Where Sea Meets Sky by Karina Halle
I think normally I’d be oohing and aahing a bit more, but after seeing the beauty of the Routeburn Track—and after everything that had happened this morning—it’s all a bit anticlimactic.
So my thoughts keep going to Josh. He leans against the railing beside me, sipping the coffee, and I want to stare at him instead of one of the world’s wonders. He’s the wonder of my new world. His arm is pressed up against mine and I’m caught in a tangle of conflicting feelings.
On one hand, if I want to pursue things with Josh, I’m free to. I’m not with anyone. Nick and I are over. I don’t have to feel guilty, I don’t have to make the hard choices. There’s no one in our way.
Yet I am in our way. Because there is the other hand, the one that tells me getting involved with Josh would be a bad idea. I care too much about him now for this to be just a fling, and eventually he is going to leave and that ache in my chest might turn into a full-on wound.
The only way this can possibly work is if I can find a way to detach even further. Have fun, a lot of fun, a lot of good, hot sex, and try my hardest to keep my heart where it belongs.
I just don’t know if I’m strong enough to take a chance.
But as I stare up at Josh’s strong, beautiful face and he catches my eyes, his lips quirking into a cocky smile, I don’t think I’m strong enough to not take one.
The butterflies are taking flight again, their wings tickling my insides, and I swallow hard, looking away and breaking the connection.
“Dolphins at the bow!” someone yells from the front of the ship, and everyone around us starts to head on over, some slipping on wet patches on the deck. It’s pandemonium and Josh’s face lights up like a Christmas tree.
“Go see them,” I tell him.
He looks at me like I’m crazy. “You don’t want to?”
I shrug. “Dolphins, I’ve seen them all.”
He raises a brow. “Well, look at you, Miss Too Cool for Dolphins.” Then he runs off up the deck with everyone else.
I look at Amber. “You’re not interested?”
“I’m a bit seasick,” she says. She nods her head at the wheelhouse. “And this is the one place where the wind isn’t killing me. I’m from California, you know, I’m not used to this during the summer.”
“Well, it’s not summer yet,” I tell her. “And I’m fully aware you’re from California, you won’t shut up about it.”
She smiles and takes my coffee from my hand, having a gulp of it. I have to say, I’ve grown really fond of my cousin in this last while. I’m going to miss her to pieces when she’s gone.
As if sensing my hidden affection, she gives me back the coffee, her eyes sparkling. “So,” she says, and the way she draws it out makes me hold in my breath. “Now that you’re not with Nick . . .”
I don’t have time to play games. “Yes?”
“Oh come on, you know what I’m asking.”
“I don’t.”
She rolls her eyes playfully. “Are you going to go for Josh?”
I give her a blank stare. “And why would I do that?”
“Because, the guy is, like . . . obsessed with you.”
I raise my brow and try to keep my face as blank as possible. Obsessed with me? My chest fills with a wonderful warmth and a smile fights its way to my lips.
“What do you mean?” I ask super casually, keeping the smile at bay.
She doesn’t seem to buy it. “Like you don’t know. He wants you. Bad. And I don’t know but I’ve caught the way you look at him. You guys need to combust. With each other, preferably. That’s why I thought you guys were going off together last night.”
I shake my head, even though the smile has crept onto my face. “No, I seriously just wanted to see the sunset.” I pause. I want to grill her for more information but I need to do it in the most delicate way. “I, erm, I thought that you wanted to get with him or something.”
She waves that notion away with her hand. “No, not really. It just happened that one time and we talked about it afterward.”
My smile disappears. Something sinks inside me, heavy and deep. “What?”
Amber frowns. “What?”
I swallow uneasily, my pulse starting up in my throat. “What happened that one time?”
She’s uncertain now. “Um, the thing in the theater.”
“What thing?” my voice is hard, my eyes harder.
She shrinks slightly. “I thought Nick told you. He saw us.” I just stare at her. “You know, making out and stuff.”
I purse my lips, my eyes widening, as if that helps me to absorb this awful information. “Nick saw you and Josh making out in the theater?”
“It wasn’t anything nasty, I swear,” she says, starting to panic. “Just kissing and groping, that’s it.”
Oh my god, I’m going to throw her overboard.
“Oh my god,” I say. “Oh my god. Oh my god.”
“Shit,” Amber swears. “Fuck. I’m sorry Gemma, I thought you knew, I thought Nick told you. Otherwise I wouldn’t have said anything.”
“You wouldn’t?”
“No, well, it’s just that it happened once and it didn’t mean anything and I could tell Josh wasn’t into it.”
“Of course he was into it,” I snap. “He’s a dude and you’re a hot fucking chick and not the one with the asshole boyfriend.”
“Gemma, seriously,” she says. “I didn’t think you cared this much. You’ve had Nick with you this entire time.”
“I don’t care this much,” I say, trying to hide all the emotion from my voice. My stomach swirls with rotten green jealousy. It shouldn’t sicken me, I have no right whatsoever to care about what Josh did with Amber, especially seeing as I was with Nick, but it still makes me feel like I’m going to chunder.
I wish I could blame it on being seasick.
