Chapter 4 Ghost Sharks
ghost sharks
Elusive, deep-sea creatures, unseen yet real. Like the secrets I’m wading into. And the ones I carry deep within me.
I thought it would be the hallway, the hundreds of framed family pictures, the faces and frivolity and fun times .
. . I thought that would haunt me. I hadn’t expected the thing that clung obsessively to me over the next week to be those white sand beaches and fluffy clouds behind the Eiffel tower.
Not a single pair of eyes, yet it was an entire wall of him. Ika. Dead fish.
My new identity.
And bonus: It comes with a prickle at the nape. One year, guarantee!
Trent gave me the basics. Just enough to get by. Ika was a free spirit. Into acting too.
“And the rest? Neighbours, family, anyone who might know?”
“They don’t talk about him,” Trent said. “They know not to.”
Not blunt. Just matter-of-fact.
“And if someone does ask?”
“Improvise.”
Right. That’s my job, after all.
Packing is a quick affair. I’ve never stayed long in any of my rentals and I hate asking for help to move, so I only have a suitcase of clothes, another bag of shoes, duvet and pillow—fit with their covers. If I balance it right, I can probably drag the whole lot all the way to Grandpa’s.
But before I leave my key on the table and trundle with my life’s possessions down the street, ping! A message. Trent has a pickup truck. Give him an address, and he’ll hoon right there.
He doesn’t use the word hoon. I don’t think that’d be something in his vocabulary.
I’d like to hear the word hoon come out of that mouth.
Hoon. When everything else he says is so measured and carefully weighed and calmly spoken.
I snort, throwing him back my address, too caught on him saying hoon to recall I don’t want his help. I don’t want anything beyond the act.
Trent pulls up and parallel parks smoothly before me. Too smoothly. There’s nothing hectic or rushed about it. No second attempt. No correction. Just clean execution. Effortless. Unnatural. Insane.
My fingers tighten around my suitcase handle and the pressure shoots up my arm into my shoulders, right to the sharp crush of my jaw. Stop imagining kicking the damn tyre. I flex my fingers, but the moment Trent steps out, stretches, and rolls his shoulder, they clamp right back around the handle.
Is it Trent that’s making me grit my teeth? Or is it that I, with my past, joked about the word hoon?
Trent lands in front of me; his large hand rises to my forehead and casts a shadow over my eyes. “Still squinting,” he states.
“I don’t like the way you drive.”
He keeps his hand there, shielding me from the sun, the edge of his pinky finger bumping against my skin. His other hand pulls out his truck keys. They’re connected to other keys, house, something else, each a different colour, and they jangle before me.
“You drive then.”
I step back sharply to be punched by sunlight. Trent lowers his arm slowly, like he’s only now aware it’s still there.
The warmth from where his palm pressed lingers on my forehead and I resist the urge to wipe at the tickle.
He’s in belted shorts and a short-sleeved shirt.
Light blue today with a dark blue print: starfish, shells, everything Under The Sea.
He smells of it too. Sea salt, something warm.
Maybe the sun is beaming too strongly on my feet, but his scent is reminding me of digging my toes into sun-baked sand.
Trent follows my gaze and plucks at his shirt. “Gift. Marine Conservationist. Most of my socks are themed too.” He moves to my suitcase, heaves it up and swings it into the back seat atop some gear and coiled rope. His shirt ruffles up a bit. Enough for me to think: Not only your socks . . .
After my stuff is stowed, the door shuts; I snap my gaze up and around as I waffle between a scowl and a smirk.
“Let’s go,” Trent says, heading to the driver’s side without any follow-up, as if one step back was enough for him to understand. He doesn’t. He has no idea.
When I don’t move, he looks back. And for just a second, his fingers tighten on the keys. A flicker of hesitation. A question, unspoken.
Like he’s asking: I misunderstood? You did want to drive?
I want to laugh and say finally! See? You don’t see through me.
But I can’t. He didn’t misunderstand. And I don’t like the way that settles in my chest.
I catch the keys he tosses reflexively, and . . . they’re warm. Still holding the feel of his grip.
My fingers curl too tight around them. Enough to register how solid they are in my palm. How familiar. How foreign.
I clasp them to me a moment and then, calm as I can manage, I toss them back. “I don’t drive.”
I wait for the curl of knowing superior lips. I was right after all.
But he just looks at me, too long, too steady, like he’s glimpsed a ghost-shark in these depths.
Without a word, he inclines his head and slips behind the wheel.
