Luke liked the playful manner in which Amelia threw down the blanket on a secluded part of beach near some boulders and threw off her shirt and shorts, revealing her bathing suit. She took the fastener from her ponytail and took off running down the beach. Her beautiful dark hair rippled in the wind like ocean waves, soft, revealing a blue black sheen beneath the sun. He shucked down to his suit.
She ran into the ocean, and he followed. He stopped at the edge, aware of the sand washing out from under his toes and the water rising and falling over his feet. Despite a twinge of uneasiness, he walked on in. When he neared her, she scooped up water and threw it into his face. She swam farther out. She could duck beneath a wave and come up still standing. He was hit with each wave and came up trying to swim.
“You fight the water,” she said. “This is the way.” She showed him how to be one with the ocean waves, not fight them but become a part of them, a part of nature, moving with the rhythm of ocean music. She was like music.
They swam far out, and Luke realized he had not swum since he’d almost drowned while trying to reach a foreign beach. He lay on his back and let the ocean rock him. Had she not said they mustn’t go too far, he might have let the ocean take him where it would.
They swam back to shore, and she picked up a shell, held it to her ear and then to his. “This is what children do,” she said.
His hand covered hers at his ear. Her eyes held a question. Why? Was it like a child wanting to know if he heard the ocean in the shell? He heard it, along with a warning voice, a cautious voice, a voice of reality saying she was showing him a child’s game—this widow of his younger brother.
The swell of the waves seemed to be in his senses, and he forced the thought that a child would be waiting for his response. Do you like it? Are you intrigued? How should he answer the unasked questions?
He wanted to take something back to his parents. Would they want a shell? Could he take a shell and say, This is from the beach where Joe ran and played in the ocean and had a girl, and they were happy and in love?
“May I keep it?” he said. He wasn’t thinking of his parents but himself. He would like to remember this day. It had felt like two people just enjoying the sun, the sand, the water, and … each other.
“Sure,” she said, and he felt her hand move beneath his. She laid the shell in his open palm. He looked at the intricate markings and the color. The sound of the ocean was no longer in his ear, but the sounds of the entire ocean seemed to fill his being.
With a shell in his pocket, a camera in his hand, and Amelia by his side, he delighted in the afternoon of visiting Kona and the coffee plantation, seeing outrigger canoes gliding along the bays, and watching natives fish with spears on the coral reefs while Amelia told tales of the past, such as the king flinging a lock of hair into a stream of lava to appease the goddess of volcanoes.
He experienced the mixture of past and present and a strange kind of calm belonging to the magical place. He easily felt at one with others walking and running along the beach and hearing the laughter of children as they played on the sand and frolicked in the water.
He snapped pictures, careful to avoid Amelia. Finally he asked, “Could I have you in some pictures? Just for me? No one else would ever see them. I promise.”
To his surprise, she consented. Perhaps she, as he often did, thought only of the fun time they were having together, without the intrusion of past memories. Or perhaps she’d begun to trust that he wouldn’t mention her to his parents without her permission.
She led him to a luau taking place on green grass beneath swaying palms, with a view of the ocean.
“Are we crashing a party?”
“Sure.” Then she grinned. “Kidding. A restaurant provides this for tourists or locals, for a small fee.”
Pigs were roasting. Yellow tablecloths covered long tables, their edges dancing in the breeze. Pineapples and coconuts formed the centerpieces. Amelia and Luke stood in line and filled their plates from the buffet.
Before long, a man blew into a conch shell and announced entertainment while pretty girls in colorful dresses placed leis over each of their heads. A male quartet sang Hawaiian songs, while others strummed their ukuleles during the spectacular sunset.
“Now the hula,” Amelia said, leaning toward Luke. She kept smiling at him as he alternately watched and glanced at her. Soon he knew why. The male and female hula dancers came around and invited everyone to dance, but they took the arms of him and Amelia and led them up front.
As the sky darkened, his spirits lightened. Luke followed instructions but saw that Amelia was as adept with the hula as she had been in the ocean. He felt it wasn’t dancing but a gentle sway of the arms and body in rhythm with the ocean waves and the palm branches in the trade winds. Hawaiian air was flowers and music, and he felt lost in its spell.
Amelia’s eyes were soft. Her face held an ethereal expression as if only this moment mattered. Was it at a luau that she had fallen in love with Joe?
