“Yeah, no worries,” he said. “If I can handle pas de deux before breakfast, I can definitely hack this. Plus, I can’t leave you out here on your own. Don’t trust you not to steal a koala when no one’s looking.”
Heather giggled and took his hand. Her body still buzzed from dancing with him, as if it had been the opening night of some huge production, not a simple improvised pas de deux in the middle of the bush. Dancing with Marcus felt strangely intimate. They’d slept together, and sex with him felt like dancing, when all the steps came easily and the music sang in her bones. Sex with Jack had felt like a hard class she always wanted to overanalyze later to figure out how she could do better.
But actually dancing with Marcus? Feeling him listen to her body and understand it with almost no words? Knowing he wouldn’t judge her if she wobbled or messed up? That made her feel far more exposed to him, and far closer to him, than anything else they’d done.
As they made their way down the gully, Craig turned and picked his way along the track backward, telling them all about the effort to turn the national park into a koala sanctuary. The koalas were thriving here, Craig told them proudly, and their numbers were slowly growing: the first crop of babies—joeys, they were called—had arrived this year. The two girls squealed when Craig delivered this news, and Heather barely stopped herself from joining them.
“It’s hard to say where they’ll be from day to day, so we might spend the morning getting cricks in our necks trying to find them,” Craig warned. “But generally, we’ve found them around about here, so keep your eyes on the track, but make sure you’re looking up, too.”
Everyone slowed, craning their necks at the trees around them while trying not to trip on the uneven path. They walked this way for about ten minutes, descending deeper into the valley. Heather’s neck, already sore from last night’s restless sleep, was starting to complain when she heard a triumphant “Aha!” from the front.
Craig stopped and held a finger to his lips as the rest of the group halted. Then he pointed toward the treetops on the side of the path. They all followed his hand with their eyes, and one of the girls gave another quiet squeal.
At first, Heather wasn’t sure the koalas were even there. There was no movement except for the long gum leaves swaying in the breeze, and the occasional flicker of foliage disturbed by a bird in the branches. It was only when Heather looked closely at the ash-brown trees that she saw the round gray lumps wedged into places where the trunks and branches met. As she and Marcus stared upward, she realized the lumps were expanding and deflating ever so slightly. Breathing. If Craig hadn’t told her where to look, she would have missed them entirely. Looking more closely, she could just make out the outlines of ears and a squished face on one of the nearby lumps: the koala had its back pressed against the tree,its head drooped down toward its stomach, like a rotund old man snoozing in a recliner.
Slowly, the koalas began to wake. One of them unwedged itself from the join of the branches and stretched out its arms to grab hold of the tree. It moved along the branch, painstakingly slowly but with total stability, gripping the bark with its small, clawed hands until it reached a tuft of leaves. As Heather watched, her mouth open in awe, it pulled the tuft with one hand and thrust the leaves into its jaws.
“Dad, look!” one of the girls shrieked, and her father shushed her. “Look, a baby joey!” she said in a stage whisper, pointing at a tree on the other side of the path.
Heather followed her finger, and sure enough, a smaller gray lump was attached to one of the koalas. As the larger animal started to climb through the tree, Heather pulled out her phone and held it up, zooming in just in time to see the joey raise its head and look over the forest with dark, beady eyes. Its ears were impossibly fluffy and entirely too big for the rest of its head.
“OhGod, it’s cute,” she whispered. Marcus rubbed her back, and she noticed he was grinning with what looked like delight and self-satisfaction. But he wasn’t looking at the treetops. He was looking at her.
“It’s well and truly time for brekkie,” Craig said in a low voice as Heather saw several more koalas digging into the gum leaves of their respective trees.
“Breakfast,” Marcus translated, under his breath.
“No, I got it,” she smiled at him. “My tour guide’s taught me well.”
Marcus chuckled, his eyes on the trees. “Why koalas?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why were you so dead set on seeing koalas?”
“Oh,” she said, glancing over her shoulder to where the two girls gazed at the trees and chatted animatedly to Craig. “I thinkI’ve always been a little bit fascinated by them. Probably because I had a koala when I was really little. A toy,” she clarified quickly.
“Did it have a name?”
“Bear,” she said with a shrug. “Just Bear. I know”—she rolled her eyes as Marcus smiled again—“it’s a very creative name. I don’t even remember when I got him, or who gave him to me. Probably one of my mother’s friends or coworkers. Anyway, I used to take him everywhere with me. Slept with him every night, especially when I went away for summer intensives. He got so grimy and worn out after a while. His eyes popped off, and my mom had to sew one of his legs back on a bunch of times.” She sighed. “I don’t even know what happened to him, in the end.”
That last part was a lie. Heather knew exactly what had happened to Bear. He had come with her to the dorms when she’d become a full-time student at NYB’s school, then sat on her nightstand in the apartment she’d shared with Carly, slumping, floppy and stained, between her lamp and her body lotion. When Jack asked her to move in with him, she had shoved Bear into a storage box and hadn’t dared to unpack him for fear that he’d think it was silly and childish. Somewhere in a storage unit on Avenue B, along with most of the belongings she’d taken from his apartment, Bear was still in that box.
“Well, now you’ve seen some real-life Bears.” Marcus gestured up into the trees and looked hopefully at her face.
“And they’re so cute I can bear-ly stand it,” she quipped.
“Oh God,” he groaned. Marcus hung his head and shook it in feigned dismay. “That was not a high koala-ty joke.”
Heather chuckled and watched the real life Bears pull leaves into their mouths with methodical determination, munching slowly, rhythmically. At one point, one of the larger ones, which she suspected was a male, abandoned his breakfast and stretched back on his branch, revealing an off-white stomach that he proceeded to scratch with such evident pleasure that both Heather and Marcus burst out laughing.
Heather took Marcus’s hand, and their fingers intertwined again. He took a tiny, almost imperceptible step toward her.
“Thank you,” she murmured. “This is the best date I’ve ever been on.”
“Me too,” he said quietly. “But next time let’s stay in a hotel.”
Chapter 15
