My feet pound the rainforest track. I focus on the ground, scanning for the roots that jut from the hard-packed soil around the next bend. Ferns reach out, brush my arms as I pass. Parrots flit through the trees ahead, flashes of yellow and blue, shattering the quiet with their squawking. I smell damp leaves, rain-sodden earth. A hint of salt from the sea beyond the fig trees and palms. The morning sunlight is muted in here, the forest full of shadows.
I’m running hard, arms pumping, legs aching. Twisting and turning along a track I know like the back of my hand. Sweat trickles down my face and neck, cool against hot skin. My t-shirt clings to my back, my heart thunders in my chest.
And still every jolt brings a new memory, each undercutting the other. Burrowing into me.
Jude walking away from the Sanctuary. From me.
Rafa goading, humiliating me. Both of us lying bleeding in broken glass in the Sanctuary piazza.
Memories from the Sanctuary. Memories from the past week. Real memories, fake memories. All pieces that belong to different puzzles. There’s no way they can all fit together.
I reach a fork in the track and veer towards the beach out of habit. Patches of blue appear between the trees. The breeze picks up, carrying sounds of seagulls and pounding surf. I sprint right to the edge of the rainforest and then skid to a stop and collapse under a clump of pandanus palms, hands on knees, chest heaving. The sand blurs and I taste salt—sweat mixed with tears. It’s a while before I can draw enough air to fill my lungs. Finally, I slump back in the sand. I draw my knees to my chest and stare out at the horizon, try to tell where the sea ends and the cloudless sky begins.
I feel exposed. Like I’ve been walking around naked and I’ve only just noticed.
Movement catches my attention closer to shore: three dolphins leaping out of a wave. Synchronised, playful. Water trailing from tailfins. I’d been in Pan Beach for two days the first time I saw a dolphin launch itself out of a breaking wave. It was one of the most amazing things I’d ever seen: still is.
And it hits me, hard and fierce: I love this place.
Further along, the water is crowded with surfers. A figure jogs down from the dunes, board tucked under his arm. Dark hair curling to his shoulders. Everything about him so familiar it makes my chest ache. He looks in my direction, shields his eyes. Sees me. I have no idea where he got the board, but it’s no surprise that he did. When I need to think, I run towards water; when Jude needs to think, he needs to be in it or on it. Of course this is where we’d both come.
More memories crash in, these ones from the past two days: Jude on the dock in Hobart. Me, falling to my knees, clinging to him, sobbing. Jude defending me on the roadside near Pan Beach, putting Mya in her place. Standing beside me to stare down the Outcasts and the Five at the Sanctuary. Back to back with me last night, fighting Gatekeepers, the commissary on fire behind us.
I know I should talk to him. I need to talk to him. But first I have to work out where everything fits. What’s real and what’s not, what feels real—and if there’s a difference.
Jude waits to see if I’m going to at least acknowledge him but I take too long. He bends down, secures his ankle strap. Then he turns to the sea, spends a good minute watching the sets roll in and break. He must feel my eyes on him, but he doesn’t glance my way again as he jogs into the water. He jumps on his board, starts to paddle out.
Yesterday—or was it earlier today? I’ve lost track of time—he told me he hadn’t surfed for a year. And as I watch him dive under a wave and come up the other side, I see how much he’s missed it. He might have spent almost a year on a yacht battling the freezing ocean south of Tasmania, but he dreamed of a sun-kissed sea every day. I know this without him telling me. I knew it even when my memories of him were a lie. So much of him is the same as it’s always been: attitude, sense of humour, obsessions. Exactly the same. The bits that aren’t are the ones I’m wrestling with—and his role in shaping the lie I’ve been living for the past year.
Out on the water, Jude sits on his board and waits. The surf is decent, but it’s breaking hard. The swell rises, lifts him. He lets the wave go. Two younger guys further along the alley chase it, miss it. Jude lets another wave pass. When the next swell rolls in, he waits until the last second and then flattens himself on his board and paddles hard. And then he’s up, carving the face of the wave. Balanced, focused, as if doing this only yesterday. I don’t have to see his face to know he’s lost in the moment. He twists sharply to avoid a kid on a board too big for him. The wave peters out well before shore and Jude dives in. He surfaces near a girl in a black vest and hipster bikini—nobody I know. He says something, she laughs, and then they grab their boards and head back out.
Jude catches three more waves before I notice another figure on the beach, standing at the base of the boardwalk steps.
Rafa.
My heart gives a startled thump. His hood is up so I can’t see his face, but even from here I recognise the tension in his shoulders. Images from the past week rise up, smudge all my edges.
Rafa turning up in Pan Beach. Telling me who I was. Lying to me about our history.
Rafa putting himself between me and the Outcasts in Dubai.
Kissing me on the beach. This beach.
Rafa caked in blood in the iron room, his life leaching out of him. Willing to die to keep me safe.
Me wrapped around him naked, wanting him more than air…
Jude rides a wave all the way in to shore, milking it for all it’s worth until he has to jump off in the wash. He scoops up the board and walks to Rafa, hair dripping down his back.
Rafa starts talking before Jude reaches him. Jude’s hand comes up, as if Rafa needs calming. There’s gesturing. It’s not angry—more…emphatic. Rafa flicks his hood down, pushes up his sleeves. He’s frustrated. I could get up and go over there, find out what’s going on between them. I don’t. I’m not together enough for one of them, let alone both. They talk, heated, for a few more minutes. They’re guarded. I’ve never seen them like this, not with each other.
And then Jude gestures in my direction.
My breath catches. Rafa turns, sees me sitting in the shade twenty metres away. He knows. Jude’s just told him. I can tell from the way he’s standing, shoulders slightly hunched, hands jammed deep in the pockets of his cargoes. Neither of us acknowledges the other. We stare, twenty metres of sand and a hundred and thirty-nine years between us. A line of sweat snakes down my spine. I can’t push back the memories clawing at me, but I can’t ignore everything I’ve felt for him this past week either. A rush of sensations: the feel of his body pressed against mine, the taste of his skin. Heat flares. Confusion. Shame. The pang that hits is painful, knots my insides.
Rafa watches me, motionless, and before I can untangle my thoughts he turns and walks back to the boardwalk. Away from Jude.
Away from me.