The Day Of The Wave (24 page)

Stay cool.

'Put the lights on,' I tell her. I walk to her side as she climbs on, puts on her helmet, flips the stand and balances the bike between her legs. My fingers brush hers on the dash as I flip the lights on. I do up her chinstrap with fumbling hands. Her soft breaths on my face are like zaps to my insides.

'When did you break it off?' I ask, keeping my voice nonchalant. 

Her eyes flit to my scratches. 'Today, but I was a bit of a chicken, I wrote him an email,' she says. 'We talk so much on Skype and on the phone and every time we do that he manages to convince me that everything's fine, when it's not. I only see that clearly when I'm...' 

'When you're what?'

Izzy turns the key in the ignition. The bikes rumbles to life but I press my hand over hers on the brake. The wind howls between us again. Already the clouds are threatening to block out the moon. 'When you're what?' I say again.

'Doing stuff I would never do with him,' she finishes. 'Like this.' She revs the engine slightly. A grin spreads from her mouth to her big brown eyes and I can't help matching it. 

'Well, you're one hell of a hell's angel,' I say as her hair blows out from her helmet and brushes my cheek. Some of the tension lifts. Some, but not all. 'I'm not so sure many people could match your awesomeness, Isla Sullivan.'

'I have you to thank for that,' she says. 'Let's go before it rains.'

'Yes ma'am.'

It takes us just a few minutes to reach Shady Palms, but by the time we get there the rumbles from across the headland are louder each time. It could get pretty serious later. I guide her up the pathway under the swaying trees, till the glisten of the ocean is ahead of us again. We stop between our two huts. 'I have to shower.'

'Me too.' she says.

'I'll knock for you in ten.'

'OK.'

I watch her head into her room, then I walk back into mine, turn on the shower. With the water splashing my face I look up at the bathroom ceiling - the sky - black with no spattering of starlight now. I still feel so bad about what Izzy must have been thinking tonight, sitting there waiting for me like before. Staying here might be my own way of making sure I never let go completely, but that doesn't mean Izzy feels the same. She's been trying to let go since that day, while I've been trying to hold on. Somehow we just met in the middle. 

Did she really break up with Colin?

The battering in my chest at the thought of her next door makes me soap up faster and I'm dressed in my jeans and a white shirt in no time. I can't help pacing my room, though. If she broke up with Colin, and I broke up Kalaya, there's no barrier anymore; there's nothing to hide behind. The only thing between us right now are these walls. 

Pull it together.

I grab two waters from the fridge, head back outside, run up her steps faster than I probably should. I knock on her door and she opens it right away. She's wearing the long green dress and a look I can read as apprehension, because it's pretty much like looking in a mirror. Her hair is wet, down around her shoulders, falling into her cleavage. 'Drink?' I say, holding out the bottle.

She smiles, taking it. 'No bucket tonight?' 

'I don't trust you with buckets.'

She laughs, steps past me onto the deck and rests her folded arms on the railings. I stand next to her, watching the rain. The branches and bushes are glittered with droplets now and the jasmine is blooming like it always does at night, filling the thick, heavy air with perfume. I can feel the pressure like the storm, building out at sea and inside me. 'I'm so sorry I made you wait tonight,' I say after a moment. 'I didn't even think, Izzy, I'm such an idiot.'

'You were doing your job, Ben, don't worry about it. You do it every day, why would you think about it?'

'I just don't want to bring all that stuff back for you...'

'I was thinking about the starfish,' she cuts in, turning around with her back to the ocean. The wind is causing ripples to billow in the flat black blanket of it. She looks to me. 'On that day, I was waiting for you to come back, and I was writing in my book and I was thinking how you were going to give me that starfish.'

I sit down on the hammock now, but my eyes never break from hers. 'I forgot about that,' I say. I really did. Things got crazy after that. 

Don't think about it.

'It wasn't just a starfish I was waiting for though, Ben,' she says now, folding her arms and looking down at them, nervously.  I watch her teeth on her bottom lip, biting down, and my heart starts its thud, thud, thud. 

