Three Words: A Novella Collection (19 page)

It was then
that Lily realised, that as much as she loved Travis, she was not
prepared to uproot her life and begin again in a new city on the
other side of the country. Yes, she wanted to be with him but not
at the cost of everything she’d have to give up. He was being a
teeny bit selfish in asking her to do so. She’d never expect such a
thing of him.

Travis had
appeared stunned when she informed him of this. His face took on
the pallor of a pair of old greying sports socks and his mouth
opened and closed like a fish trying to breathe out of water. He
seemed unable to believe that she wouldn’t want to drop everything
for him. She’d always been so easy going and accommodating in the
past. The whole thing had ended with Travis calling her a ‘spoilt,
self-centred bitch’ and her replying that it was lucky he thought
that way because she’d always thought he was a pretentious
arsehole. Especially when it came to her friends, to whom he was
positively rude.

That had been
three months ago and Lily had to say, there had been times when
she’d regretted those words. Once or twice, she’d found herself
missing him so much that she’d had a bag half packed before she
came to her senses.

“
No,” Lily replied, trying to shake the thought of Travis from
her head. “I don’t think it’ll be that much fun if I’m
single.”

“
But the ball’s a red theme this year,” Rebecca
cajoled.

Lily looked at
her friend. They both knew red was Lily’s thing. Deep, blood red
suited her dark colouring well. More than one man had told her that
it made her look exotic. Which may well have been true but remained
pointless thinking about when she wasn’t going to the Ball.

“
You can’t change my mind.”

“
I can get you a date.”

Lily’s head
dropped into her hands on the table. She exhaled so loudly the
people around them stopped their conversations to see if she was
okay. “
NOOOO
. I will not be going on any blind dates. God,
don’t you remember the last time?”

“
Me setting you up and your mother finding you a ‘suitable
match’ are not the same thing,” Rebecca stated. “I happen to have
very good taste in men.”

“
What about Walter?”

“
Walter doesn’t count.”

“
You went out with him.”

“
Yes, but I was emotionally traumatised at the time. After the
disaster that was Dennis, I was so blinkered, I didn’t see Walter’s
faults.”

Like they’d
have been hard to spot.

Walter had
worn a t-shirt that read ‘orgasm donor’ to meet Rebecca’s parents,
who were known to be the straightest couple this side of Adelaide.
Needless to say, they were not amused. Walter had a lamp stand in
the shape of an erect penis in his bedroom and on the one and only
time he’d invited Rebecca for a ‘slap up dinner’ he’d taken her to
Hog’s Breath Café
. He drove a seventies panel van emblazoned
with car art that read ‘Shaggin’ Wagon’. Rebecca often said it’d
been like dating a twelve year old who’d recently discovered sex.
On the internet. The list went on. Luckily, the relationship had
been short.

Lily gathered
her handbag and, pulling out her wallet, handed a twenty-dollar
note to the other girl. “Look, we’ve got to get back to work.”

Rebecca
checked her makeup in her compact and tossed it back into her bag,
which she then slung over her shoulder. Together, the two girls
walked to the counter.

“
Are you sure I can’t talk you into it?” she asked.

“
As sure as I am that Walter was a complete
wanker.”

“
Please?”

Lily turned to
her friend. Rebecca’s face was more earnest than if she’d just got
down on one knee and declared her own undying love for Lily.

“
Please?”

Lily felt her
resolve beginning to melt. God, she hated it when Rebecca did
that.

“
I promise I won’t leave you alone,” Rebecca
begged.

Lily tried not
to smile.

“
I’ll watch that stupid movie with you again.”

“
Message in a Bottle
is not stupid. It’s
romantic.”

“
Yeah, but the ending’s lame. Nicholas Sparks really sucked
with that one.” Rebecca gave her a cheeky smile. “Come on. It won’t
be that bad.”

Pocketing her
change, Lily gave in. If it would make Rebecca happy, she supposed
she could frock up.

