Burning Moon (20 page)

My mother said something to me once. Well, she'd burbled something to me in a somewhat slurred voice with the half-closed eyes of a mad, drunken woman, while trying to pick herself up off the floor. (It was a delightful sight, which is probably why her words have stuck with me through all the years.)

“Sometimes in order to move forward, you have to go back to the beginning again.” *Hiccup*

At the time I'd paid her no heed. I never did. I thought the words were nothing more than the intoxicated ramblings of my liquored-up mother, the actress who talked incessantly but never said a single thing. At the time she'd said it, I thought she was just trying to justify the fact that she was being dragged into rehab for the fifth time.

But now, holding a ticket to Thailand in my sweaty hand once again, almost a year to the day,
I got it
.

The trip had been a very easy sell to my family and friends this time—they practically pushed me onto the plane. Any reservations they had once had about my feelings for Damien were all gone. I strode into the airport feeling happier than I had in nearly twelve months, and then I stopped. There was Annie, leaning against a pillar with a massive smile on her face and a bag at her feet.

“What are you doing here?” I ran up to her.

“I'm coming with you.” She smiled at me playfully. “Someone needs to make sure you don't go missing again.”

I threw my arms around my cousin. I loved the idea of having company on the trip. We linked arms and walked through the airport together. It felt strange—sort of familiar and yet totally different this time.
I
was different. For starters, I wasn't wearing my pajamas, but most importantly I wasn't scared shitless that my life was falling apart and that I was alone.

I had learned that life is a game of improvisation—you have to adapt to the unforeseen circumstances and roll with the punches. But I also learned that as you go, you learn to defend yourself. Until you get stronger and faster and better.

I felt better.

I managed to get onto the plane this time without causing delays and incurring the dirty death stares of the other passengers. Bizarrely, I was sitting in almost exactly same place as the last time. Annie was nowhere near me, as we hadn't booked tickets at the same time, but it was very comforting knowing that she was there. As I buckled up, I couldn't help myself and immediately looked up the aisle in the direction that Damien had been sitting before, on the off (far, far off) chance that fate would have brought him back to me that easily, but she hadn't.

I looked around at my fellow travelers. To my left were obvious honeymooners, desperate for a horizontal surface, or perhaps waiting for the toilet to become conveniently unoccupied. Across the aisle from me sat an angry-looking teenage girl and her tired-looking parents. In front of me sat an old couple that appeared to be in their seventies. I wondered if Damien and I would ever be like that one day.

Everyone around me was settling in nicely now as the plane reached its cruising altitude. Books were opened, iPads were turned on, and TV screens fired to life. But as they were watching their movies and reading their novels, I was playing a totally different kind of movie in my head, over and over again.

It went a little something like this.

I arrive at Burning Moon, looking gorgeous, of course, and I immediately go to find Damien, who is no doubt already settled into his favorite moon-watching spot. I walk up to him confidently and call out his name. As he turns, our eyes lock and he smiles at me—that slightly crooked, sexy, sideways naughty-boy grin that is his trademark.

He is wearing black—a faded, torn, and slightly creased T-shirt. His hair has grown a bit, and it is messy. I smile back at him, and then I run and jump into his arms. We hug and tell each other that we love each other and that we no longer want to be apart. We kiss and it is amazing. The moon slowly starts turning red in the distance and we make love, and that is it.

Simple. Damien and I would be together.

End of movie. Roll credits. Applause.

I played this through a few more times in my mind's eye, each time adding a little something extra here and there as I went. By the third rerun Damien wasn't wearing a shirt, by the fourth he was completely naked—followed by several other variations of that scenario, which I'm not sure I should share with you. Just use your imagination…it was a very long flight, okay? But somewhere around the sixth rerun I think I managed to fall asleep.

We arrived in Thailand safely, despite some turbulence during the landing. I looked out the window and the rain was pelting down in thick, heavy sheets and the whole world was wet and glistening. It reminded me of my first night with Damien. I had thought about that night so many times over the past year. I hadn't wanted to forget a thing about our time together, or about Damien. I'd often imagined him down to the minutest detail, the tiny scar he had on his eyebrow, the cluster of freckles that were sprinkled across his shoulders, the twirling lines of his back tattoo, and the dark depth of his inky eyes.

