Where Sea Meets Sky (38 page)

“Skydiving?” Pops says. “You’re crazy, mate.”

“I can’t argue with that,” Josh says.

After we go and get our stuff from Mr. Orange and settle into the tiny twin bed guestroom at the end of the house, Uncle Robbie invites Josh to sit outside with him while I’m talked into helping Aunt Shelley and my grandfather with the
hāngi
preparations.

Our
hāngi
are held on the beach at Bland Bay, even though traditionally they’re held on a
marae
. I know a few of the neighbors probably started earlier today. Basically you dig a pit in the sand, start a fire, and then place hot stones on top. The stones heat up for hours and hours, then the food is added. Right now we’re preparing wild boar, lamb, mussels, kumara, potatoes, zucchini, and pumpkin. Then you cover it all with sand (naturally the food has been wrapped in aluminum foil) and the food cooks for a long time. By the time the meal is ready, everyone has been on the beach for a while, having a few laughs and drinking the night away. That’s why Auntie Shelley is preparing snacks; it’s going to be a long night.

“So Gemma,” Pops says while he cuts through the pork with a hefty knife.

“Mmmm?” I muse, pulling the disgusting hairy ends off the mussels. Blah.

“I had a talk with Jolinda the other day,” he says.

My heart starts to speed up a bit. “Oh yeah?”

“She told me you lost your job.”

I exhale sharply through my nose. “Yeah. That sucked.”

“Do you know what you’re going to do?”

I’m silent for a few moments, concentrating on the mussels, though I can feel Pops and Auntie Shelley’s eyes on me. “No,” I eventually say. “I guess try and start from scratch.”

“Personal training and all that?” he asks.

I nod. “Yeah. I guess. I mean, what else can I do? That’s all I know.”

“That’s not all you can do, Gem,” he says. “You can do anything you put your mind to. You’re only twenty-two years old. You’ve been out of high school for, what, four years? That’s nothing. You’re a baby.”

“I am not a baby,” I say, about to give him a look but remembering to rein in my feelings and show my respect at the last minute.

“Aye, I know that. What I’m saying is, you’re young. No one has their stuff together at your age. Believe me, I didn’t know anything at that age. It took years to know what I wanted, and years after that to know who I was. Take it from me, I’ve been around. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

“I’m not.”

“You are,” he says pointedly. “I can tell. You’ve always been hard on yourself. Over time, it makes you hard. Get my drift? You’ll be all right, though, if you believe you’ll be all right.”

“Has my whole family banded together to give me pep talks?” I ask, giving the two of them incredulous looks.

“We’re your
whānau
and we’re worried, that’s all.”

“You never seemed all that worried before.”

He smiles calmly at me. “We’ve always been. Maybe now you’re finally seeing it.” He whacks his knife into the pork. “What was that saying again? When the student is ready the master will appear?”

“Sounds very
Karate Kid
.”

He laughs. “Gemma, you aren’t old enough to remember that movie. That’s how young you are.”

“Here,” Auntie Shelley says, pushing me gently out of the way to take over the mussel duties. “Go wash your hands and take the food out to Robbie and Josh.”

“Now who’s the pushy one?” I point out but gladly oblige, eager to run away from the serious grandfather talk. I go into the sunshine where Uncle Robbie and Josh are sitting in wooden chairs and staring at the bay and smoking, Barker spread out on the grass.

“Gemma, what’s wrong with you?” Uncle Robbie asks me as I bring over the tray of biscuits and fruit, setting it down on the driftwood table between the chairs.

“What?”

And then I see that he’s not smoking a cigarette at all but a joint and passing it to Josh, who puffs back like an old pro.

“Josh here tells me this is the first New Zealand grass he’s smoked this whole trip,” he says. “You’ve been driving around our islands in a VW bus, listening to Pink Floyd, and you haven’t even had a spliff? You’re a disgrace to our culture.” But he chuckles. Josh only grins at me happily.