'The way you said what you said... you probably don't remember, but I was waiting for a kiss. It was all I could think about.' She laughs to herself. 'Stupid, I know. I thought you were waiting to kiss me, too. That's what I was remembering just now at the dive shop. I remember that when the other stuff gets too much.'

Holy shit.
 

I lean forward in the hammock, reach for her automatically, tug at her arm till it falls to her side, pull her by the hand towards me. She sits next to me and we sink lower to the floor, squished up close, shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee through the fabric of her dress. I can hear her breathing, swallowing. 'I was waiting to kiss you,' I tell her. 'You know I was.'

I reach under her hair to the back of her neck, guide her closer, forehead to forehead. 'You wanted a kiss and you never got it,' I say. I brush my lips against the space between her brows; kiss, kiss, kiss down to the point of her pretty nose. 'That's one thing we can fix.'

I shouldn't. I shouldn't do this, but I can't fight Izzy's tsunami. I place my lips on top of hers, softly, gently. She presses harder, draws me into her opening mouth with her arms wrapped around me. I'm breathing in desire and breathing out confusion in an instant, but the two clash with redemption of some kind as we kiss and we kiss and we kiss. 

Her tongue rests on mine, then sweeps and swirls in what space is left between our gasps and soft licks and light moans. 'How's this,' I breathe, my hand on her waist now, moving higher up to the curve of her breasts. I want to make her happy... so much happier than this. I trace my finger along the edge of the dress, brushing her flesh till she clamps my lip gently with her teeth. 

'Perfect,' she breathes. I can feel her smile against mine as we lift our legs and lie down in the hammock. It swings as her hand finds my hair behind my head, clutching, kissing, kissing, kissing with the length of her body pressed to my side.

Yes. It's redemption, isn't it? Some form of it at least, being claimed with this kiss; with the pain and the scars of the past as bare in our breaths now as they are on her arms. I stroke the soft, hot flesh of them as they fall across my chest. Her fingers splay and hold tight to my shirt and she moves and breathes my name, just the once, like it means the entire world. 

I fill my lungs with the scent of her shampooed hair and we kiss, and we kiss, and we kiss, till she's shivering against me and through me like the ripples of the moonlight on the ocean. 

I don't know how long we lie here. I don't want dinner. I don't want a movie, not that it would be happening in the rain anyway. I want Izzy. I shouldn't but I do. I move my hand, run my thumb along her jaw, across her swollen bottom lip. I feel a dampness on her cheek, then on my shirt. 'Are you crying?' I say.

'Yes.'

'Why?'

'Because I got my kisses, Ben, from other boys,' she says. 'But
that
was the one I never stopped waiting for.' 

Mali has fallen in love with me. I've never had so many hugs in my life and I'm kind of besotted with her, too. She's six, going on seven and she's the cutest thing; so keen to learn everything I'm teaching, especially English. 'Go sit down,' I tell her now, once I've re-tied the ribbon in her hair. She skips to her tiny chair at her tiny desk, rests her head on the heels of her palms and beams at me.

'Right guys. Animals!' I say, lining up my marker pens in a neat row on the desk in front of me. I balance the lid of the green one at the end of the row, start to draw a picture on the whiteboard. 'What's this, in English? Can anyone tell me?' A sea of hands appears in front of me.
Isla, Isla, Isla, me, me, me!

Most lessons it's just me - being slow season there aren't as many volunteers passing through as there are in the drier months. But there's a sense of peace and usefulness in being with these children that I can't helping thinking I've been missing out on, sitting at a desk in London, writing articles that hardly anyone reads about fondue, stroppy chefs and who wore what to restaurant openings.

'Elephant!' a little boy called Tee shouts out now.

'That's right, Tee, now what sound does an elephant make?'

They stare at me blankly. Crap, they don't understand me. Sometimes this is hard. I make the sound of a cat and tap the picture. They all shake their heads and giggle. I bark like a dog and they giggle even more before Tee stands up on his chair and makes the roar of an elephant, mimicking the trunk with his arm.

'Excellent work!' I clap my hands and he jumps up and down excitedly while I spell out the word on the board. 

It's been the most insane week. Most of the time I feel like I'm floating. I teach three hours every morning while Ben does his dives, though things are definitely slowing down with the tourists. It rains every afternoon. 

