The Day Of The Wave (26 page)

Don't think about it.

She puts her hand to my cheek, turning me back to her. 'You OK?'

'I'm OK,' I tell her quickly, 'just having a hard time believing this is all happening.'

'Maybe it was supposed to,' she says, shuffling around to sit in front of me, cross-legged, covered in sand. 'Isn't that what you said, at the waterfall?'

'I don't know, Izzy.' I say it under my breath. Her eyebrows knit together but in a second I'm kissing the doubt away, willing the thoughts to stop colliding in my brain; the ones that scream how right she is, and this is, and the ones that scream this has to stop. I pull her back with me. She's in my head and my heart and my soul but I'll hurt her, like I hurt everyone. How could I not, in the end?

Don't think about it. 

I kiss her harder and her arms wrap around me till she's on top of me on the sand and I'm swimming in the ocean of her, and not the thoughts that try to drown me every time I get my head above the water

She's good for you.

But Ben. She doesn't know the half of what you know.

I wake up with a jump. What the hell was that? It sounded like a... I don't even know. I rush to the window and my eyes practically bulge out of my head. Oh my God.

A knock on my door. I almost jump out of my skin this time. I pull it open as my heart starts skipping like a kangaroo and Ben puts his hand on the doorframe. He's grinning, looking impossibly sexy in an open blue shirt and khaki shorts. His hair falls over his eyes as he leans in to kiss me. 'Happy birthday,' he says, 'you'd better get dressed, your ride won't wait for long. She's hungry.'

'You got an elephant!' I say now. I can't help the laugh coming out of my mouth, or the way my feet make me jump up and down on the spot like a child. I throw my arms around him and he picks me up for a moment, squeezes me tight. 'Where did you get that?' I say into his neck.

'Sonthi knows a guy,' he tells me, putting me down. 'Get some clothes on, Ghostbuster!'

My cheeks flame as I look down at my pajamas. 'I've been awake for three seconds,' I say, 'what time is it?' 

'Just after seven. We have a long day ahead of us. Your classes are covered and so are my dives.' 

'Really?'

'Really!'

'This is amazing, Ben!' I rush to the wardrobe, grab my shorts and my bikini, head to the bathroom to throw them on. Ben's sitting on my bed when I peek around the wall with my toothbrush hanging out of my mouth. 'How did you know it was my birthday?' I ask him around the toothpaste froth. I swear I haven't told anyone, have I?

He laughs, a bit sheepishly now. 'A little drunken British birdy told me.'

I frown. Then I cringe. 'Oh, right.' 

When I walk back to the wardrobe for a shirt, I catch Ben's eyes on my body but he lowers them to the floor when he sees I've caught him looking. I walk up to him, pulling the shirt over my head. I stand between his legs, put my hands to his clean-shaven face. He looks younger when he's shaved; cuter, like the teenager who promised me my starfish, only far, far less innocent. 'What's wrong?' 

'Nothing!' he says, putting his hands to my waist now, lifting the white cotton slightly to drop a kiss to my stomach. His lips shoot butterflies through me but he stands up straight away, heads for the door. I can't read him at all.

For more than a week now he's been so attentive, so amazing, but he still hasn't once tried to sleep with me, or even get me naked, and he does stuff like this all the time... treats me like I'm some china doll he can't really touch. 

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't surprised, and a bit confused. What he said before keeps running circles in my head, the more he distances himself: I manage to form friendships, usually, not relationships. If that's still his philosophy then maybe he remembers the look that must have been written on my face when I called him out on his meaningless sexual friendships. He knows I wouldn't want that. 

But is that all he wants?

Does he even want me? 

'Ready?' he asks as I slip on my shoes and pick up my day bag. 'Sunscreen, water, camera...'

'Check,' I say, shoving the nagging paranoia aside as I put my iPhone into my bag. It's the only camera I have. When he opens the door and the elephant is still there, I have to blink in case I'm dreaming. A bare-chested Thai guy's sitting on its head, carrying what looks like a bamboo pole. There's a wooden box on its back with room for two on top of bright red blankets and it's decorated with frangipanis on strings. 

Ben takes my hand, leads me down the steps. 'I can't believe you did this,' I say.

'You never got to ride an elephant,' he replies. 'We had to do something about that.' 

