Our Kind of Love (8 page)

Merda
.

Anna felt it like an electric shock. That chemistry they had, the combustible something that had flared between them the night of the wedding, was still there. It was in his smile, in his eyes. It was in the way her chest tightened when he looked at her. It was in the sound of his voice and the tease of his words. When she squeezed her eyes closed, all she could see was him naked and her fingers twitched with the memory of his body next to hers. And everything came back to her in a rush. The dancing, bodies tight against each other. The kissing, tongues roaming and his fingers twisting in her hair. The sex, his hands on her breasts, hers on his chest. His body, so hard and strong beneath her as she’d straddled him, groaning and moving against him. She tried to swallow the memory that was stuck in her throat like a fish bone.

She’d had sex with Joe to help her forget Alex. Hadn’t she?

Now, anger and humiliation and lust plummeted to the pit of her stomach and swirled around together like primordial ooze. She wasn’t sure which man she was supposed to be feeling guilty about.

Anna looked at Joe again, hoping the reality of seeing him would sweep away the distorted memories and help her get a grip on reality. But the soft expression in his eyes had her questioning if Joe was also remembering their night together. And in the smile on his lips and in his eyes, she didn’t see guilt or regret or shame. She was seeing something else entirely.

She wanted to curse herself. This was insane. She had to get her head on straight. She wasn’t a free spirit. She was who she was. And one-night stands were not part of her repertoire. She wasn’t built for them. She’d have to write Joe off as a mistake, an error of judgment. She didn’t make mistakes often, in fact, she made it a practice to avoid them at all costs, but when she made one, she made it big. And handsome.

Joe reached out a hand in her direction. He was about to touch her again and Anna suddenly felt completely uncertain about how she would react if his fingers landed on her skin. There was only one thing to do. She bolted.

‘I’ve gotta go.’ With a quick move, Anna sidestepped into the bedroom and slammed the door behind her. She lowered herself onto the edge of the bed and held her head in her hands.

Good girls, sensible girls, didn’t put themselves in situations like this.

Wasn’t she that good girl? She’d always believed she was, had liked being that person and had willingly occupied that role since she was born. There had never been pressure from her family to be good; it was simply who she was. It was the role predetermined for her it seemed. And she’d revelled in it. She was responsible and sensible. She’d studied hard to please her family and established her career before she’d married Alex. Good girls like Anna were respectful of their family and their traditions. When she married, she knew exactly who her prospective husband was; his character and their compatibility, his personality and predilections and how they complemented her own.

Good girls like Anna weren’t supposed to get divorced.

Good girls like Anna certainly didn’t fuck around for fun.

The damp towel around her was making her cold and she shivered. Her night with Joe had only ever been a diversion, about no-strings-attached fun. It couldn’t be anything else.

It simply couldn’t.

Merda
.

There were two heavy knocks on the door. ‘Anna?’

She counted to ten before answering.
Uno, due, tre
… ‘What?’

‘Can I come in?’

‘No.’

‘C’mon Anna.’ She found the teasing and pleading in his voice almost impossible to ignore. It sounded half fun, half agony. She found St Christopher and gave him a good working over, twisting and turning the medallion around in her fingers. ‘What do you want, Joe?’

‘You hungry?’

Hungry? Was that swirling feeling in the pit of her stomach hunger? No, it was confusion. Anna flopped backwards onto the bed and covered her eyes with her forearm, swearing softly in Italian. She wanted a real coffee more than anything. But to have it with Joe? She couldn’t. She’d have to live with her desperation until she got back to the city.

‘No, I can’t. I’ve got to go home.’

Outside in the hallway, Joe rested one hand high on the doorframe, trying to resist the urge to barge right on in and whip that towel from Anna’s body. He couldn’t believe he was envious of a towel. He’d found it hard to keep from staring at the way it barely draped over her body, leaving no mystery about the curve of her breasts or her tanned thighs. Instead, he stilled and listened intently for any sign of movement. There was a ferocious kind of whispering, but he couldn’t make out any words.

‘Look, Anna. Why don’t you just open the door?’ It didn’t feel right to leave it like this.

