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‘But the thing is, Kirsty, I can’t keep from wondering if that has to be true. I mean … surprising things can happen, right?’
Sure. Like crashing a plane. Like having your arm squeezed so bad you think you’re going to hear that snapping noise again, the one that you’d spent years—a lifetime—blocking from your memory. Bad surprises freakinglovedhappening, which was why it was important—imperative—to stay one step ahead of them and never, ever, stay.
Joey’s hand had somehow roamed across two floorboards and a stretch of swag canvas and curled itself around hers, and his voice was all deep and rumbly and quiet. ‘Like, one day you’re doing your farm chores as usual, and you’re thinking to yourself, man, I thought switching from a desk job to a farm job would be a piece of cake, but actually it’s the hardest darn thing I’ve ever done. And then, another day, you look up from your tractor and the fields are slashed and the steers are lowing and the macadamia trees you’ve pinned your future on are growing new leaves and all you have to do to keep that momentum going is get up at dawnand work, work, work. But then you walk into your derelict shed and you find a trespasser who sets a fire going in your chest, and next thing you know you’re telling each other stories under the starlight.’
A fire. Oh man, yes oh yes, she’d sure feltthat.
Joe’s thumb had found her wrist. ‘Maybe you find yourself kissing your trespasser in a waterhole and you wonder if you might have something special. Something you hadn’t planned on, not yet anyway. Maybe it freaks you out.’
She plucked at a loose thread on the cotton sheet she’d stuffed into her swag. ‘I’m not special.’ And this was just the beer talking. It had to be. Besides, she couldn’t let herself think about what she really was, because then she wouldn’t function.
And she needed to function. Bill’s legacy needed her to function, and so did her mother.
‘Definitely special,’ he said. ‘And beautiful. And very, very, good at kissing. Why don’t you stay a little longer, Kirsty? We could get to know each other a little better.’ His question drifted like low cloud over the farmstay paddock.
She didn’t have an answer.
‘Kirsty?’
Crap. He was being lovely, and she was sitting here like a bag of cement. ‘Look, Joe, I’m … having a break from getting to know myself better, to be honest. It’s kind of the whole reason I’m in Clarence.’
‘Taking a break,’ he said. ‘You might want to be careful with that.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, sheesh,’ he said, as though that answered everything. ‘I took a break and look what happened. My owndad.’
‘I’m sorry you were hurt today.’
Joey sighed. ‘When we were growing up, Mum and Dad insisted we did everything—and I meaneverything—together. Holidays, bike riding, chores, getting in the bathtub, walking to school.’
‘That doesn’t sound too bad.’
‘I was the oldest, the responsible one. So at bath time, for example … me and five other kids stuffed into one porcelain tub. Have you seen the way they squabble?Joey, don’t let Felicity poison Anthony with lice shampoo. Joey, Daisy got soap in her eye.Fast-forward to when I was seventeen and trying to schmooze my way into getting a girl from school to kiss me. The other guys borrowed their parents’ cars and took their date to the outdoor cinema in Lismore. I could borrow the car, sure, but there’d be a row of way too interested little faces in the back seat.’
She giggled—she couldn’t help it. The aggrieved tone in Joe’s voice … it was too funny.
‘You can imagine Daisy and Wombat, can’t you?Ew, I just saw your tongue,Joey.Those kissy noises make me want to vomit,Joey. Even popcorn couldn’t shut them up.’
‘No way,’ she said.
He shook his head. ‘It was a miracle any girl agreed to go out with me.’
She raised her eyebrows. As a late-thirties bachelor with a sprinkle of silver in his lion-coloured stubble, Joe Miles was a heart-stopper. And she was pretty sure that when he was a teenager the girls at the local high school would have been lining up to score an invite to the movies, no matter how many little annoying people would be there to spoil the mood.
‘They couldn’t have cramped your style too badly. Didn’t I see your initials carved into a heart with somebody else’s at the waterhole?’
He was quiet for a moment. ‘JM and NS,’ he said.
It was her foot’s turn to tap his. ‘Tell me everything. Who’s “NS”?’
‘Natalie. She’s— Well. It didn’t work out.’
‘Doomed high-school romance, huh? We’ve all been there.’ Hadn’t Brad Gidley torn her heart out in Year Ten when he dumped her after a two-week hand-holding session because she suddenly grew taller than him?
‘Kind of.’
She wasn’t imagining things, was she? His voice had grown distant.