His words send a rush of something that feels a lot like love from my brain, to my heart, to my fingertips. He did this for me because he remembered. He remembered I was about to ride one that morning, remembered it was my birthday. Today's gratitude is Ben, without question. It was Ben yesterday and the day before.

I realize I'm holding my breath as we approach the creature. She's huge and so majestic with the morning sunlight falling over her leathery skin in wrinkles. 'This is Khalua.'

'Like the drink?'

'Exactly!' Ben strokes her huge trunk and puts my hand on it, too. She snorts through it suddenly and her breath sends the sand flying around us in a swirl.

'Hello,' I say into her huge, kind-looking eye. It's crinkly round the edges, like a giant old lady's. 'You look so clever, and you're so beautiful,' I tell her softly and I swear she almost smiles. Khalua is browny-gray. She feels like a wiry brush to the touch. She flaps her ginormous ears as we stroke her cheeks and front leg. Just one of her legs is as big as my entire body.

'Ready to get on?' Ben says, leading me backwards a step. The Thai guy shouts something. Straight away Khalua bends her big knees in front of us and kneels on the sand, sending up more swirls. Ben guides my foot into a wooden strap so I can pull myself up, then follows me, sitting next to me in the box. 'Hold on!' he says and he wraps his arms around me, laughing as Khalua gets back up again. I lean into him, grip the front of the box as Khalua starts plodding with us down the beach. 'Where are we going?!'

'Patience, grasshopper,' he grins. Then he sweeps a hand behind my head, bunches up my hair and kisses me like he means it, like I'm the only person in the world who exists except him. I hate myself for over-analysing his reluctance to go too far, too soon. Of course he wants me. This is Ben. Ben would never hurt me. I've never felt this safe with anyone.

The sun is climbing higher in the sky by the time we start heading inland, but thankfully there's shade under the thick trees of the jungle. When we head up a track and into a clearing I note the white sheet spread out on the ground and what looks like a wicker hamper in the middle of it. 

'I hope you're hungry,' Ben says, dropping a kiss on my temple. Khalua kneels down again and the Thai guy, who hasn't said a word to us so far, gets down to help us off. 'Birthday breakfast for the birthday girl,' he grins, leading me to the sheet by the hand and sitting me down. 

The breeze lifts up my hair. The frogs croak in the trees and bushes all around us. The hot air smells like warm peat and I'm strangely aware of a million unseen eyes on me as I watch him get plates and cups and containers out of the hamper. The feeling that feels a lot like love is still booming through my body, threatening to turn into some kind of song. 

My love, my love, my love, my endless love
...

'You're amazing,' I tell him now, reaching for his hand. 'I don't know what to say.'

He kisses my fingers and smiles. I'm so shocked at what he's done. No one's ever done anything this amazing for me before. On my last birthday Colin ordered takeaway from his favorite Chinese place in Clapham, but they were an hour late delivering it and then he spent ten minutes on the phone shouting at someone after he found a hair in his chop suey. It wasn't very romantic, really.

'It's nothing special,' Ben says. 'This is just how we do birthdays in Thailand.' He winks and holds a strawberry out for me to bite. The sweet juice fills up my mouth as he eats the rest of it and kisses my juicy lips. I register how weak my knees are in a heartbeat. He scoops fresh fruit salad onto a plate for me, pulls out a flask off coffee and pours it into two cups. Then he leans against a tree as Khalua sniffs around us with her trunk. I throw her a chunk of pineapple and she snuffles it up and spoons it into her mouth. I swear I see her smiling again. 

'She's so awesome,' I say to Ben in his accent as we eat. He nods, thoughtfully. The sun is throwing patches of light on us and his hair looks more golden than brown today. His eyes look yet a different shade of blue under those thick brows; the ones that give him a different expression every second.

'It's like you can see what she's thinking, right?' he says.

I realize I'm still looking at him and not the elephant. Jesus. 'Exactly.'

'They're so smart. Did you hear about those two elephants who broke free from their chains and ran up the hill right before the tsunami?'

I nod around my forkful of papaya. 

'No animals died that day,' he continues, pouring us more coffee, 'none that weren't chained up or caged, anyway.'

'I know,' I say, remembering. 'They all ran away. I read that elephants at least have some kind of seismic-vibration detectors in their feet, but I don't know about the others.'

