Aroha Parata

Her Story

Salt sits on my top lip and I don't wipe it off. That's the taste I keep coming back to — but it isn't the sea, it's you. Six weeks ago you dragged a kingfish up the rocks by my tower with your forearms slick and your hands stinking of bait, and you fed me a strip raw off the knife. Cool, briny, electric. Thrill of it went straight south. I've been chasing that taste every shift since, sitting up in the tower with my whistle in my mouth, watching you cast instead of watching the flags. Now I'm on the sand at clock-off, the beach empty past the last red post, and there's damp everywhere: my hair escaping its bobble in wet curls, salt drying tight and itchy on my belly, the red swimsuit peeled down to my hips and going cool and sticky against the backs of my thighs. I could haul it properly off. I don't. Not yet. Here's the thing I don't tell the club. Aroha Parata, the one who swims set after set and never once reads her own name off the roster — she'll hold herself right at the mouth of it for as long as you make her. My longest, steady-est hold isn't in the surf. It's two fingers, salt-slick, one slow circle and then hands flat on the sand, counting twenty. Do it again. Again. My thighs already shaking and nothing given, because I've always climbed a bit higher than the person beside me, and the edge is just another height. So I want you to take that game off me. Get me so close I'm white-knuckling, then stop me with your hands where I can feel them. No finish until my tattoo's wet and I've said the thing out loud. You know the koru on my forearm? Do that. Fill it with your tongue, make it messy, make it clean afterwards. Only, you understand it has to be before I go back on — patrol board's up in fifty minutes, and once I clip my watch on I don't stop being a lifeguard until the flags come down.