In Too Deep by D C Grant Page B

Gina peered in.
    “Hi, Josh.”
    “Come in, Gina,” he said.
    “How’s your hand?” she asked of his father.
    “It’s fine, thank you,” he said as he got up from the table. “I’m off to the store for a decent coffee.”
    Gina took off her jacket and Josh hung it in the laundry.
    “What shall we do today?” Josh asked Gina.
    She shrugged and said, “I thought you might have some ideas. What do you do in Piha when it’s wet?”
    “There’s not much to do down here when it rains. My parents read and I watch TV. We don’t have an internet connection here so usually I just hang around and wait for it to stop.”
    “We can hang around here then.”
    “My dad’s been at me to sort out my room. Do you want to help?”
    “Yeah, whatever. Maybe I’ll find out your deepest, darkest secrets,” Gina teased, and laughed.
    “I don’t have any.”
    “We’ll see,” she said and followed him to his room where she sat on his bed and looked at the posters on the walls.
    “Bevan’s got these, too,” she said.
    He sat next to her on the bed. He was close enough to smell the fragrance in her hair. She turned to him and he wrapped his arms around her. He started kissing her and a warm feeling spread from his stomach into his groin. He slid his hands underneath the bottom of her T-shirt and ran his fingers over the skin on her back. She was soft. He slid down so they lay across the bed and started to tug at her T-shirt. He wanted to get at all that beautiful soft skin.
    “No,” she cried as she pulled away from him.
    He couldn’t get his hands out from under the T-shirt and he struggled as she slapped at his upper arms. Finally, they were free and she jumped to her feet.
    “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said, frightened she was going to leave him. “I didn’t mean … I wasn’t thinking. Let’s go for a walk or something. We don’t have to stay here.”
    She surprised him by laughing. “Let’s not sit on the bed,” she said. She looked around the room. “What’s in the boxes?”
    “Magazines, photos and stuff.”
    “Are there photos of you?”
    “Yes, they’re in one of these boxes.”
    “Let’s find them.”
    Gina knelt down beside one of the boxes and started to open them. Relieved, Josh crouched down beside her. This girl intrigued him but confused him all at the same time. Sometimes she seemed to come on strong and then she’d push him away. He’d never felt this way around a girl before. Was he falling in love?
    When his father returned, they were sitting on the floor of his room, surrounded by the stuff that had come out of the boxes. They’d found photo albums which Gina had eagerly flipped through, stopping now and then at photos that caught her interest. He’d found old surfing magazines and had gone through them one by one, remembering when he’d first started and had bought everything ever written about surfing.
    His father appeared at his bedroom door. “Are you going to tidy this up, Josh?” he asked.
    “Sure,” Josh said without conviction.
    “Is this all you’ve been doing since I’ve been gone?”
    Josh looked up at his father and caught the look on his face. He glanced at Gina, but she was looking down at a photo album and hadn’t looked up.
    “Yes, this is all we’ve been doing.”
    “It’s stopped raining,” his father pointed out, but Josh didn’t know why. “Perhaps you’d like to go out.”
    Now Josh understood. He thought about where they could go.
    “Would you like to visit the waterfall?” he asked Gina.
    “There’s a waterfall?”
    “Yes, at the end of Glen Esk Road. You have to walk up to it, but it’s not hard.”
    “Sure,” said Gina as she put aside the photo album.
    As Josh left with Gina, he caught his father’s speculative look. He knew if he started to deny anything, his father would think him guilty anyway, so he didn’t say anything.
    Let his father wonder.
     

Chapter Sixteen
     
    Later they sat at the very top of the waterfall