“
Yippee!” Rebecca danced to the door. “I’ll meet you back at
the office, then. I have to duck into the chemist on the way and
get some more of that magic eye stuff they keep under the
counter.”

“
You don’t need it.”

“
That’s because I use it.”

Lily opened
the door of the café, waving her hand as she left. “Whatever. See
you in ten or so.”

Chapter 2

Lily left
lunch content that she had made her friend happy and averted a
disaster all in one lunch hour. And that’s what a blind date would
have been ~ a disaster. Seriously, she had no idea what Rebecca was
thinking to even suggest such a thing. It was bad enough that she
was going to spend Valentine’s Day alone, without a boyfriend.
There was no way she was going to spend it with a stranger. Well,
not unless Ryan Gosling rang to ask her out but technically he
wasn’t a stranger. She’d seen
The Notebook
so many times she
could practically parrot it word for word. Sad, but true.

The walk back
to the office was only a few blocks and having a spare ten minutes
~ Lily liked to make full use of her one-hour lunchbreak ~ she
stopped at
The Cobbler Shop
to pick up her shoes. Under
normal circumstances, having a pair of shoes re-soled would have
been out of her realm of comprehension, Lily was more of a
ditch-them-and-buy-new-ones type of girl but the shoes in question
had sentimental value. Lily had been wearing those pretty red pumps
with the impossible heels on the day she’d been offered her current
job, the one she thought she’d never get. She’d been wearing them
at the bar the night she and Travis met. He’d complimented her on
them. She’d also had them on when she’d discovered she’d won two
VIP tickets, complete with backstage passes, to see
Coldplay.
Yep, those red pumps were her lucky shoes and
there was no way she was letting them die.

Letting the
front door swing closed behind her, Lily approached the counter,
rustling in her handbag for the docket as she went. She stopped,
taking in the pigeon holes filled with newly mended shoes, all
fixed and ready to be loved again. A smell of leather and shoe
polish filled her nose and she breathed it in thinking how odd it
was that people never polished their shoes anymore. She still did.
She loved the look her biker boots took on after a good spruce
up.

Placing her
manicured finger on the bell, she gave it a quick ‘ting’ to summon
the cobbler.

“
Hi, can I help you?”

A large hand
swung back the plastic curtain, revealing an unidentified man, who
sported the nicest shoulders Lily had ever seen ~ well, through
clothing. This certainly wasn’t the cobbler, who would’ve been
pushing eighty on a good day, but it certainly was a nice surprise.
A very nice surprise.

The man was
wearing a baby pink checked shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbow
and a pair of stone coloured pants with a thick brown belt. His
forearm bore a tastefully small tattoo of what looked to be a girl,
like one of those 1940’s pin-ups. Lily would have loved to get a
little closer to see the detail but she was vaguely aware that she
was staring and as her mother had always told her staring was very
rude. Even if the object of the stare was hotter than a bushfire in
summer.

“
Can I help you?” the man repeated, running a hand through his
sooty hair and making it stand deliciously on end.

“
Oh, um, yes. I’ve come to pick up my shoes. Leroy said they’d
be ready today.” She handed him the ticket with her order number on
it. His fingers brushed faintly against hers and Lily’s heart did a
little skip inside her chest. Okay, well actually it was a more of
a high jump.

The man
pivoted to look along the rows of mended shoes, which was fortunate
as it gave Lily a view of his bum that she otherwise would not have
seen. And gosh, what a lovely muscular bottom it was, the perfect
ending to a pair of perfectly muscled legs.

Realising she
was staring again, Lily raised her eyes to the ceiling and tried to
look casual, cool.

Oh. My.
God.

Was that a
spider coming across the roof towards them? One hairy step closer
and she’d be leaving without her shoes. Confident and capable under
normal circumstances Lily turned to jelly when it came to spiders
especially the big, grey hairy type. She was petrified of Huntsmen
and no matter how many hypnosis sessions she went to, she was
unable to conquer the overwhelming fear. Biting her lip, she
watched the spider advance. She wished hot-butt guy would hurry
with her shoes. Because she was either going to faint with fright
or puke all over his floor.

