“The bar just got raised way up there and...”
“And?”
I shift. “All I can think about is folding all over you.”
Trent busts into a charmed laugh and then, so do I.
On instinct, I reach out, I touch him. But only to find his arm, and to feel each of the crescent marks in his skin.
This attracts me.
Not the hurt I left behind, but his willingness to bear it. The kindness, to let me hold on so tight.
I want to kiss him so badly I’m trembling. I’m aching, being this close to him and having to resist the urge.
I let him go.
I find the bracelet around my wrist and I pinch each metal fish, round and round.
sand dunes
Firm beneath our feet, until they shift.
In the morning we’re stiff. Rigid.
We groan our way out of the truck to the public loos, then take the track through the bush that banks the shore. Trees crowd overhead; the path keeps dodging the beach like it’s playing hard to get. Ten minutes later we cut left into the dunes—heaped walls of black sand—and the trail pinches narrow. Each step sinks deep.
I peel off my shoes. Cool grit slips over my arches, sifts between my toes, rises and falls like breath.
“Good idea,” Trent murmurs, doing the same. When his bare feet meet sand, he tips his head back, eyes shuttering, a soft smile tugging at his mouth: content.
We run down the dunes, losing shoes here and there, skipping shells that don’t bounce. I find extra-salty seaweed and chase after Trent with it. “Why are you running? You’re the Kelp King.”
“The glint in your eye... terrifying,” he yells over his shoulder.
“This could make a nice crown. Or wig.”
“Wear it yourself.”
“Then I’d be your Kelp Queen.”
He stops running to catch his breath, and I do too?—
Fling.
The seaweed lands on his head and shoulder.
It earns me a tackle and we’re jumbled up together, legs and arms tangled. Seaweed stretches from his head to my stomach, where my shirt has ridden up. Between ribbons of kelp, his fingers skim my scar, pause and tense, and drift on, using the excuse of clearing seaweed to trace its edge. Then, on a swallow, he and the seaweed roll off my skin.
Slippery.
Trent finds a smooth, dry spot near the dunes and drops onto it, arms and legs flung wide.
Starfish, I think.
Like the first time I saw him, in the orange shirt... It felt ominous, then. A dead starfish, something that shouldn’t pull me and does. But now... That dead starfish is a thing we share. He’s buried one, and so have I. Different losses, same undertow.
He hasn’t talked about it yet, but some form of that conversation is playing in his head. Has been playing since the moment in the studio.
