Meet Me in Tahiti

Chapter Twenty-Six

Zoe had disappeared and Finn had no idea why.

He’d asked Gina, but Gina had been ridiculously cryptic. Instead of answering his questions she’d veered off-topic, talking about how Zoe had clearly outgrown Hawke’s Cove, and how strong and independent and inspirational she was for choosing to live in Sydney on her own.

He’d laughed outright at the “inspirational” and said he hoped she hadn’t said that to Zoe. Gina had said she and Zoe understood each other perfectly and Zoe hadn’t taken offense at anything she’d said.

The cocktail party wound down and Finn made his way to the bar where Cristina, Matilda, Daniel and Joe were having a farewell drink.

He brushed aside their invitation to join them and said bluntly: “Where is she?”

“Packing,” Cristina said.

“She’s been gone over an hour.”

“It takes her a while.”

Finn dashed a hand through his hair. “Why aren’t you helping her?”

“Er...” Cristina said. “Do you even know her? She likes to do it—”

“On her own, OK, OK, got it. I’ll just go and see if she needs...anything.”

“You do that,” Matilda said, her lips so twisted with the effort not to laugh, Finn had to laugh himself.

“Shut up,” he said.

“You two!” Matilda said. “Two peas in a pod.”

But she said it to Finn’s back; he was already striding out of the bar.

Finn paused at Zoe’s door, feeling stupid about his mad dash. So she didn’t wear the hair combs, she’d left the party early, she hadn’t come up to him. She was packing, and when she finished packing she’d call him, or text him or—

Idiot. He hadn’t checked his phone.

He pulled it out, holding his breath as he checked for messages, whooshing it out when he saw nothing, knowing she wasn’t going to call or text him.

What she was going to do was leave him.

He put his phone away, rubbed a hand over his chest, over his heart, because it hurt, right there. Memories assailed him. The beach in Hawke’s Cove... Mermaid’s Kiss, two worlds colliding, inevitable as the tide. The look on her face every time she’d come up to him in the village and he’d rejected her—keep away, you’re not for the likes of me, everyone says so. The hospital room, him begging, her rejecting him. Here on Tiare, insisting she wasn’t lost, that she was independent, yet telling him it was OK for him to touch her, to lift her, unasked, because she trusted him. Her irrepressible laughter, that first kiss, the tears she never shed in front of anyone else as she poured out her deep dark secrets to him, the same way she’d shared her journal secrets only with him.

The fear was there, that he would lay out his heart and soul and she’d trample them.

But so was the fear that he would not lay out his heart and soul and he’d never know what might have been.

Sand through that damn hourglass. Last chance. Maybe it wouldn’t work, maybe she’d leave him no matter what he said or did, but he wasn’t a twenty-year-old idiot promising what he couldn’t deliver, he was ten years wiser and he knew, knew, she wanted him, and he wasn’t letting her go without a fight.

“All. Guns. Blazing!” he said through gritted teeth, and knocked hard on the door.

She’d know it was him. He wondered if she’d hide inside and refuse to see him.

But almost immediately he heard her, coming to the door. Of course she wasn’t going to hide. Not Zoe.

She opened the door and led him wordlessly onto the deck. He took a seat, not because he wanted to, but because it put him at eye level with her. There was a bottle of vanilla rum on the table and a glass. She knew it was his drink of choice, and so he knew she’d been expecting him. He poured himself a measure, took a sip, waited.

At last she sucked in a breath, then jutted out her chin. Here it came.

“I didn’t know you were married,” she said.

He put his glass down, very precisely, on the table. “I’m not.”

“I met your wife.”

“Ex-wife. Gina. I know. I wanted you to meet her.”

“I didn’t know you’d got married.”

“It wasn’t a secret.”

“Doherty Berne. The surnames, they’re different.”

“Gina wanted to keep her name.”

“She still loves you.”

“And I still love her.”

“You...you do?”

“I do. But not like...” He shrugged, sighed. “Let’s not do this, Zoe. Not after last night, when you know how I—” Stop. If she didn’t know what was the point? “What is this really about?”

“I heard about the property you bought in Hawke’s Cove. I heard you now own six properties.”

“And?”

“You never told me how many.”

“You didn’t ask.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re going home to Hawke’s Cove.”

“So are you,” he said, although panic was etching an icy trail down his spine. “You’re going home to Hawke’s Cove too.”

“No, Finn, I’m not.”

A few seconds to process that. “Your parents...the renovation.”

“That’s pie-in-the-sky stuff. They got their hopes up at Christmas when I turned up, but I’ve told them I’m happy in Sydney so not to overdo the renovation.”

He thought about that, decided it didn’t matter. Who cared where they lived? “OK, what else? My ex-wife, my properties. How about we talk about why you didn’t wear the hair combs?”

