Our Kind of Love (16 page)

‘Yes, Dr Morelli. I promise.’

‘I’ll put you back to Grace and she can book your next appointment, okay?’

‘That would be great. I’ll be up in Adelaide again pretty soon. Will we see you down in Middle Point over Easter? The weather is supposed to be gorgeous and you’ll have four whole days to relax. Won’t you come down and stay with us?’

‘I’d love to.’ The words popped out of her mouth before she could think them through. Damn her disease to please. What had she done? And now, taking those words back would seem rude and ungrateful and churlish. Why had she agreed so quickly? Wasn’t she trying to stay away from Middle Point?

‘Brilliant. We’ll see you soon. And don’t bring a thing to eat or drink. We’re hosting, remember?’

Anna thanked Julia and then transferred the call to Grace. She checked the time and saw she had half an hour for lunch before her afternoon patients began arriving.

Which meant plenty of time to let the news about Joe sink in. So Joe had been dumped too. The night they’d spent together, the night of Ry and Julia’s wedding, suddenly made so much more sense. She hadn’t been the only one running from failure, looking for a way around the misery and humiliation of her life.

They were purely a distraction for each other. That night had simply been about two sad, lonely people pretending they were someone else, with someone else.

Heartbreak did that, she knew. You saw things that weren’t true, believed things that weren’t real. Convinced yourself that what you were feeling was something more than it was, when really you were just a desperate fool.

CHAPTER
19

Joe sat on the warm, white sand of Middle Point. It was a brilliant beach day, the sun shining down on him, a mild breeze playing with his hair, a cloudless sky, but he wasn’t seeing it. He’d pulled his knees up, his elbows rested on them, and his phone was pressed to his ear. He’d called Jasmine and he needed to be out here, alone, away from the suspicious eyes and big ears of his little sister. He and Jasmine hadn’t spoken since he’d driven back to Middle Point. Every contact they’d had since then had been via text message, email or lawyers’ letters. It was about time that stopped.

He heard the call connect and it began to ring thirteen hundred kilometres away in the harbour city.

He counted the rings. Three. Four. He knew that after six it would go to her message bank. Five—

‘Hi Joe.’

‘Hi Jas.’ She was there. She’d picked up. Joe had imagined over and over what he would say when they finally spoke.
Fuck you
had been on top of the list and
why
? was a very close second. But hearing her voice now, he strangely couldn’t find anger anymore. Maybe the resolution he’d made – and was about to tell her – was the reason.

‘How’s Adelaide?’ she asked politely.

‘I’m in Middle Point.’

‘Oh. Of course.’ Jasmine had never liked Joe’s hometown. Or Adelaide for that matter. She was Sydney North Shore through and through.

‘So Jasmine, we need to talk. I want to sort this all out. The house. The divorce. Everything. I need to make a clean break.’

He pressed the phone closer to his ear as the wind whipped up, picking up sand and flicking it against his legs. There was silence down the line.

‘Jas? You there?’

‘Yes, I’m here. Look Joe—’

‘We need to end this bullshit. I’m not fighting anymore. I need to get on with my life and, frankly, I need the money from the sale of the house to do that. I want to sell it and what’s left after we pay off the mortgage has to be split fifty-fifty. That’s all I want. We started off our marriage as equals. Can’t we end it that way? Surely we can sort this out without spending any more money on lawyers.’

Speech over, he felt the tightness in his chest unwind. He sighed into the wind and waited.

‘I agree, Joe. I need it to be over, too. I’ve been meaning to tell you something but I didn’t quite know how.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Michael and I … well …’

Joe’s journalist’s brain snapped back into life with a hundred questions. Had they broken up? Eloped? Had Michael cheated on her? Had she cheated on him with someone else?

He chuckled and went for the most ridiculous of all. ‘You’re not having a baby, are you?’

‘How did you find out?’ Jasmine whispered in shock.

Fuck. Sometimes he hated having a mind that worked two steps ahead of everyone else’s. Jasmine and his ex-best mate were going to be parents.

‘Lucky guess.’

‘I didn’t want you to hear about it on the grapevine. I’ve been meaning to call you, but it’s all been a bit unpleasant between us.’

‘I suppose congratulations are in order,’ Joe said.

