Page 54 of Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon
‘I really, um …’ She pauses. ‘I really appreciate you doing this. It’s … it’s lovely.’ She doesn’t know how to tell a boy he’s being nice to her without it sounding silly – there’s definitely a more sophisticated way to do it but she doesn’t know what that is, and meanwhile she wants to let him know that she’s noticed his effort.
‘You’re welcome.’ More grinning. ‘We could have gone to a restaurant but I thought you may like this.’ He gestures to the water. ‘It’s so pretty here.’
Most of the beaches on the Central Coast are pretty, but obviously he likes this one more than others.
‘Do you come to Killcare much?’
He nods. ‘Killcare, MacMasters, Copacabana … They’re all good. Do you like the beach?’
‘Yeah. I don’t go that often, though. Not sure why.’ But she does know why: none of the girls from tech liked the beach because they all hated being seen in swimming costumes, and she understood because she was also self-conscious about it, but she really wanted to go more anyway. Just not alone.
‘We’ll have to change that.’ His voice is light but he’s looking at her with intent.
And did he just say ‘we’?We!
‘Oh?’
He puts down his roll on the towel. ‘I really like you, Josie.’
She feels warm and her heart is beating faster, and she’s not making it, it’s just doing it on its own, and all she wants to do is ask him why he likes her – what’s so special about her? – even as she’s always wanted to be special to someone. Someone other than her parents, because that’s a different kind of special – sometimes a suffocating kind of special – and when she daydreams about a boy saying to her exactly what Brett has just said she thinks about how the boy who thinks she’s special is choosing to do so, whereas her parents have to think it, don’t they? She’s their child. They just love her. There’s nothing in particular about her that has made them love her. But someone else has to choose her, and that’s always seemed impossible. In this whole, big world, how could someone find her and choose her?
‘I really like you too,’ she says.
The other night, after dinner, he didn’t try to kiss her and she was both disappointed and glad. Glad because she doesn’t know how to kiss and disappointed because she wanted to be wanted.
Now he’s leaning a little closer to her and she wonders what is meant to happen here. Will he start? Should she?
‘You’re fun,’ he says. ‘And kind.’
Fun and kind are not words she’d use to describe herself. Isn’t it odd, she thinks, that other people can see us so differently – and who’s to say if they’re right or we are?
‘Thank you,’ she says. Then she tries to think of all the things she wants to tell him he is, but her mouth won’t form the words.
‘And I hope you don’t mind me saying,’ he goes on, ‘but you’re really pretty.’ His smile is shy this time.
‘No, I don’t mind,’ she says quickly.Mind?Why would she mind? She knows it shouldn’t matter that he finds her pretty but it does. It really, really does.
She’s still holding her prawn roll when he shifts closer to her and stares into her eyes, and also when he puts his lips on hers, and they feel warm and dry, surfer’s lips, lips that have been out in the sun and bear its mark.
At some point she drops the roll, she must do, because several minutes later – or maybe it’s an hour or more, she loses track of time – she finds it on the towel with a few grains of sand on it, and he smiles as she picks it up and keeps eating, because she doesn’t want to talk, can’t talk, has no words to tell him what it meant to her that he kissed her like that, with tenderness and passion balanced, with one hand on her cheek and the other arm around her. She felt like a woman, that’s it. Like a proper adult, like a woman a man wants. If that’s what love feels like, she wants more of it, and even if it’s not, she wants more of it.
When he drives her back to her car he holds her hand in between shifting gears, and they don’t say much, and it’s perfect.
JUNE 1986
Madonna’s albumTrue Blueis released.
Return to Edenis on Australia’s TV screens.
Argentinian football player Diego Maradona scores with the ‘Hand of God’ against England.
The feature filmFerris Bueller’s Day Off, starring Matthew Broderick, is released.
HRH Prince William turns four.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
In come some of their retirement-home ladies, a little slower each week, Evie reckons, although that could be just her perception because she’s impatient each week for Sam to show up. This is the one morning he starts around the same time she does and she loves knowing they’ll have the whole day together. That’s at least seven hours of her being able to surreptitiously glance at him and talk to him and maybe, if the timing works out, have lunch together.
