Everything Left Unsaid (17 page)

We walk hand-in-hand to the bedroom.

I search through my bag, looking for the condoms I hid underneath the clothes. By the time I’ve ripped off the plastic, opened the box, and grabbed one, Juliet’s lying naked on the bed.

After I’ve taken off my jeans, my undies, got the condom on, I kiss her again, more gently this time. ‘You ready?’

‘Don’t hurt me, Tai.’ She’s smiling.

‘I would never hurt you,’ I whisper.
Except when I die and leave you
.

At first, she bites her lip and I murmur, ‘Does it hurt?’

She shakes her head, wraps her arms around my back, and I try to be gentle, so gentle. It’s a little awkward, yeah, but
oh god this feels good
, too.

And now I’m watching her sleep, remembering how afterwards she curled up in my arms, couldn’t stop kissing me, though it was with none of the fire from before, and between kisses she said, ‘I love you, Tai. I love you.’

We spend the first couple of days just hanging out on our own. Tai’s still exhausted and sick from the chemo, and he doesn’t want to do much. He’s lined up his meds in the bathroom, and I find him in there one day injecting something into his central line.

‘It’s saline,’ he informs me. ‘Just keeps it clean and working properly.’

‘Oh.’ Tai must’ve been doing this since the first round of chemo, but he’s hidden it from me, done it when I wasn’t around.

Tai rushes to finish and pulls on his shirt. ‘It’s okay, Juliet.’ But it’s not.

When he leans in to kiss me, I pretend I don’t notice him stumble, off balance again.

‘So what do you want to do tonight, girl?’

‘Let’s just stay in,’ I say. ‘We’ll get some pizza or something delivered and hang out on the balcony people-watching.’

Tai smiles, relieved. ‘Yeah. Sounds good.’

On the third night we’ve arranged for Tai’s mates to come to our place while I spend the night with the girls.

As I leave to meet them, Tai cheekily cautions me to behave. I tell him to worry about himself and his mates. Dad will lose it if the place gets wrecked – the bond was huge.

When I get to where they’re staying at, the girls meet me at the door. Through floods of giggles, Lina and Rae tell me Gen got her tongue pierced just because the piercer was cute. They force her to show me the phone number scrawled on her arm.

Blushing, Gen grabs a packet of hair dye off Lina and shakes it at me, trying to change the subject. It works. When the dye has been washed out in the kitchen sink, and the splatters carefully wiped off the floor, we sit around admiring our new blue streaks and making a rainbow of cocktails.

‘Here’s to no more assignments,’ Rae toasts.

‘No more uniforms,’ Lina adds.

‘No more
Ladies, where are your blazers?
’ Gen chimes in.

‘I still can’t believe it’s over,’ I say a bit wistfully.

‘I’m sure they’ll let you go back there next year if you really want to,’ Rae teases.

‘It’s not that,’ I say. ‘I don’t want to go back, but I’m going to miss hanging out with you. We’ve all applied to different unis, and Tai will be gone. I’ll be by myself. I’ll be alone.’

Gen lunges at me, nearly knocking the glasses over, and flings her arms around me.

‘You will not,’ she says firmly. ‘I promise.’

Lina and Rae stand up and wrap their arms around me too.

‘We won’t let you be lonely, Juliet,’ Lina says.

The guys arrive not even ten minutes after Juliet has left. Alex is carrying a carton of beer and Sam’s carrying a pile of takeaway pizzas. Tom thrusts a plastic shopping bag into my hands. ‘Hey, Tai. Limes, for the beers.’

We take the lot out onto the balcony and they tell me what they’ve been up to the past couple of nights – chucking water bombs off their balcony, Alex getting his eyebrow pierced, how a bunch of girls dared them to do a nudie run into the water last night. Tom tells me how one of them tried to kiss Sam, wanted him to go have sex with her, but he wasn’t keen.

‘Aren’t you still with Nikki?’ I ask Sam.

‘Nah, we broke up about a month ago. I thought I told you.’

‘Nope. Sorry, Sam. How long were you guys together?’

‘A couple of months, I think. It’s cool. She started talking about our
future
and I mean, I liked her and all, but not like that.’ Looking almost irritated he leaps up to get another beer. ‘Hey, Tai, have you got any vodka? Let’s put vodka shots in the beers.’

‘Let me see what’s left from Juliet’s cocktail-making last night.’ I grin, and go inside to get the bottle.

