold, muddy puddle on the side of a busy road in rush-hour traffic.

A sad shoe with scuff marks down the side and a peeling sole. A shoe that finds itself in the mouth of a pug with bad breath, on the foot of a homeless woman with bunions, and on the unfashionable hoof of a sweaty glam rocker with a fungal infection.

Now times all that by one hundred, throw in two extra zeros for good measure, and add it to infinity, and then maybe—
maybe
—you can begin to understand how I felt right then.

Oh, and did I mention that the shoe had also been regurgitated by an anaconda after it accidentally ate the glam rocker?

The boat ride back to the mainland had been a painful affair, literally. No longer in the Damien daze, I was very aware of the steep incline that we had to climb down to reach the boat. No longer in possession of the hero's hand, I'd slipped down some steps and grazed my elbow, bruised my bum, and had a lovely little bump smack-dab between my eyes. And to top it off, there was now a lovely crack down the screen of my phone, which was thankfully back in my possession.

The misery that I felt as I sat on that boat, in between someone's soon-to-be seafood supper and a raver on too much ecstasy, was…was…

I mentally ran through the thesaurus looking for a word that made
excruciating
sound like something used to describe the sensation of a raindrop falling on your head. But nothing. The pain I was experiencing now was nothing like the pain of Michael leaving me at the altar. This was on an entirely different level.

By the time I'd disembarked, it was already early evening. Phuket had turned her lights on and the night creatures in short skirts were filling up her streets. I walked up the road in search of a tuk-tuk, and I couldn't believe that a few days ago I'd been afraid of taking one on my own. Bad karaoke rang out and the smells of street food filled the air.

Since I'd been away, my Internet fame had clearly escalated, because despite my current state, I wasn't oblivious to the staring and pointing aimed in my direction. At first it didn't bother me, but when a woman walked up to me with a concerned look in her eyes and asked me if I needed help, I lost it.

I claimed center stage in the middle of the street, held my arms open wide, and screamed. (My mother would have been so proud.)

“Yes, people! It's me. Get over it, okay?”

They all stared. Some people took a step back, and an alarming number of them took out their phones and started dialing.
Oh, shit!
Surely they weren't going to call the cops over a tiny public display of emotion. A tuk-tuk came toward me and I jumped in quickly. I had no desire to be arrested twice in one week.

“The White Sands Hotel and Spa, please,” I managed to mumble to the driver as I got in.

The driver glanced back at me. “You look like you need drink,” he said in a thick Thai accent.

“Damn right. I just wish I had one.” A strong one.

“Here.” The little man reached over the chair and passed me a cigarette and a lighter.

“I don't smoke.”

“Looks like good time to start.”

And for some reason, that sounded like a very bloody brilliant idea. He was right, it was a good time to start. Yes, smoking cigarettes would surely make me feel better.

So I lit one. It was disgusting. It made me cough, and it gave me a queasy, nauseous, head rushy feeling.

I loved it!

Having a dreadful physical sensation to focus on made the emotional pain seem
so
much smaller. So I demanded that the man stop at the nearest shop so I, too, could come into possession of my very own box of cigarettes.

And he did. And I smoked all the way back to the hotel, which gave me a blinding headache, a sore throat, and a throbbing lung.

It was exactly what I needed.

We pulled up to the reception area where I paid the driver and thanked him for the cigarettes. I climbed out of the tuk-tuk and then caught sight of myself in the mirrored door…

Imagine an undiscovered wild woman who's been living in the jungles of Papua New Guinea her whole life and was raised by apes.

But who the hell cared, right? Certainly not me. By this stage, I was so used to looking like shit that it no longer surprised me.

There was a very large
NO SMOKING
sign on the door, so I was forced to stand outside and finish my cigarette. Only ten minutes as a smoker and I was already starting to feel the discrimination! While I waited, I pulled out my phone and realized that it hadn't been on in days, so I fired it up and watched a million messages flood my cracked screen. I tossed my cigarette away and started walking and reading.

I was nearly at my room when I lit up another cigarette. The nicotine had obviously affected my brain somehow, because it took several more reads of that last message before it clicked. I opened the door to my room…

It was a circus.

Val and Jane were sitting cutting out pieces of paper with my photo and the word
Missing
in red above it. Annie looked like she was nervously folding and unfolding clothes. My father and brothers were standing with the hotel manager and talking, while three police officers rushed around dusting for prints. My sister-in-law rushed past, talking to a strange-looking woman who was taking photos of everything and typing away frantically on her iPad.

I cleared my throat and they all looked up at the same time.

I looked at them. They looked at me.

We looked at one another.

And they all looked very worried.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my brother Adam approaching with his little bottle of white pills. Val and Jane were inching closer, too, but my dad stood dead still.

“Sweetie.” Worried little voices. “Are you okay, babe?”

“Hey, sis.” Adam was desperately trying to hide his panic and worry under casual lilting inflections. “Did someone hurt you? What's that on your forehead? May I have a look at it?”

They all inched closer, even the cops and manager. The scene was totally bizarre, and I had been so caught off guard that I hardly knew what to do.

“Sweetie, can you understand what we're saying?” Val started talking very loudly and very slowly.

“Yes. Lilly, do you know who we are?” My brother was unscrewing the bottle and a small white thing was coming toward me.

