And now she’d been Marc’s first kiss, too. Maybe more? That thought bit deep down inside. Right down deep where she always considered their kiss behind the library to be special. Even if it had led to the end of their friendship.
Her throat tightened up. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ More importantly, how could she have not noticed? She’d been so attuned to Marc’s every breath.
He sidestepped her outrage. ‘Why would I tell you? It was just a kiss.’ Beth gave him her most penetrating stare, straight out of childhood. ‘Okay, a bunch of kisses, but it’s not like we were dating or anything.’
‘I hope not, because that would mean I really was oblivious to everything going on around me.’ Curiosity got the better of her. ‘Why were you kissing Tasmin if you weren’t dating?’
Marc dragged his eyes off to the horizon. Back to the whale. Anywhere but on hers.
‘Marc?’
He hissed and tossed his hands up. ‘She volunteered.’
Beth blinked. Several times. ‘Tasmin Major volunteered to kiss you? Did I miss some kind of recruitment process?’
Cautious eyes met hers briefly. ‘Actually, we volunteered with each other.’
Beth’s stomach compressed into a hard ball. An insane jealousy surged through her as she realised what that meant. They wouldn’t have been the first kids in school to do it. ‘You went to her for kissing practice? Why?’
The look he gave her took her back a decade, too.
‘Okay, other than practice, obviously. I can’t believe you went to Tasmin. I mean she’s nice and all, but … What was wrong with me?’ And why on earth was this hurting so much?
That brought his head up instantly. Hazel eyes blazed sincerity. ‘Nothing was wrong with you, Beth. But we were friends.’
She thought of all the girls at school who turned their snooty noses up at Marc because of the way he lived and dressed. As if they would ever find a finer person. Her estimation of Tasmin rose a notch because she wasn’t one of them, even if it also meant that she’d spent half their childhood with Marc’s tongue down her Olympic throat.
Then something else hit her. ‘Who were you practising for?’
He tipped his face back down to the whale, sloshed harder. Resolutely ignored the question. Beth waited. Silently. Her heart pounded. How far had she truly come if she was this frightened of finding out?
‘It’s old news, Beth. Hardly important now.’
Her frown threatened to leave permanent grooves between her eyes, encrusted in the salt. ‘I thought I knew everything about you back then, Marc. It’s thrown me.’
He waved his shredded towel. ‘I just wanted to get the whole first kiss thing out of the way, Beth. Can we just leave it at that?’
She looked at the tightness of his lips, the shadow in his gaze. She softened her tone. ‘That library kiss was pretty accomplished. You guys must have practised a lot.’
The corner of his mouth lifted. ‘Good times.’ Then he looked back up at Beth, his eyes guarded. ‘Anyway, I thought that day was off-limits. Moving on …’
Right. Moving forward. The past was in the past. ‘Next question.’
It took Marc nearly two hours to hand-dig a deep enough trench a metre on-shore of the whale and reinforce it with driftwood to hold back the collapsing sand. In that time, the blazing afternoon sun dipped its toes into the ocean on the horizon and the most magnificent orange light coated everything around them. Her artist’s eye memorised the colour for future use. Beth sighed as much as the whale did as the scorching heat suddenly eased.
In the dying light of dusk, Marc laid the strap out and then asked Beth to take one eyeleted end. She mimicked his bent stance, her prune-skin hands pressed down to the shallow ocean floor and her back screaming its protest. Then they started sawing the strap under the sand, towards the whale.
Push. pull. Push. pull. A slow, agonising rhythm.
Beth felt the moment they got close to her because, exactly as she’d suspected, the sand compressed into a rock-hard mass under the whale’s weight. But Marc’s idea worked, though slowly. With every wave that ran in, the suck of the water rushing back out between every one of a million grains of sand loosened it just a tiny bit and they were able to saw the strap, inch by agonising inch, beneath the giant mammal. The tide had crept in so much and they bent over so far that Beth’s lowered face was practically touching the rising water. Her muscles trembled with exhaustion, screamed with frustration, but she wasn’t about to complain to Marc, even though every part of her felt as if she’d been hit by a truck.
Her back. Her skin. Her feet. Her arms. Even her head thumped worse than any hangover she’d ever earned.
Marc grunted as loud as she did. The whale did nothing but blow the occasional protest out of its parched blowhole. Finally, just when tears of utter exhaustion pricked, he called a halt.
Standing upright nearly crippled Beth after the abuses of the day and she cried out as her muscles went into full cramp, stumbling back onto her knees in the rising water, wetting the bottom half of Marc’s fleecy sweatshirt. It galled her to go down in front of him, but how much did he expect she could take? She caught herself before she sank completely down onto her bottom but she was incapable of getting back up. She froze in an odd kind of rigor where she was. Her hands shook as if they were palsied. Her head drooped.
Marc was with her in seconds, his strong arms sliding around her middle to keep her up out of the water. ‘Beth, grab on to me …’
Tears came then. Angry. Embarrassed. Relieved. It had been so long since she’d last felt any part of Marc against her and it felt so right now. Safe and strong. Welcome and long-missed. Where she was bone and long hollow muscles, he was solid and smooth and rooted to the earth. Even in the water.
And he was her friend. At least he had been. Once.
He might have been stronger but he was just as tired as she was, it seemed. He needed her cooperation to get her back on her feet. Hours ago, he could have lifted her single-handed. ‘Come on, Beth, pull yourself up,’ he said, low against her ear.
If she turned her head just a bit she could breathe in his intoxicating scent. ‘I’m sorry …’ Her vision blurred.
His strong fingers tucked around her waist, burned there.
‘Don’t be. You did well. We got the strap around her.’ His voice was tight as he steadied her back onto her feet but she let herself lean into him until the last possible second. He smelled of salt and sweat; an erotic, earthy kind of scent that elicited all kinds of tingling in her. Nothing like the over-applied, cheap colognes Damien liked to mask himself with.
She turned her face more closely into Marc and breathed in deep.
He pulled her out of the water, supported her long enough that they got up on the beach to where the supplies were. She collapsed down onto the sand, knowing she might never get back up but knowing she couldn’t keep standing.
Even for him.
‘Take
