And Then We Fall

by Bryce Taylor

  She is looking positively startled. Conflicted. She finally settles on a flat non-committal look.

  "The truth, Leigh," I remind her.

  "Sure, sure, you look good," she says looking past me, to the side of my head. "You know, objectively. You are my friend."

  "So, all that blushing before?" I ask.

  "You caught me off-guard?" she says tentatively still staring at the coffee counter as if something fascinating is happening there.

  "So," I ask, stretching out my hand towards hers, "I have no effect on you at all?" Taking her hand in mine.

  She snatches her hand back, jarring her teacup.

  "Jesus Christ," she exclaims, looking back up at me.

  Well, this is fun.

  "I am going to have to help you with talking to girls if you are ever going to pick up," I tell her, smirking.

  "I don't have to talk to girls to pick up," she says intent on the table, mopping up her spilt tea with a napkin.

  I bet. She wouldn't have to say much for me to sleep with her.

  "You pay for it?" I misconstrue, pretend incredulity.

  She looks up. Eyes widening, before she sees the look on my face.

  "You suck," she says sourly.

  "Leigh, that's a bit personal," I tell her in mock outrage.

  She raises an eyebrow, a half-smile on her face. "I give up," she says, grinning.

  "Oh, come on," I tell her, "this is the most fun you've had in days."

  Her face changes. Sadness. Consternation. Amusement. "It's the most fun I've had in a while," she tells me wryly, the truth of it writ large on her face.

  How about that? Me too.

  I drink the last mouthful of my coffee and stand up and hold out my hand. "Come on," I tell her.

  She eyes my hand dubiously.

  "I'm helping you with your girl problems," I tell her sardonically. "We can't have you keeping paying for it."

  Her face doesn't change.

  "I hold hands with all my friends," I tell her, which is a lie.

  "All my good friends," I correct. Katie anyway.

  Her face softens the tiniest degree.

  "You can't do this," I tell her. "You are killing my self-confidence."

  This is actually a lie, for some reason I don't have that anxious pang of my already low self-worth disappearing around her.

  She laughs the smallest laugh.

  Jesus, she looks exhausted.

  She takes my hand and her fingers twitch slightly as they close around my hand as if she can feel the sparks too.

  I do have time.

  "Give me your keys," I tell her as we leave the cafe.

  She hands them over, no questions asked.

  "Where is your car?" I ask her.

  She points down the street and I crane my neck.

  Yep, there it is, it’s hard to miss, it looks so completely out of place here, sandwiched between a truck and a van.

  I thought it would be pretty fucking obvious what I was going to do, but she looks surprised when I unlock the car and get in the driver's seat. It is very shiny but it is also horrendously uncomfortable and I can barely see over the dash. I'm not even really that short.

  She is grinning. "Where are we going?" she asks.

  "I'm taking you home," I tell her.

  "Oh," she says, looking kind of bummed.

  I want her to smile again. "Where else would we go?" I ask her.

  She shrugs, thinking this over.

  "You have to get to work. I really can drive myself home, you know," she says her momentary happiness evaporating in the face of reality.

  I poke her in the side and wait till she glances across at me. "You can't think of anywhere at all?" I ask her grinning.

  Leigh thinks about this for a moment, the expression on her face brightening again, reminding me of the first day we met, melting places inside me that I hadn't realised were frozen.

  "It's a nice day," she says, "have you been to the baths at Coogee yet?"

  I shake my head.

  "Lead the way," I tell her rashly, refusing to think about next week's pay cheque with the loss of this shift.

  Pausing for a moment as I stare at the dash, at all the bloody dials and gadgets and lights in front of me and realising with horror that it has been over a year since I last drove a car and now I am trying to manoeuvre an excessively expensive car out from a spot sandwiched between a lorry and a van.

  Wonderful.

  I can feel my nerves twisting and uncoiling inside me. A nest of snakes. An oil slick in my stomach.

  The fear I now have of doing something wrong before I've even tried it.

  Leigh looks across at me. I take my hands off the steering wheel and wait for her to tell me that she will drive after all.

  She narrows her eyes at me, trying to work out why we aren't going anywhere, what my fecking problem is.

  "The car is insured for way more than it is worth," she tells me blandly after a moment. "You'll be doing me a favour if you damage it."

  She appears to be completely serious and as if to prove her intent to let me just wreck her car she lounges back in her seat and then adjusts a few buttons to tilt it back further.

  "Wake me up when we get to your place?" she asks tiredly.

  I stare at her in disbelief as she shuts her eyes.

  She opens them after a moment when I neither say anything or start the car.