The plane came to a stop and I jumped up and grabbed my bags speedily this time, eager to disembark as quickly as humanly possible. My destiny was out there after all, and I needed to go find it and claim it. I glanced behind me to see Annie muscling her way down the aisle. I was so glad she was coming with me. Maybe with a little luck she might meet someone in Thailand and dump that sleazy Trev (confirmed as an abbreviation of Trevvor, with a double
V
—even his name was irksome).

The airport was exactly as I remembered it, but this time, as I walked past the guards they smiled at me. No one pounced or took my photo or pointed or stared. I went through customs without incident, but just as I was about to exit, I heard a familiar voice call my name.

“
Leelee.
” The Thai accent was unmistakable, and I knew exactly who it was the second I heard it.

“Hi!” I turned around and came face-to-face with the three smiling guards from the year before, Ang, Ginjan, and Piti. It was uncanny how all of this was playing out as if it was an exact repeat of the previous year—except this time I wasn't being dragged off in handcuffs, looking (and I suspect smelling) like a hobo.

“You come back!” Ginjan said with such enthusiasm that it seemed to be our cue to start hugging each other like long lost friends—which I guess in a way we were.

“I did,” I said, half squeezed to death in Gin's surprisingly firm grip.

“And who this?” They turned and looked at Annie.

“This is my cousin, Annie.”

“Annie.” They all sang out simultaneously, as if she was also a long lost friend.

“
Sawadee krap
,” Annie said rather clumsily, gazing down at something scribbled on her hand. But it didn't matter, because they all lit up. “I've been learning some basic phrases in the plane.”

“You know, you become very famous last year after you left airport,” Piti said, and they all nodded simultaneously.

“Very famous.”

“Yes, your picture was everywhere, and we all say, ‘We know that girl,'” Ang added.

Yes, the infamous photo had had a life of its bloody own, even after I'd returned to South Africa. For a whole month it had been plastered across every computer screen, smartphone, and tablet across the globe. From Papua New Guinea to Patagonia, I was everywhere.

“So you have boyfriend now?” Ang asked me.

I shook my head. “No.”

“So you and that other guy just become friends?”

“Which other guy?”

Ang pointed in the direction of the door. “The one that was just here. The one you with last time. The thin one?”

My heart started racing—could it be true? I glanced at Annie and she looked back at me with the same startled expression that I must have had on my face.

“Damien?”

Piti nodded. “Yes. One with tattoos and dark eyes.”

My adrenaline spiked and my whole body woke up instantly. “Damien was here?”

I looked in the direction that Ginjan had pointed, but I couldn't see him.

Ang nodded and looked at her watch. “Only five minutes ago. He went through customs and Ginjan and I say to each other, ‘Yes, we know him.'”

“What?” My shriek startled them, and some other tourists who were standing too close, too. I grabbed onto Annie's arm and squeezed it in sheer excitement.

My new set of BFFs looked curiously at me. “This is good or bad thing?”

“It's good. Very good!” Annie said.

“I came here looking for him.”

Ang, Ginjan, and Piti all looked at me with doe eyes and then said a few things to one another in Thai. Before I knew it, they'd grabbed us both and were dragging us across the airport. I slung my bag over my shoulder; this time I'd packed light.

“That line take too long. We take you straight to the front. Come, come this way.”

“This is so exciting.” Annie squealed as we all raced past the long line of people and went straight to the front.

We all hugged once more and just before Annie and I went through customs, Gin shouted something that made me smile then and still makes me smile to this day.

“When you get that boy, you must feed him. Too thin.”

Ang nodded in agreement and added, “Too thin. Too thin. He need sandwich. Or two.”

If only they knew the punch he packed underneath that shirt.

Annie and I bolted straight for the door and toward my happy ever after (hopefully).

“Hurry. Run,” I screamed as Annie fell behind. Clearly adrenaline hadn't given her the gift of incredible speed, like it had given me. I imagined seeing Damien standing outside the airport in all his black, dark glory, looking as hot and mysterious and deliciously dangerous as I had remembered him every night in my dreams—God, that was a corny thing to admit. But it was true; he was an almost nightly feature in all my dreams.

