Cara Colter - First Love, Second Chance

‘Sorry?’

She cleared her thick throat. ‘You asked earlier which half of my list you were in. I just wanted you to know you were in the top half.’ She clenched her hands. ‘High in the top half.’

His next words were cautious. Almost unwillingly voiced. ‘You seriously have a list?’

She nodded.

His brows dropped. ‘Why?’

Panic surged through her. What a stupid question not to have anticipated. She swallowed hard. ‘Self improvement.’

His frown looked like doubt. But he let it pass. ‘How high was I?’

Somewhere off in the dunes, a bird of prey shrieked out across the night. Her voice, when it came, was hushed. Quiet enough that he’d have to hear her heart pounding. ‘The top. Number one.’

It took a lot to shock Marc Duncannon. But she managed to pull it off. He had a few goes at answering before coherent words came out of his gaping mouth. ‘I’m the first person you’ve come to find?’

Shaking her head made thick cords of salty dark hair, still a tiny bit damp from her dunking earlier, swing around her face. It had to suffice as a screen. ‘Actually, you’re the last.’

‘But did you just say—’

‘Top of my list, yes, but the hardest. I left you till last.’

God. Would he realise what that meant? It was screamingly obvious, surely? The silence was almost material. Even the whale seemed to hold her breath. Emotion surged through his eyes like the waves battering them both. Hope, hurt, anger … Then, finally, nothing. A vacant, careful void.

‘You’ve held onto those memories all this time?’

Her stomach sank. ‘Haven’t you?’

He looked away and when his eyes returned to hers they were kindly. Too kindly. ‘No.’

No? Beth blinked.

‘Give yourself a break, Beth. We were kids.’

His unconcerned words struck like a sea snake. Bad enough to have sabotaged for nothing the only relationship of her life that meant something to her. Now she’d wasted years of angst, endured a mountain of guilt. and it had barely registered on his emotional radar.

‘Losing our friendship meant nothing?’

He sighed. ‘What do you want me to say, Beth? It cut deep at the time but everything worked out. Life goes on.’

Mortification streaked through her. She stared at his carefully neutral face. Maybe Janice had been right? Cut free of her, Marc had gone on to make a success of his life—not what he’d always told her he would do but then how many of her school mates had ever actually grown up to do what they imagined they’d do for the rest of their lives? She certainly hadn’t. While she was literally drowning in her regrets, Marc had rebounded and done a fine job of getting by without her.

Everything she’d been through. For nothing?

‘Beth?’

She shot her hand up and turned away from his indifference. She tossed her tattered whale-washer ashore and turned to wade out into the deep, dark water. The only place she could go. To let her heart weep in private. She pushed her legs angrily through the water for a few steps and let the angry ache fill her focus.

‘Beth!’

She wanted to keep walking, to show him he meant as little to her as, apparently, she did to him. But she just wasn’t that good a liar. She turned when the water was thigh high.

‘Not in the water, ‘ he urged. ‘Not at night. Go up on the beach.’

Screw you. ‘Why not?’

‘Sharks will be drawn by the dead calf. They’re more active at night. We shouldn’t go in deeper than our knees.’

She practically flew back to the shallows. Survival before dignity. Marc didn’t say anything further. It took her several minutes walking down the beach to reach a place she felt was sufficiently dark and safe. Safe from the dune snakes. Safe from the whale-eating sharks. Safe from Marc Duncannon and his awful neutrality.

She sank down onto the sand and let the tremors come.

Her life had changed direction that day behind the library and it had changed again eight years later and this man was central to both. A man who was so entirely unaffected by what had happened to them back at school.

Deep breathing helped. Plunging her bare toes into sand that was still warm from the day helped. Closing her eyes and imagining she was anywhere else but here helped.

Whatever it took to fool her body into thinking it wasn’t facing an unbearable amount of pressure. Something she wasn’t really used to having to face. As a rule, a drunk body didn’t care what was going on around it. And she’d been drunk for the better part of eight years. Even when she wasn’t.

In the early months of her marriage, she’d walked a careful line with Damien and his rapidly developing fondness for the bottle, keeping him just shy of the point where he liked to express his drunken feelings with his fists. But that line quickly got too hard to predict and so it was just easier to give in. To tumble behind him into the abyss where he was happiest and she was safest. The help she might have had evaporated. Friends. Her parents. They’d all stopped trying after her repeated assurances she was fine.

Why wouldn’t they? She was Beth. Beth didn’t make mistakes. But Beth—as it turned out—was a gifted and convincing liar.

By the time they’d realised she wasn’t fine, she was well and truly sunk. After a while, she didn’t even hate it. The abyss was a pleasantly blur-edged place to lose your youth. And she’d learned how possible it was to function in normal society while artificially numb.

And then one day she’d woken up and looked around at the empty half of her bed, the total strangers dossed down in her living room and she’d seen, with awful clarity, the faces of all the normal people she’d thought she was cleverly keeping her drunkenness from. Their averted eyes. Worse—their pity.

For no real reason, she’d thought about Marc that morning. About the boy who’d had such faith in her. The boy she’d lived her life for as a teen. The boy she’d finally forced from her dreams—her marriage—after his memory had steadfastly refused to leave. And she’d realised she hadn’t thought about him in years.

She’d sat crying in the shower long after the hot water ran icy cold.

Those convulsive shivers had been nothing on what was to come. The spasmodic wretchedness of weaning herself off the liquor, alone in her father’s old warehouse, surrounded by the tormented images she’d painted in her darkest days. The destructive try-and-fail spiral that had made her feel increasingly bad about herself. Increasingly desperate for the unconditional acceptance a bottle offered. The only thing that had kept her going was painting.

Then one night she’d stumbled—drunk, to her eternal shame—into an AA meeting and found a room full of survivors who’d given her compassion and empathy and a path out of the abyss, not judgement.

Those strangers had saved her life.

Long before any make-good list, she held onto Marc’s name as a ward against ever again forgetting someone who had represented such goodness in her life. She’d scrawled his name down on a scrap of paper that day she’d tumbled from the shower and she’d carried it in her wallet ever since, in lieu of the photos she’d thrown out years before in a fit of drunken heartbreak because looking at him had hurt too much.

She’d known that facing him today wouldn’t be easy. But it had never—ever—occurred to her that he simply wouldn’t care any more. If he ever actually had.

‘Beth? Are you done?’ His voice called her back from the darkness, just as it had two years ago that morning in the shower. ‘I need you.’

There was urgency in his voice she couldn’t ignore. And, in the face of what the whale needed, her decade-old issues could wait a few hours more. She quickly did what she’d come to do and then staggered, too sore and tired to run, back down the beach towards him.