Against the Water by Owen Wright

Author:Owen Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia
Published: 2023-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

THAT NIGHT, WE SLOTTED into a group of her friends and mine for dinner and drinks in Bondi. It was a newly formed combination of ten or so people but, as far as I could tell, everyone was happy.

Then Kita happened to say how old she was. She wasn’t talking to me at the time, but I heard her say, ‘Oh yeah, I’m nineteen and…’

I almost choked on my beer. Nineteen? I was twenty-five.

I swear you’d never have picked her as a teenager. I’d been chatting with her (electronically, admittedly) for a month and a half, and nothing about her conversation suggested adolescence. Then, having spent the day with her, bushwalking and sitting on that rock in silence – a sort of grown-up silence, if you know what I mean – and seeing how self-assured she was and the fact she was crisscrossing the world for her music career… it hadn’t occurred to me she could be just a year or two out of high school.

I was so taken aback, I interrupted the conversation she was having. ‘For real?’ I asked.

It probably wasn’t a smart thing to say. But Kita smiled and nodded.

I wasn’t thrown for long. I figured there are some nineteen-year-olds who seldom leave their parents’ house and spend their days sending gossipy texts, while others like Kita grow up fast into worldly souls.

The two of us had talked about heading over to Cronulla after dinner to see Matt Corby perform, but things were going so smoothly in the group that we stayed put. Ty and Lil were in good spirits and talking with Kita’s friends.

When it was getting late, someone suggested we should all migrate up to this nightclub in the Junction, El Topo Basement. Next thing I knew, we were all piling into taxis. A quarter of an hour later, we filed into the club.

The thing is, I’m not the biggest fan of nightclubs, all the noise and booze and peacocking. I was relieved when a mate called, so I could step outside and talk to him and hear myself think. Kita told me later she thought I’d bailed on her. She’d said to herself, Oh no, that didn’t end well.

I went back in and found her. For the first time since we’d met that morning, she looked uncomfortable. Maybe this wasn’t her scene either.

‘It’s kind of a bit much,’ I said.

‘Yeah, it’s a bit much. Let’s go.’

So, we both smoke-bombed. All up, we were at the club for probably only forty-five minutes.

We kissed at the end of the night. And we talked about catching up soon, doing something fun in Los Angeles, my new flame’s next port of call.

After leaving Kita, I was so euphoric and distracted that I left my phone in the back of a taxi. I thought it was gone for good. But this group of girls found it and texted me, and I retrieved it the next day.

My luck was in.

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