by Lyn Denison
“It is. But it’s hard work. And that’s what I think we should talk about, Mel.” Crys paused for a moment. “I won’t expect you to, well, run yourself ragged. I’ll leave it up to you how involved…that is, how involved with the farm you want to become. As I said, I can’t pay you much—”
“And as I said, I wouldn’t want any money. I could pay for my room and board.”
“You won’t have to do that. Bed and board is free to friends. And any work you do on the farm I’ll pay you for.”
“You might want me to pay you when you find out how hopeless I am when it comes to, well, farms and stuff,” Mel said, only half jokingly, feeling more than a little apprehensive.
Crys laughed again, and Mel thought she could listen to that laugh for hours. It was so full of…Mel couldn’t quite find a word to describe it. It was soothing, yet arousing, relaxing but somehow exciting.
“Are you trying to tell me you don’t have a green thumb like your mother?”
“That about sums it up.”
“No worries. I’ll provide the instruction.”
“You’re going to have your work cut out for you. I warn you now that when it comes to plants I’m hardly an asset. Punnets of seedlings in shops have been known to feign drooping when they see me approaching to discourage me should I even consider buying them. They know they’d have next to no chance of surviving with me.”
Crys’s laugh turned throaty, and Mel smiled broadly.
“I promise I’ll warn the plants.”
“And the animals,” Mel added.
“There’s only the dog and the cats. Oh, and a few cows in the paddock I lease out. But as far as we’re concerned the cows are just part of the scenery.”
“I’m relieved about that. And cats I can handle, I think. Not sure about the dog though.”
“You’ll be fine, Mel.” Mel heard Crys take a breath. “So when can I expect you, and do you need directions?”
Mel glanced down at the notepad and grimaced when she saw that her mother had just slipped a written page of directions to Crys’s farm onto the phone stand. “Mum’s given me a mud map. How about Friday?”
“That will be fine. Well, I’ll see you then.”
“Yes. Thanks, Crys.”
Mel set down the phone. Only then did she realize she hadn’t been going to go down to Crys’s farm.
CHAPTER TWO
For the second time that day Crys realized she was standing holding a buzzing telephone receiver and she gently set it back in place. Unconsciously she leaned against the doorjamb behind her. And she tried to analyze her feelings.
Mel Jamieson was coming to stay. Her mind flashed up images from the past. Mel as a shy ten-year-old riding her bicycle. Mel climbing the huge poinciana tree between Crys’s house and the Jamiesons’. Mel as a quiet fourteen-year-old when her parents divorced.
Crys walked back into the living room and crossed to her overfilled bookshelves. She reached for one of her photo albums, turned to sit down, and rested the album unopened on her lap. Taking a deep breath, she opened the book to the first page.
And there they all were. The first photograph, the colors changing slightly with age, was taken at College’s Crossing outside Ipswich nearly twenty years ago, just after Crys had moved in next door to the Jamiesons. Crys realized she must have taken the photograph herself as she was the only one not in the group shot.
There was Angela and her husband, Danny. Crys’s husband, Paul. And Amber and Mel. They’d been swimming, and the remains of their picnic lunch lay about them.
Angela sat with shoulders back, looking like a model in her brief bikini, long legs folded neatly beneath her. Danny, her husband, was scowling as he always seemed to be from the time Crys met him until he and Angela divorced.
Paul was grinning, striking a pose designed to set off his well-developed physique. Crys studied the face of her former husband, looked at him without emotion. Until recently she hadn’t been able to so much as think of him without bitterness rising within her. She’d never forgive him for what he’d done, but…Crys sighed. Life just went on, and hatred was so destructive.
Paul Hewitt was certainly handsome, with a mass of curling dark hair and brooding good looks. Yet she was all too aware that the curve of his smiling mouth could droop sulkily or twist cruelly in the space of a heartbeat.
Crys knew she wasn’t totally blameless in their fiasco of a marriage. She’d married him for all the wrong reasons and had known even before their wedding day that she was making a big mistake. But, at the time, she’d bowed to convention because she’d felt she had nothing left to do.
