vast as the entire ocean, and you wanted to dive right in and discover every treasure that was hidden beneath their surface. But I’d tried to dive once before, not in an ocean, but in a field of flowers, and that hadn’t exactly gone well.
“Sorry! Sorry!” The words I heard just as Noah and I fell backwards into the water. For a second, we were both under water, still looking into each other’s eyes, and then we came up to the surface and looked around to see what had happened. A large guy, well over six foot, was rushing towards us.
“Sorry, man, I didn’t know I would fly out like that!” he said, pulling up his swimming trunks, which were now dangerously low.
“It’s okay,” Noah said. “It’s a crazy ride.”
“Crazy,” the guy agreed, tying his swimming trunks tighter in the front. “Anyway, sorry I knocked you guys over. Keep well.”
“No worries,” Noah replied, and just like that, we were back in reality and back in the pool and back with our feet on the ground. Bubble burst. Like someone had come and just stuck a pin into our own private inflatable.
There was a slight awkwardness after that, as we walked out of the pool together, me lagging behind. We grabbed our towels and moved to a sunny spot, out of the shadow of the massive slide. It was still warm in Durban, but still there was the lightest cool breeze in the air that made the hairs on your arms prickle.
“I’m exhausted,” Noah finally said, breaking the persistent silence between us.
“Me too!” I smiled at him, despite the feelings inside.
“I feel quite lazy all of a sudden,” he said, his straightened shoulders slumping a little and his posture changing. “I could seriously do with a change of pace.”
“Me too,” I agreed. The exhaustion from the night before was catching up with me.
“What about that?” Noah said, pointing at a sign.
“The Lazy River ride,” I read. “Kind of sounds perfect.”
CHAPTER 61
We floated down the river on the big inflatable ring. It was just big enough for the two of us to rest our backs against, our legs trailing off the sides into the water. Our bodies were pressed together, and I was hyper-aware of every part of him that was touching every part of me. We moved slowly down the man-made stream, the gentle movement of the water creating this relaxing sound. The walls of tropical plants on both sides made you feel like you were in a river in the Amazon or something equally adventurous and exotic. It reminded me of the tropical atrium inside Sheik Khalifa’s Desert Palace, the one where he and Amanda had shared their first kiss, and I thought how amazing and fortuitous it would be if Noah and I shared our first kiss here.
“This is amazing. Like being in a jungle,” Noah said.
“Did you know that half of the world’s animal and tree species live in a jungle?”
Noah smiled at me. “No, I didn’t know that.”
“Well, now you do,” I declared as we floated underneath a wooden bridge. The ring touched the side of the wall, and the motion made us spin around slowly in a full circle, before we continued on our way down the lazy river. I touched the water with my fingertips, and let them trail there languidly, along the top of the slow-moving river. This really was a lazy river; the gentle movement of the inflatable was making me feel more relaxed than I had in days. I threw my head back and looked up into the bright, blue cloudless sky illuminated by the warm autumn sun. It wasn’t too hot; it was just perfect. I was having a Goldilocks moment here: not too hot, not too cold . . . just right.
That was the thing about this moment, everything just seemed so damn right, and there was a part of me that was genuinely scared by this. My life had never been “just right,” and this was a new feeling to me. And, as much as I liked it, I was terrified because, in a few days’ time, Noah and I would go back home. Him to his house and his new career, and me to my—well, I don’t think I had a career anymore, but I did have a dull as hell apartment. And then it would all be over. Just right would be gone, and now that I’d tasted it, the metaphorical porridge one could say, I don’t