‘Please go away.’

‘Not gonna happen,’ he said. ‘Why are you hiding in there?’

‘I’m not hiding.’

‘Yes you are. You’re acting like a politician with a secret.’

‘And you’re acting like a paparazzo. I’m not answering any more of your questions.’

That one was like a kick up the arse and he pulled himself back. Joe knew Anna was right and the last thing he wanted to do was scare her away. He was so used to asking questions that he had to remind himself occasionally that people had a right not to answer them. He’d always defended this behaviour by saying that he was only out for the truth, the whole truth and nothing but.

Those black and white lines had become murkier just lately and he’d had to learn that all the asking in the world didn’t automatically get you what you want.

‘Anna, listen …’ He stopped to think about what he really wanted to say. Hoped he’d get it right. ‘Look. The thing is …’

He pressed an ear to the door. There was no sound. Either she was standing stock-still or she’d passed out.

‘I don’t want you to feel bad about what happened. It happened. But this is Middle Point. There’s not much chance of us avoiding each other down here, even if we were trying really hard. Surely we can have a coffee together as friends.’ Friends? He shook his head in disbelief. Where had that come from? Did he want to be friends with Anna? At this point they were two strangers who’d happened to have unbe-fucking-lievable, no-strings-attached sex. Wasn’t that what every man wanted? He knew that in years to come, he would chalk her up to one of those good times he could look back on when he was old and grey, when his best friend was a walking frame and he might be lucky to have all his own teeth.
Remember that time at the wedding down at the beach
, he’d ask himself?
When you were still moderately handsome and you met that Italian woman? What was her name?

Anna.

Joe knew he’d never forget her. He’d growled her name when he was inside her, whispered it in her ear after he’d come.

‘C’mon, Anna.’

‘I meant what I said, Joe. What happens in Middle Point has to stay in Middle Point. Got it?’

He lifted a clenched fist to knock again but hesitated. He got it.
She’s trying to give you the kiss off. She’s married, you dumb schmuck
. Joe turned to leave but his mind whirred with questions. He’d made a career out of reading between the lines of what people said and he couldn’t help but wonder why, if Anna was married, she kept turning up to Middle Point all alone?

As he walked out the front door into the bright sunshine and the sea breeze, Joe realised there was another question he couldn’t answer.

Why did he care so much?

CHAPTER
11

In the half hour since he’d left Anna barricaded behind the bedroom door at Dan’s place, Joe had thrown down a hasty coffee at The Market and then headed out into the water with his surfboard. He needed to get her out of his head and he knew that the ocean was the best place to do it.

Looking back on Middle Point from one hundred metres out, past the swell of the water in front of him and the white foam caps, the sand and the cliffs, Joe had a light-bulb moment. He’d been too long out of the ocean. He’d lived a lot of life since the last time he’d been a regular out on the water in his hometown. And to him, home didn’t necessarily mean the place he’d grown up in. Or his family, most of them gone. It didn’t mean schoolmates or the first time he’d driven a car or got laid. He hadn’t felt settled anywhere since he’d left, almost two decades ago.

Except for one place. This ocean. Where the water was all around him for what felt like a million miles and the rhythmic swells from the south carried him, propelled him along and gave him a feeling he’d never been able to find anywhere else. This place had been his playground. He’d practically grown up out here, past the rocks of Middle Point and the swell of the Southern Ocean. Out here, with breaks left and right, and the southern swell sweeping in to the long wide beach. And even when the waves didn’t come, you could just sit on your board and look to your left along the coastline to Victor Harbor and to your left, to the east, was the sand as far as it disappeared into the sea mist and the horizon.

