Unchained Melody (13 page)

‘Hey honey. How are you holding up in this mess?’

‘Fine.’ Hunter flipped Darren off, who had draped a tea towel over his head like pigtails and was pretending to skip around the bar in an unlikely representation of Hunter being a ‘girl.’

‘That’s good. Look I’m just calling to let you know that dad and I have gone to tow Sadie back to the house. We shouldn’t be too long, and Callie swears that she’ll be fine but I just wanted to let you know that you should probably hurry home as soon as-’

Hunter didn’t bother to hang up the phone. He dropped it before his mother had even finished speaking, whirled on Ryan and spat out: ‘Fuck! Mum and Dad left Callie at home in this to save their damn boat!’

‘What?!’ Ryan’s features contorted in fury. He was already reaching for his black leather jacket, shrugging into it. ‘How long ago?’

‘Beats me!’ Hunter jogged to the door and looked down the street as though he could see through the buildings and to his house but he could barely see the glowing red of the traffic lights twenty meters away for the rain! It was already getting dark, the sky turning a color that was like black smoke burned from yellowish green flames. ‘But we have to go, now. She is going to flip out if she hasn’t already!’

‘Agreed.’ Ryan turned and pointed to the stage. ‘We’ll be back. Don’t let anyone touch my shit and if Rathe shows up, tell him to just set his own up.’ Rathe was one of the junior music students they were getting in to play bass for them that night. Hunter hoped he’d work out and get them one step closer to being a band.

‘Yeah, okay.’ Darren wasn’t laughing anymore. All the guys at Wolf’s Breath were sweet on Callie, and always had been. ‘Drive safe.’

‘Will do.’

As soon as they got to the curb, Hunter realized that driving unsafely wasn’t an issue-because although his green Torana was still high and dry, there were police officers in fluorescent yellow parkas setting up traffic cones at the intersection in the kind of arrangement that did not allow for cars to get through. Above them, the traffic lights had stopped being red and had started flashing orange. In the ten seconds that Hunter stood there, wondering if the streets were open at the other end of town, he got saturated, and then, he began to shake. If the power was out there, Callie was in a dark house alone.

‘Shit.’ Ryan said. ‘Pond way? Then round the Abbot’s place?’

Hunter nodded and dragged his keys out of his pockets. Just then a rumble of thunder so loud and so jarring that Hunter himself let out squawk and jumped clapped above them and his heart didn’t just skip a beat; it was more like a typewriter furiously smashing at a page with fifteen broken stems.

‘Move,’ he grunted to Ryan, shoving his key into the lock on the driver’s side and almost ripping the door off its hinges in an attempt to get in. The car smelled like thirty year old stale cigarette smoke, fish oil polish and Callie’s hat. And something about that scent without that presence beside him made him feel bereft.

It wasn’t often that Hunter had bad feelings, but he was having one then. And it was telling him that he was about to lose is best friend. Just to what, he did not know.

*

Callie couldn’t take it anymore. Metallica hadn’t drowned out the storm ripping the world apart outside and neither had Sepultura. Hunter clearly hadn’t vacuumed under his bed in forty-eight years because the amount of dust and discarded guitar picks under there was making her sneeze constantly and yet despite the panic, she had somehow managed to get bored out of her mind.

When the lights flickered for the third time and something else struck the roof of the house hard enough to send a vibration through the floorboards, Callie began to cry and inch out from under the bed army-style, keeping low like Dorothy bracing for a landing in Oz. The storm was freaking her out but she was handling it better than she had hoped. However, Callie’s fear was not what she was currently facing, but what was to come when Cyclone Addison made landfall.

Callie had been through cyclones before, more near-missed than hits, but the last substantial one Joy that had hit while she was in primary school had scared the be-jeesus out of her. She could still remember being huddled in the bathroom with her mother and father- could still hear the sounds of the roofing screws screaming in protest as they fought the wind for their hold on the Colourbond steel. Many roofs in Horizon had lost that particular battle- would Callie’s house withstand it again? Would Hunter’s?