I ran out of the airport and was hit by that familiar wall of sticky heat, but this time it was accompanied by rain. I didn't let it slow me down, though.

“Oh wow!” Annie puffed behind me, getting drenched. “It's boiling here, yet simultaneously wet.”

I immediately scanned my surroundings: tuk-tuks, confused-looking tourists pointing at maps and trying to decipher the signs, and of course, a few more of those lovey-dovey honeymooners who didn't care if they could read the signs.

But then I saw him.

“There he is.” I pointed and Annie jumped.

“Where?”

“There…black hair, black shirt, and…
Oh shit
, he's climbing into a tuk-tuk. Fuck! Run!”

And so we ran as if we were the last runners of a relay race, tasked with carrying the batons over the finish line. We almost tripped over ten people as we went, and Annie ran straight into someone's suitcase.

“He's getting away.”

And that's when Annie started screaming. Loudly.

“Damien, Damien!” She shrieked like a banshee and waved her arms in the air, almost swatting a few people along the way.

I joined her. “Damien. Damien.” We both yelled, but it was too late, his tuk-tuk pulled off and started making its way out into the congested road.

Now I'm sure you're all familiar with another popular theme in Hollywood movies, where someone jumps into the back of a taxi, points, and shouts, “Follow that car!” And then the driver springs into action and the car goes careering forward. Well, this was not like that.

We jumped into the nearest tuk-tuk, sopping wet, and pointed. “Follow that car.”

But the driver turned around and looked at us with a decidedly confused kind of a thing happening on his face.

“Not understand.”

“Follow. Go after. Chase.” I could see my words were still not getting through.

Annie pulled out her phone and started pressing buttons frantically. “Google Translate, Google Translate…
aha
, got it!” She held her phone up for the driver. He read it and started nodding.

“Yes, yes,” I screeched again. “Follow!”

Naively I was still expecting a speedy pull off. But no! The tuk-tuk chugged to life and spluttered and shuddered its way into the road—and straight into bumper-to-bumper traffic.

“We're never going to catch up to him like this,” I said to Annie.

“Jump.” She practically pushed me out and we both started running from tuk-tuk to tuk-tuk, sticking our heads into every opening and peering inside—and causing a lot of fright as we went. But no Damien.

We finally reached the end of the line of traffic and stopped. That was it. There was nowhere else to look. Annie threw herself down on the embankment next to the road. We were both wet and out of breath, and my ribs were killing me.

“Fuck. I didn't sign up for this, Lilly.” She rolled over onto her back and lay there, not caring that people were looking at her strangely. “I taste blood. I actually taste blood. Is that normal?”

I sat down next to her feeling completely disappointed. We'd been so, so close.

Now what?” Annie asked.

“I don't know.”

“You know him, where would he go?”

“Backpackers lodge,” I suggested.

“Which one?”

But I didn't have an answer for her, and the only thing we could do was to systematically go to all the backpackers lodges and ask for him—and so began our long, tedious, and ultimately unsuccessful hunt for Damien through the backpacking underworld of Thailand.

Let me tell you a little something about backpackers—they can easily be divided into two groups. Hippies with dreadlocks and dirty feet and young, drunk students. By the end of the day, after visiting ten lodges, Annie and I had somehow managed to drink two rounds of shots with the students, who promised to relay my message to Damien if he checked in—although I suspected that two minutes after we left they would forget. We had also reluctantly had one very small puff of weed from a hippie who had insisted that the clarity of mind the magic herb would provide would help us find Damien. (I was desperate, okay, and by that stage maybe a little tipsy, too.) But as the day went on, I started to suspect that Annie might have had more than one puff.

“This is so much fun…” She was literally skipping down the street. “I feel like a student again, except that now I can afford
not
to sleep there and I don't have to hang something on my door handle when I want to have sex in my room and I don't need to eat leftover microwave popcorn for breakfast…” She laughed loudly and abruptly stopped. “Oh my God, I am
soooo
hungry.” She turned and looked at me with this goofy grin, and I couldn't help but laugh at her.

Annie had always been the truly cool one. If ever you wanted to know what you should be wearing and what bag to have on your arm, she was your go-to girl.