‘Thank you. I know you were never interested in having kids—’

‘No, I wasn’t,’ he said through gritted teeth. Is that why she’d run off with his ex-mate? To have a bloody kid?

‘That’s not the reason I fell in love with Michael.’

Joe stood. This wasn’t a conversation he could have sitting down. ‘No? You sure about that?’

‘Don’t, Joe. You put everything else before me and our marriage. You never stopped answering the bloody phone. Your sources and your stories spent more time with you than I did.’ Jasmine sighed down the line. ‘But there’s really no point going over this again, is there?’

Joe began walking up the beach towards the pub. ‘No. There’s not.’

‘I’d like to have this all sorted out by the time the baby arrives. I agree, let’s ditch the lawyers and sell, half and half.’

Joe looked out to the waves, rolling in from the distance. He wished he was out there on his surfboard with his fingers trailing in the cool water instead of divvying up the failure of his marriage. ‘I’ll call my lawyer and tell him the news,’ he said. ‘Poor bastard. He’ll have to cancel his skiing holiday to Colorado now I’m not spending all that money on his good advice.’

He heard a chuckle down the line from Sydney. He hadn’t heard one fall from Jasmine’s lips in a very long time. He felt relieved to be ending it this way, after all the acrimony and hurt.

‘I’ll call mine, too,’ she said.

‘You’ll be free before the baby arrives.’

‘Thanks Joe.’ There was a long pause and Joe didn’t know how to fill it either. What did you say at the end of a marriage, when the fighting and the accusations and the horror were over?

‘Good luck,’ he said. And that sounded exactly right.

‘You too.’

Joe tucked the phone into his pocket. So that was it. It was over. After all the bitterness, it felt strangely anti-climactic. It felt like turning the final page on a book that you’d loved at chapter one but at the end couldn’t remember why you’d picked it up in the first place. Any interest in the story was gone and, with the benefit of hindsight, you’d never read the book again.

He was free.

Joe had always been slightly cynical about weddings, as he’d been about most other things in life. Had seen too many of them crash and burn under the pressure of two jobs, mighty ambitions, crushing Sydney mortgages and long commutes. But he’d never been cynical about his. Somehow, he’d believed he and Jasmine were different. They were stronger than all of that, had intellectual insights into relationships that other people didn’t. When a friend introduced them to a new partner, he and Jasmine would play their own private party game, making bets on who would and wouldn’t last. It was all so hilarious, wasn’t it, from the smug happiness of their own marriage. Not for them petty jealousies about work commitments or weekends away with the girls – or the boys. They hadn’t needed to be tethered to each other like charms on a bracelet. They were adults, with an adult, sophisticated relationship, unburdened by children or too much responsibility.

And, apparently, unburdened by insight. It had been a long six months since the day his world had come crashing down. If he’d been reporting it, he would have laughed cruelly at such misfortune.

‘Check out this sad fuck. He gets made redundant and then his wife leaves him for being such a loser. And guess who she leaves him for? His best mate!’

The headline potential for that scenario was every journalist’s wet dream.

‘Man Loses Job, Wife On Same Day’

‘Top Columnist Sacked’

‘Yesterday’s Hero: Joe Blake’

‘Has-been Journo Back in Hometown, Old Bedroom’

‘Total Shocker: One-night Stand in Sister’s Bed’

And there she was, back again.

What the hell was it about that night at Ry and Julia’s wedding that had got under his skin?

Joe didn’t normally dance at weddings. Or at engagement parties, fortieth birthdays, farewells, bar mitzvahs or wakes. He was always more than happy to report on other people making fools out of themselves.

So what was he doing strutting his stuff on a dodgy wooden dance floor out the back of the Middle Point pub on a hot summer’s night? Joe wasn’t sure if it was the champagne or this mysterious Italian pocket rocket, Dr Anna Morelli, who had him feeling so goddamned loose and better than he had in such a long time. The rhythm of the music and the exuberant dancing of everyone around him was kind of catching and watching Anna dance was hypnotic. She swerved and shimmied, stepped to the side and back, shook her hips and her hair and sang at the top of her lungs. All in those damn high heels. He wondered how she hadn’t broken an ankle.