I give Uncle Robbie a look. “Well, I guess he needs to work up an appetite if he’s going to the
hāngi
tonight.”

“You ain’t wrong, girl,” he says as I sit on the arm of Josh’s chair. Josh wraps his arm around me, blowing smoke in the other direction.

I playfully pull at his hair and he momentarily closes his eyes in pleasure. “Is my uncle being nice?” I ask, shooting Uncle Robbie a wary look.

“Yup,” Josh says. “I’ve been filling him in about the trip.”

“Oye, Gemma,” he says, adjusting his baseball cap, “Josh here tells me that you had to give away all my old
Penthouse
magazines. Is that true?”

I eye Josh and grimace. “Yes. And I don’t regret it for a moment.”

“All right, all right,” Uncle Robbie says, relaxing back in his chair. “I thought maybe he was spinning a yarn and keeping them for himself.”

This conversation has the ability to get all sorts of weird, so I get up.

“Where you going?” Josh asks.

“You’ll find out later,” I tell him with a smile. I walk to the back door of the house near our bedroom and find his sketchbook. I tear a piece of blank paper out of it, pick up the pastels and some old book about New Zealand trees to use as a hard surface, and go back outside.

I walk to the edge of the lawn and jump down into sand below, then make my way along the beach, fine white sand at my feet. Further down, by the holiday park, there are people gathered, the
hāngi
pit starting to smoke, the air filling with the smell of burning manuka wood. I go the opposite way, rounding the corner of low, red clay cliffs and find an isolated pocket of beach with stunning views of the neighboring rocks and islands.

I think about what my grandfather has said.

I think about what my mother has said.

I think about what Josh has said.

And I start to paint.

New Year’s Eve has always been a big deal in my family. In fact, I think it’s a big deal to every Kiwi, and not in the same way it is elsewhere in the world. Our New Year is about being with family and enjoying the summer. It’s a week-long event where people holiday at family baches and barbecue a lot of food, not just a one-night stand, as it seems to be elsewhere in the world.

At that, I look over at my one-night stand. He’s sitting on a log with Auntie Shelley and one of our neighbors, Jono, the lanky fellow who runs the campground and likes to take tourists out for bushwalks. Josh is laughing hard at something Jono has said, and Aunt Shelley leans over to smack Jono on the shoulder.

It’s dark, the stars are out, and the fire flickers and flames. We ate the
hāngi
a couple of hours ago, and as usual, it was delicious. It’s not just the fact that we used high quality meats and vegetables but the fact that it’s such a process, such an event shared by many people, that makes it taste so good.

Josh seemed to love it. He ate everything he could before going back to drinking with my grandfather. It’s almost midnight now, but if it’s like any other year, we probably won’t notice it’s the new year until after the fact. No one here counts down. We just enjoy being with each other and slide into the next year that way.

Josh catches me staring at him. I was supposed to grab a beer from one of the chilly bins and come right back but I’ve been taking my time. I want to slow down. Time is going way too fast.

He excuses himself from between Auntie Shelley and Jono and strides over to me.

“Hey handsome,” I say and can’t stop myself from grinning. Even in the firelight, he steals my breath.

“Hi beautiful,” he replies, grabbing my hand and a beer. “Care to join me on a walk? I heard you like long romantic walks on the beach.”

He waggles his eyebrows in an overexaggerated manner and grabs my hand.

We walk away from the robust crowd until the firelight begins to dim and their voices fade. Occasionally you can still hear Uncle Robbie laugh. We go along the edge of the water, the waves gently lapping. Stars reflect on the bay. We don’t talk but we don’t need to.

I feel him in every part of me. I feel like we’re saying enough with each breath we take in, with the way we squeeze each other’s hand. We walk past our house and to the little cove I was at earlier in the day, when I sat down and made a pastel painting of the bay. It still hums with my creative energy, like it was waiting for me to return.

Someone in the far, unseen distance yells “Happy New Year!” and the sky behind us lights up with a few cheap fireworks.

