‘Not me. Oh no. Boys weren’t interested in me in high school.’ I tilted my chin up, showed I wasn’t bothered.
‘More fool the boys,’ he murmured, the words silky, caressing over my ego.
‘Not really. I mean, I didn’t have contacts then, I tried to hide my big boobs with frumpy clothes, I had a retainer – puberty was not kind.’
‘Would you have wanted to go make out at the drive-in, if someone had asked you?’
‘What teenager wouldn’t?’ Again, breezy voice. I didn’t want him knowing how hard those years had been. How much I’d longed forsomemale attention. So much so, I’d ignored my better judgement when the cutest boy at school looked my way. ‘I bet you looked just the same when you were a teenager – life is unfair like that.’
‘You think I looked like a man in my thirties when I was a teenager?’ He raised an eyebrow at me.
‘You’re right, that would be weird. Go on then. Tell me how awkward-looking you were.’
‘I did all right. I had the usual spots – a very difficult year when my voice was breaking, and I grew six inches but gained no extra weight. On the whole, I did okay though.’
‘Okay, he says.’ I scoffed under my breath. Even the best-looking boy at my school wouldn’t have held a candle to him. I shook my head. ‘You can go y’know. I don’t mind doing the babysitting by myself. It’ll give me a chance to write.’
‘You can write now if you want. I won’t be offended.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course.’ He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs at the ankles. ‘Sitting here with you is more pleasant and more helpful than going home to sit by myself.’ He looked out over the garden, his teeth scraping his lip for a second, like he’d said too much. Was Stephen…lonely? Was that why those strange looks kept creeping over him at my parents’ house? Being in the centre of a crowd of close-knit people was bound to make you feel isolated, even when he was getting so involved – he had so little family left. When I’d seen him at the bar a couple of weeks ago, I’d wanted to figure out who the true Stephen was, like he was a Sudoku puzzle, but I hadn’t thought about the consequences of doing it. I didn’t want to see his hurt and feel this tenderness growing in my chest for him.
‘Being able to sit quietly, companionably, with someone is a novelty,’ I said evenly.
‘Particularly with you,’ he quipped and I cuffed him around the head on my way to get my notebook. I wanted him to grab my wrist and pull me down into his lap, to kiss me boneless. But that wasn’t going to happen. He’d made it clear the ball was in my court where that was concerned; he was going to respect my wishes and I knew better…didn’t I?
We sat in the velvety darkness, a set of tea lights along the railing to my sister’s deck while I wrote in my notebook. The stars were overhead, and something was stirring in my mind. I let myself write. Not plan or outline or scratch away at a problem. I just wrote a scene where Kit and Charmaine sat down together and talked, and touched…
And realised that they were falling in love.
Chapter Eleven
Once Noelle’s sister and brother-in-law returned, I called us an Uber. Noelle fell asleep in the back, slumping into my shoulder, her arms folded protectively around her big handbag, the notebook she’d been scribbling into tucked safely inside. Her hair smelt of sweet smoke and sunshine and it was a wrench having to nudge her awake and lose the warmth of her pressed up against me.
She was still half asleep when I saw her to her door and she hesitated a moment as she was saying goodnight, before reaching up on impulse to give me a kiss on the cheek that stayed on my skin like a burn long after she’d gone inside.
It had to be because she was tired and had been with her family. All the affection she had for them spilling over onto me. I walked home feeling more restless than made any sense following a platonic kiss.
For the first time in a long time I didn’t look forward to going back to work on Monday. Patrick was panicking and absentminded when it came to updating me on matters he’d dealt with and then expecting me to know what he was talking about. He was obviously stressed, and I didn’t want to add to that but with only two weeks to go before his paternity leave, I had to ensure he wasn’t going to drop me in it. He’d still not arranged a number of key client meetings and I hoped I wasn’t going to have to take up Georgina’s offer to step in. I was avoiding her as much as I possibly could. Every time she cornered me in the office, I could feel dozens of pairs of eyes trained on us, ready to pick up any little detail they could gossip about.
I decided to ask Patrick to meet me in the mornings to go for a run. He was so enthusiastic I felt guilty that I’d ever doubted his sincerity when I first started working in New York. It turned out his wife’s blood pressure was on the rise and they were thinking about doing a caesarean to deliver the babies early. His wife was worried, he was worried, and my first thought was whether Noelle would be able to help, given her experience both as a midwife and with having twins in the family.
I picked up the phone a number of times, ready to call her, but something held me back. She had work to do and even though she said she wanted to be friends, and I wanted to try, was I really capable of suppressing my attraction to her? I wasn’t sure I could deal with her disappointment in me if I slipped up. When she received word from her dad about Trevor, she’d let me know. That’s what I needed to focus on, and all I had to do was wait.
But as the week drew on and I didn’t hear anything, I began to wonder what was the worse torture? Being in her company or not having her around me at all? Work served as some distraction but Thursday was Independence Day, a national holiday. I had nothing to do but stay at home, do more work and catch up with the friends and family back home.
After ringing my nan, I braved contacting Nick. I’d been giving him small updates about the search, to reassure him things were in hand but not getting into in-depth discussions about it, so I arranged to talk to him while we played GTA across the network on our PS4s.
‘Wow, so this could be it? Will you go straight to see him, or would you like to wait until I’m over, so I can come with you?’ Nick asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I hedged; a flat-out ‘no’ would just open myself up to an argument. ‘I have no idea how long it will take Ken to find an opportunity to do the search. He’s a detective so he obviously has higher priorities.’
‘Of course.’
Nick was trouncing me in the game, constantly blowing my head off the second I’d respawned, but since his job relied on his being able to hit the right buttons at the right time, with superior hand-eye coordination, I had to take it on the chin. When I caught him off guard, blasting his avatar into a building and crowed in triumph, he groaned.
‘Beth just came in. I was distracted.’