She sighed again and shifted her gaze to Amber Jamieson, Angela’s older daughter, who was a carbon copy of her mother. Amber had paused in the act of tidying up and Crys smiled faintly. That was Amber, always the little homemaker.
Standing behind her sister was a laughing Mel. She must have been about ten or eleven, long and gangly, her dark hair straggling about her face. Mel was four years younger than her sister and obviously took after her father’s family, or so Angela always said. Although Crys could see no resemblance to Danny Jamieson in Mel’s face. All that aside, Mel was as dark as Amber was fair.
In the photograph Mel held a slice of watermelon, the juice smeared over her face as she grinned at the camera.
Crys turned a few pages, saw the changes that the couple of years made to Mel. Crys knew Angela felt Amber was the beauty of the family, but as far as Crys was concerned Mel was more interesting. And she had always had an inner glow that her older sister lacked.
Two pages stuck together and fell open at a small studio portrait of a grinning baby, and Crys’s heart gave the familiar throb of loss. David, her son. The next photo showed Paul holding David when he was about two years old. Paul was all proud father, and Crys felt the familiar momentary urge to lash out at her husband’s smiling face. These were the only two photos she had of her son. She swallowed and made herself keep turning the pages.
And there was Mel looking surprisingly grown-up in high school in her formal outfit, her handsome young escort beside her. Young Gary O’Leary who had lived around the corner. He’d hung around the house for weeks trying to get Mel’s attention.
Crys grinned wryly. Gary had been persistent, Crys gave him that, while Mel had been far more interested in swimming and in shooting baskets in netball. Much to her mother’s disgust. Crys could hear Angela now.
“But it’s so unfeminine, Melissa. Heaven only knows why you want to get all hot and flushed rushing about after that silly ball. Men prefer the waft of subtle perfume, not unpleasant perspiration.”
“I don’t care what men prefer,” Mel had said forcefully. “And I don’t smell.” She’d turned to appeal to Crys. “Do I?”
“Not that I’d noticed,” Crys replied and got a quelling look from Mel’s mother for her trouble. “And you can hardly say swimming isn’t a clean sport,” Crys had added, teasing her friend.
“Swimming only gives you broad shoulders,” Angela retorted airily.
“It’s healthy, and, apart from that,” Mel had stated with youthful arrogance, “I like it.”
Crys looked again at the tall sixteen-year-old in her deep maroon dress. She knew Mel hadn’t wanted to attend the formal dance, but she’d bowed to her mother’s pressure. Crys could see Mel now, sitting at her breakfast bar, frowning intensely.
Mel often unburdened herself to Crys, and Crys had tried to encourage the young girl without doing anything to undermine Angela’s directions, although sometimes it had been difficult and called on all Crys’s powers of diplomacy.
Why did people dance anyway? Mel had asked Crys. It was a pretty silly sort of thing to do, in Mel’s opinion. All sweaty palms and trying to keep to the same beat.
Crys had laughed, secretly agreeing, but of course she couldn’t say that or Angela would have been livid with her. Or quietly wounded, which would have been worse.
Mel had confided that she wasn’t interest
ed in Gary and worried that going with him to the dance was just giving him false hope. Once again Crys had silently agreed with that, too, but she’d known Angela wouldn’t thank her for voicing that opinion.
Having a very attractive mother and older sister had been something of a burden for Mel during her teenage years. And Crys could sympathize with the young girl. Crys had thought Mel’s disinterest in dating was her personal adolescent rebellion against her mother.
Yet in the end Mel had gone to the dance with Gary, and less than a week later it had all come to a head. And if Angela had known what —
Crys forced those thoughts right back into the forbidden territory from whence they’d come. Now was not the time to rehash those vaguely confusing memories that still had the power to make her feel so ambivalent, as though something had never been totally resolved. She knew she felt a lingering guilt. But it was more than that.
