It Started With A Kiss (7 page)

“
Coming, Georgie?” one of
the other guests asked, as he headed down the gangplank and back to
shore.

“
Yep.” She took the offered
hand and stepped lightly onto the walkway at the very moment a
cargo vessel decided to blast its hooter.

Startled, Georgie squealed, jumping higher
than she’d ever jumped in high jump competitions at school and
hitting her head on some ship paraphernalia.

“
Ouch!”

She raised her hand from the rail to rub at
her head, which of course was the completely wrong thing to do. In
front of her, the large wake from the passing boat was causing the
walkway to wobble and her eager helper was making it worse by
clutching at anything and everything in sight, including the
plastic sword at Georgie’s hip. Georgie, despite having the balance
of a seasoned board rider, found herself teetering with him until,
finally, they toppled over the unprotected side of the gangplank
and straight into the water. Her only thought as she spluttered her
way to the surface — other than hoping nobody had emptied bilge
water in the near vicinity — was ‘not again.’

“
You’re supposed to
hold
on
to the
rail,” Tara tutted, as one of the crew used the boat hook to fish
Georgie out of the river. “What the hell were you
thinking?”

“
Nice night for a dip?”
Georgie laughed, wringing out her wet pirate dress and smoothing
her bedraggled hair. In the kerfuffle she’d managed to lose one of
her boots and her hairclips. Her dilly bag — because a clutch was
not appropriate pirate attire — had sprung open in the fall,
revealing its intimate contents to the other partygoers. They were
currently being retrieved with a net. Georgie didn’t care about the
bag or the lipstick. She just hoped her keys were still inside and
that her phone was in working order. The last time she’d seen it,
it had been floating down the river right side up and she had a
feeling she may need it to call a taxi any minute. Tara looked
extremely peeved.

“
This isn’t a laughing
matter, Georgie. You can’t come to the restaurant looking like
that. You’ll have to go home and get changed.”

Georgie was well aware that she couldn’t go
looking like a fish left out of water too long but seriously, Tara
was going overboard. It wasn’t as if she’d purposely gone for a
dive. And it wasn’t her fault. The man standing next to her, who
looked like he’d been put through the heavy-duty cycle on a washing
machine, was more to blame. He’d grabbed her sword and pulled her
into the water. If anyone should be getting a tongue lashing, it
should be him.

Georgie sighed. “It’ll take at least an hour
to get home, changed and back. And I’ll never get another taxi. Not
on a Saturday night. I’ll just go home and stay there. You go
without me.”

Tara gave a low, cross grumble and stomped
towards the minivan that was taking them to the restaurant. “God,
you’re hopeless. Get in the taxi. And sit up the back. I don’t want
you dripping all over me. He can take you home after he drops us
off.”

“
It’s okay, she can get a
lift with me. I’m sure I’ve got a bit of plastic in the back of the
car so she doesn’t ruin the leather seats.”

Standing next to the minivan was Nate.

Georgie swallowed in surprise. What in
heavens was he doing here?

Tara was not as subtle. Her cheeks were
positively glowing at this new arrival. “I should have known you’d
show up sooner or later, Adams. You never could stay away from
Georgie.” Then, like a mother hen with her chicks, she gathered the
remainder of the group who were wearing dry clothes and bundled
them into the minivan, leaving the ‘lovebirds’ to it.

“
Ring me in the morning,”
she called through the open window like a wayward fairy godmother.
“And don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“
That doesn’t leave much to
the imagination,” Nate said.

“
You can say that
again.”

As they watched the taxi van speed off in the
direction of the restaurant, Georgie, who was beginning to feel the
cold in her damp dress and pantaloons, turned to Nate.

“
What
are
you doing here?”

“
After I got home, I got to
thinking and I think I liked seeing you again this afternoon and I
want to see you some more.”

“
But you have a girlfriend.
I’m not going to come between you.”

