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Authors: Tammy Robinson

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BOOK: Charlie and Pearl
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PEARL

 

Why does he keep looking at me like that? His eyes are big, and the way he keeps opening them even wider makes him look slightly unhinged. They are a
startling colour though, blue with flecks of green, like the Mediterranean sea in the travel brochures I love to collect and dream over.

When he smiles he gets these curved lines each side of his mouth in his cheeks, not dimples
as such
, longer than that, but very sexy whatever they are. Laughter lines?

“What’s your name?” I ask him.

“Charlie”

“I’m Pearl” I told him.

“Pearl”....he swirled it round his mouth and rolled it
up in
his tongue in a way that was a bit too personal
, like
he was tasting it.

Outside I realised with some degree of relief that h
e obviously wasn’t a car guy, like most kiwi guys, with their souped up, lowered, lit from beneath,
deafeningly
loud cars. His
had seen better days,
was
in fact
a bit of a dunga, faded blue, a big scratch down one side. He saw me looking at it.

“Not my fault” he
noticed where I was looking
, “the other guy backed into me. Insurance refuses to pay out because the asshole won’t admit it was his fault, stupid pricks” Then he looked guilty, “Sorry” he said.

“For what?”

“My language”

“Relax, I’ve heard worse”.

I climbed into
the passenger seat which was
surprisingly tidy inside
.
I expected piles of rubbish. He’s a good driver, follows the speed limit, checks both ways.  I tell him where to go then relax. The movement of the car is soothing, a lullaby. He smells...spicy, oriental or Middle Eastern? Something like that. It’s deep, layered, warm on the nose like cinnamon or nutmeg. I close my eyes.

My shoulder being nudged gently wakes me. I fell asleep again? God this guy must think I have a sleeping disorder.

We’re home.

He’s out the door and round my side before I’ve even unbuckled my seatbelt, opening the door and offering me his hand like an old fashioned gentleman. If I wasn’t feeling so tired and weak I might have laughed, but I am, so I take it gratefully.

Inside he settles me on the couch in the open plan dining/lounge and then proceeds to close all the curtains, turn on the lights, put the groceries away, all the time talking, talking, talking, about nothing, nothing that I really listen to anyway. Trivial stuff.
I itch to open the lounge curtains again, having them closed like this around me leaves me claustrophobic. I prefer them open to the sea and the stars.

Having him here, in this house with me at such close proximity and making so much noise, annoys me. I want to him to leave so I close my eyes and lay my head back on the couch. Maybe if I breathe nice and slow, even snore a little, he will take the hint.

“How about a glass of that wine then?” he says.

Maybe not.

“Look, sorry, not to be rude, but I’m shattered, I just want to go to bed”.

“Are you sick?”

“Excuse me?”

“Sick. I don’t mean to be nosy, it’s just you look really, really,
pale
, and you fell asleep in the shop, so I just wondered.....”

What? I wondered what exactly he thought I had.

“I’m fine” I told him, “Just getting over the flu”. As if I would tell a total stranger my business.

I looked at him. He looked at me. I willed him to read my thoughts,
leave now
! And then because I w
as raised to be polite I added a
please
.

Still he hovered. It looked like he wanted to say something. Was he going to ask me out? If so his timing sucked. I was off men.

He obviously thought better of it because he just smiled and said, “I’ll go then.”

“Ok.
Thanks again for the ride.”

“No problem”

S
till
he didn’t make a move
.

“Night” I said, faking a yawn.

“Oh
.
Right, night night, don’t let the bed bugs bite!” h
e said, then cringed because it
sounded so sadly uncool
to us both
.

“I won’t”

“Maybe I’ll see you around?”

“Hmm, maybe” I’m non-committal.

He left. I don’t intend on seeing him again.

CHARLIE

 

I am such a dickhead. It’s been
four
days since I dropped Pearl back at her
Beach house
and my cheeks are still
tinged
red. I know she knew that I was into her; I wasn’t exactly subtle about it.
But in my defence
I’ve never felt like this before. I realise I don’t know too much about her, other than her first name, she’s very pale and I’m pretty sure she’s my soul mate.

I feel very strongly about this last fact.

I can’t explain it.

I just know it. And now I just have to help her see it too.

I haven’t stopped thinking about her for a second since I left her. She’s the last thing I think of when I go to sleep and the first thing I think of when I wake. The hours in between are filled with dreams of her. And the hours during the day are filled with endless fantasies.

A recurrent one features the outdoor shower I noticed that night.

The second I saw it I thought, “Ooh-er, I’d like to see her in that!” and then I felt bad because it was exactly like something my mate Rangi would say, and the girls at the pub call him a sleazy bastard, although they know he’s pretty harmless.  He’s been with Cushla, since he was like, 12, and they have 6 kids. He’d never cheat on her because, 1), she’s gorgeous and he’d never do better
than her,
not in a million years,
and
2) she’d kill him if he did
.

He likes to tell rude jokes (and forward them by text – some are truly, truly awful) and he loves summer when all the campers from the campground come into the pub. He puffs his chest up and rolls up his sleeves to better show off his muscles, and he acts like he could have anyone he chooses. He says things like, “
fuck yeah
, I’d like to bend her over the kitchen sink”
then
laughs loudly, elbowing Mike and I and expecting us to join in, which we do, but
much,
much
quieter, because actually I have a lot of respect for woman, and not enough experience in that area to be able to joke confidently about it.

