AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Tamara walked down a lane that joined onto a residential street that joined onto a main road… and if she crossed that road, she would be only a short walk away from a small nearby shopping centre. Out of the way, I don’t think it even had a proper name. The sort of place you could go to pick up some milk or beer—yes, even condoms—if you didn’t want to run into anyone you knew.
I didn’t want to follow Tamara there. It seemed like a very fucking bad sign. But I didn’t want to give up this chase now. Once I was certain I knew where she was headed, I split off down a different road, came in at the opposite end of the mall, and was hiding at the end of the corridor leading down to the cleaners’ cupboards and shopping centre admin when she showed up at the food court. I’d already worked out that since Tamara didn’t have me on her mind at the moment, she was probably thinking about someone else. Someone she was planning to meet here…
Someone she wouldn’t want anyone else to know she was meeting.
Tamara scanned the food court seating for a few seconds, then her posture changed completely as she took in a big man sitting along one edge of the space that didn’t get a lot of traffic because the Chinese and Indian food places were there and Tasmanians are fucking racists. I’d noticed the guy already, because he looked completely out of place at that tiny chair and table. No amount of twisting, hunching, or straddling was helping. And he looked a bit shifty too, his head down and his eyes glinting as they moved, like he half-expected to be confronted and asked to move on.
As Tamara made her decision and started to head towards him, he did look up fully, a grin crossing his face as he took her in.
That was the moment I realised it: I fucking knew him.
Not personally or anything; he’d been gone long before I could have ever met him. And he was a lot older now than he’d been in all the pictures I’d seen, though still recognisable with his similar hairstyling. But I’d been an AFL
nut from the age of six, and it was probably the only thing my dad understood about me, so he’d helped me out every way he could think of. He’d given me all his old books and magazines, which made me the coolest kid in my class because they didn’t seem to print so much of that stuff these days.
And like just about every kid who was obsessed with that sort of thing, I knew a really stupid amount of stuff about a lot of star players and up-and-coming players… most of which had completely left my head, but Brad Chalmers had been interesting enough to stick, apparently.
Well, he was definitely interesting enough. What else could you say about a guy who was predicted to be the biggest star of the next generation of players… who instead disappeared, never even making the draft?
But if he was Tamara’s dad, if he was the guy who’d hit her and made her mother run, it all made complete sense now. Like my dad kept telling me, you couldn’t be a big-name sportsman if you hurt women. That had to apply ten times over if you hit a kid.
I was finding it hard to be okay with this. I wanted to walk right over and get between Tamara and that man whose size made her look like a little doll even now. But I, of all people, had to know there were complicated issues in these sorts of situations. A guy could be pushed to do a lot of bad things, especially when he was pretty young and had a lot of energy to burn.
Then I realised Tamara was staring across at me. She’d come around the far side of the table to sit down, and I’d been too busy trying to accept this new development to think about keeping out of her sight.
Of course, she hardly reacted—just like she hadn’t let on when I was fucking her just how new the whole thing was to her. I had to admire that bitch’s ability to keep things under wraps. She just sank into the little plastic food court chair across from Brad Chalmers, looking tiny in it—a fucking comical contrast to him—and managed to angle herself so that she probably looked to him like she was giving him her attention, while she was still watching me.
I wanted to stay. I felt like I should stay. I’d helped her to bring this guy back into her life, I owed it to her to make sure she was okay at the end of it.
But I also knew I couldn’t do anything to fuck this up for her, like distracting he when she was trying to work out what to make of him. I had to give her the space she needed to decide what Chalmers could be to her, and I had to trust her to know if she needed to seek help. It wasn’t like I was the guy she’d want help from anyway.
I had a feeling I needed to remove myself from this situation to figure out what I thought about Tamara possibly being the daughter of Brad Chalmers, too. Because right now there was another part of me that was feeling a strong urge to run over and be a fucking fanboy right in his face. It’s an honour to meet you Mr. Chalmers…
Fuck that shit.
Making sure Tamara could still see me, I started to walk forward. I headed straight for a set of sliding doors that led out of the building, and didn’t look back once. Hopefully she would see exactly where I’d gone.
We were definitely going to talk about this on Monday. But we both needed about that much time to process what had happened that afternoon.
Chapter Seventeen: Tamara
I was surprised when Steven just walked out. But at the moment his stalking seemed to be confined to working out what I was up to, and he was probably smart enough to figure out after taking me to get that birth certificate that this big guy was not some secret boyfriend.
I was relieved to see him gone. Aside from the obvious distraction, it niggled at me to be there in front of Brad Chalmers and to think about how things were with Steven now, when he was such a big part of my getting there at all. I knew, right then, I was going to have to confront him next week. Keeping my distance and hoping things settled down did not seem to be working.
But for now, I had to focus on my—this—what did I even call him?
Brad Chalmers grinned. “I think for the moment we’ll stick with you calling me ‘Bradley’ or ‘Brad’, okay?” As if he’d known exactly what I was thinking. “And are you Tamara? Tammie?”
“Just Tamara.”
His smile was so like my brother’s it was unsettling. “Well, Just Tamara, should we grab something for lunch?”
I’d been considering it, but now I was here I knew I wouldn’t be able to eat. “I can’t stay long, I have to get back to school. Maybe just a coffee?”
“Great, sure.” He jumped up out of his seat, tipping his chair onto the floor with a crash. I hid a smile behind my hands as he picked it up. “I’ll go get something for you, my shout, no need to get the wallet out.” I’d hardly started reaching for my bag. “Just wait there for a moment.”
He made his way over to the coffee stall in the middle of the food court, constantly glancing back like he thought I might bolt. I had been planning on using the time to collect my thoughts, work out where my head was at, but my brain was filled with nothing but fuzz until he was sitting back down and sliding a very milky-looking cup across the table towards me.