  "To get your swimmers?" she asks. It hasn't escaped my notice that Leigh has that terrible Aussie habit of phrasing statements as if they are questions.

  Then her words sink in.

  Oh, sweet Jesus.

  I hadn't realised we were planning on swimming at the baths.

  Whilst I do have a swimsuit I never had any intention of using it.

  Not to swim in anyway.

  Realistically not to wear either, after all I am a product of thousands of years of evolutionary adaption to a cold bleak island.

  The thought of both of us being at the beach in our swimwear does wonders for my nerves about crashing her car.

  I'm out of the car space and driving down the road numbly thinking that it really does handle well before I remember that I was until moments ago terrified of driving this precious beast at all. It is responding so perfectly to every touch that the fear isn't coming back, there is merely an urge to accelerate, to take that next corner even though I should be going straight ahead.

  By the time we get to my apartment I feel confident and powerful, that I could take on the world.

  Possibly even Leigh and I both in swimsuits.

  I leave Leigh dozing in the car and bound up the stairs, change into my swimmers and a dress, grab a towel and some exceedingly high protection sunscreen designed for people like me.

  By the time I get back to the car Leigh is staring out the window, her booted feet resting on the dash looking bored.

  "Do we need to stop at your house?" I ask her as I get in, feeling excited, at playing truant from work.

  "Nope," she says, yawning and stretching, "I always have mine in the back."

  Leigh directs the way to a local beach and all too soon I am turning off the car regretfully, wondering if we couldn't just go for a longer drive.

  Those northern beaches she'd spoken of.

  Leigh goes to the toilets to get changed and I wait for her on the sand, admiring the empty white sandy beach and the turquoise water, apprehensively watching the waves crashing in and hope that I am not going to die today.

  I'm steadily acclimatising to the blazing sun, the harsh light that peeks into every room, through crevices and cracks, but out here on the luminescent sand it is blinding and even my very sensible, actually polarised sunglasses don't seem to be doing anything at all.

  Leigh reappears in a swimsuit designed for a professional athlete and I'm staring at her lean body, the definition of her stomach clear from metres away, just a slight tan line from wearing t-shirts and shorts to distract from her sheer perfection.


  "Are you checking me out?" she asks wryly, kidding me as she approaches.

  "Of course, I am," I tell her with a completely straight face, not even remotely lying.

  She laughs at her hilarious joke and I laugh with her because it is a little funny.

  Leigh's hand in mine is all I can think of as she leads me to the ocean, to a pool cut out of the rocks.

  "Is this your first time?" she asks, laughing at me as we stand on the edge and I shriek when my hot toes dip into icy cold water.

  I glance down at her hand and look back to her with a smirk.

  "You are constantly asking personal questions, Leigh Greyson Grenfell," I tell her.

  She looks at me very seriously. "Well, you know what they say," she says.

  I raise a quizzical eyebrow at her, still focused on the freezing water.

  Leigh pulls me by the hand, tugs me, toppling the both of us into the water.

  It is even colder than I would have thought possible.

  Leigh comes up, grinning at me.

  "You might as well go all in," she finishes.

  I splash her with water to absolutely no affect.

  "Jerk," I tell her.

  "Yep," she says looking pleased with herself.

  We play around for a while, then I watch Leigh enviously as she cuts from one side of the pool to the other in an effortless freestyle.

  After a few laps she stops.

  "You know," she says casually, "when I first came here I could barely swim at all. Too many bloody heated swimming pools that used to make me feel sick in England."

  I stare at her.

  She shrugs.

  "You can trust me," she says with a reserved half-smile, "I'm a good teacher."

  My everything melts at her words. At her standing there half-naked, the water the same colour as her eyes, her smoothly muscled slender arms dripping salt water.

  At her kind way of asking if she can teach me to swim, something I haven't done since I was a child.

  She is absolutely right, she is a good teacher.

  In under an hour I am able to swim from one end of the pool to the other in a passable freestyle, turning my head to breathe mostly at the right time. This is fortunate because for the first half hour Leigh's teaching involves her hands touching my bare skin in a most business-like way, correcting my stroke and the tilt of my head and there is one point where I'm not entirely sure that I can take it anymore. That I will just wrap my arms around her neck and kiss her.

  After another hour I know that I will be coming to the beach every single day I am able. The sheer thrill of slicing through the water, the feel the sum of all my parts acting in concert, a strength returning to me that I haven't felt in years, that perhaps I have never felt before.

  Eventually even Leigh has had enough and for a few more laps every time I turn my head I feast my gaze on her sitting on the edge, watching me, an impressed smile on her face.

