Nobody but Him (8 page)

Nasty bastard or nice guy?

‘God, look at you. You must work out. A lot.’ Amanda’s gaze lingered on his shoulders and then dipped to his abs. ‘You’re even more gorgeous naked, you know that?’ She shrugged, regarded him through heavily lidded eyes. ‘So you don’t like to fuck in the shower. That’s fine with me. I’ll fuck you anywhere. The kitchen table. The floor. Your bed.’

Think about her parents. Yeah, think about her parents in the next goddamn room. Ry spun on his heel and headed to the bedroom which, judging by the way she followed him, Amanda seemed to take as an invitation. But when he hurriedly dragged on some jeans and a black, long-sleeved T-shirt, the look on her face transformed from come hither to pissed off. She stormed back to the bathroom and re-emerged with the towel cocooned around her body.

Only when he was fully dressed, safe, did he look at her again. Was she humiliated or furious? It looked like both.

‘Amanda. Why don’t you go and put some clothes on? There’s something I need to tell you, and it’d probably be best if you weren’t naked while I was saying it.’

Amanda hugged the towel closer around her, didn’t take another step towards him. ‘Just say it, Ry. I’m a big girl.’

Ry exhaled in frustration but kept his voice low. There was no point in being a nasty bastard.

‘Look, I’m sorry if I’ve given you any indication that this …’ Ry pointed from her to himself and back again, ‘ … this was ever going to happen. It’s never going to happen, Amanda. I’m sorry.’

And even as he was saying the words, trying to explain what he meant in a cruel to be kind way, her eyes welled up with tears and, yeah, he was pretty sure it was humiliation he saw in her face, not fury. Then he figured out that whatever he’d done, whether he’d slept with her or rebuffed her, he was always going to be the arsehole. And he’d have to take that like a man.

Amanda shuffled over to his bed and plonked herself down on the edge
of it. With one end of the big fluffy white towel, she reached up and wiped her cheeks.

‘You can’t blame a girl for trying, can you?’

Ry sat down beside her. ‘I know what it’s like to be lonely, Amanda. But wanting to try me out for size ’cos I look like the perfect candidate? Not a great idea.’

‘You look just like him,’ she whispered, trying to smile but giving up and dropping her gaze to her linked hands.

‘Like who?’

‘My boyfriend.’ She tried to laugh but it sounded empty. ‘My
ex
-boyfriend, I mean. We were together for four years. Four years and he leaves me. Can you believe that? I thought if I just got right back on the horse and kept on riding that … somehow … I’d be okay.’

Now it all made sense. Her desperation and her hopelessness. This wasn’t about him. It was about the other guy. Amanda was trying to kill off the memory of a lover by sleeping with someone else.

What a fucking stupid idea.

He should know.

Ry shoved those bitter memories down his throat. ‘Look. Why don’t you get dressed. Let’s go downstairs and make breakfast for your parents, butter them up before we break the tragic news to them that we’re not getting engaged.’

And then Amanda smiled. It was perhaps the first genuine smile he’d seen from her all weekend. ‘They’ll be heart-broken you know. They love you.’

‘And someone else will love you one day, Amanda. You can count on it.’

But it won’t be me.

Julia had spent hours scrubbing and scouring and her hands felt soggy from being inside sweaty rubber gloves. She’d filled up most of the day with her stress-relieving cleaning binge and was waiting for Lizzie to arrive with a supply of empty cardboard boxes she’d nabbed from the pub. What had once transported bottles of wine would soon be packed with things that needed to be removed from the house, whatever decision Julia made about its future. Renting or selling, there were things that needed to be dealt with. Old linen. A kitchen full of dishes, platters, cake tins, aged
crockery and cutlery. Laundry cupboards that had to be emptied of odd tools, mysterious ice-cream containers full of odd screws and nails, and dried-up tins of shoe polish. There were no memories for Julia in any of it. They were simply the accumulated accessories of a life as wife, mother and widow.

She’d already taken a quick glance at her own things, crammed into her old two door wardrobe and discount store chest of drawers. She’d left behind almost everything when she went to Melbourne and a cursory inspection now had her resolving to ditch the whole lot. All that was left was an old rain jacket hanging next to a stiffened wetsuit she hadn’t worn in fifteen years, which jostled for space with a box of rolled-up posters and a box of CDs. None of it meant anything to her anymore.

