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No matter how much I pretended, we didn’t belong.
We couldn’t.
Even if I believed we could, she wasn’t really interested.
Was she?
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I got the pillows and doonas out again the next night, piling them up in the back of my ute. She came outside while I was busy piling and teased me mercilessly about it.
“Call me a pansy, then,” I scoffed. “But it’s been too fucking wet today.”
“That’s ‘nother dollar, Uncie Roman,” I heard from inside, but it didn’t sound like her heart was in it. She’d been a little lethargic all night and was not fighting the bedtime routine for once.
Piper laughed and I pointed at her, Maddy temporarily forgotten.
“Don’t you start,” I told Piper.
“Do you have a swear jar?” she asked.
I sighed. “Yes. Maddy…insisted. She had a couple of days at school last term as orientation and it came up.”
“Are you now very poor?” she teased.
I pouted at her. I’d been aiming for sexy and, given her response, I didn’t completely fail. “Let’s just say that Maddy’s probably going to be able to buy herself those new roller skates in about a week.”
She snorted, clapping her hand over her mouth like she was actually trying not to laugh. I rolled my eyes.
“Go on, then. Have a good laugh at my expense.”
She beamed at me, her eyes shining brightly. “No. No. I’m on your side.”
“Sure you are.”
“Are we going now?” she asked.
I looked around like that would answer whatever question was going on in me. “Uh, we can. Yeah. You don’t have…stuff to do?”
She headed for the passenger door. “No. Do you?”
I shook my head. “Uh, no. No. Not at all.”
She was quite literally the only thing I ever wanted to be doing right now. In ALL the senses of the word.
Piper gave me a nod and climbed into the ute.
I wasn’t going to ask her if she was going to change. In a skirt and her ugg boots, she was in about the same thing she’d been in the other night, and she’d seemed fine under the blankets then, so I wasn’t going to assume she needed to be told what to do or second-guessed now.
“Mum, we’re out,” I called inside.
“All right, love,” she called back. “Have a nice time.”
I climbed into the driver’s seat and told myself my whole body wasn’t prickling with Piper so close by. I told myself I wasn’t hyperaware of every time she shifted in her seat or turned her head. I wasn’t totally alert that my hand was on the gear shift and hers lay on the seat beside her. So. Fucking. Close.
“Maddy seemed in a good mood,” she said, breaking my chain of thoughts. Probably for the best.
I nodded quickly. “Yeah. She was a bit more settled than usual tonight.”
