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She dropped the shirt and wadded in. The sun through the trees striped her bare skin like a tiger, but she had every intention of turning mermaid, and once she did, she’d be out of reach.
“Darcy, I’m not comfortable with you going in there.” He went to the edge and his boots sank in the thick, damp creek sand.
She was thigh deep. “I can see that. I thought spiders could swim?”
“Some, not this spider, not here.”
“How deep does it get?”
“It’s very shallow from my new kitchen.”
She was waist deep, her back to him. “Can I stand further out?”
“I don’t know, please come back.”
She gave a little cry, “Something touched my leg!” He stepped forward, water inside his boots.
She was laughing. Facing him now, water to her armpits. “What’s down there?”
That was it, he tossed his hat behind him and he walked in. He’d drag her out by her hair if he had to.
“You could’ve undressed,” she said, moving into deeper water.
He was on her in a few lurching strides, his clothes heavy, his boots like twin dredges sucking into the sand, his jeans tugged down low on his hips, his t-shirt ballooning then plastering to him. At the deepest centre he was still standing easily. Why couldn’t Norman stand? Why didn’t he stumble out of here the same way he stumbled in?
Darcy came into his arms with no resistance, wrapping her legs around his waist, her arms around his neck, and he breathed again. She wasn’t going to get dragged under and drowned and neither was he.
She stroked his face. “Norman had a choice, Will. To live like a responsible adult, not to be a legless drunk. Not to beat two defenceless kids who were dependent on him. You were young, terrorised, beaten. You did what you had to do.”
Will’s heart was really hammering hard, almost painfully in his chest, pumping out ridiculous, irrational suspicions about this creek and its fake and man-made monsters. He had to get past this. Get past the horror of seeing Norman’s waterlogged face, his staring eyes. The memory of how long it took to dig what they judged was a deep enough hole, lug him there and tumble him into it. How much quicker it was to cover him with earth and know they were finally safe. How they’d slept, sleeping bags set close together, until the pain in Will’s side woke him and he knew he needed help.
“Will, let it go. It happened. It was a terrible thing. But you and Pete survived, and it’s over. It has no hold on you, not then, not now.”
She pressed her lips to his. “Will?” He was seeing Pete’s face, the shock, the fear, but relief too. Pete who’d kicked and kicked Norman’s body, screaming himself hoarse as much to make sure his father wasn’t getting up again as to express his rage.
“Will. It’s over. I’m here now. Be with me.”
She was tugging at his shirt, trying to peel it off him, she unzipped his jeans. She wasn’t going to get them off over his boots. “What are you doing?”
“This is a beautiful place; the place where you were reborn. I want to make a new memory here with you—a beautiful one.”
She was extraordinary. He’d known it the moment he walked into that room in Pudong and she’d eyed him off, taking his measure. He wanted this new memory with her for now and to store up with all the others for when they couldn’t be together.
He carried her back into shallower water and put her down. He tore his shirt struggling to get it off. He hopped around like an idiot working on his boots, his cast getting soggy, ending up completely submerged with her laughter and the outraged squawks of birds for guidance to the surface. She helped him with his jeans and that was surprisingly difficult, like wrestling, like struggling to remember, struggling to forget.
He took her to him standing waist deep in the creek, loving her body with open eyes and light hands. They were buoyant but anchored together, solid and real. He drank her kisses and cleaved to her strength. He gave in to her reasoning, too tired to hold out any longer, too alive to welcome guilt anymore.
46. Rearranged
“Things that are done, it is needless to speak about, things that are past, it is needless to blame.” — Confucius
They had today and then she had to drive back to Sydney. Will wanted her to stay another day, fly from Brisbane. Leave her car there; he’d get it back to her. Maybe drive it back to Sydney himself. But he wasn’t ready to leave yet, and she knew she needed time to decompress from the intensity of the time with him before she went back to work.
Leaving tomorrow was better and not only because it was practical, though Will thought bringing a helicopter in to pick her up was practical, but because neither of them wanted to talk about the future.
As far as they’d ever got was the interview.