“
Lydia? She’s not my
girlfriend. I think she’d like to be, though. She’s just a girl I
know through a bloke at work. His girlfriend was trying to hook us
up but she’s not my type. She’s loud and her boobs are way too
big.”

Now where had she heard that before?

Georgie began to search through her dilly bag
for a comb. She must look an absolute fright. “How did you find
me?”

“
I took a punt that your
parents still lived in West Leederville. I rang your old
number.”

“
You spoke to
Mum?”

That was all she needed.
Georgie’s parents had never been very approving of her relationship
with Nate, once it changed from friendship to love. They thought he
stifled her, made her give up on her dreams, that Georgie never had
a mind of her own when he was around. What they never realized was
that it was
them
who’d been stifling. Georgie had done everything she’d done to
make them happy but none of it had made her happy.

“
She gave me your number. I
don’t think she knew it was me. I tried to call you before I left
home but it went straight to message bank.”

“
Possibly because my
phone’s been floating in the river for the past half an hour but
that still doesn’t explain how you found me.”

Nate gave her a look. “How many tall ships
are there in Perth, Georgie?”

Hmm. He had point.

“
It wasn’t exactly rocket
science. All I had to do was Google the location.”

“
Well, I’m glad you’re
here. It’s nice to see you.”

“
You, too.”

They walked along the jetty towards the car
park. The moon had risen fully now and Georgie was getting chillier
by the second. She didn’t care though. She was with Nate. “I don’t
mind that I’m missing out on dinner now you’re here. I didn’t know
many of the people in that group. It would have been a night of
small talk.”

“
Or pirate talk. Why are
you dressed in pirate garb anyway? The Leeuwin isn’t a pirate
ship.”

“
It’s
International Talk Like A Pirate Day
.”

“
No shit? They have such a
thing?”

“
Apparently.”

They came to a stop beside a shiny new car.
Nate pulled the keys out of his pocket and flicked the remote.
Swinging the rear door open, he searched around for a second,
before pulling out a large plastic bin liner.

“
So the Red Devil went to
car heaven, then?” Georgie asked.

A faint smile lit Nate’s his face. “That car
was the best.”

“
As long as you don’t count
the time we got stuck in sand dunes at Lancelin, or when we broke
down in the middle of the freeway during peak hour.”

Ignoring her, Nate opened the passenger door
and spread the bin liner on the seat, tucking the sides firmly
down. He gestured to Georgie to sit. “That should do.”

“
My hero,” Georgie
gushed.

“
Get in the car,” he
laughed. “You’re shivering.”

Only with excitement, Georgie thought. Nate
was back and this time, she wasn’t letting him go.

Chapter 8

People who believed that Georgie and Nate
were inseparable when they’d been friends were astonished at how
much more time they were able to spend in each other’s company once
they became boyfriend and girlfriend. From the morning after their
first kiss, Nate had practically taken up residence at Georgie’s
house. He had spare clothes in her wardrobe and a wetsuit hanging
in the garage. Every time Georgie’s mother turned around, he was
there, helping with the dishes, doing homework with Georgie or
putting the vacuum cleaner over the living room rug. At one stage,
Mrs. Bird declared she was unsure if they’d gained a boyfriend or a
live-in housekeeper. Whichever, she knew it wasn’t healthy. Georgie
should be out with her girlfriends, not spending every minute with
a boy she’d known since she was eight. It had been fine when they
were little but the way they made eyes across the dinner table
these days was no longer because of some childish stunt they’d
planned. There were an awful lot of teenage hormones on the loose
in the Bird household and none of them were from the new pair of
Lovebirds Mr. Bird had insisted on buying.

For Georgie’s part, once she’d discovered
kissing Nate to be akin to an afternoon in the company of a huge
slab of chocolate fudge, she’d never looked back. They floated for
hours by the edge of the pool, their hands twining and unraveling
along with their lips. They lay on the cool grass of the front
lawn, their bodies playfully tangled like puppies in a dog basket,
a sight that caused Mrs. Longo the next-door neighbor, to barge in
the gate late one afternoon and demand they stop. Seeing Nate
fondling Georgie’s bare stomach was apparently too much for her
sensitive nerves. Georgie had smirked when Mrs. Longo suggested
that if she wanted to watch pornography she’d take up using the
Internet. Mr. Longo had been doing that for ages. They’d seen him
through the lounge room window.