The sun was setting over Phuket and the streets started to buzz and hum with activity. We passed a street vendor selling various types of foods on sticks. Annie bought several of them and wolfed them down in a few bits.

“Mmmm-aaaaah,” she moaned. “This is so good. You want one?” She waved a meaty stick at me, but I had far too many butterflies in my stomach to even consider eating. “Oh please don't tell Trev I'm eating this, we're supposed to be doing some weird liquid detox together.” She rolled her eyes. “Lemon juice, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper, I kid you not.”

I quickly wondered if this might be a good opportunity to talk Trev with her. As Jane says, when all of your friends don't like your boyfriend, that's got to mean something.

“So you and Trev, hey?” I tried to sound casual.

Her face lit up. “I've been dying to tell you, but didn't know if I should…he's asked me to move in with him. And I know it's only been a few months, but it just feels right.” She squealed with delight and looked so happy I suddenly felt bad. Who was I to judge after all?

“So where to now?” she asked as we wandered through the market aimlessly, looking at all the pretty, shiny things but resisting the temptation to purchase them…Well, except maybe just that one handbag and an adorable little necklace that would look great with a pair of earrings I owned. We walked farther and farther into the night and I started to wonder whether I should try to find that strip club, on the off chance that I would find him there. The chances were slim, though, probably zero. But I had no other leads and nowhere else to go until they sent the map.

But in the red-light district, everything looks the same. It's red and luminescent and the streets are lined with boys in short skirts. We must have walked around in circles for an hour before finding the club. It hadn't been an easy find, and on the way we'd been solicited by at least five men. Well, at least I knew if my current career didn't pan out, I could move to Thailand, buy a pair of Perspex heels and a short skirt, and probably make a good living.

We stood outside for a few minutes. I was too nervous to go inside. What if Damien was behind this door? And if he was, what was I going to say to him?

I'd thought about it on the plane for hours, but I still wasn't any closer to figuring it all out. How would the logistics of a relationship with him actually work? Was I going to explore the world with him? Was he going to come back to South Africa with me? A long-distance Skype relationship?

Nothing had physically changed between us since last year. I still had a life and a job back home, and Damien also had a life. And our lives were still very different.

Last year Damien had said that maybe love wasn't enough…I hoped that wasn't true anymore.

“Hey.” Annie clicked her fingers in front of my face. “Stop overthinking it, Lilly. Let's just go inside.” Annie pushed the doors open, and I took a deep breath.

But Damien wasn't there. Instead some blond beefcake was thrusting his G-string bum into the air and slapping it with his hand—a sight that I wish I'd never seen. This guy was so muscular that he had nothing even vaguely resembling a neck; his head just kind of attached straight onto his shoulders. We watched on as he bumped and grinded a bit more, with the same kind of horrifying fascination you get when you drive past a car accident—until the song was over and the houselights came on.

“So
not
my type,” Annie said, sounding amused. I couldn't agree more. But judging by the wads of cash being flung at him, the crowd clearly didn't seem to share our opinion.

“Oh my bejesus, well if it's not Miss Infamy herself.” I looked up and saw my two old strip-club buddies, Mark and Francoise. “You look beautiful, that hair of yours! Speaking of which”—he turned his attention to Annie now—“who is this stunning redhead beside you?”

“This is my cousin, Annie.” Annie extended a hand and Mark pulled her into a friendly hug.

“It's always nice to meet a fellow red…and they say blondes have more fun.” He winked at her and ran his hands through his hair dramatically. “Now come. Your cousin must have a drink with us. And I won't take no for an answer.”

“I can't believe I found you here,” I said, sipping the champagne that had already been shoved into my paw as soon as we sat down to join them.

“Oh, this is our little tradition, we always come here before the party.”

“Do you have any idea where the party is going to be this year?” Annie asked.

“Nope, we haven't received the map yet. But that's half the fun, isn't it?” He winked at her.

“So…” A conspiratorial smile swept across Mark's face and although he raised his eyebrows at me, his forehead didn't move. It remained as smooth and silky as Botoxed marble. “So…where is Damien? We were secretly hoping to see him here tonight, I mean, who can forget that little show he put on for us, and of course, who can forget your little smooch. I think every man in this club harbors a secret crush on him.”