Julia hadn’t had much in the way of cool clothes or shoes when she was growing up. Her mother’s favourite stores, more through philosophy than necessity, were second-hand ones. She never owned the cool jeans or the surf gear that all the city kids wore when they came down to Middle Point for the summer. Julia’s bathers and thongs had never been name brand, but discount department store, something the too-cool-for-school city kids had taken great pleasure in pointing out on the beach. The humiliation of those moments still burned in her. She’d gladly left all that behind when she’d shut her bedroom door for the final time all those years before.

‘Hello!’

Julia poked her head up and peered over the kitchen bench. Lizzie had pushed open the front door with a swing of her hips and was carrying a pile of cardboard in her arms, wine boxes unfolded and laid out flat.

‘I’m over here,’ Julia called out, ‘Excavating the deepest darkest depths of my mother’s cupboards. Check this out.’ Julia stood and set a metal tray on the bench with a clatter.

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a muffin tray. I swear I don’t remember my mother ever baking anything. She was so not a mother who baked. Why on earth did she need a muffin tray?’

Lizzie dropped the pile of cardboard onto the floor in the living room with a thud.

‘Jools, Mary may have actually discovered the muffin in the fifteen years you were in Melbourne, and perhaps even the friand, verjuice and quinoa.
We make a point of keeping up with the times in little old Middle Point, you know.’

Julia crossed her arms. ‘You’re telling me off again, aren’t you?’

‘Things weren’t preserved in aspic when you left, which you would know if you’d ever bothered to come back.’ Lizzie smiled naughtily.

Julia blew a strand of hair out of her eyes, after it had cunningly escaped her ponytail. ‘Believe me, I can see how much this place has changed. I see it every time I step out the front door. I just didn’t think Mum would change, you know?’

Lizzie found Julia and gave her a tight hug. ‘You can either make me cry or put me to work. Which is it going to be?’

‘Work. Definitely work.’

An hour later, Julia and Lizzie had filled boxes for donation, others for storing and there were plastic garbage bags in a pile in the corner ready to be thrown out. Lizzie had pushed the council rubbish bin out onto the edge of the front yard and was slowly filling it, while Julia had her head stuck deep inside the oven, rubber gloves on, scrubbing and wiping.

‘Hey, Lizzie, can you chuck me another scourer?’ Julia’s voice echoed. ‘This one has just died.’

When she didn’t get an answer, she got to her feet and surveyed the silent living room.

‘Lizzie?’ Her best friend seemed to have been gone longer than was strictly necessary for a walk to the edge of the street and back. The gust of wind blowing into the house and billowing the curtains seemed to suggest she was still out there.

Julia crossed the room and stepped out the front door.

When Lizzie and Ry turned to look at her, she realised it was a split second too late to go back inside with any dignity. Her rubber gloved hands waved in the air like they belonged to a surgeon who’d just scrubbed up, and her jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt were grubby and damp. Her dirty curls were pulled back off her face and she couldn’t vouch for what she smelled like.

Ry’s words flew around and around in her head. At first there had been a promise to stay as far away from each other as possible. That had recently morphed into figuring out a way to deal with this running into each other thing.

And now … she was supposed to make neighbourly small talk by the rubbish bin?

He stood on the grassed verge, alongside Lizzie, looking at her with a bemused expression on his face. His old denims and his navy jumper, shoved up around his forearms, looked soft and comfortable and worn in, the kind of thing a man like him would wear while lounging around a fireplace sipping red wine with his stylish Princess Wife.

Julia, on the other hand, felt like a total hausfrau.

‘Jools,’ Lizzie called and out of Ry’s line of sight, beckoned her forward with wide eyes and a fluttering hand. Julia decided she would kill her best friend later. Slowly.

She sucked in a fortifying breath and tried to emulate a self-assured strut as she joined the gathering. And because she wanted to get the first word in, show him that she was unfussed by his presence, she called out before she reached them.

‘Hello Ry.’ She tried to ignore the grin and those eyes. Damn him.

‘Julia.’

‘Lizzie, I was wondering where you were.’ The cold wind coming off the beach made her shiver.

Lizzie turned to Julia with a barely suppressed smile. ‘I was just telling Ry about the clean up you’re doing and he’s offered his help.’

Julia turned to look at him. Ry’s arms were crossed over his chest, his legs straight and set in a wide stance.

