“Dull. Even dumb at times, but no permanent brain damage, at least I hope not.”
“I don’t get it.” Her hands went to her hips. If she wasn’t a grown-up she’d have stamped her foot.
“What’s not to get?” He stood, but kept the table between them. “This is a sensible thing for me to do. I trust you to help me through it, and I owe you one, professionally speaking.”
All the colour fled from Darcy’s face, she plumped down on the sofa.
He stepped out from the table. “Darcy, what’s wrong?”
She looked stricken. “I have a problem.”
“Am I your problem?”
She looked miserable. “Yes.”
“I get it.”
“No you don’t.” She shook her head violently. “I need you to know I came here to convince you to do this profile because I’m desperate. The network thinks I fudged the interview about you.”
“They’re right, you did.”
She frowned up at him. “They’re saying I breached my contract and unless I bring you in like a big fish, they’re going to sack me and come after me. I could lose this job if I don’t hook you.” She looked away. “And it’s the wrong reason to even try.”
He sat beside her, but didn’t touch her. She looked down at her hands in her lap. “I’m not happy about this shit they’re heaping on you. But Lois, I expected you to disembowel me after what I did to you. I have no problem helping you out with this.”
“It’s not enough to want to help me out. You can fly out of here tomorrow and be free of all this. It’s not what you need.”
She was so skittish she might stand up and stalk around the room again. He wanted her close but he did nothing but gently lean his shoulder into hers. “Hell and back, Lois. This hardly scratches the surface of hell and back.”
“Real world, Will. This is using you as a ratings grab. This is using you to solve my personal problems.”
He shoulder bumped her. Tried to catch her eyes, but she kept them down. “I can say with authority I’ve been used for worse.”
She made a sound like a hiccup. It might’ve been a sob, might’ve been a laugh.
“Some of the other times included handcuffs, gags and terrible prison fashion.”
“How can you joke about this?”
“I survived it, how can I not?”
Now she turned to look at him. “All of this only happened to you because of what I did. Why don’t you hate me?”
He put his hands on her shoulders and saw his own shadow reflected in her big doll eyes. “Darcy, we’re not having this conversation ever again. I did this entirely to myself. You gave things a nudge, but didn’t I deserve it? I was an arrogant prick, and after that, well, you saved me by going to Tengtou. And you saved me when I was too out of my head to even know it was you. You don’t owe me anything. If you don’t want to interview me then I guess I’ll have to offer myself to Liarne Bennett.”
She blinked but otherwise didn’t move.
“So what’ll it be?”
“If you so much as think Liarne Bennett’s name, Will Parker, you’ll wish you were back in those ugly prison pjs.”
She looked so serious. Mouth drawn in a thin line, arms pressed rigidly at her sides. He laughed. She didn’t laugh with him, but God this was funny. He’d come to Tara to try to put the pieces of his life back together, make good decisions, make peace with all of his bad ones. He was reconciled to Darcy being a piece he could never afford to fit in his life, but here she was, unexpected and angry as a roused snake. What could he do but laugh?
“Will, I’m not joking.”
“I know,” he managed to get out. He let go her shoulders and wrapped his arms around his ribs, his laughter louder, harder. She was looking at him as though he’d popped another gasket. That made him laugh more.
“Are you all right?” She put her hand on his arm, apprehension on her face, and for no good reason that was funny too.
“Will?”
He couldn’t have gotten an answer out past his laughter. She kept saying his name, with concern, but her voice was higher, lighter, until she was laughing softly too.
“I don’t know what we’re laughing at,” she said, her smile so wide, so young.
“Ugly pjs!” he spluttered. “Liarne Bennett!”
“I told you,” she broke off laughing, “not to even think her...” She shoved him in the chest, her laughter bright and quickly as close to out of control as his was. “She’s a cow.”
Will got a moo sound out that was so demented it set him off again. Darcy was virtually in his lap now, her face so close, her breath on his neck. Her giggling the best sound in the world.
