[Aidan's marriage has been shattered by his wife's cheating. Unable to cope with the thing she did, he boarded a plane and put as much distance between them as possible. He finds himself in Australia, making new friends in Sydney, including a pair of mates on a road trip around their vast, empty continent. He's also met Kat, sharing her bed, the first time in many years that he's been with a woman who isn't his wife.
The background to Aidan's story can be found in
Oxygen Games
by oneagainst, continued here with permission.]
---
A FORK IN THE ROAD
Aidan pulls on his running gear quietly. Hardy and Flint are still passed out on their bunks, Flint laid out on top of the sheets in just his underwear, face buried in the pillow. They'd tumbled into the room at one o'clock, boisterous, gabbling about a near miss with someone's boyfriend. Aidan had already been in bed for an hour at that point, having slipped out of Kat's bed at midnight, well before her roommate returned from their scheduled night out.
He closes the door softly and heads down the stairs, turning right on the street in the direction of the headland that forms the northern side of the gateway to Sydney harbour. The land rises steadily and Aidan pushes on, shedding the tiredness from the night before. The narrow road opens out into bushland, threading its way along the crenelated edge of the clifftops until he reaches a lookout and stops.
Gasping, he leans on the railing, on the brink of a dizzying drop to the crashing surf pounding the rocks far below. It's early, and the sun is still low over the ocean to the east. His view extends all the way to the horizon, lit in a shimmering path of golden reflections in the morning air. He thinks of Rosa, then he thinks of Kat.
It hadn't felt wrong. Going back to her hotel room after the beach, they had made love again between her sheets, gritty from the sand still on their skin. He hadn't thought of his wife at all after that point, just revelling in the closeness of contact with the woman up from Melbourne for the weekend with her friends. It had felt easy and uncomplicated, and he had to acknowledge that when Kat smiled up at him as he lay on top of her, it had felt good.
Now, though, with the morning sun in his face and the half-bottle of wine out of his system, he was taking stock of the thing that he'd done. It's not cheating if it's over, he reminded himself. Why should he feel guilty? He wasn't the one who had broken their relationship; he was the wronged party. But the feeling of righteous indignation didn't surface this time, as it had before. Sleeping with Kat had changed something.
Curled up with a stranger, he had seen a little fragment of what Rosa must have found when she'd succumbed to the cliché and fucked the barista from a coffee shop: a moment of escape from the pressures of infertility and trying for babies, of running a business, of bearing the hormone treatments, always having to be the star in the gym and on the socials, the light on the hill.
Despite himself, Aidan reluctantly finds that he can see his wife's point of view. What they went through would have been too much for anybody. It didn't change the outcome, it didn't undo the damage of the betrayal, but it did grant a measure of absolution. In hindsight, they were never going to have been able to survive it.
An awful, choking sadness wells up, and Aidan fights it back, turning quickly on his heel and jolts into motion, putting one foot in front of the other until he's flying down the road, full pelt, lungs heaving, burning away that dark feeling, racing headlong back down towards the beach.
His pace slackens eventually, and he decides not to head straight back to the accommodation. Instead, he drops down onto the beach, running barefoot in the sand above the waterline. He passes the steps where they'd made love on the sand, keeping up a steady pace until he was halfway down the beach. Ahead, he can see a group of women arranged in rows, all in identical poses as they progress through yoga positions. They're being led by an older woman, lean and wiry with grey hair rolled up into a tight bun.
There is a sudden commotion, and one of them begins to wave. One by one, the other women stop. Aidan drops to a walk and then halts. The only one not waving has long, dark hair and as Aidan sees her, she shrugs.
"Aidan!"
It's the hen's party, taking a class in the morning sun in the beach in front of their hotel. Not all of them, but enough to cause a fuss. Kat looks mortified. The blonde woman next to her is the one who called his name. He turns towards them and Kat jogs down to meet him halfway.
"Sorry," she says, "You're famous."
"So you told them all about me?"
"Yeah, I boasted about my conquest at breakfast, how good I was in bed, how much you loved it."
Kat's grinning, then she nods over to the blonde woman.
"Nah," she confesses, "Carla's made sure that everyone knows what happened last night. Kelsey was pissed off that I was somewhere else with a rugged stallion instead of her party, but, y'know, I just don't give a fuck."
