“Was that Carly I just saw?”
Nick turned around to see Marcus walking out of the water with his board under his arm.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Nick said quickly. He had the sudden feeling he’d been busted doing something he shouldn’t have. He nodded out towards the waves, eager to change the subject. “Good swell this morning.”
“No, yeah, it’s been great the last few days. When it’s like this I sometimes try to come back in the evening, too. My hair’s never fully dry anymore.” Marcus grinned contentedly and led Nick up the beach towards the surf club building, where two garage doors opened onto the sand and rows of empty storage racks stood ready to receive Nick’s borrowed board.
As they rinsed and dried their boards, Marcus chatted amiably with a few other surfers he seemed to know quite well. They asked Nick where he was from, where he usually surfed, and it was such a relief to be able to speak to strangers here without worrying about his accent throwing them off or making him have to repeat himself. Nick’s French wasn’t bad for someone who’d only taken a year of company-sponsored formal classes, but his accent had caused frequent confusion among native speakers. He hadn’t realized until this morning that he was usually bracing for confusion or repetition every time he opened his mouth to someone who didn’t know him. That was what home was, wasn’t it? A place you understood, and where you could be understood?
As Marcus waxed his board, he and another surfer began what sounded like an ongoing friendly debate about the merits of various wax brands, and Nick found his mind drifting. His friend had stopped dancing two years ago and had found himself an entirely new existence: Marcus had a new career path, a new hobby, new friends, and of course, he had Heather. Somehow, Nick had managed to fail completely at all of the above. Marcus seemed truly happy. He hadn’t been dealt an easy hand in the last few years, between his dad’s death and his injury and getting fired from ANB, but he’d come through it and built himself a full new life after ballet. Nick had done none of that.
“You need a coffee?” Marcus’s question interrupted Nick’s silent self-recriminations and brought him back to the cool, musty concrete room.
“Yeah, I need several,” Nick agreed. He hadn’t slept well the previous night. The noise from the bar downstairs filtered up through the floor.
A few minutes later, the barista at the surf club café slid their takeaway coffees over the counter—she’d started making Marcus’s the moment she saw them coming—and they sat down on a bench overlooking the dunes.
“So what’s on the docket for you today?” Nick asked. After lunch yesterday, Heather had divided up the tasks on her spreadsheet and given each of them a carefully ordered list of wedding tasks to attend to, complete with little checkboxes they could tick off when each job was done.
Marcus sipped his coffee and leaned forward on the bench, stretching his hamstrings with a quiet, satisfied groan. “I need to go to Randwick for my final tux fitting. But first we need to get you Mum’s car. I can drive us both over there, then you can drive back on your own and collect Carly. Sound good?”
Not really, Nick thought. Not to him and not to Carly. Not if their brief and disastrous interaction this morning was anything to go by.
“You were right, she’s kind of a lot,” Nick muttered.
“Who, Carly? Yeah, I know.”
“I mean, I’ve met some ballet brats, but she’s on another level. Did you know she—”
He stopped. He didn’t need to tell Marcus the whole story of yesterday’s trolley-suitcase-dildo disaster. He took another sip of coffee and shook his head.
“I can see why you think that,” Marcus allowed. “Like I said, she’s a lot. But you should hear the way Heather talks about her. I reckon she’d trust Carly with her life. They’re basically sisters. Did you know it was Carly who told Heather the truth about her ex?”
“About him cheating?”
“Yeah. She was the one who busted him with his girlfriend, and she came to Heather and told her about it, and then let Heather sleep on her couch for months after the break-up.”
“Hmmm,” Nick said, noncommittally, unwilling to admit to Marcus that he was impressed. Everyone said they’d tell someone if they knew they were being cheated on, but how many people chickened out when confronted with the choice to actually do it? He had the feeling Carly Montgomery never chickened out of anything. The idea annoyed him.
“Heather owes her a lot. So do I, come to think of it. If not for Carly, Heather would be married to that dickhead right now, instead of about to marry me. To Carly,” Marcus said, raising his coffee cup and bumping it against Nick’s.
“Maybe I’ll put that in my best man speech,” Nick laughed, and Marcus chuckled. “I’ve got a lot of embarrassing school stories to get through, though, so I might not be able to fit it in. Remember that time Justin dared you to do a whole class with your dance belt on backwards?”
“I do, and so do my balls,” Marcus replied darkly. “But you wouldn’t dare mention my balls at my wedding.”
Nick swallowed a mouthful of coffee and gave Marcus an evil grin. “Wouldn’t I?”
Marcus chuckled again and gave him a playful shove. “You go right ahead, then, but remember that I’ll get you back with interest when your own turn comes. Speaking of which, how is the lovely Delphine? Are you going to put a ring on it any time soon?”
Nick felt his smile fade. He’d been hoping that Marcus would be so distracted by his own nuptials that he’d forget to ask about Delphine, but he should have known better. He cleared his throat.
“Euh, Delphine’s kind of French about marriage,” he dodged. “I don’t think it’s really for her. Sorry she couldn’t make it, but rehearsals are just too intense right now.”
He couldn’t bring himself to tell Marcus the truth, not when his friend had his life so completely together. It was bad enough that he’d come back to Sydney with no job and his whole life in a suitcase. He couldn’t bear to tell Marcus that once he’d stopped dancing, once they’d stopped working together every day, Delphine had decided they didn’t have much in common. And that his post-retirement funk was gettingennuyeux. Boring. Better to play the French libertine card and let Marcus hear what he wanted.
Marcus nodded, apparently satisfied by his answer, and Nick took a relieved sip of his coffee. It had been a while since he and Marcus had really talked. But when they were kids, they spent almost every day together, and they’d known each other so well they barely needed more than grunts and body language to convey complicated ideas and feelings.
“You gonna see your parents while you’re here?” Marcus asked.