This had been home, before ambition had overwhelmed him and he’d caught a bus to Sydney to escape his small town for a career in the biggest and most competitive news market in the country. He’d surfed when he first moved to the east coast, but he’d soon replaced his passion with his ambition. It wasn’t long before journalism had replaced the waves for the sheer buzz of an adrenaline rush. Soon he was on the Sydney fast track, where weekends were spent schmoozing not surfing, but life was good. It was even better when he met Jasmine. Three months later, in a lust-filled, sex-fuelled rush, they were married and he was in heaven with a beautiful woman on his arm and his face in the newspaper every day. There was no longer anything small-town Middle Point about him – he’d made it. He’d willingly paid the price for his career and for being married to a woman like Jasmine, which had made him feel like an even bigger fool now that it was all over. The headline of their relationship may as well have been ‘North Shore Beauty Meets Small-town Hack’. If he was honest, and he could do that now because it was over and he’d spent more than enough time wallowing in his misery, he’d never believed he was good enough for her. She’d never wanted to visit Middle Point for their holidays. She’d chosen the destinations and it was always the shops of New York or London in time for the new fashion season, rather than the place he’d grown up in. At first, it had seemed like a small price to pay for having such a beautiful woman as part of his life. A career, a marriage, life had all conspired to turn him into one of those blokes who looked out at the waves through the wistful eyes of someone who felt old and serious.

Surfing Middle Point had helped him pass the time over the summer months since he’d been back. He could spend hours out there on the water. He had even become acclimatised to the colder Southern Ocean again. Out there in the swell, his fuck-ups, the competitive bump and grind of Sydney and the loss of his job all twisted together like a clump of knotted sea grass, which he could imagine floating away as he rode the waves to the sand.

Ahead of him, the Point was his onshore reference mark. The pub was perched right on top of it and further east the Norfolk Island Pines dotted the coast. The view had changed dramatically in the years he’d been gone. Hundreds of new holiday homes lined the coastline like modern monoliths, taking advantage of the best vistas west and east along the coast, their glass windows winking back at Joe as the sun caught their eyes. Each one was bigger and grander than the next, square shapes with oddly angled roofs, in coastal colours of sea-blue and lemon-yellow, silver and taupe. He counted along the row and could pick where Julia’s old house was – now Dan’s place. It was so small and dwarfed by its neighbours that it almost disappeared behind the dunes, so low its rooftop could barely be seen. From here, it could have been a vacant block. Joe had been impressed with Dan’s pledge to keep the little green beach shack exactly as it was. Middle Point needed more of that, he decided, more history and more connection to its past, not more of the stuff that turned it into every other beach-side town in the country.

Joe raked his hands through his wet hair and soaked up the warming sun on his wetsuit. He straddled his board, legs dangling and balancing with ease, something he’d learned young and never forgotten.

‘Just one more,’ he told himself, as he repositioned himself and lay flat. One more wave, just one more, and then he’d head home.

Anna hadn’t made it to the pub for breakfast. Of course she hadn’t. That didn’t mean she was a coward, not at all. She was simply a realist. There was absolutely no point in spending any more time in Joe’s company.

She knew Dan and Lizzie would be wondering why she was a no-show after her promises the night before, but one of the perks of being a doctor was that she could convincingly feign a whole array of illnesses, depending on the needs of the situation at hand.

It was almost lunchtime before she heard her car pull up outside Dan’s house. Since Joe had left, she’d spent the rest of the morning beating herself up and hiding, trying to retreat into a novel she’d found on the coffee table. It was useless. Nothing had sunk in. The only saving grace was that after a forensic search in Dan’s kitchen, she’d found real coffee.

She was finishing her second cup when Dan walked into the house, jangling her car keys in his hand. ‘You all right, Anna?’ When she saw the genuine concern in his eyes, she felt slightly guilty for the lie she was about to tell. Sometimes it was hard being a severely lapsed Catholic.

She smiled up at him. ‘Bit of a headache. I didn’t think I’d be great company at breakfast so I decided to stay in and look at the view.’

They both turned to admire it through the windows. The promise of the morning had come to fruition – a sapphire sky, cloudless, white caps on the surf, and a light breeze taking the edge off the heat of the day.

‘It’s pretty spectacular, isn’t it?’ Dan smiled then turned back to her. ‘Hey, Lizzie was disappointed you couldn’t make it. But we did have company for breakfast.’ Dan crossed his arms over his chest. ‘Joe turned up for about five seconds and said he’d seen you and that you were heading back home. Lizzie sent me here to find out what’s going on.’