Page 45 of Friends with Benefits

That night, Danny and I made love quietly in his hostel bed. For four weeks, we were inseparable. We made love, we took treks in the Balinese jungle. We ate like the Balinese. We explored the islands, truly. We meditated with my aunt and uncle. The four of us did yoga at sunset. It was the first time since my mum had died that I felt like I had a someone. It was nice waking up with him in the morning, even in sleeping bags and old tents. It was nice to hold someone’s hand. I enjoyed not making every decision about where to visit each day by myself.

Danny was confident and worldly. He found me a market stall where I sold my clothes, the first time I had actually made money from something I had made. He convinced me I should try to write a travel, fashion and food blog. That might not seem edgy these days but eleven years ago, it was very new age and something I never would have thought about doing if it weren’t for Danny.

He was great for me. He brought me out of my turtle shell, as he called it. And even though I would never give up the dream of having roots one day, he made colors seem brighter, sounds sharper, and every experience somehow felt more alive. I felt like I understood the world more and life. There was a part of me that was almost happy.

‘He makes you smile,’ Aunt Ruth said one day when we were taking a dip in the pool of waterfalls. ‘I like him.’

It was the same day that Danny told me he was moving on soon. I dove under the water to wet my hair and kicked back up to the surface.

‘He’s leaving,’ I told her. I shouldn’t have let it upset me; I knew that. People leave. Bad things happen. I knew as much. But I couldn’t change the fact that I felt it in my heart. The heart I had thought solely existed to pump oxygen around my body. The heart I thought was otherwise redundant.

I saw concern in Ruth’s face. A rare thing, which told me she knew how much I had enjoyed having Danny around while we were here.

‘Where is he going?’ she asked.

‘New Zealand. He’s taking a campervan from Christchurch and driving around for a few months, or until he gets bored. He has lined up some farm work for a few weeks, which should pay for the van.’

Ruth nodded, contemplatively. ‘You could go.’

I felt my brows scrunch. ‘Go?’

Leave the only people in the world I knew and run off with a man I’d known for four weeks and one day?

‘You mean to New Zealand?’

She shrugged. ‘You’re nineteen. You can fend for yourself. And Danny is very well-traveled.’

‘But… it would just be us. We’d be, like, together.’ I could feel panic whirring in my chest. Not wanting it to show, I slipped under the water and held my breath. Keep control, Jess. Stop panicking. You’re fine. I heard my mum’s voice then. It carried through the water and hit my ears. Just breathe, angel. Breathe. I breeched the surface and took an enormous breath, as if I were being born from the water. My heart rate calmed and for the rest of the day, I contemplated going to New Zealand with Danny. I had never been with anyone since my parents. Sure, I was dragged from place to place by Ruth and John but I was always my own person, left to my own devices. Being with Danny would be very different.

Two days later, with a necklace made of flowers in place of a ring, Danny took to his knee in the sand and proposed.

He offered to show me more of the world. He offered to be my someone, and I knew in the way he looked at me, the way he touched me when there was no need, the way he spoke to me so warmly, that he meant every word of his proposal. He loved me. I felt his love. It made me swallow my fear and say yes to him.

The days that followed were a blur. Ruth and I spent hours making my wedding dress and the flower wreath for my hair, discussing what food to buy from the local market, and which beach to use for the ceremony.

‘Are you telling your family?’ I asked Danny the night before our wedding, as we lay in a wood hut that Ruth and John had paid for.

He stroked my bare arm as I rested on his chest. ‘I’ll tell them afterward,’ he said.

He didn’t offer more and I didn’t ask. It made me sad that his parents and siblings lived in the world and he didn’t care enough to see them or to tell them he was getting married. It concerned me that he perhaps chose not to say anything because they would try to talk him out of it – after all, it was crazy. But it never occurred to me that he didn’t tell them because he didn’t love me. I knew he did.

He held me tight against his chest and drifted to sleep, his breathing so quiet, all I could hear was the sound of waves on the beach on which we would be married in a matter of hours. As I lay there, my chest started to tighten and I knew, no matter how much my mum’s voice came to me, this was one attack I wouldn’t be able to fight.

I slipped from under Danny’s arm, my entire torso and throat feeling like they were swelling, like it was impossible to expand them and take in air. But inside the swelling, my diaphragm was out of control.

The fear that gripped me in those moments of panic is indescribable. I had learned to live with the attacks but for those moments, the moments when I was back in a hospital room watching my dad’s own body drown him, I was terrified.

I staggered onto the sand and looked left and right as I held my hands over my chest, willing air to come. In the moon’s light, I could see I was alone, and I let myself break.

I fell to my knees and I sobbed, dragging in ragged breaths as I braced my body on all fours. And I remember thinking, There’s nothing I wouldn’t give to have my parents back. To be part of their family. Part of something, something that never had to end because we were just too happy.

See, the fundamental difference between Danny and me was that he thought I couldn’t be happy because I constantly aspired to achieve something that I would never reach. In his mind, life was a circle of birth, suffering, death and rebirth. I thought differently, and I still do.

I heard him run toward me, calling my name, and I felt his arms as he slid his legs around me and held my back to his chest. There, I found my breath and I found a calmer state.

‘What is it, Jess? Talk to me,’ he said into my neck, as he stroked tears from my cheeks.

I explained to him then, ‘My circle of life is different to yours, Danny. I don’t believe in rebirth. I believe I suffer but not because I am trying to achieve something intangible, the love my parents shared. I suffer because life’s circle can only contain so many elements. There’s a finite amount of each. There’s a finite amount of happiness and unhappiness in the circle. My parents used up their happiness and they had to suffer for it. I used up my happiness when I was a girl and now I can’t have any more.’

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