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“Nat, I’m so, so sorry. I’ve been flat out at work, and I mixed up my weeks.”
I remained quiet, whilst I figured out what I really wanted to say.
“What’s going on with you, Jake?” I was fed up with the hot and cold conversations.
“Wha…what do you mean?”
“We’ve barely spoken in months, you’ve been distant with me, you forgot my birthday…I’m starting to think you don’t want to be with me anymore.”
“No! No, Natalie, that’s not what I want. I want you. I love you. I’ve just been…”
“What?” My heart hammered in my chest.
Jake sighed into the receiver. “Avoiding you.”
I absorbed his words, but couldn’t make sense of them. “If you’re avoiding me, then it’s obvious you don’t want—”
“I kissed someone else,” he admitted hastily, like tearing off a Band-Aid.
My heart dropped and pain seeped into my chest.
“I swear it didn’t mean anything. I was stupidly drunk and missing you,” he rushed. “I’m so sorry, Natalie. I didn’t want to tell you like this.”
“I wish you didn’t have to tell me at all,” I replied, barely above a whisper.
“I know,” he croaked. “I’m sorry.”
“Do you…do you want to break up?”
“No! Please no. I want you to forgive me.”
“Yeah, well…I’m gonna need a little more time to process this, so…”
Before he could say another word, I hung up the phone and escaped to my bedroom before Mum—or worse, Dad—saw my tears.
Everyone warned me the long-distance thing would be hard. But he was only three hours away and it was just until I finished school, so how could we possibly screw it up? I couldn’t even focus the blame on Jake, as I was wracked with my own guilt. I knew my accidental kiss with Luke was perfectly innocent, but my feelings definitely weren’t.
* * *
Luke picked up extra shifts at the pub, leaving me with too much free time to think. Since Dawn was home more, I asked her for extra music lessons. They would get me out of the house and give me the perfect excuse to avoid Jake’s persistent phone calls. She knew I was learning guitar with Luke, but she didn’t give me a hard time like I expected. She was just happy to have me back in her music room.
Dawn worked the opposite schedule to Luke, so I didn’t have to worry about running into him at their house. I sat down at her beautiful grand piano, and began my usual series of warm up scales to loosen up my fingers. Meanwhile, Dawn gathered up the piles of sheet music that were littered across the closed lid of the piano.
“Are you writing again, Dawn?” I asked with anticipation, knowing she was quite the composer back in her day. She hadn’t written a song since John died.
She laughed and shook her head. “Luke has been working on this piece for weeks. I’ve never seen him so frustrated,” she admired. “It must be something special.”
I pulled my eyes away from the keys and slowly scanned Dawn’s music room. There was sheet music everywhere. On tables, on the floor, even the bin was overflowing with scrunched up paper. I had never seen the room in such a mess.
Dawn noticed my shock and chuckled. “It got a lot worse than this when I was writing.”
* * *
Luke surprised me that night by joining my family for dinner on his rare night off. Annoyingly, he spent most of the night chatting to my parents about the farm. A topic of conversation that irritated me, and Luke knew this.
Occasionally our eyes would meet and he would pop out another stupid question about cattle farming. I knew he wasn’t interested in farm life and it felt like he was somehow baiting me. When the frustration got too much, I excused myself and left the table.
I couldn’t work out what was annoying me more. Luke’s sudden interest in the difference between Angus and Wagyu, or the fact he had written a song and hadn’t told me about it.
