First Love, Second Chance: Friends to Forever / Second Chance with the Rebel / It Started with a Crush.... Nikki Logan
for the first half of my life and my drinking numbed me to it for the second. I’ve never really had to make a difficult decision or face a stressful situation. They were there for me. Or you were. I’ve always followed instructions or someone else’s lead. Or avoided painful situations completely. I still have a lot to learn about life.’
He regarded her steadily. Was he remembering all those years where she’d tagged along with him, his partner in crime? Or the way she’d cut him from her life when things got too tough behind the library? When the going gets tough, the tough go drinking.
‘You sought me out. That can’t have been easy.’
‘No. It wasn’t.’ But she had an unspoken and barely acknowledged incentive—seeing him again. He’d come to mean as much to her as alcohol. A yin to its powerful yang. That scrap of paper in her wallet a talisman. The painful ball in her chest made its presence felt. ‘But I’d chew my leg off to have a drink right now. Do you call that coping?’
He flinched at her raw honesty. Pain washed into his eyes. But hiding who she was wasn’t sustainable. He might as well see her, warts and all. For richer or poorer. In sickness and in health. Presently, sickness. But one day.
‘It’s been a rough night …’
The understatement of the century.
‘If the flask washed up at your feet right now, would you open it?’
Her chest started heaving at the image. As though his words magicked up the little vessel, filled to overflowing with the liquid escapism she’d relied on for years.
No pain. No shame. No past.
No future.
Sadness flooded through her. ‘Would you believe me if I said no?’
His deep silence brought their discussion to a natural close. She’d run out of story and courage. Her attention drifted back to how cold and how wet she was and she sagged against the whale as the after-effects of her monumental confession hit her body.
Marc frowned at her. ‘I’ll ask you one more time. Will you go back to the car?’
It hurt her to say no, but she’d promised herself she wouldn’t leave him down here alone. And if she gave in on just one thing. She shook her head. A particularly icy shock of wind chose that moment to surge across the beach. She gasped at the savage, frigid gust and her skin prickled up into sharp gooseflesh.
Marc swore and glared at her. ‘Don’t say I didn’t give you a choice … ‘ He grabbed up his decrepit towel and ploughed out of the water and around to her side of the whale. Then he stepped in behind her and wrapped his whole body around her like a living, breathing wind-breaker. Her body sang at the close, hard contact, the port in this storm his strong arms represented. A moment later, the slight warmth bleeding through his wetsuit also registered.
She sighed and convulsively shivered.
Marc swore and pulled away for an icy instant. She heard the zip of his wetsuit opening, the gentle brush of his fingers pulling her wet hair to the side, and then the blissful brand of his hot chest straight against her barely covered back. Skin on skin. Fire on ice. It soaked in like a top shelf brandy.
‘Christ, Beth. You’re glacial.’
He took her hands in his and crossed his arms around her, closing her more fully against his warmth. Her numbness leached away like ice melting and exposed a shelf of complicated emotions she’d been doing her best to muffle. She stiffened immediately.
‘Don’t argue, Beth. You had your chance. Let’s get back to it.’
Their two bodies formed a hypnotic rhythm—bend, scoop, slosh … bend, scoop, slosh—half the speed they’d been going before the sun had set. His towel dripped on Beth’s arms as she bent to refill the two-litre water bottle she was now using to wet the re-stranded whale. If not for the awful truths she’d just shared, their position would have been downright sexy. A half-naked man glued to a half-naked woman. As it was, it was just plain uncomfortable. For both of them.
And it went on for an eternity.
Despite the warmth seeping in from behind, Beth’s teeth started chattering again. Marc convinced her to pull her barely dry jeans on again as some protection from the wind and she took the brief on-shore break to wolf down the muesli bar she’d had tucked away. Her body immediately started converting the grain into desperately needed energy and warmed her briefly from the inside. It wasn’t a patch on the blazing warmth of Marc’s skin.
She was too cold to worry about pride as she slipped back into the surf and then tucked herself shamelessly back into his body. He received her with the practice of years, not hours.
As if it was her rightful place.
Skin rubbed against skin periodically as Marc’s body followed hers down and back up. His breath was warm against her bare neck. The sensations she’d been numb to for several hours came roaring back—making her tingle, making her remember. Making her—for once—ache for something more than a drink. A neglected part of her longed to peel his wetsuit right down to his waist, to see in detail and up close just how much of a man Marc Duncannon had grown into.
But she’d have to settle for feeling the topography of his body against her back instead.
‘Does it feel good?’ Marc said, low and almost unwilling against her ear.
She gasped and half turned in his hold. ‘What?’
‘Addiction.’ She could feel his tension against her back, she didn’t need to hear it in his voice. ‘I figure it must for so many people to do it.’
Beth thought long and hard about that. About the rush, about how it felt when it was gone. Or denied. About why he wanted to know. She twisted back around in his arms and continued sloshing. ‘It’s not a choice you make. For me, it wasn’t about how good it felt when I was drinking. It was about how bad it felt when I wasn’t.’
‘Describe it to me. Both feelings.’
She swallowed the lump of tears that suddenly threatened. Even though she knew this was more about his mother. There was the Marc she remembered. He wanted to understand.
‘Were you ever infatuated with someone?’ She forced the words out. Between the cold and the strong arms cocooning her, it was amazing she could speak at all.
‘Like love?’
‘No, not love. Obsession. Did you ever have a massive crush on someone inappropriate when you were younger—someone you could never be with?’
Marc stopped sloshing. ‘Maybe.’
Tasmin? Except that he’d finally prevailed with her. They’d started dating in the final months of school.
‘Do you remember how it possessed you? How it took over your days, your nights, your thoughts? You can’t remember it starting but then it just … is. It’s everything. It’s everywhere. Like it’s always existed. Like it could never not exist.’ She stopped sloshing in his hold. ‘Have you ever felt something like that?’
The tightness of his voice rumbled against her back and birthed goose bumps in its wake. ‘Go on.’
‘It’s how it was with me and my addiction. I didn’t recognise how it consumed me when I was deep inside it. I arranged my day around it. I made allowances for it. It became so normal. I learned to function around the compulsion. Just like the most concentrated of adolescent infatuations. And every bit as irrational.’
She felt him shake his head and she tensed. ‘Is that no, you don’t remember how it feels,’ she asked, half turning back towards him, ‘or no, you don’t understand?’
His lips were enticingly close to her face. His breath was hot against her cheek. He swallowed hard. ‘I remember.’
‘Then you know how it can take you by stealth. The passion.