  We go for lunch at a tiny cafe nearby, Leigh and I both starving, demolishing our food with a fervour that neither of us had a few hours ago.

  When I'm finished I look across at Leigh and see that she is truly exhausted now, that in my enjoyment of today I've forgotten that she was already running on empty and now she has nothing left at all.

  She falls asleep in the car, passed out and I spend a full hour trying to navigate the streets to her house with a road map open on my lap, pulling over to consult it now and again. Although truly, it isn't just the maze of roads, I do spend quite a lot of that hour just watching her sleep, realising how at peace her face looks in contrast to when she is awake.

  By what I don't know.

  When we do get to her house I know that I am never going to want to drive an ordinary car ever again.

  I also know that Leigh is in some way that I don't understand as flawed as I am, that somewhere inside her is a weakness that has the power to cut her deeply. That if I am not careful it will hurt me too.

  That somehow that makes me feel better, that both of us are just a little broken and I'd prefer a Leigh who is not entirely flawless.

  I sit in her car in the driveway in front of her enormous white facade house and watch her for just a few minutes longer, unable to tear my eyes from her.

  Then just a few minutes longer than that.

  Eventually Leigh stirs and I immediately realise that I am being creepy, watching her sleep for the better part of ten minutes and leap out of the car, pretending that we just arrived.

  I guide her to the door, my arm linked with hers, holding her tighter when she stumbles.

  I hug her to say goodbye and after a moment she hugs me back, gently but with a strength that feels good.

  I'm smiling as I'm walking to the bus stop, trying to work out where I am and how to get home or if perhaps I might just go for a walk down to the beach and have an early pint at the pub.

  A few hours later I get a text from Leigh apologising for her tiredness and that she didn't give me a ride home, that she had a really great day and thank you.

  I tell her that I'm sure I can find some way that she can make it up to me.

  She says, anything.

  Chapter 4

  After that day at the beach work goes on as normal but I am suddenly seeing a lot more of Leigh. I mention this one morning after she asks me where I am rostered on today. Me drinking coffee, her holding her usual cup of tea, not drinking it.

  She shrugs.

  "If I know where you are going to be I'll walk in that way to say hi," she says casually.

  Only the hospital is huge and sometimes when I see her she must have had to walk a mile out of her way to see me.

  It's doing wonders for my cred with my fellow nurses when she stops in. I'm amazed how many of them she knows by name, considering none of them are in surgery, that she is happy to talk of developments in people she has operated on, is interested in how they are healing or not or if anything could be improved.

  Unless there is another doctor around then she just raises an eyebrow and grins and keeps going on.

  The last hour before the end of each shift I'm waiting, glancing in every direction trying to see her before she sees me.

  Like now.

  I'm back in the children's ward which is in a whole different building from her. Nowhere near where she parks her car.

  I'm assisting a resident with a patient review. Which he could not be doing more slowly, reading each line carefully, his finger tracing over the relevant parts. I wonder when the last time he slept was.

  He is mumbling to himself about the kid's schedule.

  "On the last page," I tell him shortly, looking down the corridor for Leigh.

  He glances shyly at my name tag. "Uh, thanks Ah-Dah-Nat."

  Oh god. Could he mangle my name any worse?

  I open my mouth to correct him.

  "Her name is Aednat, dickbrain," Leigh calls breezily, appearing in the doorway to the ward for a moment, stopping only to grin at me momentarily, give a casual, 'what's up' head nod to the kid in the bed before vanishing down the hall.

  She's in her usual uniform, boots, jeans, tee and I realise I've never seen her in scrubs. Not that I'm complaining I think as my eyes flick down over her body.

  "Oh, man, she is so hot," says the kid, the same look on his face that was on mine. "Makes me wish I was awake for my surgery. "

  "What are you, twelve?" I ask him in amazement, trying to ignore the hot flush of embarrassment spreading up Gupta's cheeks at being corrected by Dr Grenfell.

  "I'm fourteen," he says indignantly, "anyway, I don't need to be a fucking adult to know that she is the hottest doctor in the hospital."

  He grins and points at the central line in his neck. "She can adjust my line anytime."

  I feel a flash of jealousy.

  Jesus wept.

  "Yeah, well, she doesn't even swing your way," I tell him tartly, unprofessionally, feeling ridiculous.

  The kid raises his eyebrows.

  "Duh," he say
s in an injured tone, "but I'm pretty sure she is not going to ask me out on a date even if she was straight."

  True.

  I wish she was going to ask me out but I think I have as much chance as the kid does.