“Happy New Year,” he says, pulling me toward him and planting a long, lingering kiss on my lips. It’s hot. The sand on our bare feet is cool. The sky is alive with light. The horizon is black.

I murmur it back to him, lost in his kiss, in the heat of his embrace.

“I was thinking,” he says when he finally pulls away. From the way he cups my face and the earnestness of his words, my pulse kicks up a notch.

“Yes?” I ask with shaky breath.

“Maybe . . .” he trails off and looks away.

“What?” I ask, even though I think I’m afraid to hear the answer.

“I don’t want to leave.”

I exhale and smile. “I don’t want you to leave either.”

“So what if I don’t?”

My smile falters. “I don’t understand.”

“What if I don’t go. What if I stay here.”

I nearly laugh. “Josh, you can’t. You have school.”

He pulls away briefly, and in the light of the moon I see him run his hand through his hair. “I know I do. I know. I just . . . Gemma. I can’t leave you. If I can think of a way to stay, to make this work, I will.”

I feel like there’s a brick lodged in my throat. He can’t stay here for me. I’m not worth it. He must know that, he must know the kind of person I am.

“Why would you do that?” I ask. “Why . . . I give you nothing. I’m just this girl . . . you deserve someone else, someone . . . better. Anyone.”

“Gemma.”

I manage to swallow. “What?”

“I’m in love with you.”

Those words.
Those words
still my heart. They reach into my chest and make a fist. I can’t breathe. I feel too much that it numbs me. The sharp stab of happiness sinks into me like a blade, but it’s the blood, the aftermath, that makes me so incredibly scared.

“Did you hear me?” he asks quietly. He comes over and slips a hand to the base of my neck, holding me gently. I can see the moon reflected in his eyes as he peers down at me, trying to see the parts I’m trying to hide. “I love you.” His voice is gruff and so heartfelt that it’s almost like he’s putting his heart in my hands. “I love you.”

It hangs between us, heavy and weighted, like a hook.

I don’t know what to do, how to handle it, absorb it.

I only know how to deflect.

I grab him and kiss him hard. Before he has a chance to react, I’m pulling his shirt over his head and tumbling into the soft sand with him. My shirt is nearly ripped off, the skirt I wore for the occasion is yanked down along with my underwear.

We’re both naked in no time and I’m under him and he’s in me and all I can think about is that this is what it’s like to be devoured. To be consumed. To be loved. It all feels like the same thing.

There could be nothing left of me when he’s through.

When we’ve both come, sated and breathing hard, we lie on the silky sand and watch the blackened waves roll in, their crests lit by moonlight.

It’s a lonely sight, all that black on the horizon, all that nothing.

He loves me.

He loves me.

How?

“How can you love me?” I’m surprised that’s what comes out of my mouth but it’s the truth and it’s out there, floating in the dark.

He’s surprised, too. He balks at the question, his head jerking back.

After a long moment, the silence filled by the lapping water on the shore, he asks, “Do you want the truth?” Of course I want the truth. Of course I need to hear it. But I steel myself against it all the same. “It’s not easy to love you, Gemma,” he says, his fingers sliding up through my hair, gently, affectionately, in contrast to his words. “You are not an easy person to love because you don’t seem to have any use for it. You don’t want it. But the more you push, the more I pull. I fell in love with you because it was like staring at the frozen sea. I only saw the surface but I knew there was more underneath, miles of depth that no one has had a chance to discover.”

“I thought it was because I’m a good lay,” I say, attempting to make a joke.

His eyes harden. “It’s a lot more than that. I fell in love with you because you made me crazy, and you were like this unattainable world that I’d never be able to get my hands on. And then I did get my hands on you. And you got your hands on me. And I saw into your depths and found what I was looking for.”

“What?”

“You,” he says, pushing the hair back from my face. “A funny, sweet, vulnerable little girl who hides from the world under a big sheet of ice. That’s who I found. That’s who I want. That’s who I have. The artist, the poet, the dreamer, the risk-taker. The lover.”