A Place Beyond The Horizon

03. 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.