Where Sea Meets Sky

“Nick, seriously,” I tell him, taking my hand away. “If you’re going to come, you can’t be a dickhead the entire time. Josh is a nice guy, he’s not a drug addict, and he’s not going to rob anyone. This trip is for Amber anyway, so you have to learn to be nice and get along for her sake, if not for mine.”

“I am nice,” he protests. “But if anything goes wrong, it’s all on you.”

“Fine,” I tell him. And though things aren’t going to go wrong in the way that he thinks, I know there’s no way that things are going to go right either.

Chapter Six

JOSH

“Josh, do you know what the Kiwi term munter means?” Tibald asks me casually in his near-perfect English.

I don’t lift my head up from the pub table. “What?” I mumble into the wood.

“It means you, Josh. You, right now, are a munter.”

Tibald, Schnell, and Michael all laugh. They are “taking the piss,” another Kiwi term I’ve learned since seeing Gemma.

Whatever a munter is, I’m sure there will be a picture of my face next to it in the New Zealand slang dictionary.

I lift up my head and rest it in my hands. “To be fair,” I say between my fingers, “when she invited me on the trip, she had just said only she and her cousin were going. This boyfriend, Nick the Dick, or whoever he is, he pretty much invited himself along once he learned I was going.”

“And that’s probably when you should have said, you know what, on second thought, no,” Tibald says before he signals to the waitress for another round of beers.

“It will be like that American sitcom, Three’s Company,” Schnell says without a trace of a smile. I think it’s like the second thing he’s ever said to me.

“Except her cousin will be there,” I say. “So, Four’s Company.”

“Never heard of it,” Schnell says.

I ignore him and look at Tibald. “So, what, you think I should have bowed out?”

Tibald shrugs. “Sure.”

“Would you have?”

“No way,” he says adamantly. “I don’t back down.”

At that, Michael drums on the table and starts singing the Tom Petty song, I Won’t Back Down, in German.

“Yeah, well, neither do I.” Everything until that moment when Nick showed up was absolutely perfect. Naturally, I had been nervous as fuck. Seeing her in the flesh made everything much more real. She was as gorgeous as I remembered—that body, that smirk—and within seconds I felt like talking to her was the easiest thing in the world. Okay, maybe it wasn’t the easiest, I was trying my hardest to not come across as a stalker or some obsessive guy, and I was trying even harder to hide the growing bulge in my jeans.

But, all that aside, being around her felt . . . right. It felt natural. I felt like I had worried for nothing, and from the signals she was giving—the way she locked eyes with me, the toss of her hair, the nervous shake to her hands—I assumed she felt the same.

Obviously I am a total munter when it comes to reading women, because she does not feel the same. She has a boyfriend. His name is Nick. He’s a total roid-monkey douchebag. His smile reminds me of a donkey that’s used teeth whitener. He looked at me as if I were beneath him. In fact, he said something about me looking like a drug addict, and it took all I had at the time not to punch him in the face, let alone pretend that it didn’t bother me.

Never in a million years did I think that Gemma was with someone. Obviously I never would have come to New Zealand if I had known that. Hell, I probably wouldn’t have slept with her either, since I know what it’s like to be cheated on (though there’s still a chance I would have—I’m still a human with a penis).

And now, well, now I’m going on a road trip with her, her cousin I don’t know, and her fuck-face boyfriend. And why? Because I’m stubborn? Because I didn’t want to lose face in front of the turdburger?

Or because in some deep, terribly hopeful part of me, I feel like I still have a chance. Like I can win her over. Like it’s not over. I mean, I’m here aren’t I? That’s still something.

As if reading my mind, Tibald suddenly says, “Maybe she’ll change her mind.” The waitress comes over with our drinks and he stops her before she can leave. “Excuse me, miss?”

She gives us a tense smile. She has a million tables to wait on, the bar is full of backpackers and other riffraff, and she looks all kinds of exhausted. She can barely humor us.

“Yes?”

Tibald nods at me and I groan inwardly. “See this man here. He’s a good-looking guy, right?”

The waitress looks at me and smiles. It’s genuine. At least she thinks I’m mildly fuckable. “Mmmhmm.”

“Well,” Tibald goes on, “he’s come all the way to New Zealand for a girl. He meets with her and then she invites him on a road trip to the South Island. He agrees, naturally, and then she adds that her boyfriend, whom he did not know about, will be coming with them. Now, in your wonderful opinion, does he still have a chance with her?”

She frowns in thought and taps her tray against her thigh. “I don’t know,” she muses. She looks at me. “Were you always good friends?”

I clear my throat. “We had a one-night stand, just before she came back here.”

Her eyes widen and she looks a little less tired. “Oh. You came all the way here after a one-night stand? She must have been a good shag.”