“Of course I bloody know who you all are. I'm not a loony!” I finally said, while exhaling a big puff of smoke. “But who are you?” I asked the woman who was still typing away on her iPad.

“Lizzy Brown. PI. I was hired to find you.”

I was stunned. The severity of the situation hit me all at once. “You guys hired a private investigator? You all flew here? You called the police?”

“Do you know how worried we've been about you?” Annie shouted, sounding like she was on the verge of angry hysteria.

“It's okay,” my dad said, moving closer to me. “The most important thing is that you're all right and that we've found you.” And then my father burst into tears, leapt across the floor, and scooped me up in his arms. That seemed to be the cue for everyone to flock.

JAMES:
Jesus, sis, we've been here for two days, we've hung up missing posters on every street corner.
(Aha, that explained the stares in the streets.)
We've been so worried. I'm glad you're okay.

ADAM:
Can you tell me how you sustained that injury on your head? Did you black out or lose consciousness? Can you feel your extremities? Oh my God, I've been so worried about you.

JANE:
We thought someone had kidnapped you and then taken a photo of you and put it online. We were waiting for a ransom note. I've been so scared.

VAL:
I've been so worried. You look terrible, and smell like fish, and when did you start smoking?
Oh my God
, we've all been so freaked out.

ANNIE:
Sorry I got angry; I've just been so worried. Stormy said to give you a kiss; you know how she can't fly. And your mom is passed out next door if you want to see her?

They all hugged me and while I was supposedly distracted, I saw my brother Adam relieve me of my box of cigarettes and throw it in the trash. I was so touched by everyone's care and concern, and I felt terrible for causing such an international emergency that I burst into the tears that I'd been holding back for the last few hours.

“I'm so sorry I wasted your time,” I wailed at the policeman who gave me polite smiles and disappeared.

“I'm so sorry, guys.” I turned to my friends and family. “I didn't mean for you to all get so worried and fly out here.” A chorus of “Don't worry, at least you're okay” rang out.

And then I wailed. “I love him!”

The tears became a waterfall drowning my face. Unflattering snot bubbles came next. “I love him. I love him so much.”

“We know. We know.” Val was trying her best to soothe me.

“When we saw that photo of you online, we realized how bad it was, how much pain you were really in.” Annie took me by the hand and led me to the bed. “So the private investigator tracked him down.”

“Yes, and we all had a very,
very
long talk with him,” my dad said.

“It was a very serious talk,” James piped up, smashing his fist into his other hand. “If you know what I mean.”

Adam held his hand up to silence James. “No one beat him up, but we did make our feelings very,
very
clear.”

“Crystal!” my sister-in-law said with venom.

Then it was my dad's turn to add to the conversation. “He apologized, and we hashed the whole thing out for hours. I was furious with him at first, obviously, but he is very sorry and he explained what happened.”

Then Adam jumped in. “It can happen to anybody, Lilly. Hell, I was nervous before my wedding. Committing yourself to someone for the rest of your life is a massive deal and it can be very overwhelming. I had cold feet, too, and wondered if I was ready for it—”

My sister-in-law cleared her throat loudly and shot my brother a sideways look.

“Obviously I didn't run away, though, and that was terrible of him. Terrible. But he panicked and he didn't know what to do. I'm not suggesting you forgive him right away, but it's also important not to just give up on a good relationship.”

“Of course you don't have to take him back right away,” Annie qualified. “You may need to go to some counseling, but he is very sorry. I can see that.”

“
Wait!
” I screamed. I had to stop them; they were going around in circles and I was starting to feel like a little goldfish in a bowl. “What are you talking about?”

“About loving Michael,” Annie offered gently.

“But I don't love Michael.
At all.
I love Damien.”

There was an eerie silence in the room, and then I heard it.

“Who's Damien?” The voice came from the doorway behind me.

The voice made my skin crawl and made me feel violently ill and homicidal all at the same time.

I clenched my fists, and if I were the kind of person who could crack her jaw, I probably would have.

You know how in those spaghetti Westerns, when the two cowboys have their big standoff in the main road of the town all the folk come out to watch before that distinctive Western music fills the air? That's what was happening now.

I stood up slowly, with my back to Michael. In my head they were playing that music and I was fingering the trigger of my imaginary gun, ready to cock it, aim, and fire.

I closed my eyes and saw Damien's face. And then I turned very, very slowly and faced my ex-fiancé.

He looked exactly the same.

Blond.

Buff.

Beefy.

Blue eyes.

Big, straight, white smile.

Good, clean, fun, commercial.

Picket-fence commercial.

Boring bastard commercial.

“Who's Damien?” His voice had a biting quality to it that I didn't like.

“He's a guy I met.” I spat the words out with flaming indignation.

“You met a guy on our honeymoon?”

“Well, you were nowhere to be found!”

Michael pulled out his phone with such smugness that it made me sick. He pressed a few things and then held it up to me. “Is this Damien?”

I looked at the picture on Facebook. It was of Damien and me—Jess had obviously taken it and tagged me in it.

“Why are you stalking me on Facebook?” I asked Michael and grabbed his phone, but only because I wanted to look at the picture of Damien closely. His shirt was off, I was in my bikini, and we had our arms around each other, laughing.

I heard another voice from behind me—it was the private investigator. “On ascertaining that you were in fact missing, the first thing I did was check your Facebook and other social media pages. I noted that you had friended this character, one Damien Bishop, recently and—”