With trepidation, Amber places her hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
I sigh angrily, blowing a strand of hair from my face. “It’s fine.”
“It’s not,” she says pitifully. “Please don’t let this ruin things between you and Josh and please don’t tell him I told you. He’d kill me.”
I bet he would, I think. Suddenly the risk of going after Josh seems higher. He couldn’t really like me all that much if he was willing to feel up Amber and stick his tongue down her throat. If I’m already this bothered by the image of them together, how bothered am I going to be when he leaves New Zealand?
Amber is staring at me with big, pleading eyes and I manage to give her a smile. I’m pissed off as hell but she’s actually doing me a favor. She’s helped make my choice. My heart will stay buried but intact. I won’t have to lose any more pieces of myself.
“I won’t say anything,” I tell her, and it’s a promise. “It’s fine.” That’s a lie, but one out of two ain’t bad.
When the dolphins seem to have gone on their way, Josh joins us. He has his swagger and his easy smile and I realize nothing I choose is going to be simple.
“How was it?” Amber says a little too brightly.
He shrugs. “Meh, dolphins, you know, whatever,” he says, mimicking me and my accent.
I can barely crack a smile and his expression falters, as if he thinks he’s offended me. I turn away from him, concentrating on a waterfall that the ship is approaching. I stay turned away for as long as I can.
Chapter Thirteen
JOSH
“Maybe Nick isn’t the problem.”
Amber had said that to me on the shores of Lake Wanaka, and at the time I had completely brushed it off because, hello, obviously the roid-monkey douchebag boyfriend is the problem here. With him out of the picture, everything would be smooth sailing for me and Gemma.
But that’s not the case. Something happened, something I can only seem to pinpoint to the boat ride on Milford S
Gemma seemed resilient though, if not a bit quiet, and by the time we were cruising around the bay on a boat full of Japanese tourists, she seemed to open up. Lighten up. It was like watching the sun come through the clouds.
Then I went and saw some dolphins jumping about and when I came back, it was like she had turned to ice. And as we get on the bus that will take us back to Mr. Orange, the ice only seems to thaw in Amber’s direction, not mine.
I can’t figure it out. I sit behind them on the bus, beside some young dude who keeps elbowing me and playing his headphones too loud. The drive back from Milford is actually just as stunning as the Sound. The mountains loom high overhead, there’s a fuck-ton of waterfalls we keep stopping at, and we pass through Homer Tunnel, which cuts through the ranges. We even see kea parrots hopping around at one of the waterfall car parks and trying to make off with a picnicker’s food.
It’s here, as most of the bus group goes to look at waterfall number one billion, that I pull Gemma aside. I can’t help it.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
She tugs out of my grasp, and from that alone I know she’s not. “I’ve been better, Josh.”
I bite my lip, wanting to ask her if it’s all because of what happened or if it’s something I did. But I let it go. She’s been through enough today and I don’t want to add to her problems.
“Well, if you need someone to talk to,” I say, but I know she won’t be turning to me. There’s this strange emptiness in her eyes that chills me. I remember everything she said last night. Her fears.
She walks back to the bus, uninterested in the waterfall and all the curious green parrots roaming the area, looking for handouts.
She’s uninterested in me.
I refuse to let that deter me, though. I’ve come this far. I’ve just got to take my time.
But I’m leaving in three weeks.
I don’t really have time.
We all get back on the coach and finish the rest of the route. It takes about four hours for us to finally reach Glenorchy where we left Mr. Orange, and I find it kind of funny that the drive feels just as long as the days of walking we just did. I can’t believe I just walked over a mountain range. As active as I am at home, the most strenuous thing I’ve ever done was the infamous Grouse Grind up Grouse Mountain. It takes about forty minutes to the top. That was nothing compared to what I just accomplished.
The minute the bus pulls into the Routeburn car park, I can feel that something is wrong. It’s instinct but it’s huge and unwavering.
We hop off the bus and make our way over to Mr. Orange. At first the VW bus looks fine, but on closer inspection it looks like the back window has been busted out.
“Oh shit,” I yell and start running but Gemma has already beaten me to it. It looks like someone has bashed it in completely and the gravel around us is peppered with sharp shards of glass.
“Oh my god,” she cries out, her hand to her mouth. “My uncle is going to kill me.”
“Gemma, it’s okay,” I say, even though it’s not really. She’s had one hell of a day.
“How is it okay?!” she cries out, and her eyes start to water. “I don’t have a job to come home to, how am I going to afford to replace the window?”
I raise up my hands and come toward her. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll help, I’ll pay for it.”
She glares at me as if I said the wrong thing. “Who do you think you are, some Prince fucking Charming swooping in with heroics? I don’t need your saving.”
Whoa. I blink at her, shocked by her sudden anger.
I’m about to retort with a “What?!” but Amber is peering through the window and screeching.
“Holy fuck!” she yells. “There are things living in it!”
We all gasp and immediately leap backward away from Mr. Orange. Not one of my finer moments.
“Okay, hold on,” I say, manning up. I quickly run along the forest edge and pick up a long stick. There are a few other cars in the lot that also have their windows smashed, victims of hooligans, but there’s no one else around to see this.
