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He tied his boat to the dock, jumped up onto the worn wooden planks of the walkway and headed over to her.
She straightened her shoulders, resisting the urge to lift a hand to her hair, which was being caught and played by the ocean breeze, the only respite against the heat of the summer day.
‘Guy.’ She pasted on a neutral smile. ‘Hi. I’m glad you could make it.’
He nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. That one syllable was maddeningly vague. Yes, he was glad he was here too? Yes, he knew she was glad he was here? She was starting to see that Guy Williams was pretty opaque, impossible to read, even without her amnesia in the mix making her second-guess every man that she met, looking for clues to a shared past.
‘Good,’ Meena said, attempting to be equally enigmatic. ‘Let me just grab my gear and we can head off.’ She started lugging air tanks and the bags containing her dive gear from the small cabin, but froze at the feel of Guy’s hand on her shoulder.
It shouldn’t do that to her, she reasoned. It shouldn’t make her stop like that, as if the rest of the world had ceased to matter and there was just him, her and touch. She should be able to breathe normally, even when he was standing so close. Her skin should feel like just skin, rather than a tissue-thin, failing barrier between her and pure sensation, fireworks, lightning strikes and every cliché she could think of, all from the innocent touch of a hand on a shoulder. She was starting to see, being around Guy, how she must have got it so wrong last time. How easily her body could be led astray by a man she desired, whoever that man in her past had been. How he had made her forget what was important to her.
Well, this time, she was prepared. She knew the consequences of oohing and aahing over those fireworks. Of looking to find where those sensations led. She wasn’t going to make the mistake with Guy that she had made in the past. He was leaving the island in two weeks anyway. As if she needed another reason why she couldn’t act on her feelings.
At least she didn’t have to try to convince herself that following these feelings she had for Guy would be an equally colossal mistake. She was well aware of the fact. Every rational, sensible part of her brain—at least, all of those that she could readily access—was signalling to her on high alert that he was dangerous. Dangerous to the status quo. To her way of moving through the world, which was largely based on avoiding entanglements with the opposite sex.
‘You can leave it, if you want,’ Guy said. ‘I have some on the yacht you can borrow.’
If she hadn’t already seen his snorkelling equipment, she might have hesitated. But she knew that his scuba gear would be top of the range too. If you were stocking a luxury yacht for a dive, you were hardly going to cut corners. And if it would save her having to lift and carry her air tanks, she would say yes to anything. She threw her dive watch, underwater camera and dive plan into her backpack, though—those were non-negotiable—and accepted Guy’s offer.
‘Okay, sure, thanks,’ she said, locking the strong box and stepping up on to the walkway.
‘So what’s the plan?’ Guy asked as they jumped down onto his speedboat and left the sleepy Saturday afternoon capital behind them.
‘Deeper water,’ Meena said with a smile. ‘There’s a few reefs on the ocean side of the island that have coped better than most over the last few years. We collected coral fragments from them after a storm and grew them out in the lab. Then we transplanted them on to the reefs that were suffering the worst from bleaching. We’re checking them both out today.’
‘Does it harm the healthy reef, taking the fragments?’ Guy asked.
Meena pulled a face. ‘It’s not a perfect solution, because those fragments would normally fall and grow on the reefs nearby. But I don’t want to go breaking handfuls of coral off a healthy reef. So...it’s the best we have. It’s a risk. And if it doesn’t take on the other reef—it’s heartbreaking,’ she admitted.
A huge part of her job was weighing up benefits and risks like this, and it felt as though the stakes couldn’t be higher. And so much of the time it didn’t work. The damage that had been done was irreversible.
‘But sometimes, like the reef we’re going to see today, the transplant takes, the coral grows, the fish and all the other marine life come back and it’s...’ She smiled and gestured with her hands as she searched for the right word. ‘It’s...glorieux,’ she said at last. It’s glorious.
* * *
She was glorious, Guy thought as the gentle breeze off the water teased her hair into soft tangles and her passion for the reef brought a glow to her face that he recognised from a younger Meena. She invested so much in these reefs. It was obvious from the look on her face when she spoke about them how personally she took each success and failure.
Had that been there before? he asked himself, trying to remember. Back then, he was pretty sure that he’d been only interested in her passion for him. That wasn’t fair, he corrected himself. It hadn’t just been about lust, or the thrill of the chase. It hadn’t been a physical thing. Or just a physical thing. Though, while they were talking about glorious...
The connection between them had gone deeper than that. They’d cared for one another. Cared for one another’s passions as well. It seemed important to him now that he was the only keeper of those memories that he got them right.
He’d come here wanting to forget, to pour concrete over his memories. To stop them seeping into his consciousness, making it impossible to move on. But once he’d found out about her amnesia that hadn’t seemed fair any more. He couldn’t tell her about what had happened between them that summer. Not without hurting her. But if he wiped those memories from his own mind too then they were truly gone. He was the backup copy. And Meena had lost so much already that he didn’t want to take that from her as well.
After they had swum together alone the other day, he had known that spending more time together—just the two of them—was a bad idea, but here they were. It would be too easy to slip back into old ways of t
hinking. Old ways of feeling. He had to remember that things were different now. That he was different now. That the things that he’d had to offer her back then were no longer his to give. He had wanted to love her. To protect her. To be her partner. But he’d failed her back then, and failed the woman he had replaced her with, and he knew that it would happen again. And he wouldn’t hurt her like that again. She had spent seven years moving on from what they had shared, and lost, and he wouldn’t drag her back.
‘What do you hope to see?’ he asked, keeping their focus on the dive.
‘I want to check the transplant sites first; make sure that the new coral is still growing well. We used a couple of different attachment methods, so it’ll be interesting to see whether there’s any difference in how they are faring. I’ll need to survey the marine life, as well, to see if there are any new arrivals since I checked it last month.’
He nodded; that all seemed reasonable. ‘I’ll show you to where you can get changed,’ Guy said as they both looked up to the full height of the yacht. The little speedboat had brought them to the lower deck and the white of the cabin towered, blindingly bright, above them.
He could let a steward show her to the guest cabin that he’d put aside for her use. That would be the sensible thing to do. But it was inhospitable, he justified to himself. She was his guest on the yacht, so it was his responsibility as host to make sure she was comfortable.
That was a lie. He wanted to spend time with her. He was excited by her presence in his life and he wanted to make the most of it. There was no point denying the way that he was drawn to her. But that didn’t mean that he was going to be stupid about it. He knew that he was bad news for her. Knew that he was walking on glass, trying to keep their shared history from her even if he genuinely believed that knowing the truth could only hurt her.
As they climbed the steps to the upper deck of the yacht, he wondered what she would make of it. The Meena that he had known so many years ago wouldn’t have been impressed by it. She loved the boat that she had rescued from a junk yard before university and had lovingly restored. He had felt a pang in his gut when he had seen it earlier, remembering all the times they had taken that boat out to Le Bijou. It had been their escape, somewhere they could relax without the fear of being spotted by someone from the resort, without risking Meena’s job.
