‘Throw it away?’ he thundered. ‘I bled over that decision, Beth, even worse than when you—’ He stopped short and snapped his mouth shut, glaring at her through the darkness. ‘She’s an addict. You have no idea what it is like to live with someone who is controlled by their compulsion. The kind of damage it does to everyone around them. How the poison spreads.’
Tears pricked dangerously in Beth’s eyes, welling and meeting the salt that still clung to her lashes. It dissolved and filled her eyes with a stinging mix that she had to blink to displace. He was talking about her. He just didn’t know it. She turned her face away on the pretext of re-wetting her shredded rag. Behind her, pain saturated every word.
‘I have no interest in ever putting myself in that position again, ‘ Marc vowed.
She knew plenty about being an addict but what did she understand about living with one? Her response to Damien’s addiction had been to cave in and join him. Hardly a battle. Walking away from Janice must have been brutal for Marc—on all fronts—but it meant he kept his sanity. He survived. He controlled the spread of the poison.
Misery washed through her.
She lifted damp eyes back to his. Nodded. ‘I understand, Marc. I do understand.’ Only too well. Her eyelids dipped heavily. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you,’ she risked after a long silence, forcing her lids open.
Marc was silent for the longest time but finally spoke. ‘I’m sorry you weren’t too. I could have used a friend.’
Did he not even have one to turn to? ‘When did you walk out?’
‘Christmas Eve four years ago.’
She’d spent most Christmas Eves trying to act straight while her over-protective parents threw anxious glances between her and Damien, who’d done his best to appear attentive. Meanwhile Marc had been carrying suitcases away from his mother’s house. Lord, what a contrast. ‘Who did you … Were you alone—at the time?’
‘Are you asking whether I was single?’
She was so tired she could have been asking anything. ‘I’m asking whether you were alone.’ Worrying he’d had no one only made it worse.
He nodded. ‘I was.’
No father. No extended family in Australia. No friends. No girlfriend. Just a long-time addict mother. She closed her eyes for the pain she could hear in his voice all these years later. As a boy, Marc’s defence of his mother was legendary. He held on to love for a long time.
‘I went back out onto the trawlers for another couple of seasons. More than they recommend, but I felt I had nothing to hang around the city for. That decision turned my life around.’
‘You’re still such a glass half-full person, aren’t you?’ She’d clung to the concept when things were at their lowest ebb. ‘I remember that about you.’
He paused the sloshing. ‘We’re responsible for our happiness just as much as our actions. No one else is going to do that for you.’
True enough. She was a walking example. If she hadn’t dragged herself back from the abyss. An exhausted yawn split her thought.
‘I have to move faster, ‘ she said to herself as much as him. ‘If I keep slowing down, I’ll stop for good.’
‘You can stop any time you need to, you know that.’
If only life were that simple. That simply wasn’t true sometimes. As she and his mother knew only too well. ‘I’ll be here as long as you are.’
‘Still competitive?’
There was no way she was going to abandon him another time he needed her. But there was no way she was going to tell him that either. She forced her body to double its pace.
‘You got me.’
BETH had long given up trying to control the violent shaking of her frozen body, but the advancing ice-age finally showed in the loud chattering of her teeth. Not surprising, given she’d lost Marc’s fleecy sweatshirt to the dark depths of the ocean during the refloating. It meant she only had her flimsy blouse to keep her top half warm. And nothing on the bottom.
Marc had eventually accepted she wasn’t going to go back to the car and leave him alone with the dying whale, but he didn’t like it. Exhaustion had even wiped the frown off his face. But her loudly clattering teeth seemed to break the last of his tolerance.
‘Beth, you’re freezing.’
Both their bodies were well into survival mode now, her own barely conscious of what was going on around it. Neither of them could do more than lean on the whale for support and drag arm-after-painful-arm from the water to slosh onto the animal to keep it wet.
‘You have to get out of the water,’ he said. ‘You need to warm up.’
Her chill caused her voice to vibrate. It hurt even to speak, so tight was her chest. ‘It’s warmer in the water than out of it. And I’m not leaving you, Marc. You’d have to work twice as hard and you have nearly nothing left now.’
‘I’ll feel better knowing you’re safe and dry.’
‘I’m not leaving.’
She couldn’t see his glare in the darkness but she could feel it.
‘Fine,’ he finally growled. ‘Give me a second.’
He spread his dripping towel out on the whale’s hide and splashed slowly ashore. Beth lost him in the darkness after he passed her. It seemed like a lifetime, alone in the dark with the whale, but he finally returned.
‘Take this,’ he said bluntly, thrusting the last muesli bar at her.
Too exhausted to eat, she tucked it into the hip of her knickers. Too exhausted to protest, he just watched her do it.
‘Now this,’ he said, and thrust something else at her.
Beth reeled back and almost lost her footing, catching herself at the last second against the whale’s cold body. Her mind lurched out a preventative no! a split second before her body hummed an eager yessss!
‘It’s whisky. Dry, but it will warm you up a bit.’ He raised the silver flask right in her face and it glinted in the moonlight.
Her stomach roiled. Her blood raced. Her body screamed with excitement.
‘Get it away from me.’ She didn’t mean to shove him so roughly, didn’t even know where she found the energy, but the flask fell from his hands into the salt water. He scrabbled to pick it up, frowning in the moonlight.
‘Take it, Beth. You need to have something.’
‘I’ve been drinking water.’
‘That’ll keep you alive but it won’t stop you getting hypothermia. If you won’t get out of the water, then it has to be this.’
‘I don’t drink.’
Her ridiculously weak protest actually made him laugh. ‘Well, you’re going to have to make an exception, Princess. Survival comes first.’
He shook the water off the flask and held it out to her again.
Her chest heaved and her eyes locked on it. She could just reach out and—
‘I can’t, Marc …’ I can’t break down in front of you.
‘It won’t kill you.’ He unstoppered the flask and took a healthy swallow, wiping his hand across his sticky lips when he finished