“I...I didn’t want you to get the wrong impression. After last night.”

“And what impression might I have got last night?”

“That there was...something...special...between us. I mean, w-we’re friends, that’s all.”

“Friends, that’s all?”

“Friends with a one-time benefit, and I...I thank you for that.”

“Oh, you thank me, do you? Well, Zoe, leaving aside the fact I told you very distinctly I have no intention of being in the friend zone this time around, how about you tell me—since that’s where you’re so determined to put me—why you haven’t told your parents I’m here at Poerava. I’m sure you’ve told them about your new ‘friends’ Matilda and Joe and Daniel, right?”

Up came her chin. “How do you know I haven’t told them about you?”

“Because I’m not an idiot, Zoe.”

Her hands were on her thighs, rubbing up and down. Good. He wanted her to be nervous. He needed her to betray something.

“OK,” she said, too levelly, “I didn’t tell them because there’s no point. This was a week, just one week. Why distress them for one—”

He banged a hand on the table. “Distress them? What about distressing me?”

“You’re not distressed.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t know the first thing about me, Zoe, because you haven’t bothered to ask me how I feel or what I want or what I’ve been doing for the past ten years. Even when you thought you were interviewing me for an article you didn’t look me up online, which would have told you whatever you wanted to know about my business, my marriage, my mother’s death, everything that’s happened to me since you threw me out of your hospital room. Is it that you don’t care? Or is it that you do and you’re scared?”

She fired up then. “Don’t you dare try to tell me you’ve given me a second thought since that night! You didn’t think about me until I showed up here, and you only cared then because you wanted to play games with me. Come close, Zoe, keep your distance, Zoe. Paying me back for that night.”

“I wasn’t playing games, and I don’t care about that night, not anymore,” he said, his voice rising. “I’ve stayed on Tiare for one reason: waiting for you to see me, to know me! I wanted to be good enough at last! I thought I was! I didn’t want it to be like that summer, Zoe, two puzzle pieces that couldn’t quite work out how to fit together, me wanting you like I’ve never wanted anyone or anything before or since, and that’s a hard truth to confront, let me tell you, and you not having a clue about it. Do you know how it felt when you introduced me to Brad Ellersley that day in the Cove, dragging him over against his will to see me like I was some exotic wild animal in a cage?”

“That’s not how it was. I wanted a...a relationship with you.”

“Not the kind I wanted.” He tore his shirt open. “Look, damn you, look! I’m proud of the marks you left on me. I want more, and more, and more.”

“You never so much as asked me out on a date!” she said, scrabbling for ground.

“Considering you’re twenty-eight today and still can’t tell your parents about me—”

“That’s not fair.”

“That’s so fair it’s painful. Or are you telling me your parents would have welcomed me with open arms the way they did Brad?” He got to his feet, paced to the edge of the deck, tearing his hands through his hair. “Brad Ellersley,” he said to the water, “Prince Perfect, who decided a girlfriend in a wheelchair was too much hard work and chose to tell her that while she was still in a hospital room.”

“I didn’t hold that against him, Finn, so why should you? I was the one who offered him the out. All he did was accept the offer.”

Silence. A long, aghast moment of it. And then Finn faced her.

“You didn’t hold that against him, but you’re holding an ex-wife and six properties against me,” he said. “Except that you’re not, are you? They’re excuses. You talk a good game, Zoe. You always did. Wanting to live your dreams without people rushing to protect you, pamper you, fuss over you, shield you. That’s what you said. But you never went all the way to get what you wanted. Even now you’re playing the tragic damsel, living alone in a tower, but this time it’s a tower you’ve built for yourself to keep you safe.”

“Of course I want to be safe,” she said. “Everyone wants to be safe. But...but there’s a difference between being safe and being...being saved, which is what you want to do. Save me, just like everyone else wants to, save me because you couldn’t save—” She broke off, sucked in a breath.

“My mother, Zoe?” He came back to the table, sat. “Did I want to save my mother? Of course I did, and of course I couldn’t. She had cardiomyopathy. She was going to die, she knew it and I knew it, but that didn’t stop me wanting to save her. Do I want to save you? Yes, I do. I’m not ashamed to say it. I want to save you in all sorts of ways. I wanted to save you from myself for those two years. I wanted to save you from the hurt of Brad Ellersley that horrible night. I wish I could have saved you from the accident, and you can believe I came close to ripping off Henry Hawkesbury’s head for what he and Claudia did to you, but it was too late to save you from that and I knew you wouldn’t want me to kill him for you the same way you wouldn’t let me beat Brad to a pulp. I mean, you couldn’t even bait a fish hook.” He reined back the rage, compartmentalized the despair as he realized he was losing the fight, tried again. “What you choose not to see, Zoe, is that people want to save each other all the time. People want to help each other all the time. People want to look after each other. You let Malie look after you in Hawaii, why can’t you let me look after you?”