She took a fist full of his shirt, “They had frog toggles.”
He knew he shouldn’t, but it was too funny. “Ribbit!”
Her head went down on his chest, her whole body shook with laughter. They were laughing about his prison experience and it felt so good.
He and Pete had laughed like this, when Norman was in town, and they’d been left to fend for themselves, sometimes for days at a time. They’d laughed till they made themselves sick, till they had sore ribs. And it was always at nothing, at each other, at the stupidity of being blockies living in a shipping container in the middle of the bush.
A favourite trigger was the word, ‘ahoy’. It had the power to set them both off into hysterics and never got old. He said it now. “Ahoy,” remembering two skinny boys trying to make a life and avoid a daily beating.
Darcy’s head came up, a bewildered expression on her face. She choked out an, “Ay, ay Captain,” and they were the funniest words he’d ever heard. She was flushed a gorgeous pink and completely breathless. She shifted so she could twine her hands around his neck and sit astride his lap.
Too silly but he said it anyway, “Ready to come aboard?”
She lost it altogether, throwing her head back. He had to grab her to stop her toppling off his knees. When she righted herself there were tears in her eyes.
His laughter shut down as flash fast as her mood changed. She was snatching air, only a shuddered breath away from sobbing. “I thought they’d killed you.”
This might kill him, seeing her open and raw like this.
“I was so scared, Will.”
He touched her wet cheek with his thumb and she sighed. He brushed it over her trembling mouth and replaced it with his lips. She couldn’t make a kiss happen, she was crumbling. He rested his forehead on hers and wrapped his arms around her. “I was scared too. I thought I’d never hold you again. Never have the right to.”
Her sobs broke and the sound of them pierced all his wounds. He squeezed her tight to stop himself breaking too. His knee ached, there was hot pain in his arm, his face hurt, his ribs creaked. And then he did break, his own tears falling in her hair and on her neck.
He needed to kiss her, to have all of her with him to feel whole again, to fight off that terror memory of losing her imbedded in his head. This time she could shape her lips to his and her touch on his back, on his chest, on his face, anaesthetised the pain, brought heat, brought healing, brought ardour.
From laughter to tears, from tears to sharp flickers of desire; now they were coming apart in a different way, equally as urgent, felt bone deep, but wilder, without restraint and without fear.
Will carried Darcy to the bedroom. She was weightless, fine, wrapped around him like cling-film. They stripped each other between fevered embraces and sucking kisses. His boots were a struggle, his plaster cast scratched her skin. When they were both naked, she toured his body, scar by scar, old and new, fingers and tongue with tiny grazes of teeth and whispered nonsense. Every touch made him want to beg her to stop, beg her to go on. She moved from his knee to his hip, over his ribs and chest to his collarbone and shoulder. She licked the scar under his chin and brushed her nose against his, fingertips pressing his reformed cheek, and brow.
“Show me you’re alive, Will.”
He was super
human for her, alight for her, craved the vanilla of her skin, the fit of her in his body’s hollows and muscle curls. Joined to her at mouth and centre, he needed nothing else to survive. The answer to anger and sadness were inside her softness, inside the roll of her hips and the dig of her fingers on his back.
She was surgery for his senses, stitching them together with kisses and kitten noises, with undulating rhythms and jarring quakes, sealing them with subtle caresses and tight possessive grips.
This coming apart was blindingly brilliant, coloured by hope and future, dipped in wave after wave of exhausting pleasure.
She slept, sprawled across his chest, and he gazed at her in the long shadows of afternoon light with childlike wonder. In Pudong, she’d been a toy, something to play with before deciding if he wanted her. God, the arrogance of it. And the shock of surprise from the wanting. And how quickly it became something more. He’d figured she was essential before he understood what that meant, and now that he did, he agreed with Jiao.
She could ruin him if he let her. If she hadn’t already.