We sit out there for ages, radio up loud, pooling our cash and ringing up for more pizza, getting drunk because we can. Alex produces a bottle of rum from somewhere and says, ‘Drinking game, you guys, come on,’ and it seems like a good idea, even if all I feel like doing is watching.

So they drink and brag and Tom dares Alex to squirt lime juice up his nose and it’s the funniest thing I’ve seen in forever. After a few more passes of the rum bottle Alex starts looking pretty seedy and says he’s going to spew. I yell out, ‘Don’t spew on the carpet! Juliet will kill me – no, her
dad
will kill me.’ I hustle him into the ensuite and shove him towards the toilet – just in time. I watch him spew and then lead him to the lounge, where he passes out.

Heading back onto the balcony, I freeze when I hear my name. Tom and Sam are leaning on the railing, talking quietly.

‘What if he dies tonight?’ Sam’s saying.

‘He won’t,’ Tom says, and pats him on the arm. ‘He’s still got ages, yeah?’

‘But they don’t really know, do they?’ says Sam, sculling the rest of his drink and setting it down. ‘I mean, they only know how long at most, that’s what Tai said, but the tumour could like explode or something, couldn’t it? And what if we get up in the morning, and he’s dead?’

‘I promise you, mate, he’s not going to die tonight.’

‘I’ve never seen a dead person,’ Sam says, and there’s an edge of panic in his voice. ‘And I don’t think I could handle seeing Tai dead. It just creeps me out.’

‘I’m sure he’s not going to do it on purpose.’ Tom laughs, but Sam doesn’t join in.

‘I’ve never even been to a funeral,’ Sam says, ‘and Tai’s pretty much planning his. Doesn’t that just seem weird to you?’

‘Well, yeah. Of course.’

Breath caught in my throat, I watch as Sam reaches over to grab another beer from the table. He takes a swig, then says, ‘Doesn’t it make you think,
Hey, that could’ve been me
? How easily could it have been any one of us, you know?’

‘Yeah, I guess. Glad it’s not me, though.’

‘Yeah, me too.’ He sounds as if he feels guilty for admitting that.

I want to go back out there, say,
Hey, Sambo, it’s okay. You don’t have to feel guilty for being grateful it’s not you. If this was happening to you I’d be pretty damn happy it wasn’t me
.

I don’t want to interrupt them, don’t want to let them know that I’ve been listening, so instead I turn around and head back down the hallway to bed.

The next morning, I walk back to our unit feeling seedy and miserable. The effects of the cocktails, of celebrating with the girls, are long gone, and they’ve taken with them the temporary feeling that everything is right with the world. Tai meets me at the door with a cuddle for a greeting, and I hold on to him for a long time.

‘Everything okay?’ he asks gently.

‘Yeah.’
No, actually,
I don’t say.
And sometimes things are so not okay that it scares the hell out of me
.

In the afternoon, Tai’s feeling well enough to walk down to the beach with me, meet the girls there, and drag Gen back to the piercers. I decide to cough up fifty bucks and get my tongue pierced to see what this guy’s about. Lina and Rae are helpfully doing some oh-so-unsubtle pointing to show me which one is him, but they don’t need to. The second he and Gen see each other, they both get this
look
. I’ll hand it to her, he’s pretty cute, and manages to be all professional while being totally sweet to Gen. As he launches towards me with the needle I look at Gen.
I’ve got your back, girl
. It’s only after he’s tightened the bar on my tongue stud and given me the after-care talk that he and Gen arrange to meet up later that night.

As Tai and I walk back to our unit, debating what to have for dinner, he looks at me and says, ‘Hang on. Did you just get a needle put through your tongue just so Gen could work on her love life?’

I grin. ‘That’s what friends are for, Tai.’

I’m feeling a bit lethargic and headachy so we decide on a quiet night in front of the TV with instant noodles and alcohol. Juliet flicks through the channels until she finds a chick flick and then snuggles down, happy. She starts giving me a cynical running commentary on the movie, pretending to be the characters speaking but saying stupid stuff, or laughing at their stupid plot. The Main Guy takes the Lead Girl out to a restaurant, and while Juliet’s saying, ‘Bet she orders a salad,’ Main Guy slips an engagement ring into Lead Girl’s glass. She finds it, they kiss, everyone else in the restaurant claps, and Juliet makes a little
pfft
noise in disbelief. ‘As if. She’d probably run away and hide in the toilets. Then come out and slap him for asking her to marry him somewhere so public like that. Or not even see the ring and choke on it.’