Callie stood in the centre of the room after she’d pulled herself to her feet, and instantly wanted to crawl back under the bed. But she knelt instead, reaching for a Cypress Hill C. D on Hunter’s shelf, quickly switching discs in the walkman and hating every second of silence lapsing between the final strains of Roots Bloody Roots and the beginning beats of Insane In The Brain. She bopped her head, hugging herself and wondering if she looked like a cold chicken.

That was when she noticed Ryan’s open duffel bag on the floor, and his sheet music folder peeking out of it like a bright blue promise of distraction. She grabbed it, deciding to use her time to go over Are You Game and began flicking through the pages, still chanting along with Cypress Hill. ‘Yes I’m the pirate-pilot of this ship!’ She rapped loudly, knowing she would scream the lyrics if it muted the thunder even a fraction more. The first title in the folder was: ‘Always.’ And it was a professional script purchased through the music store in Townsville where they all ordered their stuff through. Bon Jovi, of course. Cali flicked a few pages ahead, and was just beginning to breathe evenly again, comforted by the stream of treble clefs and minims and quavers that made up her most favorite language, when a bunch of sheets fell from the back. They hadn’t been sheathed within the plastic pockets, but stuffed behind the rear cover. By the look of them, they’d been stuffed in several places before that, smoothed out and then stuffed again.

The lines were the photocopied type, and the titles and notes were all hand-written in Ryan’s tiny print. She read the first title, and frowned. ‘Fisted Heart.’ Then she shrugged, shuffled two pages ahead, because the song was incomplete, and read the next: ‘She wears his hat.’ That made Callie suck in a breath and as desperately as she wanted to read the words, the bright yellow of a Post-It marking a page further towards the back of the stack beckoned to her. She dropped the others, lifted the post it and read the title, feeling everything inside her turn to jelly.

‘I want to be inside you Callie.’

Callie dropped the pages, her hands coming to her mouth to stifle a sound that was half yelp, and half gasp. But even in her lap, the lyrics were easy to read: ‘You touch me like it’s nothing/ but you know you are my all/ You’re sweet and hot and cherry ripe/ you whet my every appetite/ I’m gonna take you home tonight and pin you to the wall.’

Callie pressed her head into her shoulder like a shy baby bird, caught off-guard by the lustful candor of her gentle Ryan’s words and yet excited to the point of hyperventilating. Was that seriously how he thought about her? It was so unlike him! Then she saw the post-it she’d peeled off, which at first she’d assumed to be a page marker, but now when she read what it said, her world blew apart.

Callie,

I hope you care about me enough to snoop, because the only way I can tell you what I’m thinking without him knowing, in a way I know you’ll understand, is to do it in song. And so here are my songs; they go deeper, hotter, lighter and sweeter than anything I could ever think to say to you, but read each, and you’ll have a fairly good idea of what I’m trying to say.

Yours for now, but fear forever

Ry.

A fat tear slid off the end of Callie’s nose and made the word ‘Ry’ blossom like a navy-blue bloom on the bright paper. She wanted to read the rest of the songs for some perspective but then she thought of the way she’d been in Hunter’s arms the day before and she felt queasy with guilt. Then the lights flickered, and continued to flicker, and Callie’s heart seized so sharply that when the lights went out, and the C. D skipped by the force of the thunder rattling the house and Callie’s every cell, there was nothing left inside her to constrict, but her mind.

‘Insane in the brain. Insane in the brain. Insane in the-’ Callie tore the headphones off her head, flung them to the wall, and ran for the door.

12.

Shit!’ Hunter dragged his hands down his cheeks and then brought them back up to muss up his hair. ‘Oh shit!’ He moved from one room of his house to the other, but he knew he wasn’t going to find Callie there. His boots made a slurping sound as he sloshed back to his bedroom, the first place Ryan had gone, leaving puddled footprints stamped on his mother’s previously gleaming floors.

They’d taken too long and Callie was nowhere to be seen. If they didn’t find her soon, they were going to have to alert the authorities!

I cannot hold you or let you go/ until you hear what I’ve come to know/ my girl next door/my saving grace/ I’ll kiss your lips and touch your face/ between our bodies leave not a trace/ of wasted wasted space/ Not second place/ Cotton to lace.

