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“Why didn’t he, then?”
I sagged back against my cushions, tiredness creeping over me. “You’ll find out soon enough. For now...let me indulge in the newness of feelings. To share the first stirrings of love from a girl who’d found everything she ever wanted in a boy. A boy who wanted nothing to do with her.”
“Oh, now we’re talking.” Margot finished her lemonade and sat forward with her chin in her hands, abandoning her writing and letting the microphone capture my tale. “Go right ahead. I’m here for all of it.”
I smiled and drifted. “It all began when my father cut Aslan’s cast off...and I forced him to go swimming.”
Chapter Thirteen
*
Aslan
*
(Moon in Welsh: Lleuad)
“HOW WERE THE CLAMS?” I ASKED, LOOKING up from the laptop where I’d been tweaking another data system to try to streamline Jack’s saved files with keywords and locations instead of time stamps and gibberish code that meant nothing to him.
The sun had been extra hot today and the ocean extra blue. My eyes ached even behind sunglasses, but at least the shade sail kept my skin from crisping like the first day.
“They were good. Samples show the water is healthy at the moment, so I’m happy,” Anna said, wringing out her hair and heading to the cage where the scuba gear was stored. Methodically stripping off her tank, belt, and wetsuit, she smiled. “How’s your wrist?”
I stuck my arm out, scowling at the slightly paler skin and the weaker-looking muscles. “Pathetic.”
She laughed as Jack clambered on board, speaking to Neri who threw her flippers past his face and jumped up behind him.
“It will take a few days to get used to the cast being off,” Jack said as he copied what Anna had done and stripped his gear, leaving him in black boardshorts. “Sorry we couldn’t take you back to the hospital. It would’ve been good for a check-up, but well, you know...circumstances aren’t exactly ideal.” He winced. “Does it feel healed at least? When I cut it off this morning, I didn’t see any deformities, and you said nothing crunches or hurts when you move...so that has to be a good sign, right?”
“It’s fine, Jack.” I smiled at the man who’d turned his garden sala into a bedroom for me. Who kept me safe and lied for me. Who gave me a second chance...all when he didn’t have to.
I rolled my healed wrist as Neri drifted past, giving me a cool smile and looking at my exposed arm. Up until this morning—when I’d complained of how itchy the cast had become and Jack had announced it’d been seven weeks and should probably come off—I’d been beholden to the temperamental nature of plaster of paris and water.
Showering with a plastic bag on my arm had become the worst part of my day.
Not being able to help clean the dishes made me feel like I took advantage.
But now...I was free.
Finally.
Free from everything trapping me since I’d been tended to at the hospital.
My stitches had dissolved a long time ago, and the wound on my head had faded into a pink scar. My cast was now in hacked-up pieces in the Taylors’ rubbish bin. And I’d discarded the moonboot after week four—even though Neri had scowled and tried to persuade me not to be an idiot.
But I’d reached my limit.
I was sick of not being able to move without a hobble and even though my ankle still ached in bed and twinged if I decided to do anything more than walk, I was happy enough that it was mending.
Seven weeks I’d lived with the Taylors.
One week in their guest room and six weeks of sleeping in my sala-bedroom in their garden, listening to the gentle lap of their pool as the underwater vacuum kept it clean, and a bone-deep longing to slip into the coolness kept me awake. I’d lost my fear of being on the ocean through forced exposure, but I had no desire to swim in it.
The Taylors’ pool, however?
I was past the point of desperation to get away from the stagnant Port Douglas heat.
A few nights last week, I couldn’t stand it anymore, so when the lights turned off in the house, I’d waded into their pool up to my waist, keeping my arms above the waterline.