I put the green lid back on, do the same with the red and start drawing the best rooster I can draw. I smile to myself, remembering yesterday after class when Ben met me back at the waterfall. I was writing in my book when he showed up. I've been doing that a lot more since we got back from Phi Phi.

'
For whatever we lose (like a you or a me), It's always our self we find in the sea'. 

Ben read the quote aloud over my shoulder. 'E.E Cummings,' he followed when I put the book down flat. He sat next to me, bare-chested, straight from his dive no doubt and kissed me, easing me down to my back on the rock in a way I could tell he'd been thinking about doing before he even reached me. Whenever Ben kisses me; whenever I touch him I'm right back to being that sixteen-year-old girl with a stomach full of knots and a grin you couldn't wipe off if you tried. 

'You know E.E Cummings?' I said, trying to sound normal as the tingles turned my body into a static mess next to him.

'Course I do,' he said against my lips, running his finger lightly down from the side of my face to the straps of my bikini top. 'Not such a dumb American after all, right?'

He pulled me up again against him and I kissed his salty lips, tasting the ocean; an enemy dressed as some kind of angel. He draped one arm around me and we looked out over the falls together. 'I think it's about going home,' I told him, 'maybe in a more spiritual sense, rather than sailing there, you know?'

He cocked an eyebrow, kissed my temple lightly. 'Go on.'

'Well, when we look at something so infinite, we feel small, like children. We go back to where we came from in a way, when nothing really bothered us. You can lose your worries in the waves.'

'I know I do, ironically, when I'm diving,' he said then, sighing into my hair. 'I had to force myself to do it at first, but then it was a lifeline, I think.'

'Back to a state of bliss?'

'Kind of,' he said.

'I suppose I can see that now - how it might be calming, even if, in a literal sense those waves are what gave you all your worries in the first place. What do you think the poem means?'

Ben was silent for a minute. Then he skimmed a stone across the water. 'When we set ourselves on some impossible mission... like, I don't know... like looking for a loved one who's never going to be found, maybe we wind up finding something else, in ourselves.' He looked at me for a second. 'And maybe that exact journey was always what was meant to be.'

'Deep,' I said as my heart leapt, and he groaned, pulled me to my feet. 

'You know what, hot cross bun? I don't even need any magic mushrooms when you're around.'

'Chicken!' Mali yells now from her seat, yanking me from my daydream.

'Great guess, yes, that's a chicken!' I say. 'Or a rooster. But my drawing isn't very good.'

They all clap and giggle again, copying the letters that spell chicken into their books as I write them down. I start to draw a dog. My art is improving at least with this job, and the time always passes quite quickly, too.

When I'm here I try not to think that at any moment Kalaya could come back, or the fact that I still haven't responded to Colin. All I want to think about is Ben. Last night they rescheduled the movie we couldn't watch before and we sat on day beds that were put out on the sand by one of the resorts, watched the big screen flickering with Jennifer Anniston. I didn't watch much of it. I was hyperaware of Ben's arm around me; every inch of my flesh that was touching his, and of the not-so-subtle looks Sonthi was throwing him. Will tonight be the night?

Tingles take over my limbs again. 

We haven't slept together yet. He's being frustratingly gentlemanly about the whole thing, walking me back to my hut every night, kissing me in the doorway, then going back to his hut right next door. He's only ever slept in my room with me once - that first night when we kissed in the hammock and were three hours late to say bye to Marcus or meet Sonthi and Sasi for dinner. We didn't really do anything then either, except kiss and kiss and kiss. I could kiss Ben forever.

The kids rush outside to play as soon as class is over. I pack away books and straighten out chairs, waiting for their parents to arrive. Some head home themselves on foot, but others are always collected. I'm just packing some coloring pencils into a box with the notepads when a lady walks in with a purple sari around her head. 

'Sorry, sorry!' she says to me in the doorway as Mali races up and wraps her little arms around her middle. Mali's mother.

'That's OK!' I say, 'you're not late, it's nice to meet...' 

Oh my god.

I stop dead in my tracks when she pulls the sari from her head. 'Oh my God, it's you.' My hand flies over my mouth. 'It is you, isn't it?'