Crys sighed, her fingers absently tracing the line of Mel’s young face in the photograph.
“Oh, Mel, she said softly, the sound of her voice startling her.
She closed the album firmly and stood up to replace it on the bookshelf. There was no use delving into the past. She’d had to come to terms with that often enough in her life.
They were all nearly a dozen years down the track. Mel had grown up. She, Crys, had grown older. They had both followed their chosen paths. Life had gone on for both of them, and it would continue to do so for the short time Mel stayed here on the farm. And it would go on after Mel left.
Crys switched off the television and headed for a hot shower and bed.
Mel knew she should be heading back to her car instead of lazing here on the sand. She’d had an invigorating surf, enjoying the cooling water, the exhilaration of the incessant waves at Burleigh Beach. Then she’d renewed her sunscreen and sprawled out on her beach towel on the warm white sand.
As she’d dried off, she’d absently watched the people around her. The families, parents building sand-castles with toddlers, supervising youngsters boogy-boarding on the waves as they washed up on the sand. There were plenty of muscular young men, tanned, with salt-knotted hair matted by the wind and the sea, their surfboards under their arms, some leashed to their ankles. But Mel only gave them a cursory look.
Her gaze was drawn to the women, women of all ages, all shapes and sizes, all coloring and colors, the tanned and the pale skinned. And she wondered idly how many of those women preferred women.
One in ten supposedly, she told herself. And her eyes went from one woman to another as she speculated about which woman was that one in ten, that one woman who was different. The way she, Mel, was.
Mel’s eyes narrowed behind her sunglasses as she noticed a tall young woman who was slowly, almost sensually, rubbing suntan oil into her glistening skin. The woman had an incredible figure. She was dark haired and had long shapely legs. Just like Terry.
The now familiar pain twisted in Mel’s stomach and she sighed. Oh, Terry, why did you — Mel stopped herself asking the questions that had haunted her for months. There were no answers, so it was pointless going over and over it all the time. Terry certainly hadn’t been able to make any rational justification when Mel had asked her to explain. She hadn’t been able, or hadn’t wanted, to answer any of Mel’s questions.
Why wasn’t I enough? Why did you leave me? Why did that giggling twenty-year-old appeal to you over me?
Mel rolled over to her stomach, glad of the anonymity of her sunglasses to hide behind to mask her despair. If anything she felt worse now than she had when it had happened six months ago.
After being together for six years, Mel had thought she’d known Terry so well, thought they were the ideal couple their friends had said they were, that they’d each found the perfect partner in business as well as in their private life.
Of course, they’d had a few problems over the years, but not insurmountable ones. Didn’t everyone in a committed, monogamous relationship?
There were only two subjects that had really caused them any ongoing tension. One had been Terry’s complete disinterest in family, although in the beginning Terry had been greatly amused when Mel’s mother thought Terry was a young man.
Terry’s family was in Western Australia, a continent away, and that’s how she liked it. All Terry ever said was that her parents were elderly and that they wouldn’t understand if she came out to them. Why stir them up unnecessarily? Terry had dismissed the subject on more than one occasion. And she said she had no interest in meeting Mel’s family. Mel had been disappointed, but she hadn’t pressured Terry.
Their other ongoing argument, especially in the beginning of their relationship, had concerned Terry’s somewhat irrational fear that other people would discover they were lesbians. Terry had often stated that she hated the label, that the fact she preferred to sleep with a woman had nothing to do with anyone but herself.
Who cared anyway? Mel had replied, and Terry had said their young fans’ parents would and Mel had laughed. They’d only had one book published at that stage. It wasn’t as though they were household names in children’s book publishing. But Terry had been totally convinced they would be. And she’d been well on the way to being right, as it turned out. Now that they had not one but two Picture Book of the Year Awards from the Australian Book Council their names were far more well-known.
Terry wrote the stories and Mel did the illustrations in what were now popular children’s picture books. Since they’d won the award, their sales had skyrocketed and, last year, when they’d taken the coveted prize for the second year in a row, well, as Terry had said, it was almost like winning a lottery twice over. Financially, they were more than comfortable.