I edge back to the bus and try to look through the part of the window that Amber was at.
She wasn’t wrong. I can see small fuzzy bodies moving along the floor of the van and on the front seats.
“I’ve got this,” I tell the girls and grip the stick harder. I motion for Gemma to give me the keys. She throws them to me and I catch them in one hand. I creep my way over to the driver’s side. There’s a lot of condensation and fog inside the windows so I can’t see much except the shadows of something moving inside.
I quickly go over what Gemma had told me, that there were no big predators in New Zealand. Still, I’m being overly cautious as I unlock the door. I take in a deep breath or two, then fling it open.
All I see next are claws coming at my face and a whoosh of wings. I duck and whack the air with my stick but it doesn’t hit anything but empty space.
Beside me a kea parrot lands gracefully with a few beats of its red and green wings and stares at me, as if to say, Why do you have a stick and why are you breaking into my newfound sanctuary?
I straighten up and look back into the bus. There are at least three other parrots inside, perched on the back of seats and the steering wheel.
Gemma and Amber squeal girlish sounds that I may have made when the parrot flew at me. They come to stand behind me.
“Jesus,” Gemma swears, holding on to my arm, and for that moment I don’t regret my decision to become the parrot fighter. “Keas.”
“Wow,” Amber says breathlessly. “Why would parrots break into our car? Unless . . .” she looks at me with quizzical eyes. “Unless instead of Planet of the Apes . . .”
“Amber,” I say, holding my palm out to her. “Stop.”
“. . . this has become Planet of the Parrots,” she finishes.
I throw my head back and sigh and it takes us a good ten minutes of poking them with the stick and waving our arms around like monkeys to make sure every parrot is out of the bus.
Miraculously there doesn’t seem to be much stolen. Amber is missing two bottles of Waiheke Island wine she picked up in Auckland and Gemma can’t find her iPod, which is another financial blow for her, but everything else, including her uncle’s stash of seventies porn, remains in the van.
Naturally, both the thieves and the parrots have left a colossal mess but it’s getting dark and we need to camp somewhere. We throw towels over our seats and head out along the road, me in the back and the girls in the front. The wind is cold as it whips in through the back window and the moon is out when we finally pull into our next stop, Arrowtown.
We find a holiday park that has a spot for us and it’s not long before we’re all getting settled for bed. Naturally, I let Amber and Gemma have the foldout below while I take the bunk. The last few times I’ve slept up here I haven’t fallen to my death, and besides, it’s the only place in the bus that the pooping parrots didn’t have access to.
I don’t tell them that, of course.
The next morning there’s dew covering the tarp above my head and everything feels slightly damp, but it’s warm compared to the last few nights out in the bush. I wake up before the girls and try to land in the bus below without waking them. I make good long use of the showers at the campsite. It’s the first shower for days—and it’s a hot one—and I stay in it as long as possible, even though it means pumping more twenty-cent coins into the machine.
By the time I emerge, my skin is pink and red like a newborn but I don’t care.
Thankfully, all the beauty stays with me. The sunset and sunrise over Key Summit. Gemma’s honest words. The look on her face while she took in the world, so new to her. The feel of her between my arms.
I want her so badly and it’s more than I can bear. Her sudden frost keeps me back and I’m constantly misreading her looks and her words, wanting to believe that she feels something for me but so afraid that it’s all in my imagination. It was almost like she flirted more with me when she was with Nick, and now that she’s not, I’m nothing more than some guy paying for petrol.
After a quick breakfast, we work our way out of tiny, quaint Arrowtown and onto a narrow winding road that’s supposed to lead us from here to Christchurch. Before the Routeburn Track, I’d contacted Tibald to see where he was and it seemed like Christchurch was the only place where our paths would intersect.
In our original plans, we were supposed to stop overnight at a bed-and-breakfast in a town called Twizel and go on a Lord of the Rings Tour, which my inner geek was flipping out over, but now with Nick gone, Gemma seems hellbent on getting us to decent civilization.
She drives Mr. Orange as if her life depends on it, and even when we stop at Lindis Pass to take pictures of the yellow flowers dotted on rolling suede brown hills, she seems like a woman on a mission. None of what we’re witnessing seems to be sinking into her brain, and her face remains impassive and dull, as if she’s not really here.
The ache she was talking about, well, I’m starting to feel it now. I look at Amber and she doesn’t seem to notice that Gemma has gone into autopilot, her own attention focused out the window at the rolling hills of tussock under a saturated blue sky, not on our driver. But mine is, and I just want to beg her to stop driving, to just take a moment and breathe.
Luckily—or unluckily—Mr. Orange decides to do that for us, and it’s all thanks to me.
Outside of Twizel there’s a turnoff for Mount Cook, the tallest mountain in New Zealand. I get Gemma to turn onto what looks to be a private drive. From where the main road is, it looks like it climbs and snakes its way up a hill, providing spectacular views of the brilliantly blue Lake Pukaki and Mount Cook. I want a view that will knock Gemma’s socks off. I want her to feel.