The Guilt Trip(24)

Noah had stroked her hair from her face. “But you’ve only just met him. Are you honestly going to put all your plans on hold for a guy you’ve only known for a couple of months?”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she’d said. “Who does? But I just know that right now, I don’t want to go halfway around the world and risk never seeing him again.”

“And what about us?” he’d said, lifting himself off to study her.

She’d pulled herself up onto her elbows. “What about us?” she’d said. “You’ve had four years to work on that, but you chose to sleep with pretty much every freshman who’s come onto campus instead.”

“Are you saying you’ve wanted more, before now?” he asked incredulously.

How had he not noticed? She’d obviously become too adept at hiding her true feelings, and now he was finally reciprocating them, she didn’t feel fully able to. It’s what they called Sod’s Law.

She’d shaken her head in answer. It seemed easier to lie.

“Why don’t you just come with me to Thailand?” he pleaded. “Just to give us a chance of seeing where this might go.”

She’d laughed. “And if it doesn’t work?”

His hand had trailed between her breasts with a feather-light touch and down her flat stomach.

“I would have lost you and Jack.”

“But this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Rach. This is never going to come around again. Before you know it, we’ll be chained to a desk and married with kids.”

“We’re twenty-two,” she said, arching her back as she felt his fingers. “We’ve got all the time in the world.”

Perhaps if she’d known then what she knows now, she’d think again, because all of a sudden, time isn’t so infinite. It does run out, for all of us. Days run into weeks, and months run into years, and we find that the twenty-year-old we thought we’d always be, was lost decades ago.

“Here they go,” says Ali, as she lowers herself slowly into a side split on her yoga mat. She demonstrates her suppleness even further by pushing her head forward so that the peak of her baseball cap touches her knee.

Rachel doesn’t know whether she should watch her, or the men, as they run into the sea with their surfboards under their arms. Will deftly jumps up and straddles the board as soon as he’s past the breaking waves, while Jack and Noah struggle to untangle themselves from the leash that’s attached to their ankles.

“Oh my God, it’s Dumb and Dumber!” Paige laughs, as Noah manages to get himself up onto it, only to fall straight off the other side, while Jack’s lying down on his, paddling furiously but going nowhere.

“They call that the dick dragger,” says Ali, laughing. “He’s going to feel that later on.”

There’s a tightening in Rachel’s chest as she watches the three of them move further toward the monstrous waves.

“He’s not going to take them all the way out, is he?” she asks no one in particular.

“Don’t worry,” says Ali. “The waves look bigger than they actually are.”

Rachel would imagine that the reverse is true when you’re out there and there’s one looming large over you.

“Will knows what he’s doing,” says Ali, as a dark-haired man, with a mustache and a body to die for, approaches them.

“You iz Ali?” he says in broken English.

“Yes,” she says without getting up from the splits. “You must be Ramiro.”

She throws a glance at Rachel and raises her eyebrows, as if to say, “Surprise!”

Rachel groans inwardly. Having to do a downward dog on a busy beach is surprise enough, without being told to contract your pelvic floor by an Antonio Banderas lookalike.

They laugh, though, as he manhandles them all into the bridge position and then instructs them to “Frust, frust, frust,” as fast as they can.

By the time he asks them to adopt the lotus pose, Rachel suspects he’s actually a comedy act rather than a yoga teacher, and keeps one eye open, on the lookout for what he’s going to come up with next.

Her heart lurches as a wave starts building out at sea, rolling and rolling toward a line of surfers straddling their boards.

Her instinct is to shout, “It’s behind you,” but they know it’s coming—in fact, that’s exactly what they’re waiting for. She wonders for the umpteenth time what would possess anybody to want to do that.

She squints to see if she can pick any of the boys out of the line-up, but in their dark wetsuits they all look the same; like sharks rising up out of the depths. Then she catches a flash of fluorescent green, the topside of Will’s surfboard, and sees him frantically waving his arms above his head. She stops breathing as her eyes follow his call to see Jack and Noah floating aimlessly into the path of the rising swell.

She gets to her feet, for all it will do, as the crest of the wave starts curling over onto itself. It’s like watching in slow motion as the white water comes crashing down, taking everything in its path with it. A few brave or stupid surfers ride it in, but it gobbles Noah and Jack up and all that Rachel can see are the bright tips of their boards going over and over as if they’re in a washing machine.

“No!” she shrieks, running to the water’s edge.