I’ve been to Pearl’s house before I realised later, lying in bed and going over the night in my mind. It had looked familiar when I was there, and had been bugging me as to how I knew it but it took me awhile to remember. I went to a party there once, with a few of the guys from school. 
A mate, Mike, long since left this town and moved on to brighter things,
had been trying to cop off with this girl he’d met at the jetty; Tania? Trisha? Something like that. He did too, lucky bastard. I only got as far as a kiss, my first, in the sand dunes out front of the house, the tussock crunchy underneath us. It was pitch black so I couldn’t see her properly, but she smelt nice and was a fantastic kisser, even biting my tongue once or twice in what Rangi said later must have been some sexy show of her desire. 

At work, for the first time I’m
a little
grateful that Pete spends half his time somewhere else because it means he doesn’t notice that I’m somewhere else too. Every time I walk out the back to the office I look at the desk and picture her how I saw her that first time, her hair fanned out over her face so I could only see one closed
, curved
eyelid.  I smile at customers, direct them to the section they want, scan their choice, process the transaction, bag the book/s, wish them a good day, but the whole time I’m thinking about her.

And how I can see her again.

The girl on the checkout at the Four square, Amy, who was
a few
years ahead of me at school and
has breath that smells like rotting shellfish and which can smelt from
anywhere within
a two metre radius
, now thinks I have a crush on her because I’ve been in there buying cans of V just about every hour of the working day the last
four
days
on the off chance
Pearl
might
be
in there buying more wine. Consequently I haven’t slept much the last few nights and my hands have developed a bit of a tremor. I’m detoxing now because Amy wrote her number on my receipt yesterday and told me to give her a call, then she winked at me and leered
which scared the shit out of me
. I haven’t had the guts to go back.

Upon reflection though, s
urely Pearl would appreciate a friendly visit from the man who rescued her in her hour of need, just to check that she’s ok?
T
hat’s the only polite thing to do
, really. In my humble opinion
.

Perhaps with some sort of gesture.

Flowers? The only offerings round here are sold at the four square or the service station, and both are trucked in from Tauranga, so half dead by the time they arrive and
ridiculously
overpriced
.

Chocolates? By the look of her she doesn’t eat too many, she’s skinnier than most girls around here.

More thought is required.

 

PEARL

 

Adam and I met at a bar. I was out with the girls, celebrating
the fact that one of us had
just got engaged. We drank bubbly wine and danced on tables
till the bouncer threw us out
.
W
hen I’ve had a few drinks I tend to get flirty; I think I’m sexier than I
actually
am. It
certainly
wasn’t the first time my alcohol induced confidence had attracted a guy
.

I hadn’t had a serious boyfriend since my high school sweetheart, Darren. You can’t really call a high school romance ‘serious’
though,
can you? I mean, at the time you love him truly madly deeply and it seems like the end of the world when you break up, but hindsight
and a few years
reveals
childish love, tantrums, deliberately trying to make each other jealous, picking fights for no reason other than to feel passionate and have make up sex and feel smug that no one else feels the same way you do
and that your love will last forever
.

Oh, the angst.

Since Darren I’d had boyfriends, the longest lasting
six
months but which I don’t include in the serious category because I never even saw him completely naked. He had been raised religious and although no longer went to church every Sunday felt that sex between the unmarried was a sin but if we did it with the lights off perhaps God wouldn’t notice.

I hadn’t had sex in almost
five
months when I met Adam, and that first night he bore the full brunt of my frustrations. We went at it like rabbits. God it was fantastic. We didn’t get any sleep at all. I did the walk of the shame
back into my house
the next morning, but I wasn’t ashamed, I was in love.

Adam never said the L word. Not in the entire time we were together, just over
eight
months. I said it easily, as
casual as if dropping the word u
mbrella into the conversation.

“Babe, can you pass the salt?”

“Here you go”

“Thanks, I love you”

See, anytime, anywhere I said it.

I spent nights examining every inch of his body, the curves behind his knees, the way his big toe was slightly
webbed with the one next to it.
Our love coincided with the first heat waves of summer, and we spent a lot of time naked.
I remember
curling up on his couch and watching him do sit-ups in only his briefs.
We ended up making love right there on the floor. He cooked naked apart from an apron, a tasteful black BBQ one that said ‘chief cook’, and then we ate naked, using our fingers as utensils, the juice from the steak running down his arm and I licking it off, staring up at him seductively as I ran my tongue up his forearm. We ended up making love on the table.

I was consumed with him, there’s no other word for it. And he seemed the same with me. He got jealous if another guy checked me out, wanted to pin down all my plans days in advance to make sure he had the correct amount of attention he felt he deserved. He had no worries there though. I wanted to spend every waking minute with him. I called, text, emailed him every hour from work. I couldn’t eat I was that lovesick. I lost weight, cut my hair off because he thought long and curly was too ‘young’ for me. We went shopping and he picked out gorgeous clothes for me, clothes I would never have considered. Dresses, tailored trousers, Heels even, for the girl who previously lived in jandals. He taught me to like red wine, choose elegant salads rather than fries at restaurants.

BOOK: Charlie and Pearl
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