There had been a certain amount of media interest in the two of them with articles about them in weekend newspapers and in a couple of mass-market magazines. They’d even been interviewed on the Midday Show on television earlier in the year.
Terry had been as nervous as a kitten about their television appearance since they’d just bought their new flat. That they’d been living together in a small rented flat for four years before that hadn’t seemed to bother her. Fortunately, Terry’s fears had been as unfounded as Mel had said they would be. The sympathetic interviewer hadn’t even touched on the subject of their living arrangements. The emphasis had been on the fact that they were friends who had met at a party and agreed to collaborate to produce a popular product.
Mel’s lips twisted. Friends. Mel had thought they’d become just that from the moment they’d met at that party. Good friends. Actually, it had been after they’d become lovers that they’d decided to write the children’s books.
Terry wrote the text. Mel drew the pictures. They laughed together. Made love. It had all been so perfect. But apparently Mel had been the only one who thought so.
Now she was alone, and Terry had moved in with a twenty-year-old who was all adoring eyes and nubile body. Just the way Mel had been seven years ago.
Mel paused. What had made her draw a parallel between herself and Terry’s new lover? They were physically totally different, but they did have one thing in common. They were both enamored of Terry. Mel certainly had been. Still was, she reminded herself.
She’d fallen for Terry the night they’d met at a party given by one of Mel’s art school classmates. Terry had been at the center of an attentive crowd. Nearly six years older than Mel, Terry was tall and slim and extremely fit. Her dark hair was long and curled loosely to her shoulders.
That first night Mel had watched her with longing, wishing she could be so at ease with a crowd around her, wishing she had the confidence that Terry so obviously had. And wishing she could ask Terry to come out with her, for coffee or something. But of course Mel had been far too reserved to do that. She’d tried once and — Mel stopped those disquieting thoughts.
So Mel had endeavored to be at whatever party or sporting event that Terry attended. She’d joined Terry’s adoring audience and eventually she’d got up t
he nerve to talk to her. Of course, Mel had gained the courage from the measured looks Terry had given her and, after that initial contact, Terry began to seek Mel out, too. They’d talk for hours, go for long walks together and, after what seemed to Mel an eternity of fear and yearning, Terry had kissed her.
Mel couldn’t have been happier. They were indeed soul mates. She could barely believe her good fortune.
And she could remember the exhilaration knowing Terry felt the same way she did. When Mel had shyly admitted this to Terry, Terry had laughed, confessing she had been involved with women since her early teens.
Although Terry had been experienced herself, Terry had been Mel’s first real lover. Mel shifted uneasily on her towel. Not that she hadn’t tried to…
She swallowed. Her first clumsy attempts at seduction just before she turned seventeen had been such a humiliating failure Mel hadn’t had the nerve to try again. She’d forced that part of her life into the dim, dark recesses, never again to see the light of day.
And she hadn’t told a soul about it until she had divulged some of it to Terry. To Mel’s disappointment, Terry had been highly amused. Occasionally she’d even resorted to teasing Mel about her youthful infatuation, and Mel had told herself she should lighten up about it. It had happened years ago. She’d grown past it. Or she should have. Yet it still had the power to unsettle her.
But, all that aside, if it hadn’t been for Terry, perhaps Mel would still be denying her sexual preference. For she’d kept that buried inside her until she met Terry.
When Terry kissed her it was as though all the doors inside her she’d slammed shut had burst open and everything was swept into a whirlwind to settle back into a new and so-right place. Terry had been so intelligent…so attractive…so passionate.
Mel brought Terry’s beautiful face into focus, and her heart ached with loss. And then suddenly Terry’s features disappeared and she found another face sharpening in her thoughts. Hair darker than Terry’s.
Eyes deep brown where Terry’s had been hazel. A full, generous mouth with the hint of a dimple in one cheek.