Page 28 of Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The winter sun casts a rich yellow light across the water at Killcare as Josie stretches out her legs on the towel and squints as she looks out to the tinny with two fishermen in it, their rods propped up.

‘Tell me if you’re cold,’ Brett says as he spreads out a towel for himself and sits beside her.

It was his idea to come here for their second date. He didn’t use the word date, but that’s what it is. Josie’s friend Sue was really firm about it when she told her.

‘Did he ask you or did you ask him?’ Sue said.

‘As if I’d ask him!’

‘All right, all right.’ Sue had kept chewing her gum, then nodded enthusiastically. ‘Definitely a date. Where’s he taking you?’

‘He said it’s a surprise.’

‘Just as long as he doesn’t take you somewhere weird.’

‘Like where?’

‘That rollerskating rink at Long Jetty.’

‘Why would that be weird?’

‘Do you know any blokes who rollerskate?’

Sue had looked so serious when she said it, but Josie couldn’t take her seriously – why would Brett want to go rollerskating?

Except afterward she found herself worrying about it, which just went to show she was gullible like her mother always said, so maybe that means she’s gullible enough to think it’s a date. Except Sue was really sure it was.

Brett had wanted to pick her up at home but as it’s a Sunday she told him not to – that would involve her parents looking out the living-room window and seeing her getting in his car, which she’d have to explain later, and it just wasn’t worth the hassle.

Instead she said she’d meet him at the nearby jetty at Brisbane Water.

Well, actually, first she said she could meet him wherever he had planned to take her, but he insisted on picking her up because it was a surprise.

The surprise, it turned out, was that he’d bought prawns and some bread rolls, and he brought a lemon from home and a knife to cut it with, then he picked her up and drove her to Killcare, taking towels out of the boot, and now they’re sitting in the warm sun and he’s peeling the prawns, which is really such a nice thing for him to do.

‘Thanks,’ she says, gesturing to the prawn-shell carnage on the paper. ‘You had to get all messy.’

‘No worries,’ he says with a grin, then he walks to the water’s edge and rinses his hands. ‘Easiest place in the world to peel prawns,’ he says as he returns, shaking off the water.

He cuts open the bread rolls then tucks prawns inside, squeezing lemon over them, before handing a roll to Josie. It’s one of the sweetest things anyone has ever done for her: so simple yet caring. Thoughtful, that’s what he is.

She knows what Sue would say: He just wants to get in your pants .

She knows what she would say back: What if I just want to get in his?

Except she wouldn’t say that, because even the thought of it makes her blush.

And feel curious. And, sometimes, giddy.

It’s not as though she hasn’t had crushes on boys, and wondered what it would be like to …

you know, do things . But she hasn’t done things.

‘Pretty good prawns,’ Brett murmurs. ‘Salty.’

‘I wonder where they caught them.’

‘Tuggerah Lake. That’s where he usually goes.’

‘Oh?’

The casual way he says it, the ‘usually’, suggests he’s familiar with this prawn catcher and that intrigues her.

She wants to know the story. She wants to know him.

It feels comforting and strange and exciting and settled all at the same time.

Is this what falling in love is? Sue couldn’t tell her because it’s never happened to her, she said.

Once she thought she got close but the bloke got back together with his ex and moved to Newcastle.

‘Yeah.’ Brett grins. ‘My neighbour. Terry. He catches them at Tuggerah and sells them out of his garage. Everyone knows about it, so he does well.’ He keeps grinning as he takes another bite of his roll.

‘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.