The words hit him so hard that Hunter almost stumbled into a wall. It wasn’t just the words either, he could hear the melody, feel the chords under his fingers, and hear Ryan behind him, backing him up… And that was where his daydream became a fairytale. Because if Hunter ever said those words aloud, there would be no Ryan standing behind him, because Ryan would never speak to him again! So Hunter shook the words off- he didn’t have time for his jejune daydreams! He needed to find Callie before the lyrics became a eulogy!

‘She’s bolted Hunter.’ Ryan’s voice was barely audible over the wind moaning through the ceiling. He was clutching a bunch of rumpled papers in his hands and staring down at them morosely. ‘I just don’t know if it’s the storm’s fault, or mine...’

‘What?’ Hunter shrugged out of his hoody and crossed to his cupboard to grab a new one and his rain coat. He was freezing, feeling kilos heavier from the rain his boots, jeans and shirt had taken on. ‘Did she leave a note?’

‘No.’ Ryan’s voice was barely above a whisper. ‘I did. And I don’t think she liked it.’

Hunter saw the music in his hands, the title boldly printed, so clear and neat that Hunter could have read it from across the room, and he felt everything inside him fragment, because Ryan was holding the song he’d written for Callie; the song that expressed what Hunter felt, the song Hunter knew his heart was singing louder. Too infuriated to even reprimand Ryan, too scared he’d never see Callie again, Hunter turned on his heel and stalked towards the door.

*

Callie ran into the little shed and slammed the door behind her, looking for a lock to drop and keep it secure, but finding nothing but a cheap little latch that she could probably break with her fingers. Teeth chattering, sobs tearing her apart, she crawled into the space on fizzy legs and curled up next to the dirty old water pump, gripping the base of it and pressing her face into the ground.

Callie had never been colder, wetter or more scared. She wasn’t even relieved to have found the shed because she knew she’d been one thousand times safer at Hunter’s place. She sniffled and allowed her eyes to dart around, trying to ignore the persistent banging of the door as it shook in its frame. She’d run through sodden fields until her muscles were the only things burning more than her lungs and then when she’d collapsed, she’d crawled to the only structure visible for miles knowing she wouldn’t make it much further- a small shed at the back of a cane farm Callie couldn’t place for the pouring rain.

It wasn’t just a pump shed; it was quite a large building, and a tractor was pushed up against one wall- a new tractor. Whoever owned it had taken good care of it, and Callie hoped that maybe the doting cane farmer would come out to double check that his stuff was okay, find her, and get her back where she belonged.

But where do I belong? She wondered miserably, as her teeth settled to an almost sweet weep that was as cathartic as it was effortless. Invisible magnets were drawing her to Hunter, but longing was pulling her to Ryan whose predatory lyrics had left her breathless, severing yet another thread of any normalcy she’d managed to weave together to cling to. She wanted to belong to both as she always had, but they weren’t kids anymore. What if this need for more never abated? Callie’s head was beginning to pound as though she had dehydrated herself from crying so much. She clutched it in her hands and the timing was perfect because a bolt of lightning hit so near to the shed that Callie’s scream was soundless in comparison.

‘No! No! No!’ Callie felt, no she knew as her knees curled up into her chest, that the lightning was after her. That the cyclone was coming to swallow her whole. It made no sense and all the sense in the world and suddenly, Callie wondered why she was running from what she knew to be true: that she had come to the world in the eye of a storm, and that she was supposed to exit the same way.

It felt like she was being beckoned to run into the lightning and join her chaotic energy with its own. But she didn’t want to go. She loved so much in her life! The memories, the music… it all still mattered. If the weather would only clear and stay clear, Callie knew she would get her senses back again and that her life might be salvageable under the debris.

‘I don’t want to go!’ She screamed as she heard the timber door give and creak open. ‘I don’t want to go!’

‘Callie!’ Her name was half-cried, half-sighed. Suddenly, she wasn’t alone anymore. Warm arms were around her, squeezing what little breath she had left out of her. ‘Oh Callie! Callie! You’re okay!’