“Because I... I’d be a burden! Not just for an afternoon or a night or a day, or a week or even a month or two, but for a lifetime. And I don’t want to be a pity project, a...a barnacle on a stolen dinghy, along for the ride but not in the boat helping to navigate.”

“That’s not fair, Zoe! Not to me and not to you. It was never fair, what you said about pity projects, and you know it, Zoe, you do, it’s there, the memory, waiting for you to find it, clear it out, to know I forgive you, the way I want you to forgive me for the things I said.”

She shook her head, looking frantic. “I don’t—I don’t—” Stop. He could see her swallow hard. “I know what it’s like, Finn, to be pitied! I know! People have always smothered me with it.”

“But you never told them to stop, Zoe. You were the brave damsel in distress always. Stiff upper lip. Never shedding a tear, even though everyone around you did, even when you ended up in a wheelchair.”

“When did I get the chance to shed a tear, Finn? Everyone was already crying over me. People had been crying over me for eighteen years. They’re still crying over me.”

“Zoe, you were in my arms last night, crying. Doesn’t that tell you something? Doesn’t that tell you that I get it? That you can stop being strong, brave, inspirational Zoe Tayler and just be Zoe Tayler with me?”

She shook her head, said nothing. She wasn’t going to see it. Wasn’t going to meet him even halfway.

“Don’t you know, Zoe, that you saved me? I had no hopes and dreams until you gave me yours that summer.”

Another shake of her head. She was a stone wall. She did not want him to breach it, she didn’t want to know. And yet he had to keep trying.

“That time I told you to fight your big battles to the death but not to sweat the scrappy skirmishes if you wanted to win the long war,” he said.

“That’s what I’ve done. What I do.”

“So when’s the big battle?”

“I don’t—huh?”

“The big battle? When is it? What are you waiting for?”

“But I’ve got everything I wanted.”

“Where’s your novel?”

“Fairy tales, Finn. Life isn’t a fairy tale. I’m not Rapunzel or the Mermaid of Zennor. I’m just...me.”

“Just you,” he said. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing you’ve been right about tonight, Zoe. I didn’t think about you these past ten years. That’s because while I do fight the big battles, and I have every day of my life, you were always too big a battle for me to win. People came out of the woodwork to tell me back then. The gang. Ewan. Everyone in the village. Your parents. Even my mother, who watched me turning myself inside out for you. After you left Hawke’s Cove I wanted to forget you, to say goodbye, but I couldn’t. And then when my mother died, and I left England, I actively, painstakingly, cut you out of my memories. I worked hard not to think about you when I got my first travel job. When I got married. When I got divorced. And I resented having to work at it. It takes a lot of energy to deliberately not think about someone. When I saw you again, here at Poerava, it was almost a relief to think about you again. So I’m going to let myself think about you, and wonder about you, and remember you. But twelve years...it’s too long to want someone the way I want you, Zoe. That time machine we were talking about? The only reason I’d go back in time is to change how I acted and what I said to you that night ten years ago, because I was wrong, so wrong, and I hate myself for it. But other than that...”

He tore his hands through his hair. This wasn’t working. He had to lay it on the line, make or break. “The truth is, Zoe, you were right when you said it’s best to live in the present. I wanted you twelve years ago exactly as you were, but I probably would have messed things up. I wanted you ten years ago exactly as you were and I definitely would have messed that up. But now? Now, Zoe? I want you more than ever, exactly as you are, because of who you are, and I know I won’t mess it up. I’d steal a dinghy for you any day, but no way would you be a barnacle on the bottom, you’d be in the boat beside me, telling me where to go.” He closed his eyes, laughed, though it cost him, took a deep breath, then opened his eyes. “But I’m done waiting for you to see yourself the way I see you, and I’m done waiting for you to see me any way at all. I’m not fighting the big battle anymore, not by myself. If you want me, come find me. If you don’t, then I guess you don’t.”

It started to rain as Finn got to his feet.

He looked out at it for a moment, and then, without another word, he left.

A split second after the door closed behind Finn, Zoe’s phone announced a text message.

For one wild, hopeful moment, she thought it was Finn telling her he was coming back, but when she opened the text she saw it was from Brad Ellersley.

Happy birthday, Zozer! Shayla sends her love—and hopes we got the time right this year. Did you hear Finn Doherty’s bought that crumbling old manor and is going to turn it into a boutique hotel?

Automatically, numbly, she tapped out a return message, as bland as her emails to her parents used to be:

Thanks for the birthday greetings. You got the date and time spot-on. Yes, I heard about the manor. Give Shayla and little Robbie a kiss from me.

She hit send.

And then she burst into tears.