15 - Broken

They met on the boardwalk that ran the length of the beach, dividing the ocean from the city. There was a small cafe there, an ice cream stall really, little more than four wooden walls with a door in one of them and a square hole to serve punters through in another. It was surrounded by metal chairs and tables, silver in colour, but today shining in the strong sunlight and reflecting all the colours of the people moving across the boardwalk. The sound of the ocean was a soft layer below all other noises, above was the sound of footsteps, cars, voices: the city. Some of the tables stood firm on the hot black tarseal of the boulevard, but there was not room for all of them, so many more lay scattered on the sand of the beach, some listing alarmingly off the horizontal.

They sat at one of the tables on the beach. Lachlan had gotten them both vanilla milkshakes, consciously or perhaps unconsciously echoing the first time they had met at this location, on their second date. They had met at a pub, friends of mutual friends. They had shared a drunken kiss at the end of the night. She thought he would ask her to come home with him, but he didn't, just asked for her number and taken it, said he would call, said good night, kissed her again, then walked into the darkness. She was surprised when he called her the next day and asked if she wanted to go out on a date. The classic dinner and a movie date, he'd called it. The movie hadn't been any good that she recalled, although she had spent most of it wondering if she should hold his hand. She was surprised and delighted when, halfway through, he took hers with his. They polished off a bottle of wine over dinner and by the time they left, she was more than ready to go home with him, but again he said goodnight, said he'd called, and kissed her goodbye. They kissed for longer this time, less drunkenly, but she was still left confused. That was a Saturday. He had asked if she wanted to meet again on the Sunday, at the beach, where they now sat. Where the first date had been self-conscious, the second was not. Something about the hot sand and the wide open sky had made it more comfortable, more comfortable than even the wine had been able to accomplish on the previous evening. They had laughed, sipped their vanilla milkshakes, chatted, then walked along the beach with their shoes in their hands, letting the small waves of the bay wash over their naked toes.

That had been last summer. Cammie had been a different person then, or at least she certainly felt that way when she looked back on that time. In retrospect, her wants and needs seemed simple, or naive. She supposed that she felt the same way about herself a year ago, and would look back on herself at this time as just as simple and naive. Was she always running away from who she was, looking back and being embarrassed by herself? Was that what her life was going to be, a series of long regrets?

They sipped self-consciously at their milkshakes, both afraid to begin the conversation. She suspected they both knew what was coming. To admit the possibility seemed to be synonymous with admitting to the reality. Lachlan was never really one to mince words.

"So what's going on?" he asked, putting his milkshake down on the table. His eyes looked directly into Cammie's, and then temporarily flicked over her shoulder, focused on something, then quickly returned to her face. A few moments later a pair of women in bikini tops walked past them from behind where Cammie stood, explaining Lachlan's rapid eye movement.

"I'm not happy." She said simply.

"Because I haven't thought about the future?" Lachlan said with exasperation. "How can you put that on me?"

"No, it's not that, I mean, it is, but not the way you mean." She was trying to order her thoughts as she spoke, still finding out how she felt even as she tried to explain it to him.

"I feel small." She said, which was true.

"I make you feel small?"

"No, you don't, I just ... feel like I am never going to get anything done."

"Done like what?"

"I don't know."

"Neither to do I."

She struggled to make him see what she was feeling, but realized she didn't know herself. "That's exactly it. Neither of us knows, but I am thinking about it. I think about little else. Maybe someday I'll figure it out, and maybe I never will. But I think about it, and I worry about it, and I don't think you do."

"I don't worry that I'm never going to get anything done? I get stuff done!"

"Yeah, you get stuff done, you have a job and a place and your mates and you're happy with that, that's enough for you."

"So what's the problem?" He said, a tinge of anger, driven from confusion, coming into his voice.

"It isn't enough for me."

"My life's not enough for you? Well excuse me."

"Not your life, my life. I need more, I need to do more, and I need to be more. I don't want to be a waitress all my life. I don't want to live in crumbling flats all my life. I want to achieve something."

"Like what?"

"Like I said, I don't know yet. I just know that it's not this, and I want to move on. I need to."

"Move on from me? From us?" Now he was angry, and yet he still couldn't grasp the source of her unease.

"I don't know!" She said, her temper rising also, not only at his response, but by her own failure to understand herself. "I need to focus on this, and you're ... comfortable."

"I want to be comfortable."

"Yeah but comfort is complacency, Lock. It's just so easy to sit back and enjoy the ride and lie in each other's arms and do not much about moving forward. That's the sort of person you are, and it's the sort of person I'm at risk of being. If I give in to that feeling now, I give in to it forever."

"So," he started, muttering 'Christ' under his breath before continuing. "you get rid of me, and then you move on, to what? If there's something you want babe, we can make it happen, together. I can help you to your goals, I can support you in where you want to go. I want to put the effort in, I want to keep it together. The question is: Do you?"