‘She’s not okay!’ A second male voice, a voice that was usually all honey and woodsmoke was cracked with concern. More arms were around her. The bodies were wet but still managed to infuse her with their warmth.

‘She will be! God you scared the crap out of us Callie!’ Hunter’s voice was as close to dreaming as Callie had ever come.

She opened her eyes and stared into Hunter’s, lifting her fingers to touch his brow, wondering why she’d never touched it before, sagging with relief against his shoulder, grateful that they’d hunted her down. ‘You found me!’ She whispered. ‘Thank you.’ Hunter sobbed, and the sound was so alien to her that Callie opened her eyes again, even though all she wanted to do with sleep. ‘Hey…’ she whispered, ‘what’s wrong Hunt?’

Hunter’s eyes narrowed and suddenly, there was nothing soft or gentle about his expression. His relief had gone, and was replaced with fury.

*

‘What’s wrong?!’ Hunter couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He and Ryan had just spent an hour and a half sloshing through rapids, losing their balance, falling so many times that once or twice, Hunter was sure he was going to be washed away and broken to pieces on century-old boulders. If they hadn’t spotted Mr Spannagle’s old shed through the trees they might have gone back to town instead- and Callie wanted to know what was wrong?

Callie’s eyes were wide, bloodshot. ‘I’ve never seen you cry before,’ she whispered, touching one of his tears with her fingertips like it was a rare diamond.

‘I’ve never been scared out of my mind before!’ Before he knew it, Hunter had torn Callie from Ryan’s half-hug and shoved her up against the wall of the shed, which swayed and groaned. Callie’s eyes widened, Ryan yelled out, but Hunter didn’t care if he was losing it! He’d been picking up the pieces of Callie losing it for weeks! He was exhausted! And she had the gall to ask him what was wrong? ‘I thought you were dead!’ He bellowed, watching her features contort with grief. He pushed her shoulders against the wall again. ‘I thought we were going to find you drowned if we ever found you Cal! You’ve been missing for four hours, the cyclone seems to be crossing the coast right now, and you want to know what’s up with my tears?!’

‘I’m sorry!’ Callie whimpered in an evanescent voice. She looked so cute in his shirt- his shirt and his hat- that he was appalled at himself for being able to scream at her like that, to make her feel worse than she already did. ‘I don’t know why I-’

‘Why doesn’t matter! What matters is that my mum and dad should not have left you alone and they did and I thought you were going to get yourself killed because I was too worried about my stupid gig to be there when you needed me!’ Hunter’s voice broke and then, he felt so much remorse for yelling at her, hurting her further, that he immediately switched tactics, wrapping one arm around her to hold her securely, while the other gripped her jaw. He drove her up against the wall again, this time, taking the impact on his own arm, and dragged his lips across hers, feeling like he could never press into her enough to sate him. ‘I thought you were gone,’ he caught her tears on his lips and moaned. ‘How could you do that to me?’

Callie turned into his shoulder. ‘Don’t Hunter. Don’t!’ She sobbed. ‘We can’t kiss, and you really don’t want to.’ She slapped at his hand, trying to loose his hold. ‘You’d rather eat a worm than even think of it, right?’

Suddenly, Hunter understood. He’d been wondering why Callie had been sending him mixed signals- seemingly into him one minute and then running for Ryan the next and now, he knew why. ‘You want to know why I took Dare?’ He asked, reinstating his hold on her. ‘Why I’d never kissed you before?’ Callie lowered her head, shaking it. Fat teardrops shone on her lashes, even in the dingy light. He felt himself expand all over, warmed, charred by his need for her. He lifted her face again and murmured: ‘Callie my answer was: Because I’m a fucking idiot. And that’s the truth; I never kissed you Cal, because I’ve been a fucking idiot who was blind to the fact that when you saved my life, you became it.’

Callie’s eyes lifted. So brown, seeming to glow. ‘Really?’