The snap of the door should mark a change in tension. It’s a perfect opportunity to start over, keep things light, transactional. How’s your morning? Nice day, isn’t it? Autumn’s coming: clear skies and a slight chill in the morning. It’s all about wearing layers.
Instead, there’s silence.
A fleeting sideways look. From him. From me.
His hands tightening on the steering wheel. Mine, fumbling with the seatbelt.
A long pause, a longer breath. The readjustment of the rearview mirror. And then—
He sweeps forward, reaching for the glovebox, and I haul in a breath of warm sea and hold it. He rummages and pulls out knotted blue cord and leather strap. It dangles briefly in front of me and I see little metal fish studded into it.
“Your wrist,” he says.
I lift it automatically.
He hesitates.
Just long enough that I feel the shift in air between us. Just long enough that I realise he didn’t mean he’d tie it himself.
I start to withdraw my hand, but his fingers brush my knuckles, a barely-there graze, before he catches hold.
The string loops around. Once. Twice. A ticklish drag, the rough cord grazing the softer skin of my wrist, his fingertips little pops of warmth against my skin.
I don’t move.
The knot tightens.
My skin prickles.
Trent slides his fingers away, but the touch lingers.
This time I do rub at it. Vigorously. He notices and quietly shifts back to the wheel, staring out at the road. “This was his. He’d wear it.”
The metal fish are a sudden bite of cold into the warm spots he left behind.
For the duration of this act, can I ever take this off?
I should ask.
My fingers flex, thumb rubbing over the rough cord. A restless movement.
I should say something.
I don’t.
The tyres hum against the road. The silence stretches, thin and waiting.
Finally, I open my mouth. “Will I live in his room too?” And then, “I want to live in his room.”
It’s a lie, and it’s not.
I don’t want to live in dead Ika’s childhood room. I want a room Trent avoids. A room that gives me reprieve from him, from this strange, tangled pull between us. This will do it, I think. He’ll hate it too.
The thought of him snapping, of a sharp how dare you, curls my lip. It’s unprofessional; I should be acting through this unease. But there’s a charge in the air, something pressing all my buttons. I want him to lash out.
I don’t want to be the only one off kilter.
I swallow hard, fold my arms, and wait.
We’re already in the street below the path leading to Grandpa’s. The truck rolls to an easy stop.
Trent’s hands stay on the wheel, thumbs rubbing once, briefly, over the leather. A slow exhale. But there’s no snap. No lashing out.
He shifts. Unbuckles his seatbelt. Turns his head.
Shadows shift over his face. He reaches forward to unbuckle my seatbelt, and his thumb pauses there as his eyes shift up to mine. “Are you sure you want to share a room with me?”
Trent-the-Flooder’s words live up to his name, coming in a flash, knocking me off balance.
I stare at him. He slowly releases my seatbelt. Only then shifts his gaze from mine, moving on to opening the door.
My seatbelt stops its slow slide over my chest the same time it hits me.
He lives in his dead brother’s room.
My stomach lurches. A hollowed-out pull at my centre.
What type of impenetrable bottle is he?
We leave my stuff in the car. Trent says he’ll smuggle it inside later.
Smuggle.
Like I’m something illegal, something wrong that shouldn’t be here. So, on some level, he knows that too.
A prickle climbs the back of my neck as I follow him down the hall. Just an act. A way to keep the improv studio. The kids can keep their moemoeā. Holly can keep her scholarship. I clamp a hand over the prickles, only dropping my arm once I pass that wall of beaches.
My first sight of Grandpa is of a ball-capped elder in a Led Zeppelin 1973 tour t-shirt, hunched over the dining table cursing at a deck of large-print cards.
Trent lifts Grandpa’s cap and sets it on him back-to-front. “Hard enough for you to see as it is.”
“I can see they’re all shit. Bloody buggering hell.”
“We don’t say that anymore.”
“Damn king won’t move. This game is a stairway to bollocksville.”
Trent sighs. “Having fun, I see.”
“If I was having fun, there’d be whiskey beside me, not this organic whatever-it-is you brewed me.” For all Grandpa’s words, he heartily gulps the organic whatever-it-is.
Grandpa squints at me. He flips a card. “Dammit.”
Then his finger rolls in the air, summoning me forward.
I move before I’ve decided to.
“Gimme your thoughts,” he says, and I blink at the organised mess of cards.
“I’m not sure that’s how you’re supposed to play solitaire?”
Grandpa sneaks a card from the back of a pile and flips it with glee that turns to slouched shoulders. “Yet, I’m still losing.”
“Not if you play by It’s Thursday rules and slip those fours on those queens.”