When Darcy resettled in sleep on the pillow, he got up, dragged his jeans on and padded into the kitchen. He made coffee and took the sat phone outside. He watched the signal meter till he had a green light. He called Pete. He had some explaining to do and one word on the tip of his tongue to do it with.
Pete said, “So Tara,” in a tone that made him grimace.
“What can I say?”
“At least I know why you’re hard to contact. I don’t know why you couldn’t tell me.”
“You’d have come and I needed to do this alone.”
“Where’s Bo?”
“Taking a road trip.”
“I would’ve come. Would that have been so bad?”
He looked down towards the creek, the stand of trees; the view dominant in the tattoo on his back. “My demon, Pete. Not yours.”
“What’s it like?”
“The same. Different. Everything is smaller, and less threatening.”
“And the creek?”
He looked down at his bare feet. “Yeah, well, we haven’t exactly communed yet.”
“Ah. Should you be alone?”
“I built a kit house. Too spoilt for camping. Going to find someone to give it to when I’m finished with it.”
“Answer the question.”
“I’m not alone and you know it.”
“She found you.”
“Yeah, she found me.”
“She’s on a mission you know. I gave her a hard time about it.”
“It’s the first thing she told me.”
Pete breathed into the phone. “All right then. You’re a big boy. You can work out what to do about it.”
“Yep.”
“What’s it really like?”
A black cockatoo and two green lorikeets screeched overhead, the cicada buzz going silent for a few seconds before starting up again. “Strange. Bo thinks it beautiful. I guess it is. We never saw it like that.”
“Is it mucking with your head?”
“A little.” A lot, as he knew it would. “Had a fit of the giggles today, fall on the floor kind of laughing. Made me remember how it wasn’t all bad here. Do you remember?”
“I remember how glad I was to leave.”
“Come on. You remember how we used to laugh.”
“I remember we used to read comics you nicked, Spidey and The Hulk.”
“I used to look at the pictures.”
Pete gave a grunted laugh. It gave Will his opening. “Ahoy.”
There was a pause, a crackle, then Pete, “Did you just say ‘ahoy’?”
“Ahoy.”
Pete laughed, a honking sound, a cartoon character noise filtered through the earpiece from continents away. “Ahoy.”
Will grinned to hear him. They’d come a long way for two boys who lived in a hot, smelly shipping container and the tent attached to it like a spinnaker.
He said it again. “Ahoy.” He waited to see if Pete remembered the rest of the joke, the nonsense response he’d made up from a list of nautical terms that sounded like swear words sailors would use.
Pete wheezed down the line. “I’m not saying it.”
“Go on.”
“No, it’s dumb.”
“You don’t remember it do you?” Will knew he did, Pete just didn’t want to say it.
“Gash fanny jibe-ho,” Pete choked out. Will waited, a roar of laughter burbling in his chest.
“Keelhaul scurvy dog lazy jack landlubber.”
Will’s bark of hilarity was so sudden he startled a flock of galahs into flight. Pete was gasping with mirth in his ear. He and Pete were going to be okay. He watched the galahs settle in a treetop, adding their pink and grey to the green, breathed the bush fragrance and laughed at Pete laughing.
If he could make peace with the creek, if he could remember how to laugh, he might make it out of Tara. Make it out of hell. Again.
44. Favours
“If a man takes no thought about what is distant, he will find sorrow near at hand.” — Confucius
Will pulled a face; self-conscious, bashful. “Quit looking at me like that.”
Darcy still wasn’t used to being with him, being able to watch him. He looked the same and yet different. He was leaning into the fridge, shirtless, wearing only a frayed, torn pair of jeans with the top button missing. For a wealthy man he had an extraordinary collection of ragbag clothes. They suited him as much as his immaculate business attire did.
She couldn’t stop herself gawking at him. Even after the best part of a day making love, sleeping, waking and doing it all over again, being with him was part novelty, part new habit, all thrill. A re-run of Shangri-La but with added bad-ass attitude and unexpected casual domesticity.
