Hot.
Oh God, so hot.
She started to lift her head from where one cheek rested on the pillow of her folded arms…and pain rippled across the back of her body. Every square inch of her skin felt like it was on fire, every pore and follicle screaming.
She let her head fall again, wincing as the tender skin on the side of her neck flexed with the small motion. Oh, no. Lulled by the warmth of the sun in her soft, sandy hideaway, and probably by jet lag too, she’d fallen asleep. And slept, and slept, as the ultraviolet, ultra-violent rays baked her to a scarlet crisp.
With a mighty effort, she pushed herself up off her stomach and turned to sit upright. The foamy breakers and blue horizon tipped out of alignment, and her head spun. For one literally sickening moment, she was sure she’d throw up, but she rested her head on her knees until the feeling passed.
Home. She needed to get back to the house, out of the sun, and into a cold shower, followed by a vat of after-sun lotion.
She gritted her teeth and winced as she slowly, carefully got to her feet. From there, the distance she had to bend to pick up her things seemed too great to contemplate. The backs of her legs would surely split right open if she bent down that far. Somehow though, moving in miniscule increments, she gathered up her towel and beach bag. Inside it, under her cover-up, was the sunscreen lotion that she’d fully intended to apply once she got to the beach. She wasn’t stupid, and she wasn’t going to not sunscreen just to defy Liam. But the encounter with him, along with her memories of this beach, had been a distraction.
And now she was paying the price. Wouldn’t he love that, after his lecture? Well, he didn’t need to know. She gave up on the idea of struggling into the cover-up, and started cautiously back down the beach. There was no way to avoid going past the front of his house, but she’d sneak down the little alley, then hightail it to the safety of number ten. Assuming ‘hightail’ was a speed she could achieve in this state.
She made it to the path, shuffling like an old woman. The sun on her head and her frazzled skin was like a blowtorch. Yes, she wished she had a hat. But she kept on, grim determination compelling one foot in front of the other…until, damn it, the next foot wouldn’t go quite where she was aiming it…and wait, now her legs weren’t working right either…and then the world skewed, and her knees buckled…and there was nothingness.
Liam looked at his watch again, even as he willed himself not to. He didn’t care, of course. But…how long had it been? Maybe three hours? He rattled the space bar with his thumbs. From the other side of the table, where he’d switched to, he had a view out the kitchen window to the little gate. He hadn’t seen her go past—but then he hadn’t been looking every second. Nope, not every second. Only every other second. He sighed. She’d probably gone farther along the beach and come back to Fife Street via the surf club, or maybe in the opposite direction, through the bush walk down by Mount Clarion. She knew that spot well enough.
He pushed the thought aside, and slapped the laptop closed. He wasn’t achieving anything here—might as well get some fresh air.
Two doses of fresh air in one day? Revolutionary. Most of the Sweet Breeze Bay air he’d had since he came back was night air, shared only with the occasional mosquito. So far, he’d successfully avoided seeing anyone. He waited until night fell to go to the twenty-four hour supermarket on the Other Side, only buying enough to fit in the saddlebags of his dad’s motorbike, and parking it back in the garage when he got home. The people he knew before—which included everyone in town, pretty much—didn’t seem to have realized he was here. Or if they had, they’d let him be. It couldn’t last, he supposed. But while it did, it was just simpler.
Although…he kept thinking about Connor and Dane. It had always been simple with those guys. Messing around, up to nothing half the time, but cracking each other up non-stop. God, they had so much to laugh about in those days. Gangly, wild-haired philosopher Connor, and sporty, outdoorsy Dane. On the surface, the three of them should’ve had nothing in common. Liam was a computer geek even then, and a music aficionado (like Ethan), boring the other two to death with facts about this band and that label. He’d got over his teenage obsessiveness about it all, but he still loved how the patterns in music were somehow reflected in coding, an unexpected symmetry between his two loves.
Yeah, he was still a geek.
He knew that Connor and Dane had both left Sweet Breeze Bay to go to university—engineering for Connor, at the other end of the country, and sport and exercise science for Dane, in Melbourne. He didn’t know if they’d come back when they finished...but then, why would you? There was nothing here.
An accusing voice barged into his head: Why are you here, then?