At Nate’s house, they spent whole evenings on
the bed in his room, listening to music and kissing frantically
with one ear to the open door in case his mother appeared. And as
their kisses grew more ardent so did their need to explore other
body parts, with the door shut. Unfortunately, Nate’s mother never
seemed to see it that way. She designated herself the guardian of
Georgie’s purity and could often be heard stomping along the hall
to announce her presence and stating she didn’t think Georgie’s
mother would approve if the door were closed. They never got to be
alone.

By the time Georgie and Nate reached the age
of seventeen, they’d been a couple for almost two years. As far as
teenage romances go, theirs had run a marathon at the Olympics and
was now in training for the next. Their feelings, far from
dissipating as hoped, had escalated into a deep lustful love and
while Mr. and Mrs. Bird thought Nate was a very nice boy with
impeccable manners, they were under no illusions that Georgie and
Nate, if they hadn’t already, were soon to take their relationship
to the final level.

The awful realization that the children were
no longer children hit home on the day Nate pulled into the
driveway of Georgie’s house, a pair of red and white P plates
taking pride of place in the front and back windows of the car he
was driving.

“
Oh my God, Roger,” Mrs.
Bird gasped, as she pulled back the curtains to have a closer look
at Nate’s new Corolla wagon. “His parents have bought him a car. A
wagon.”

“
Calm down,” Mr. Bird
replied, coming to stand next to his wife. He could see she was
about to collapse. “It’s only a car.”

“
But it has one of those
fold-down seats in the back.” Mrs. Bird was clearly worried at this
new development. Her hand was gripping her mouth like it was trying
to hold in a cry of terror.

By this stage, Georgie had screamed through
the house in her short shorts and bikini top and was sitting next
to Nate in the front seat, an adoring look on her face. As her
parents watched on, they began to test out the limits of the
handbrake by sprawling themselves across it, lips locked.

“
Yes, and if they haven’t
had sex already they’ll be testing them out soon enough by the look
of that,” Mr. Bird commented.

“
How could his parents be
so irresponsible?”

“
I’m pretty sure June and
David bought the car for Nate to put his surfboard in, not as a
shag pad.”

“
Roger!”

“
Well, you’re overreacting.
Georgie’s a sensible girl and Nate would never do anything
silly.”

Which was quite a testimony, for at that very
moment Georgie and Nate were sitting in the front seat of his car,
gazing up at her parents looking through the window and planning
how they could manage a ‘sleepover’ in the back of the newly
christened ‘Red Devil’ without anyone knowing.

“
The tickets for
Big Day Out
go on sale on
Saturday.
Hole
and
Marilyn Manson
are headlining,” Georgie said, her mind
formulating the most devious plan she’d ever come up with. Not that
she’d ever had a devious plan. Apart from the odd prank here and
there, she did exactly as she was told. “We could say we have to
line up at the box office or we’ll miss out. We’ll probably have to
‘camp out’ in the street over night. There’ll be a huge
line.”

“
But we can buy tickets
over the phone,” Nate justified. “Dad’s a member at the Claremont
Cricket Club. He gets heaps of offers for events they have at the
oval in the off-season. They already sent him a pre-sale code. All
we have to do is ring up and jump the queue.”

“
My parents don’t know
that,” Georgie replied, her eyes firmly on her mother, who appeared
to be having some sort of mini-seizure in the bay window. “Mum and
Dad come from the old school. They stood behind a barrier for three
days to catch a glimpse Roger Daltrey as he went into the
hotel
The Who
were
staying at. They didn’t even see Pete Townsend. And when they got
the photos developed, all they had were shots of the girl’s hand in
front of them.”