The man’s
hands scanned the collection of shoes and stopped; sliding out a
particularly hideous, clunky, tan-coloured pair with the most
sensible sole Lily had ever seen. He placed them on the
counter.

“
This them?”

With one eye
on her eight-legged companion, Lily looked at the proffered
footwear.

Oh
puh-lease!
Was he taking the piss or something?

“
Uh, no.”

“
Thought not.” A devilish twinkle sparked in the man’s as he
put the shoes away.

“
What about these?” He plonked another, equally atrocious,
pair in front of her.

At least they
were from the last decade.

“
No.”

Lily began to
tap her foot. Geez, did he have to be so hot while he was annoying
her like this?

“
What colour are they?”

Lily
swallowed, the words choking in her throat which was at that moment
beginning to constrict so that she couldn’t breathe. Her tapping
foot froze. The spider was making its way down the wall, past the
rows of shoes. Lily could practically see its big nippy pincers,
its black eyeballs. She could feel tiny beads of sweat forming on
the hairline of her neck. She was inhaling hard and it wasn’t from
the sight of the guy in front of her. Though that would have been
the preferable option.

“
Red. Patent.”

Turning back,
the man produced what seemed to be a pair of extremely large ruby
slippers and clomped them down on the counter, looking at Lily in
expectation. Their sequin-covered toes blinded Lily and she
blinked. No Dorothy, unless she was six feet five and a
cross-dresser would be seen dead in them.

“
You’re kidding, right?” she gasped, almost
hyperventilating.

“
They’re red.”

“
They’re also hideous.”

The spider was
by now crawling down the side of the shelf and heading towards the
counter, and her! Lily’s skin began to go clammy. Perspiration
trickled from her armpit and down her side.

“
You okay?” the man asked.

Unable to open
her mouth for fear she might vomit, Lily pointed.

The man looked
around. The spider ambled closer, taunting her with its
invisibility to everyone but her. Then it started to run. And it
makes sense, that if you have eight legs, you can run a lot faster
than when you have two.

Lily screamed.
Her knees buckled and she stepped away from the counter grabbing
the bench next to it and trying to shrink into the corner of the
seat. She pointed again, a feeble gesture that by the time she’d
raised her arm was utterly useless because the spider had
moved.

But this time,
the culprit was caught. With a move swifter than Usain Bolt could
run the hundred metres, the man took a dustpan from under the
counter and smacked it over the spider, squashing it into
mud-coloured slushy particles and bits of leg. Then he took a
tissue, scraped up the remains and tossed them carelessly in the
bin.

The man
brushed his hands together in finality. “All gone.”

“
Thanks.”

“
You look a bit pale. Can I get you a glass of
water?”

Lily didn’t
want to ask if that would involve being left alone in this possibly
spider infested room. “Yes, please.”

Thirty seconds
later, the man was back, a large glass of iced water in his hand.
Squatting in front of Lily, he gave it to her. A tender palm came
to rest on her knee while she drank. His deep brown eyes examined
her face.

“
Better?” he asked.

If only he
knew he was making things twenty times worse by looking at her like
that. It was like someone had taken to her with a Taser gun. Pulses
of energy were shooting up from her knee to her groin.

“
Much,” she mumbled.

Lily sat for a
minute longer, enjoying the warm pressure of his hand and the
concern in his eyes. Then an odd thought came to her. Travis had
never looked at her like that, not even when she’d slipped on the
ice in the gutter and torn the ligaments in her ankle. He’d just
said it was her own fault for wearing those ridiculous shoes. Come
to think of it, she couldn’t remember him ever being this sweet.
Had she imagined he cared?

“
Sorry to cause a scene like that. Huntsman spiders scare the
crap out of me.”