His eyes were beginning to tear, and Cammie felt hers begin to do the same. She cared about him, it wasn't that she didn't. But she was going to get married to someone else. She was going to become a widower. She was going to get a large sum of money. She was going to quit her job, maybe leave the country, maybe take a course. Maybe here, maybe in another city, maybe in another country. She had no savings. Her mother had no money and wouldn't give her any if she did. Questions would be asked. Other friends she could palm off with invented answers, but not a boyfriend. Lachlan was sometimes oblivious, but he was no idiot- he'd demand to know the truth, and she had to sign the pre-nup, a document saying that no-one else could know the secret she was going to share with Anthony. He was too close to her. She had to push him away, for the good of both of them. And the truth was, she was dissatisfied with her life (she must be, she reasoned, or why would she have accepted Anthony's proposal?) and he, Lachlan, was a big part of her life. She was leaving this life behind, and he was a part of that. All ties must be severed, at least for the moment. But it wasn't as though she had simply ceased to care about him, and it still aggrieved her to see him hurt- particularly when she was the source of that pain.

He was still holding his milkshake on the table with one hand. She put hers on to the table, pulled her chair forward, and leaned across it to put her hand over his. His fingers were warm over the frosty glass of the milkshake. She squeezed.

"I'm so, so sorry, Lock."

His eyes widened as the realization of what she was saying hit him. He pulled his fingers out from under hers, leaving her gripping his milkshake glass as he pulled away from her.

"So that's it?" he said in anger. "You feel small that means we're over? It doesn't make fucking sense, Cam!" He yelled the latter words, and several passersby looked at him in alarm. He didn't seem to notice or, if he did, to care.

"You know your problem?" He snarled with a curled lip. "You're never satisfied, which means you'll never be happy. Even if you figure out what you want, and even if you get it, you know what you'll be then? Disappointed. It won't be what you imagined, so you'll just think you needed something else. So you'll go for something else, and abandon whatever it was you were looking for, and the whole damned cycle will start over again. You'll always be grasping for the mirage that's just out of sight, and you'll never reach it Cammie. You'll die unhappy, and you'll never have known what it was like to just be content." His face was red with anger, his eyes larger than she had ever seen them before.

The tears finally overwhelmed Cammie's ears and fell down her cheeks. "Well at least I'll be striving for something." she said.

"Hell with you, I'm done with this." he said, standing so suddenly that his metal chair, rear legs dug into the sand, fell backwards onto the beach with a quiet puff of sand. By the time it had hit the ground, he had turned and was walking quickly away from her down the boardwalk. She couldn't see his expression, but from the way other pedestrians were stepping to one side to let him pass it must have been quite severe.

Cammie sniffed, wiped her eyes dry with her sleeve, then took another sip of her milkshake to wash away the bitter taste of tears. Her throat had clammed up and the previously sweet milkshake now tasted like ash. She put it back down, stood gently, went over to Lachlan's upturned chair and righted it. Once this was done, she unhooked her sunglasses from where they were threaded down the neck of her top, put them on over her reddened eyes, and started to walk in the opposite direction down the beach. She was wearing thongs, so she kicked them off and picked them up with one hand, threading the rubber straps between two fingers to lift them. The beach was notorious for having needles and broken beer bottles lurking just below the surface of the sand, but it was swept clean every morning, and the day was still early, so she figured she could take her chances. She walked to the shoreline and walked through the low, incoming waves, just as she and Lachlan had on their second date. Where once she had held his hand, now she was alone. He was but the first of the changes she would have to make in the new year, she reasoned, and felt both exhilarated and afraid at the same time. Afraid of the new, but desperate to escape the old, the dreary, the inescapable reality of her life.

There were some children playing in the ocean, directly out from where Cammie was walking. Most residents of the area avoided the bay water this close to the city, as several drainage pipes dumped their sewage directly into this catchment. But some tourists were ignorant, and some locals didn't mind the odd floater. She wondered which these were, but either way, they seemed to be having fun.

Her cellphone buzzed in her pocket, a dull vibration on her leg. She took it out of her jean shorts and flipped it open. Two new messages, one from Steve, and another from Lachlan. She opened Steve's first.

'Lady in the caf looking for you. Left her number. See you tomorrow. S.'

She closed Steve's message, took a deep breath in and out, then opened Lachlan's.

'Sorry I got mad' she read. 'I know you have to do what you need to do. Just know that I'll always be here for you, if you need me.'

She looked up from the phone, scanned the horizon with her eyes. The sky had a dull red tinge. White light, refracted into the red light spectrum by water droplets in the distance. Rain was coming in from off the ocean. The blue skies would soon be grey.

She looked back down at her phone and hit delete.