'Neither do I. If only they could talk,' he says, looking to Khalua again. I throw her some papaya and she eats it gratefully, looking into my eyes with her own. 

After breakfast we carry on trekking through the lush green forest. We stop to watch some howler monkeys jumping about in the trees just above us. Khalua rips leaves from nearby plants with ease and shovels them into her mouth. She's like a machine, eating, pooping, plodding along. I can't help thinking of how my mom and dad never got to do this. They would have loved it. The image of them in another box on the back of another elephant flashes into my head. They're laughing from the path ahead of us, taking photos of us. Dad has his stupid video camera.

Ben winds his arm around me and I sigh in contentment. I think my parents really are here, somehow. They're happy I'm happy, and they're happy I came back. Every time I look at that photo now, I can feel them radiating out of it, all around me. They're becoming a feeling. Love.

'Are you hot?' Ben asks now. The sound of another waterfall is getting closer and closer. 

'Not as hot as you,' I flirt and he growls jokingly and pretends to bite at my ear as I pretend to fight him off. 

Khalua stops at the waterfall. This time our guide leaves us in the box on her back and takes a running jump into the deep, shimmering pool. White butterflies are flitting in the shafts of sunlight over the water. Birds are singing a tuneful song for us from the palms hanging above, creating a natural shady spot to one side. This waterfall is smaller than the one we jumped into before, but it doesn't stop our guide coming back five minutes later and guiding Khalua into the water. 

'Woah!' My hand lands on Ben's knee. 

'Hold tight, I think she's hotter than us,' he tells me. We're shaken around in our seat as Khalua plods further and further into the rocky-bottomed pool until it's halfway up her middle. Ben's arm pulls me closer to him and before I know what's happening he's yelling: 'Close your eyes!' 

I'm drenched in an instant; then even wetter as Khalua showers us with water from her trunk. It's cold and I scream and Ben shrieks as we huddle into each other laughing our heads off. Our clothes are soaked and my hair is dripping, but Ben stands up now, peels off his shirt, stands over me with his full six-pack gleaming. 

'Good idea.' I copy him, ripping off my shirt, slipping out of my shorts. Together, we jump from the box into the pool, start swimming towards the falls. 

Ben's ahead of me. His head disappears as he reaches the gushing flow, coming down from a rocky wall about ten meters above us. I follow, pinch my nose and come up on the other side, right next to him. Every breath is an echo in the chamber. He rakes his hair back from his hair, stands with his back to the wall. I do the same, shoulder-to-shoulder. 

'Wow,' I say. There's six or seven inches between us and the pounding waterfall. I can see rainbows dancing in the misty haze but the blue of Ben's eyes when I turn to him is suddenly the only color I care about. 

'Ever been kissed in a waterfall, hot cross bun?' he says, reaching for my waist. 

The tingles between my legs make me weak on my feet now but his arms are around my middle again, holding me against him with my back to the moving water. My hipbones are pressing into his skin. I can feel the growing bulge in his shorts against my thigh already as he pulls my lips to his and kisses me... slowly at first, around the edges and corners, then heavier, more passionately, searching my mouth with his tongue and ramming his hand in my wet hair. 

It's so erotic; the things racing through my mind more than what he's actually doing. He's spinning me, holding me up against the rocky, slippery wall now by my wrists and sucking at my flesh. He moves my bikini top aside with his teeth and starts sucking on my nipple. I gasp against him, wrapping my leg around his back to draw him closer. I feel so weightless and wanted and sexier than I've ever felt in my life. It makes me grin like a madwoman.

He kisses me again with such a burning desire I half expect him to tear off my bikini bottoms underwater. But he doesn't. 'Damn,' he says almost under his breath, right into my mouth. He's nipping at my lip, breathing raggedly. 'I want you so much, Izzy.'

'I want you, too,' I tell him, and my voice, low and guttural doesn't even sound like my own.

He pulls away, runs a finger down my neck, collarbone and stomach to the rim of my bikini. 'I think our guy might get suspicious,' he whispers, lowering his lips again to lick and suck on my neck and earlobe. 'We should stop.'

'No!' He's killing me. I'm so turned on I think I might explode, but he lets me go. I grab his hand, put it back on my hip, lower my own hand now, down, down, down, till my hand is creeping inside his shorts.