‘I’d never propose like that,’ I agree.

‘That’s just drunk talk, honey.’ She grins at me.

‘Yeah, like you can talk.’ I grin back. ‘It’s all drunk talk around here tonight.’

She pauses, considers this and nods. ‘Tai? Someone drank all of my drink.’ She pouts.

‘I’ll get you one,’ I offer.

‘Are you trying to get me drunk and have your way with me?’ Juliet smiles.

‘Something kind of like that, yeah,’ I say, going to the fridge to investigate.

‘How would you do it?’ she yells out.

‘Do what?’

‘Propose. You said you’d never do it like that, so how would you do it?’

I pour Red Bull into a champagne glass because nothing else is clean and yell back, ‘The ring in the glass idea was kind of cool.’ I yank the ring off my middle finger and drop it into one of the glasses.
Clink
. ‘But not in public like that. Somewhere where it was just us. No-one else around to tell us what they thought about it, how they thought it went.’ I’m walking back towards her now carrying the glass. ‘And then I’d get on one knee . . .’ And I do it, drop down onto one knee and hand her the glass. ‘And then I’d ask you.
Her
. I’d ask her to marry me.’

Juliet’s looking at me like I’m crazy, but she’s smiling, too, eyeing off the ring in the glass I’ve handed her. ‘That’s an improvement on the movie version, but I think your choice of jewellery needs work.’

‘Yeah, well it was impromptu, you know?’ I get up off the floor, sit down again, and she climbs onto my lap, facing me. I kiss her, and she kisses back, just as hard, ripping a button from my shirt as she pulls it off, throwing her own shirt on top of it before I grab her, kiss her again.

‘Just for the record, Tai,’ she whispers in between kisses, ‘if you ever asked me, I’d say yes.’

On our last night I start packing to go home. Or putting stuff in piles, at least. The fridge is empty, apart from a few apples, a pizza box and the champagne, which we still haven’t opened. I abandon packing, grab some glasses, and fill them with bubbly.

When I come out from the kitchen holding the glasses, Tai looks at me intently. I wonder what he sees. I’m barefoot, sunburnt, wearing one of his shirts over my swimmers, and my hair – my blue hair – has gone mad from the salt of the ocean. Hesitantly, I ask, ‘What?’

‘You’re just really beautiful. That’s all.’

As we drink the champagne, we make toasts: to finishing school, to not trashing the place, to two-minute noodles being so damn good. And, eventually, we toast to us, even though we know that ‘us’ won’t last forever, even if we wanted it to.

Eventually it gets dark, and we curl up together in bed. Tai strokes my hair, kisses me, and I sigh. ‘I am so going to miss this.’

‘Me too. It’s so much better than sleeping alone. Or with River in my bed. He farts a lot.’

‘I wish we didn’t have to go back.’

‘Remember we were going to run away, once? What were we – twelve?’

‘Oh yeah. I’d forgotten about that. Will we do it now, instead?’

‘Yeah,’ he says sleepily. ‘You pack the bags and I’ll steal some morphine from the hospital, and then . . .’

• • •

The next morning I wake before he does, and I watch him sleeping.

‘We’re never going to get to do this again, are we, Tai?’ I whisper.

His chest keeps rising and falling, and his eyes stay closed.

‘I used to imagine us, next year, falling asleep together whenever we wanted, like those nights were unlimited or something. But this is the last one, isn’t it?’ I curl into him again, trying to make the moment last.

• • •

But as I now know, nothing lasts, and all too soon we’re back at home as if schoolies never happened.

A few days after our return, I’m at the shops with Mum and notice with horror that they’ve started putting Christmas stuff on the shelves. Normally I’d be excited, but not this year. This year, I don’t want to see it, don’t want to be reminded that the year is almost over.

But while I can pretend not to see the tinsel and crappy plastic Santa lawn ornaments at the shops, I can’t pretend not to see Tai.

There are four days in a row when he stays in bed, only getting up to go to the bathroom. He claims he’s exhausted from schoolies, and I feel like I’m to blame for that. Mia decides to quit her job. She’s been constantly calling and saying she can’t make it, anyway. She tells us there are more important things in life, and we all know what she’s really saying. Tai seems equally guilty and relieved at her announcement. He looks so much weaker all of a sudden, as if everything drains him. I think his pain is worse now. One day I catch him looking at the clock and silently counting the minutes until his next painkiller is due.