He shoved it away and stepped out through the folding glass doors onto the deck. The chirping of a hundred thousand cicadas merged into a roar in the late afternoon sun, and the salt-tang in the air was the essence of his childhood. Suddenly he remembered playing with Jacinda when they were kids, one summer when she came to visit just with her mom. He didn’t think he’d ever met her dad, now that he thought of it. That must have been the summer he turned nine, because his ‘big’ bike was brand new, and his mother had lent Jacinda his old one. The gap in the hedge they used to squeeze through to visit each other had grown over long ago, but he remembered how they’d found a space inside big enough to make a hut. On hot afternoons they whispered jokes to each other in the shady hideout, hung shells on the branches and threaded leaves onto twigs, and ate their way through his mom’s homemade chocolate chip cookies.
Ethan was a whole year older than him, too cool to play with someone who was still only eight. And a girl.
That had sure changed.
He turned away from the hedge and the past, and went to look over the gate, trying to appear casual. But—shit. There she was. In a flash he swung the gate open and was in the alley, gathering up her crumpled form. Her crumpled, bikini-clad form, in the top that had come undone yesterday. He ignored the part of his brain that zeroed in on that, and concentrated on getting her to safety. As he maneuvered back through the gate, trying not to bang her head on the gatepost or let her beach bag get caught on the latch, his mind was tossing up what to do. Where should he take her? He could hardly squash her through the non-existent gap in the hedge, and he didn’t want to carry her along the street like this. It would have to be his house.
He carried her inside, set her down gently on the big sofa, and stepped back as she started to come to. She was a mess. One side of her face was scarlet, and although her front was a regular color, he could see that the entire back of her body was sunburned. Well, he’d tried to tell her. But he winced in sympathy as she rolled to her side, revealing the angry redness. That had to really, really hurt.
She looked up at him then, confusion and pain in her blue eyes. “Liam? What happened?”
“You must have passed out. In the alley.”
She groaned. “Oh yeah.” Then she sucked in her breath. “Oh God, it hurts. Everything. And my head…” She squeezed her eyes closed, and pressed a hand to her forehead.
“You probably have sun stroke.”
“Do you…” Then she stopped, her face suddenly taking on an urgent expression. “Oh no.” She struggled to her feet, her hand over her mouth, and swayed precariously. “Bathroom...”
He nodded, and helped her to the guest bathroom in the hallway. Thankfully, she shooed him away and slammed the door, leaving him standing on the other side. He wasn’t enough of a gentleman to want to help with that, unless he had to. But he hovered around, trying not to listen. After a few minutes, he called out, “Are you okay?”
“Ungh.”
Was that a yes or a no? He’d assume yes. “Okay, then.” He retreated to the safety of the living room.
Ten minutes later, she emerged, gingerly hanging onto the door frame. “I’m really sorry,” she whispered. “I’ll go now. Did you bring my…?” She gestured to her bikini, and he looked, then tore his eyes away.
“Oh, right. Yeah, I got it.”
“Thanks.”
He could feel the heat in her skin as he helped get the cover-up over her head. When his fingers brushed the back of her arm, she flinched away. “Ow!”
“Sorry,” he said.
There was some half-hearted debate about whether he should walk her back to Nana Mac’s place, which was settled by her still-wobbly knees as she tried to leave without him. So he walked with her down his own path, along to number ten, and up to the front door. She rummaged in the beach bag and found the key, and got the door open.
“Thank you.” She took one step inside.
“You’re welcome.” He cleared his throat. “We should really talk about—”
She stepped right in, her hand over her mouth again. “Sorry, I—”
And the door shut.
He was left standing on the porch, uncomfortably exposed in the bright sunshine after his weeks of being a recluse inside number twelve. He turned and headed for home, only encountering a flock of boys on skateboards on the way back. They barely gave him a glance as they passed, joking and hassling each other as they headed off on some mission. The noise they made seemed to hang in the air after they’d gone.
Back inside, with the doors closed again against the heat and the cicadas, the quiet felt…wrong. He remembered how the house used to resonate with exactly that kind of boy noise, day in and day out, overlaid with music from the stereo or their guitars. Their amps must have been the menace of the neighborhood, but he didn’t recall anyone ever complaining, not even Nana Mac right next door, or Mrs. Marsh over the road.
He looked at Ethan’s electric acoustic guitar, resting on its stand in the corner. For a moment his fingers tingled, tempted by the elegant instrument…but it was Ethan’s, always would be. Unlike the girl next door.
He took another cold beer from the fridge, sat back at the table, and opened the laptop. A hefty dose of PHP and CDATA and WYSIWYG should erase the image of her in that bikini, the memory of how she felt in his arms, skin hot, sand in her hair, a grown woman, so different from that teenage summer…and yet so familiar.
The nagging suspicion he’d avoided for years rose again, but this time, he was listening. He looked back to the guitar.
WYSIWYG. What you see is what you get.
Not always.
He entered a name into Google, and hit enter.