The Beauty Is in the Walking by James Moloney

me.
    â€˜Can you meet me?’ she asked. ‘The riverside at Meredith Park.’ (You couldn’t get away from Mum’s family in Palmerston.) She’d thought carefully about where to meet, too, because I could walk to the park without my back aching. When I arrived, she waved to me from a bench in the shade of trees that grew out of the riverbank.
    â€˜Let’s go down to the water,’ she said when I joined her.
    Families came here to swim because it was shallow with lots of sand for buckets and spades, but with so little water in the river we had the wide beach to ourselves.Sand wasn’t my friend; I managed by taking it slow, and when she noticed Amy offered her arm to steady me.
    â€˜We got interrupted on Friday,’ she began, once we’d found a spot among the tree roots.
    â€˜By those thugs.’
    â€˜By your heroics,’ she said, smiling deliberately to make me blush and I probably did.
    â€˜I wanted to thank you properly for those candles,’ and before I knew it she had leaned across and kissed me on the corner of my mouth. She pulled back before I could line up my face with hers and kiss her back. After all, it wasn’t a manoeuvre I’d had any experience with.
    â€˜I know what you’ve been doing since the night we went up to Kibble’s paddock. I wasn’t sure at first, in the car, like maybe you didn’t really mean to hold me like that and get me wondering,’ she said. ‘But then you started moving us around to sit where you wanted at the table and pressing your leg against mine. I couldn’t be imagining things after that.’
    â€˜Did Bec notice?’ I asked.
    She shook her head. ‘I never thought of you like the other guys, but you’re taller now and your voice has gone deep, like Mitch’s. I like your voice and I liked having your arm around me in the car, especially after the stunt Dan and Mitch pulled that night. It was gentle and sort of intimate without getting too excited, if you know what I mean.’
    Her turn to blush and she pretended to fiddle with something beside her when I knew there wasn’t anythingthere. ‘You’re different from the other guys and that’s good because a lot of boys don’t know how to show they care. You notice things about me, like the candles and how scared I was up at Kibble’s. You even stopped the whole thing before I went totally mental.’
    â€˜Mitch thought I’d wreck his mum’s car.’
    â€˜Would have served him right for doing whatever Dan tells him. It was Dan, don’t you reckon? He was enjoying how scared I was, the bastard,’ she said with a bitterness that surprised me. ‘Just as well you drove off like that, because nothing was going to stop him. That’s what I mean about the guys around here. So immature. None of the boys I’ve been out with would have gone against their mates the way you did, or bought me the candles or given them to me in such a fun way. They don’t know how to treat a girl. They think it’s all about . . .’
    Amy had been lacing her fingers together in her lap as she spoke, breaking them apart and threading them together again, until she couldn’t face the words meant to finish what she was saying and reached for my hand instead. ‘They don’t get it, that it’s fun to hold hands and talk about stuff, like we’re doing now. Do you know what I mean?’
    Oh yes, I knew. I daydreamed about the things she was talking about, the closeness and the touching between two people and no one else.
    I thought about telling Amy of the restlessness in me lately, thought maybe she felt the same way, wanting something different without being able to say what itwas. I didn’t speak up, though, because the restlessness had slipped right out of me while we sat so close on the riverbank.
    Amy brought my hand up to her face and let it rest against her cheek.