Page 9 of The Cocky for Cody
“Squark!We can also shoot poison spines from our wings!”
I blinked at Cody in terror. “They can? Is that true?”
“Absolutely not.” Cody stood from the bed and pointed an angry finger at the cockatoo. “Kevin, that’s enough! Brooks is a guest in this house… he’s a guest in this country… and you’re not going to ruin his first time here.”
“First time?” Kevin ruffled his feathers so violently some of them fell out and drifted to the floor. “Are you suggesting there’ll be a second? You mean, he’ll be coming back?”
“We both will. We’ve decided we want to spend our time between Maggie Island and Mulligan’s Mill. Now be nice, would ya!”
Kevin strutted along the rafter. “Oh, I can be nice,” he said in a sing-song voice. “I’ll even tell your precious pookie when a drop bear’s about to fall on his head and eat his ugly face off.”
Another shudder ran through me as I whimpered to Cody, “I thought you told me drop bears weren’t real.”
“They’re not.” He glared upward. “Kevin’s just being a total arsehole. That’s enough now! Stop scaring our guest and buzz off!”
“Squark! Youbuzz off,” Kevin screeched, before flapping his wings and flying out the window like one of the Wicked Witch’s monkey minions.
Cody looked at me. “Are you okay?”
“You mean other than being stalked by that pterodactyl? Yeah, I guess so.”
He sat on the bed and gripped my hand. “I’m sorry. He’s clearly jealous. I didn’t think he’d take this so personally.”
“Just promise me he’s not going to fly in here in the dead of night and smother me with a pillow.”
Cody laughed. “Oh, God no.”
I sighed with relief.
“No, if he wanted to kill you, he’d slit your throat with one of his talons. You know their ancestors were velociraptors, right?”
I gulped. “Oh shit. He really is a pterodactyl!”
The boat was small and had been leaning up against a tree so any rain from a storm would drain away, and was secured witha chain, not to deter thieves or koalas, but to ensure the vessel wouldn’t turn into a flying missile during a cyclone.
I helped Cody carry it across the deserted beach and down to the water’s edge—well, he did most of the carrying while I did most of the grunting and panting—before he returned to the shack and came back with an outboard motor which, I learned later, he kept in a storage cupboard under his kitchen sink. He fastened it to the back of the boat, the propellor raised up out of the sand, before making one last trip to the shack, returning with two oars, a bag containing all his snorkeling gear, and the key to the outboard which was attached to a large wooden block painted bright yellow.
“It floats and you can see it from a hundred meters away,” he explained. “Nobody wants the key to their outboard sinking to the bottom of the ocean.”
He unzipped the bag and pulled out two wetsuits, one for him and a spare for me.
He pulled his T-shirt off over his head, revealing that tanned, toned, traveled torso of his. In the next moment, off came his shorts. With no shoes or underwear to speak of, Cody was suddenly standing naked on the beach before me.
“Cody! What are you doing?” There was panic in my voice.
He looked at me weirdly. “Um, I’m putting my wetsuit on. Is that okay?”
“But you’re naked. On a beach. For all the world to see.”
He gestured all around us. “Cody, the world’s somewhere else. Ain’t nobody here to see me except you. And there’s nothing here you haven’t seen before.”
“But… but… what if…”
“Brooks, there’s nobody around.” He cupped his hands to the sides of his mouth, then twirled about in the sand, shouting into the bush and across the waves, “Is there anyone out there? Hello? Woohoo? Cooee?” He looked like Tarzan calling into thejungle—naked but for the silver compass he always wore around his neck—which, I had to admit, was a total turn-on.
There was no response from the bush or the sea, just the distant cry of an osprey circling the sky.
He lifted his palms out to indicate he’d come up empty. “See? Nobody there. It’s just you and me, babe, so why don’t you get your kit off and slide into your wetsuit. I’ll even help you shimmy it on if you like.”