“They put you back together looking very sexy, but left you hopeless in the kitchen.”
He looked affronted. “I can reheat.”
“And if Bo hadn’t left you a fridge full of almost ready meals, what would you have done?”
“Eggs.”
“How long is Bo away?”
“Beans.”
“Thank God for Bo.”
Will laughed. “Echo that. You know it’s not like reading. I didn’t lose my gourmet skills. I never had any.”
“What do you mean not like reading?”
He ducked back inside the fridge, his strained, “I said that did I?” was addressed to Bo’s meticulously well ordered Tupperware.
Darcy wore an old flannelette check shirt of Will’s, the sleeves cut out, long on her, and nothing else. She sat on the dining table swinging her legs while he pretended to organise food. She could rescue him, but then she wouldn’t be able to watch him, and she wasn’t that hungry.
He abandoned the fridge, and came and stood between her knees. His hair was all rumpled, and he smelled of sex and coffee. He was going to try to seduce her again, and she was so going to let him, but he had to talk first. She dodged a kiss, turning her head at the last minute so he caught her ear.
He growled mock annoyance, and sat on one of the dining chairs. “I got my language back, but I can’t read.”
“Can’t or need to learn again?”
“Both maybe. I don’t know.”
“Keep talking.”
“That’s it.”
“That’s so not it.”
He folded his arms, his biceps bunching. “Are you being my friend, my lover or a journalist with her own current affairs show?”
Darcy sighed. It was a fair question, but she wished it didn’t need to be asked. “I’ll take boxes A, B, and C.”
Will dropped his head. “Sorry, but I like talking about this shit about as much as I like cooking.”
“What happens when you try to read?”
“I can’t make out words, just squiggles, lines and shapes, upside down and backwards letters.”
“Like when you were a kid.”
He looked up. “Bingo.”
&nb
sp; “So how did you learn then?”
“Painstakingly slowly. I had the reading ability of an eight year old when I moved here.”
“Can I help?”
He stood up. “No.” He went back to the fridge; his wounded pride stomping off first, followed by his shadow of shame. He fussed about inside it, shuffling stuff around.
“How about when you left here?”
No response. She could see the curve of his back, the shredded skin of the burn across his side, and the edge of his hipbone, where his jeans slipped low, but his face was hidden. She didn’t need to see it to know he was intensely uncomfortable with this.
“Could you read when you left here?”
A muffled, “Yes.”
“So what happened while you were here?”
“God, Darcy.” He closed the fridge door scrupulously carefully when a slam was more in keeping with his tone. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Physically he was so close, so open to her touch, but the moment she came anywhere near his reasons for being in Tara, or tried to get him to talk about his health or the future, he froze up like the steaks Bo had stacked in the freezer.
She slid off the table and went to him. He was arms folded, leaning back on the benchtop. She knew when she kissed him he’d be stiff lipped, holding back under protest. He loved kissing; he loved to lose himself in her. She was going to win this one for his sake, or sleep in Bo’s room trying.
She tiptoed her fingers up his arms and draped her hands over his shoulders. He unfolded his arms and put his palms on the bench behind him. She rose up, flicked her tongue over his closed lips.
“I know you want to kiss me. How about a trade?”
“I’ve kissed you enough today.”
Oh. She stepped away. He was properly cranky with her. She went back to the table, took up her former position and swung her legs. “Pity, it was going to work like this. I get one question answered—I grant one sexual favour.”
“If that’s the naked twister version of truth or dare, I’ll pass.”
She smiled. Will was about to be defrosted. She hitched his shirt up and parted her knees. His eyes snapped into place.
“Bingo.”
His lids came down. “I’m not playing, Darcy.” He was vaguely annoyed with himself as well now. She probably shouldn’t have used his word back at him. She didn’t want to sleep in Bo’s bed, but if Will wouldn’t play she needed another tactic. She went with push and shove. “Then why are you here?”
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