“Enough for me,” he said, feeling suddenly in Joe’s shadow. “You keep on. I’ll take pictures.”
After he snapped a few, she came to sit beside him. Darkness fell, and they were entertained by a fire-sword dancer, athletic yet graceful as the fire made circles in the star-spangled night.
She sang some Hawaiian songs on the way back. He sang a few American ones she didn’t know, and they sang together “I Got the Sun in the Morning and the Moon at Night.”
They playfully challenged each other as they took parts in “Anything You Can Do.” In the middle of “Zip-A-Dee-Do-Dah,” Amelia stopped singing. “Look, Matilda’s lights are still on. Should we stop and see her?”
“I’d love to,” Luke said and pulled into the drive and parked in the clearing beneath the trees. He took his camera inside.
Matilda held open the screen door and welcomed them warmly. Soon they were sitting on the lanai, happily talking about the day they had spent together.
“Could I get a picture of you to take back to my parents?” he asked Matilda.
“Oh yes,” she said. “If you like. I wish I could meet them. Here, take one of me and Amelia. I’d love to have that for my photo album.”
“Sure,” he said and gave a look at Amelia as if to say he’d keep his promise. She smiled. He snapped the pictures.
“Let me take one of you two,” Matilda said and added, “For my album.”
With the night as a background, they stood at the screened wall. Luke’s arm went naturally around Amelia, and he felt her ribs move with her breathing as his hand touched her waist. But to move it away would seem awkward.
“All right,” Matilda said, lowering the camera. “You two think about how Luke looked doing the hula.” She lifted the camera as they both laughed, and the bulb flashed.
“I really need to go,” Amelia said. “It’s late.”
Matilda bade them good night, and they walked out into the night. He tucked the camera into the deep pocket of the shorts. “I’ll walk across to the Matti-Rose,” he said.
Standing in the shadows beneath the trees, Luke again thanked her for the day. “It was wonderful. I’ll never forget it,” he said.
“It was for me, too,” she said. “But—”
Before she could say more, the hand that had touched her waist came up to her lovely face, felt her smooth cheek, and her lips parted slightly with her soft intake of breath. Her shoulders rose slightly, as if she needed more breath. He did. No thought entered his mind at the moment but the beautiful girl standing so close, the feel of her skin, the soft parted lips, the questioning eyes that gazed deep into his.
His errant fingers moved to her chin and tilted it as he bent to touch her lips with his. So soft, so sweet, and then he felt hers responding; he drew her close, felt the wild beat of his heart and the touch of her hand on his neck.
For a moment he yielded to the feel of this Jewel in the Sea being in his arms and his lips tasting paradise.
She was pushing him away, her hands on his chest and her head moving from side to side as she looked at the ground.
“I didn’t mean … I’m—”
“No,” she said. “Don’t apologize. It wasn’t just you.” She backed closer to her car and put her hand on the handle. “I can’t see you anymore,” she said.
“Please.” He held out his hand. “Forgive me. I promise it won’t happen again. I’m sorry if I’ve offended you.”
“No,” she said. “It’s not the kiss. I kissed you, too. If you apologize for that, then I have to apologize, too. I … wanted you to.” Her shoulders rose again, and she drew a deep breath. “But I’ve shown you where Joe and I went, what we did. There is no more.” He saw a tear glisten on her cheek and wanted to wipe it away, kiss it away.
He looked up toward the tree limbs that shadowed them. He saw her move and watched her turn the handle of the car door. Before he could find the words, she was in the driver’s seat and had closed the door.
He leaned down to the open window as she started the engine. “One question,” he said.
She looked at him, and he saw the sorrow in her eyes.
He heard the huskiness in his voice. “Was it the memory of my brother you were kissing?”
Her eyes closed, then they opened, and she stared straight ahead as she gripped the wheel. She nodded and whispered, “Yes.”
Luke felt like a fool and stepped back. There he was feeling … something … for Amelia, only to find Joe had already been there, done that. He couldn’t blame Joe. Amelia was a beautiful, desirable woman. And fun. But the fun day had been the memory of Joe and not because of Luke Thurstan.
He stood back and stared at the car as it backed into the street. Soon the red taillights disappeared.
The warmth of the day, the heat of the kiss disappeared, too, as if someone had dumped a pail of ice water over his head.