‘Really.’ Julia lifted her chin and drew back her shoulders. As if she would ever take help from Ry Blackburn.

‘Yes. He said that when your bin is full we could load up his. It’s bin night tonight so we should take full advantage.’

‘Why, how neighbourly of you Ry. Are you sure it’s not too much trouble?’

He smiled, meeting her gaze head on. ‘It’s no trouble.’

‘Thank you,’ Lizzie added, glancing from Ry to Julia and quickly back again. Julia knew she’d be working this over in her head to try and figure out what exactly was going on between her boss and her best friend. Julia wasn’t about to put her out of her misery.

‘Well,’ Julia announced, wiggling her gloved fingers in the air. ‘I’ve got to get back to the scrubbing.’ As she walked back inside, she couldn’t fight the distinct impression that Ry was watching her every step.

A minute later, Lizzie bounced back inside, laughing, her short blonde hair wild and her nose red from the cold.

‘Oh. My. God.’

Julia was at the kitchen sink, refilling it with hot water and suds. ‘Oh my God what?’

Lizzie skipped over to the kitchen bench and leaned right cross it. ‘Did you see that?’

‘See what?’

‘The way he was looking at you just now.’

Julia harrumphed. ‘I saw him looking at me all right. More like looking down his nose at me. I mean, what am I wearing?’

Lizzie took in Julia’s outfit with fresh eyes and laughed. ‘I don’t think those gloves go with those shoes.’

Julia looked down at her green rubber gloves and her mother’s bright pink runners and joined in.

‘Oh, why do I give two shits if he looks down his perfect nose at me? It’s not the first time I’ve been cross-examined visually by people like him.’

‘I don’t think it was cross-examination. He was figuring out ways to get you out of those rubber gloves and daggy clothes.’

Julia scooped up a palm full of soapy water and flicked it at Lizzie, who squealed.

‘Stop it. We were standing by the rubbish bin, not by a bar, for God’s sake.’

‘Just sayin’.’ Lizzie grinned, studied her fingernails with raised eyebrows and a grin.

By mid afternoon Lizzie had left to go to work at the pub and Julia had scrubbed herself into near hysteria. She had to get out, stretch her legs and breathe the sea air. She strangely needed to get a little bit of Middle Point back inside her, pumping through her veins, grounding her to this juncture in her life. It seemed a safe time to head across the road and over the dunes to the sand, seeing as the Handsome Jerk clearly sprang out of bed at the crack of dawn for his exercise. She could walk the beach unseen and unnoticed, which was exactly what she needed.

The beach was blustery and bleak, with great grey clouds hovering low,
threatening rain in the distance. It was so windy even the seagulls seemed reluctant to fly, huddled instead in clumps on the beach, their feathers fluffing in the force of the wind. The tide was high, leaving only a few metres of sand between the waves and the dunes, and Julia stepped up her stride, stomping over the clumps of seaweed and seagrass, dodging the remains of dead fish and driftwood with a physical resolve as well as an emotional one.

Although Middle Point had grown and changed so much that it was almost unrecognisable, the beach — her beach — was still the same. And thank God for that, she thought. The dunes, covered with green and grey coastal shrubs, hunkered low and tight against the wind and the waves and, in the distance, a few hundred metres up the beach, the rocks of Middle Point sat scattered in the shallows where the coastline jutted into the ocean. The waves had never stopped crashing onto the outcrop, continued ceaselessly today as they had forever. The wind had never stopped blowing, so fiercely in winter that trees stood tall at odd angles, never growing fully upright, leaning like Towers of Pisa away from the blustery weather. The gulls still flew, the sand still felt like quicksand if you stepped too close to the water’s edge, and the Point, as still and solid as a sentinel, continued to watch over everyone and everything.

Something shifted in her heart when she took it all in. She would soon be saying her final goodbyes to it all. Would this be the last time she walked the beach of Middle Point, looked up to that sky, stared at the waves which receded and became part of the Great Southern Ocean? If it was, it would mean she’d never see another summer either, never feel those one-in-a-million days when the sand melted your feet and the sun shone so brightly on the shallows that the water looked like liquid mercury, blindingly bright. Days when the waves were filled with people and the beach hummed with life and music and beach cricket and families and summer, surfers and bodyboarders, retirees walking their dogs in the sunshine, holidaymakers and young lovers.