Aidan watches her face as she talks, delighting in the way her lovely eyes dance between her friends and him. There's a confidence in the way she holds herself that wasn't there before.
"They're gonna make your life hell, aren't they?" Aidan replies.
"Shit yeah, I'm gonna get paid out for months," she tells him, and her face softens, "But it was worth it."
There is a pause. Her name is called, and Aidan can see it's Kelsey.
"I tell you what," Aidan says, "Let me finish my run and I'll come back. I guess you'll all be getting coffee after. I'll introduce myself, how's that?"
"You want to meet the coven? Really?"
"Your dirty little secret's out. Might as well add fuel to the fire."
"Oh Aidan, you have no idea what you're doing," Kat laughs, "But, yeah, we'll just be up on the promenade."
Aidan can feel many eyes watching them. "See you soon," he says, turning back on his way.
"Yeah, see you soon," Kat calls behind him.
Aidan smiles to himself as he picks up the pace again. It hadn't felt forced, he hadn't felt awkward. He would sit down with all her friends and allow himself to be inspected. It would do her reputation no harm for them to see her with him, how she'd snagged a man, how she was back on the horse after her marriage ended. He would get to sit next to her, in the cold light of day, and see how it made him feel. After the thoughts about Rosa on the run, he desperately needed perspective.
He grinds through another few minutes, reaching the northern end of the beach and then turning around, putting his shoes back on and running on the promenade this time. His calves are aching from running on the sand, and he knows he's sweaty, but something tells him that Kat won't mind. He spots them in the distance, sitting at a table outside, and angles across the road to meeting them. Kat sees him approach, though she doesn't wave or cause a commotion. She's playing it cool, but all the same, she's saved an empty space on the bench next to her.
"I got you a coffee," she says, by way of introduction. "I don't know how you like it though."
"Time enough for that," says the blonde woman sitting on the other side of her, smirking lewdly.
"This is Carla."
Aidan smiles at her. "Hi Carla," he says, and the smile he receives in return tells him a lot.
Kat goes around the table and he nods to acknowledge each of them, pausing to note Kelsey's disposition towards him. Unlike Carla's knowing smile, Kelsey's surveying him coolly. She looks like a woman who doesn't like coming in second place, he thinks, and somehow Kat's snagged the prize. He sits down and picks up his coffee, looking around the table, bracing for a question, but he's at one end and the conversation at the other is already picking up again. Kelsey turns, launching with a little too much zeal back into her story from last night. Yes, Aidan thinks, that's the issue: Kat's story is better.
Sitting opposite across the table from him, and the last to be introduced is Marley. She's not one of them, she's the yoga instructor, taking a coffee with the group by invitation, like him. She's lean, with light grey eyes and a narrow face, lined but striking. The way she bears herself belies a subtle confidence in the way she looks; she's nearly twice as old as some of the women at the table, but she hasn't coloured her hair; she's wearing the grey proudly.
"Marley put us through it," Kat says, "I think some of the girls are regretting coming along."
"Looks like you got a few drop outs anyway," Aidan responds.
"Oh, yeah. Apparently, I wasn't the only one last night."
Kat stops herself, and suddenly looks embarrassed. "I mean, not that any of them actually got, uh...."
"But I guess they were drinking a lot longer than you," Aidan interjects, "You must feel pretty good compared to some of them."
Under the table, he feels her tap his leg. "I do," she says, and she's smiling again now.
Kat is keeping it low-key in front of her friends. He fends off a barrage of questions from Carla with good humour, until Kat eventually intervenes to put a stop to it. She diverts the conversation to Marley, asking about her business, how she'd come to be taking hungover women through classes on Manly beach on Sunday mornings. Aidan forms the impression that Kat had been the one to arrange it, as the maid of honour.
"I'm more than happy," Marley replies. "I'm an early riser anyway, and I don't really go in for huge Saturday nights out anymore."
"Thanks for going easy. As you can see, not all of us made it down. You got more sessions this morning?"
Marley nods. "I do the grey warriors up at the northern end, though they're a little later. They need time to get going in the mornings. You tend to creak more as you get older."
Marley's eyes shift to Aidan.
"So, Aidan, I heard you're in the same line of business."
"Yeah, fitness."
"I can tell, up at dawn on the sand. How's the calves?"
"Aching. It's a long beach."
"No sand where you're from?"
