Summer Beach Reads. Natalie Anderson
fast. He hooked the fly sheet with his boot and pulled it back to see where she went as he sipped his coffee. The latrine tent. Dug way out in the distance, necessarily.
His own pack was already loaded up so he grabbed hers and started stuffing the piled-up items into it as well as taking a couple of snack bars from the container she kept perpetually handy. The notebook slipped off the pile as he packed and fell open at an oft-thumbed page.
Her list.
He stared guiltily. Cross-through after cross-through mocked his still poor effort. She had thirteen of the fifteen items. Worse than he’d realised. She’d even crossed the dinosaur one off already.
His belly looped back on itself.
Hang on … Thirteen? When only twelve were achievable?
He traced the page with his finger and then slid to a halt at the mystery tick-box. He stared.
Be transported by a touch.
His first reaction was an insanely powerful surge of self-satisfaction. His touch had transported her. His touch. Impossible to know exactly when she’d ticked that but there’d been a whole lot of touching going on since their first night on the Paxos. Then the gondola day. And the previous two days.
And then … right behind the conceit came a wave of dread.
That wasn’t the tick of someone who was casual about their time together. That wasn’t the tick of someone who was content to let weeks pass between encounters. Or who’d be unfazed about moving on when the time came.
The wave of dread solidified.
That was the tick of someone for whom their encounters had been meaningful. Enough to tick a box on a list that had taken on religious significance for her. That tick meant something.
Not something … everything.
He shoved the notebook and pen in on top of the snack bars and zipped the pack up, then sat back and stared at the brown swirl in his cup. Was it a mistake to have let himself believe she was in the same class of woman as the others in his past? Easier, faster women. Or was it just blind wishful thinking on his part? Maybe he’d just seen what he wanted to see?
Wouldn’t be the first time.
‘Taking up reading coffee grinds?’ she joked, ducking back into the tent. She saw her packed bag. ‘Oh, thank you.’ She threw it over her shoulder, bent and kissed his cold lips and ducked back out again. ‘I’ll see you by the truck.’
Confusion roiled.
Her demeanour was relaxed enough. Her kiss, easy. She wasn’t fawning or clinging. In fact she’d just ditched him for more interesting people, as far as he could tell. Nothing about her actions betrayed the glaring tick in that very significant box.
Unless … Was she so desperate to finish the list that she’d thrown in a near-enough-is-good-enough tick? Or maybe she was a good compartmentaliser: transportational sex in one department and the real world in another. Or maybe she’d only slept with him in the first place to get the tick.
No.
Just … no.
He took a deep breath and tossed his remaining coffee out of the tent door. Maybe he was making much more of this than it was worth. Her actions had to mean more than what she wrote down in private.
In her notebook …
Which was virtually a diary …
He straightened outside the tent, and intercepted Shirley’s glance from across the campsite. It was a smile, small and private, much like any other she’d tossed at him on any of their adventures. Yet it suddenly took on so much extra meaning.
Was it the smile of someone harbouring a secret?
Was it the smile of someone trying very hard not to liberate a much bigger, more gushing one?
Was it the smile of a woman who knew that their time was very soon to be over? A weaning-off kind of smile.
Or was it just the smile of someone quietly excited about the day and trying to be cool in front of the experts?
Hell.
He snagged his backpack and hauled it out of the tent after him.
And this was why ignorance was bliss.
It might have been one of the coolest things she’d ever done but it was also one of the dullest. As one half of the least experienced duo on the expedition, Shirley couldn’t have expected to be in charge of anything exciting and, to be fair, the scientists alone were doing their fair share of grunt work, too. They stood as a group at the base of sheer rock face in an ancient eroded gully.
‘This was once a cave system,’ the head palaeontologist told them, ‘before it all tumbled in and wore away to become the plateau we see today. So there’s a decent chance of finding a few bits of interest.’
Hopefully that was palaeontologist-speak for ‘dinosaur’.
That helped motivate her as the hours passed and teams of them spread out over parallel search vectors and combed the desert floor, literally, for anything of note. At first the pressure of not knowing what might be ‘of note’ and missing something significant crippled her, but as hours passed with no one calling for professional opinions Shirley relaxed and let herself just drift, eyes firmly down, looking for anything that just didn’t look quite right.
It gave her lots of time to glance at Hayden one vector over and worry about what was wrong with him.
He’d barely spoken to her the entire drive out here. Lots of smiles—carefully neutral and thin—but not a whole lot of substance. And they never reached his eyes. She’d surveyed the past few days in the same way they surveyed the ancient cave floor, segment by segment with a mind for the smallest out-of-place detail. He’d been fine for the first two days, as chatty as Hayden ever got, and focused on the stories told by the museum team of their past trips.
But come the dawn of day three and he had become a different man altogether, distracted, uncommunicative, hollow.
Anxiety burbled close to the surface. Why was her go-to response to assume something was wrong? That she’d done something wrong? Perhaps he had some kind of threshold for living rough and he’d reached it. Or three days was too much living out of tins and gas cooker coffee. Maybe he was more accustomed to finer comforts than he’d realised.
Those were all much better options than the lingering concern that it might be her.
Or them.
‘Nothing?’ she asked, loud enough that he could hear.
He glanced up. Shook his head. Then went back to studying the earth. Clearly still distracted.
She swallowed the little hurt and the frown and redoubled her efforts on the earth as she walked forward at a speed akin to continental drift.
Rock. Tussock. Earth. Rock. Earth. Bone … She stopped and bent lower, examined it. Nope—too bleached and surface dwelling for something older than a year. That much she had picked up from the professionals.
Tussock. Earth. Rock. Odd-shaped rock …
She paused again, bent. Gently dusted some dirt away from the edge of this particular rock. Rocks, she’d discovered, tended to be roundish or sharpish. A sharp rock with rounded bits in it was noteworthy. A rounded rock with a sharp bit in it—like this one—was equally interesting.
‘Eric?’
She called their floating expert over. He finished marking a site several vectors away and jogged over to her. ‘Whatcha got?’
She pointed to her feet. ‘Weird rock.’
‘Excellent,’ he murmured, forgetting her presence already. ‘We love weird.’
He dropped