As the music got louder and the crowded dance floor filled with more bodies, Joe found himself loosening up too, limb by limb, until he was waving his arms in the air with everyone else and shouting lyrics to the twinkling stars in the night sky.

They hadn’t said much to each other. He was happy to watch Anna move and she looked like whatever the hell had happened to her earlier in the night, whatever it was that had upset her enough to run into the ladies with tears streaking her face, was forgotten.

This was just what Lizzie had asked him to do, right? To rescue Anna, to ask her to dance? As he watched her eyes, dark and teasing him with glances, he realised she didn’t appear to need the slightest bit of rescuing.

It had been way too long. Man, it felt good to let go. And – Jesus – it felt even better when the song changed again into something slow and Anna had responded to the change of pace by curving her body against his, snaking her arms around his neck.

‘Come closer,’ she’d said, and he’d reacted automatically, pulling her into him. His thigh pressed into her hip and his hands claimed her waist, so small under his fingers that they almost met at her back. She’d moved with the music, swayed against him, and he held her tighter. Anna’s fingers strayed from his hairline and tightened around his neck. She pulled him down and damn it if her lips didn’t graze his earlobe. It was about the sexiest thing that had happened to him in a long while.

‘I love this song,’ she said above the music.

He knew it. Al Green was asking how to mend a broken heart. He loved it, too. Or used to, before the lyrics cut right through him. A pair of dancers bumped against him and he instinctively held her tighter, dropped his hands from her waist to the curve of her arse and pulled her close to him. So close that the fabric of that red dress, and what was inside it, pressed against his ribs.

‘I like the way you dance,’ Anna said, and he felt a low rumble in his body.

‘You’re not so bad yourself. Ballet as a kid?’

She laughed, uproariously and damn, what a smile. It lit up her face, her eyes and there was a crinkle in her cheek that he hadn’t noticed before. Was that a dimple?

‘Ballet? You’re kidding.’ And then Anna surprised the hell out of him by stepping onto his feet, shifting her weight from the ground to his shoes, and as she grew another inch taller, she tightened her arms around his neck. He responded instinctively, tightening his grip on her body. They looked into each other’s eyes and came to an instant understanding. This was no longer dancing. This was foreplay.

Was he up for a no-strings-attached night? Abso-fucking-lutely. It hadn’t been on his mind when he’d turned up for the wedding, but it was the only thing on his mind that very second. Where was he? Who’d just got married? Did he even remember his own name? He didn’t have a clue.

Ask him who he was holding in his arms like he never wanted to let her go?

Anna Morelli.

And did he want her?

Fuck, yes.

She moved her face close to his, so close she nudged her cheek against his. He could smell her perfume, something exotic and feminine.

‘You here with anyone, Joe the Journo?’

‘No. I’m not’, he said. Then he pulled back so he could see her face when he asked her the same thing. Was she up for no-strings-attached too? He didn’t want complicated or back-stabbing or dishonest. He’d had a lifetime of that in Sydney.

‘You?’

There was a flicker in her eyes and she bit her lip. ‘No.’

‘Wanna dance some more?’ Joe moved his hands slowly down her back, his fingers feeling every inch of her on the way down to the curve of her arse. He cupped her butt and lifted her against him. When her eyes widened and her lips parted on a sigh, he knew what the answer was.

‘Get me out of her,’ she’d whispered.

And since that night, he hadn’t been able to forget that look. It still teased and haunted him, asleep and awake.

Joe was almost at the Point, could see the pub up ahead. He pushed a hand through his hair and kicked a knotted lump of sea grass into the waves.

He was becoming seriously obsessed with Anna. And that was such a bad idea, he didn’t know where to start. He’d just been burned big time by his wife. She’d just been burned big time by her husband. Two people with such heavy baggage shouldn’t, if they had half a brain, go anywhere near each other. Two people trying to fuck away their hurt with a total stranger should let sleeping dogs lie and forget all about it.

Shouldn’t they?

His gut instinct told him this was something different. That she was different.

Joe reached the steps to the top of the Point and took them two by two until he reached the top. Across the road, the Middle Point pub seemed alive with people, judging from the coming and going through the heavy wooden front door and the shapes Joe could make out through the front windows. He checked his watch and realised why; it was lunchtime.