The hope in her eyes ignited him like her jealousy had the day before, and Hunter knew it was time to give his girl her first kiss and then never stop. He tilted his face to hers and slanted his lips across her mouth, both feeling and hearing her moan as their mouths met and surrendered, lips parting, tongues sweeping across one another’s in a way that made Hunter feel instantly satiated on one level and yet out of his mind on ten thousand others. He made a keening sound and sank deeper into her soft, red lips, clutching her so tightly that had she been frail or delicate in stature, he might have broken something. But she wasn’t- Callie was tall and muscular, her dancer’s legs as powerful as any of the guys in the school and more shapely than any model’s. He crushed her to him until her curves conformed to his hardness and that simple act made Hunter’s body heat flare until it threatened to scorch them both. The air of the room was thick, foggy, like the window couldn’t penetrate the warmth they were generating and then Callie was the one clutching, Callie was the one forcing their bodies to line up where it counted. She gripped the chain around his neck with two fists, hooked one leg behind his and bent him like metal softened by fire until they were falling. Hunter caught himself on the mudguard of the tractor at the last moment, keeping them upright so that they sank to their knees on the hay-covered concrete.

‘Callie you’re so beautiful,’ he whispered across her lips, and she sighed in the back of her throat as his hands slid his wet fuzzy shirt off her shoulders so that it slipped off her wrists. Then, he caressed the damp seat of her jeans, pulling her hips against his. ‘Every time you run, I’m going to find you, got it? And I’m going to catch you, like you caught me.’ His fingers raked up her back, under her sodden top, and then back down jerking her into him by digging his hands into her jeans pockets and pressing their hips together. ‘And make you feel what you do to me. Can you feel it Callie?’

‘Yes!’ Callie whimpered and her hand slipped between their bodies and caressed him through his damp jeans, making him feel like he was going to pass-out from the sudden rush of blood south. ‘I feel it!’

‘Good… then it’s my turn.’ Hunter kissed her again and slipped his fingers into the waistband of her jeans, and she moaned encouragingly, welcoming the invasion as he sought the source of her pleasure in a frenzy. Her jeans were wet but the skin beneath humid and then he felt her damp panties against the back of his knuckles just as his fingertips made contact with the warmest, silkiest and softest thing he had ever conceived of. At first he was paralysed by the exquisite perfection of the feel of her against his fingers, but then he stroked her and she gasped and his erection felt unbearably heavy in reflex to that lovely sound.

‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ Hunter thought he heard Ryan demand but Callie’s erratic breathing drowned him out. Hunter silenced her with his mouth again, cradling her neck in the crook of his arm beneath him, arcing his tongue against hers as one of his fingers did the same thing between her delicate folds, and when that made her gasp he slid the finger out and then plunged into her again and almost lost himself at the way she tightened around him. He knew it was fast but they both needed it to cross that line he was never going to let her retreat from. He needed to be inside her in every way possible. Now.

‘Touch me Callie...’ he begged, knowing it was okay to ask, that she wasn’t some game-player like Meredith, that her need for him was physical, not just some base to be rounded so she could whisper about it later. And he needed her touch so much. Her body was heaven. Nirvana. Come as you are, as he wanted her to be, as she had been intended to be: his. And then her petal-soft palm clamped around him, skin against skin, and squeezed gently and because he’d never been touched there before, he was unprepared for the wave of dizziness which hit him as her hot little palm gently pumped him. He lost himself there and then, stiffening, groaning. Callie’s hand flinched, but then she released a soft moan of approval and wonder before pumping him again, using his release to lubricate him, almost making him black out.

That was when his senses completely left him. There was no storm, no threat, no girlfriend, and no Ryan. Hunter caught the hem of her saturated top and pulled up roughly, making her head bow in compliance as the neckline cleared her hat, knocking it to the floor. Callie’s hair fell down to drape her shoulders but he wasn’t about to let it destroy his view- he took both curtains of her parted hair in his hands and used them like reins, pulling her lips to his again and then dropped his hand, palming the damp and full cup of her bra greedily. Callie’s hand slipped out of the front of his jeans and then she slid both hands into the back, clenching his naked ass, sighing sweetly as though she was enjoying his body as much as he was hers.