Chapter Ten #2
She slowed a little, but still reached the rock pool well ahead of him.
By the time he made it, the pull in his thigh was letting him know there’d be an ibuprofen in his near future if he wanted to sleep that night.
She was standing, barefoot, on the large granite boulders that formed the cradle of the rock pool, and she was looking at him with her head slightly tilted.
‘You know, the boardies are just right. The hair’s a little short, and a little darker than it ought to be, but once you’ve got your shirt off, I think we’ll be able to overlook those shortcomings.’
This was more fun than stringing up lights and painting arrows onto parking signs.
He grinned. ‘I have no idea what you are playing at, but I’m game to strip if you are.’
She didn’t hesitate, just reached down to the hem of the colourful cotton blouse she was wearing and reefed it off.
She looked spectacular in a swimsuit. It was navy, and not racy at all. It looked sturdy enough to compete in Iron Woman events or wrestle bronze whalers or rescue not-between-the-flags tourists.
He took his own shirt off and chucked it on the rock next to her dress. ‘What now?’ he said, because clearly some plan was afoot that she had not bothered to read him in on.
‘If you were going to jump in, where would you do it from?’
He came to stand beside her, conscious of the sun streaming down on their bare skin, and her hair fluttering in the breeze, and the band of sweat across the small of his back that was enjoying that same breeze.
The cicadas, which had grown silent when they’d first disturbed the country quiet with their two-legged presence, had choired up again, and the water tumbling through the rocks above them to the pool below was a mellow, dappled, lovely sound.
There were probably leeches around, but it didn’t seem the time to mention them.
After big rains, this pool was much deeper, and the tumble of water above them was a waterfall, turning the upper catchment of the rock pool into a whirlpool. Dangerously so, on some occasions. Why, once he even—
‘You!’ he said. ‘I saved you . Here.’
She grinned and then, to his delight, she bumped her shoulder into his. ‘You sure did, Hero Boy.’
He chuckled. ‘Hero Boy?’
‘That’s what I called you. In my head. Later, when I thought about that moment I was in your arms, and you carried me out of the water and set me on the rock just … over … there.’
Somehow their arms were still touching, and it felt warm, and fun, and friendly. If warm and fun and friendly could also have undercurrents of heat.
‘Did you do that often?’ he said. ‘Think about that moment?’
‘Only a million or so times. Hey, I was sixteen. Being carried by a good-looking boy for the first time leaves an impression.’
‘Hero Boy,’ he murmured, and couldn’t keep the idiot grin off his face.
‘Of course, then you put me down and went back to your friends and didn’t give me another thought. My heart was crushed .’
‘Erm, sorry. In my defence, there was something else going on that day that you don’t know about.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yeah. There was a rumour going around that Penny Atwell was going to sunbathe topless. She’d just been to Europe with her family and it was, like, the cool thing to do over there or whatever.
It kinda took up all my brain power, as I recall.
All the brain power of every boy at Clarence High School. ’
She rolled her eyes.
‘Hey,’ he said defensively. ‘Have you met a teenage boy? Say the word “topless” within a hundred yard radius and their hormones go berko. It’s a scientific fact.’
‘Uh-huh.’
He chuckled. ‘I could rescue you again now and do it properly, if you like.’
She gave him a sideways look and he knew he’d won her over.
‘I do like.’
‘But maybe don’t jump in this time. It’s low, I reckon not much more than waist deep. The wet season doesn’t really kick in until February.’
‘So … we shimmy in?’
He laughed. ‘You shimmy to your heart’s content, darling. I’m gonna use these rocks over here that are just as good as steps.’
The water was insanely cool after the heat of the day; every sense sparked up into a new version of alive. Will tried to recall when he’d last felt as carefree as that long-ago teenage version of himself had been, then gave up trying to analyse what he was feeling.
He was feeling. That’s all that mattered.
Contentment was there, he recognised that one (yay) , but also so much more.
Happiness, affection for Jodie’s silly hero-boy story, nostalgia for a simpler time back before he’d left school and discovered that adulthood could actually totally suck, and riding over the top of all of that was a shimmer of a golden, sunny something that he rather thought was good, old-fashioned, often maligned but totally awesome lust .
Well, well. Who would have thought the prickly tripper-upperer could become an object of his desire in so short a time?
Jodie had shimmied into the water with a little bit of squealing and then had dunked herself deep to the bottom of the rock pool. She emerged, her head tilted back, her hair sleek. She looked like a sea otter, all lithe and brown in the water, the red in her hair a flame in the sunlight.
‘For a couch potato, you’re not very plump,’ he said.
‘There are plenty of exercises that can be conducted on a couch, for your information.’
Yeah. He could think of one exercise in particular that might need to be brought out of hibernation.
‘You ready to be rescued?’
She smiled at him, looking as relaxed as he’d ever seen her. As wet as she was, he could see a small line running through one eyebrow, a childhood scar perhaps.
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I want the full experience. Let me sink to the bottom and roll about in death throes. You rush in like we’re in an episode of Bondi Rescue .’
And before he could tell her how nuts this was, she was gone.
Well, not gone, just submerged.
He ducked under the water, opening his eyes into the slight grit, and there she was. He reached out. And that’s when he realised that the act of laying your hands on a woman about whom you had recently been having lustful thoughts kicked up that lust factor by about a thousand percent.
He put his hands on her waist. Both hands.
A span of waist. But you know the thing about a woman’s waist?
It was nothing like grabbing one of your mates in a game of touch footy and flinging them into the mud.
A woman’s waist was so very, very near other stuff.
Breasts. Hips. Curves. Thighs. Collarbones.
Every-bloody-thing, in fact, that he now wanted to put his hands on.
And then he pulled her towards him so she was against his chest. One of his arms reached down to snag behind her thighs, and the other curved behind her back. He headed upwards to the sun.
‘You want to explain to me what we’re really doing here today?’ he said.
He was smiling, but Jodie could see there was a serious question in those few words.
‘Okay, but it will sound daft.’
‘I love daft.’ And it was easy to believe that he did, here in the cool water, with the sun warming their shoulders, and the rustle of a breeze high up in the tall trees beyond the rocks.
‘I suppose I wanted to see if it was possible to feel young again. Carefree. You know, like I did all those years ago when you rescued me.’
‘You can’t hurry your way past grief, Jodie.’ His smile had dimmed a little, but his arms were still around her. His eyes were still warm. They had come a long way from that moment on the slippery path in the pub garden.
‘I feel,’ she said, a little amazed at her own willingness to just say flat out what she was feeling rather than shy away, ‘like you might have rescued me again.’
‘As much as it swells my pride to be thought a hero, there is no undertow here today.’
‘Not from the water,’ she said. ‘I have been living such a small version of myself for so long, and coming here, chatting with you, worrying about Carol—which reminds me, I haven’t even given you the latest update in the Christmas cake war saga yet—has cheered me up, Will.
Given me purpose. You’ve saved me from myself. ’
For which she was so grateful, she slipped her hands up his shoulders, grabbed his neck, and kissed him.