Season of Shadow and Light

by Jenn J. McLeod

  ‘And it needs to satisfy you every time.’

  ‘Every time.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Aiden got it. He got her, and sitting here with him in the moonlight was a celebration of every sense and every nerve ending in her body.

  Paige peered out into the dark, the sudden flicker of a light from the cottage down the hill giving her a jolt of reality, reminding her of Rory’s and Aiden’s serious faces as they’d set off up the path this afternoon. ‘I was wondering, Aiden . . .’

  ‘About?’

  ‘About that other long story of yours. You and Rory. Sharni mentioned your SES shenanigans. I gather Rory was that partner in crime.’

  Aiden didn’t speak straightaway. She guessed the statement hardly warranted an answer; it wasn’t really a question. Saying nothing was answer enough.

  ‘It’s all history,’ he said eventually, ‘even though that word history tends to imply something significant in the past.’

  ‘It wasn’t significant?’ Paige wondered if he’d notice the heavy dose of optimism in her tone.

  ‘That would depend entirely on who’s telling the story. Let’s say I was somewhat less significant to Rory than she was to me.’

  ‘I see.’ The euphoric bubble burst. There was a candle burning even now. Is that why he’d looked so serious with her today?

  ‘She was always hard work, carrying a constant chip on her shoulder and blaming her mother because she ran off.’

  ‘Your mum ran off and you turned out okay.’

  ‘That would be a matter of opinion,’ he snorted. ‘Our mums is what made us close in the first place. Only with Rory, for whatever reason, when her mum ran off she only took one daughter. Rory never got over that. I remember the day she found out from her dad.’

  ‘How awful. The woman ran off for no reason?’

  ‘Oh, there was a reason. That’s a whole other bit of town scuttlebutt that I won’t repeat. One of those small town stories that starts out one thing and ends up with a-million-and-one versions, each one more titillating than the other. Only one story was the truth and only Tim knew—her dad. He wasn’t saying. Why her mother ran off didn’t matter to Rory. What ate at her was not being chosen.’

  ‘As a mother I find choosing one child over another a difficult concept to accept.’

  ‘Most people do.’

  ‘I still grieve the loss of my baby, the chance to give Mati a brother or sister to grow up with, share things with, to fight over clothes, makeup, boyfriends . . .’ Paige laughed a little. ‘All the things I missed as an only child.’

  ‘You’ve heard how the grass is always greener,’ Aiden said. ‘Take it from one who has a sibling. The reality comes nowhere near the fantasy.’

  ‘And does Rory know where her sister and mother are?’

  ‘I heard they’d died. To be honest, the whole affair left Rory’s dad pretty uncommunicative. Any time anyone brought the subject up it tipped him over the edge a little more. Rory’s behaviour didn’t help. Her old man was a bit fanatical and she’d deliberately antagonise him by getting a reputation around town. While Rory was getting blind drunk on her eighteenth birthday, he was praying for her. That cottage on the property? With the stained glass? Her dad built it.’

  ‘A little chapel?’

  ‘I never went in there when we were kids. Rory used to tell me he spent hours sitting inside praying instead of tending the property. From what Banjo tells me, the entire place slowly went to pot. Took a decade or so, but what was a real showpiece around town started losing business. Of course, Rory’s reaction to everything was to rebel. There wasn’t a boundary she didn’t test. When her dad tried to hold on too tight, she ran—without a word to anyone. We’d talked about getting out of town together one day, but I never thought she’d . . .’ Aiden went somewhere in his mind and it suddenly dawned on Paige that the story was longer still, and inside him a small flame burned.

  ‘We were going to travel together. I had no dreams or aspirations back then, not really, not like Rory. I knew I wanted to cook from a young age. I started when I was about twelve working for shearer gangs that came through this way, back when sheep stations dotted the country. I loved the wide open spaces.’ Aiden snorted his laugh. ‘Not Rory. All her life she wanted to get away and make a splash. The girl had something to prove. I used to ask her who she was trying to impress.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘First she’d say something along the lines of “Not you, dickhead”.’ He smiled. ‘Then she’d say she didn’t know and that her crappy life would make sense to her one day.’

  ‘She’s quite pretty.’

  ‘She reminds me of you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Sure. You’re both tall, the shape of your eyes, the way you laugh, your obsession with peanut butter. She had some really bad peanut butter jokes. Did you hear the joke about the peanut butter?’

  ‘I’m not telling you,’ Paige responded, ‘you might spread it.’ They laughed. ‘My mum, Nancy, loved jokes.’

