AllFreeNovel
Share Us
A green light came on. Tom was online and awake at this late hour. Dots appeared to indicate he was typing. A pause. More typing. Another pause. Still more typing.
Ping.
TomCat: Our families have always helped each other with the mwoing.
Was Tom was making jokes or was he mocking me? That I could believe. Or does he possibly mean it? Or that he feels obligated to help? As a duty but not as a friend?
I sighed and let my head hit the brick wall behind me
“And the overthinking has started,” I mumbled. “Great.”
A squelchy type of noise picked up on my phone speakers, which meant Tom was typing again.
Tom: Especially mowing.
Hmph, he’s definitely mocking me. More typing from Tom.
Tom: You can always ask me for help. No matter what.
Tom: I mean it. No matter what, okay? You have my word.
A smile crossed my face as I read his messages a second time.
Despite how bad it had gotten between us, I needed the reassurance that we could still depend on each other as neighbours.
Me: That’s great. I appreciate it.
Was that reply too cold? Or just enough?
So many things were left unsaid after he’d rejected me outright the last time we had talked online. Dumped by instant message:The week was fun. Go enjoy yourself with all of your admirers.
I shuddered. I had typed a message back then about to tell him I wanted him and him alone, and then Tom sent me that cold message. That I’d been a bit of fun for a week. I thought we’d connected. That something big was happening between us. That we had a future together.
But I was nothing more than a bit of fun on the side.
And he’d encouraged me to have more fun with ‘my admirers’, whoever they were. Basically, I’d been told to go be a slut and enjoy it. How else could I interpret his message?
Tom never gave me a chance to ask him what he meant. Before I could reply, he went offline and blocked me. And then disappeared from social media. I had to move on with life and my feelings rather than keep myself on hold, wondering why Tom—neighbour, friend, confidante and briefly, my lover—had dumped me and disappeared.
But I’ve never had a friend with benefits—it’s either friends or the benefits for me. Mixing sex with friends complicated things, for me anyway.
And now I have to spend two weeks in the vineyard with a former lover and former friend, who is also my neighbour.
He was supposed to still be in uni. I was only going to stay until the six-month project with the national parks team was done and then find a job elsewhere before Tom graduated and came home.
He wasn’t supposed to be here 24/7. I could cope with him being home for the odd weekend. I could get out of town at those times.
But now, with Dad sick and an employee short, I was needed more than ever.
After Tom ghosted me, he became a distant echo mentioned at once-a-year family dinners, like Christmas: ‘Did you hear Tom is doing well at uni?’; ‘Tom received first class honours for his final year project’. That sort of thing. Nothing but headline-type comments.
Amanda hardly mentioned her family and instead focussed on uni life, then London life, her job, her latest lover, and eventually, the love of her life, Stuart. I heard brief details from her about Lily, the famous country singer, when she went platinum on the country charts.
I’ve got all her albums downloaded on my playlists. She’s amazing and is Tom’s fraternal twin. Tom got all the farming genes, and Lily had all the musical talent.
God, I wanted to ask Amanda what he was doing. But I couldn’t tell her I’d slept with her brother. When I was sixteen, I had made a solemn promise that I would never go after Ryan in particular (I guess Amanda didn’t think her baby brother would grow up and turn into a man one day).
My pledge was written on letterhead stolen from the vineyard office. Amanda and I had pricked our thumbs with a safety pin and then pressed our bloody prints onto the paper as a blood oath.