  As the laughter petered out Aiden stared straight ahead. ‘Rory was my first kiss and my first broken heart. About nine-point-nine on the Richter scale when she told me one night I was suffocating her. Banjo had called me into the pub for a shift after their dishy did a no-show; the pub was a lot busier in those days. A lot more people lived in this town twenty-odd years ago. After shift, I caught Rory getting hot and heavy with some cow jockey. Sprung them well and truly in the back bar sucking lips. She dumped me on the spot. Said it was my fault. A week later we were back on after he dumped her. That’s how things were with Rory. She bounced between being over-the-top needy and not needing anyone.’ His storytelling seemed like a synopsis rather than the full story. ‘One day she disappeared. Packed a bag of not much at all and walked away. That was the day I figured I could end up the same way as my dad; pining for a woman always wanting more than I had to offer.’

  ‘And after Rory?’ Paige dared.

  ‘There were aftershocks over the years. A couple of Richter scale five’s before the big one, which remains raw.’ Aiden tongued the dregs of his limoncello.

  ‘How bad?’ Paige asked.

  ‘Totally off the scale. How about you? Please make me feel less of a whinger by having a hard-luck story of your own.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she smiled. ‘My life sounds a bit boring after that. Robert was my first serious boyfriend.’

  ‘You married your first?’

  ‘Hey!’ Paige nudged his shoulder playfully. ‘No need to say it like that. I said first serious boyfriend. I still managed to . . . You know?’ She stopped, laughed, wiped the glass of limoncello with her finger and licked it. ‘Maybe we should change the subject.’

  They started by discussing the stars. Aiden gazed at the Southern Cross constellation and said something about the Pointers helping to calculate true south, before silence fell over them both.

  Paige was deciding which line from Nancy’s arsenal of favourite conversation starters to use when . . .

  ‘I thought Rene was the one,’ Aiden started without warning, his voice soft, sorrowful. ‘The girl of my dreams and I were living an enviable existence: hobnobbing with the cool people, sitting centre stage in the best city in the world, planning to set up a trendy restaurant from scratch. I was hooked, totally high on life without any help from booze or drugs.’

  ‘Rene was the big one you mentioned?’

  ‘Yeah. We’d met three years earlier. She was returning to work after having Jess. What we had was intense and we clicked straightaway. Our dreaming started not long after and it seemed from the get-go we were the perfect match. Rene was good at everything I wasn’t, especially the admin stuff. Plus, she was better with people, always up-selling. There was this face she’d put on when she was converting a “Maybe we won’t have dessert” to “We’ll have two soufflés, thanks.”’ Like a mask, it was always the same face. I used to tell her she could sell cheese to Bega with that look. Then, when the plac
e we were both working at went on the market, our dream was suddenly that much closer to becoming a reality.’

  ‘You put in an offer to buy the business?’

  Aiden shook his head. ‘Rene suggested we remove ourselves from the negotiations. I agreed. The owner knew how much we loved the place and he could’ve inflated the price. As it was we’d need another fifty grand on top of my savings to meet the asking price. I’d already re-mortgaged my apartment.’

  ‘So you had a broker do the deal for you.’

  He gave a little snort. ‘That’s where the moron makes an appearance—and I mean me. Rene took the lead. Of course, it made sense. I was working full-time, she was part-time and looking after Jessica. I let her take care of everything so the boss didn’t get wind of what we were up to. Our broker had rung one day to say he’d heard another buyer was making a bid and suggested we combine monies or do whatever we could to come up with the required cash in a hurry. Rene had been able to transfer enough into his account so he could draw down the deposit the minute they accepted our offer.’

  ‘You knew this broker well, then?’

  ‘Sure did. He was a long-time regular of the restaurant where we both worked and we’d struck up a good friendship over a couple of years. He was a frequent diner who spent a lot of dough on clients and with Rene being front-of-house she got to talk to him a lot. He was the one who came up with the name Renegade for the plate-sharing concept we were planning.’ Aiden pointed to the tattoo. ‘I remember thinking at the time that the suggestion focused on Rene’s name more than mine. What swayed me was the grungy, earthy sound of the word. I wanted that raw, sort of rebellious approach to food and all the rules that—’ The passion in his voice dulled along with the light in his eyes. ‘Little did I realise at the time how absolutely appropriate the name was and how much of a dickhead I was being.’

  ‘This guy ripped you off?’

  ‘He didn’t work alone. They conspired behind my back. I should’ve got a new tattoo—M-U-G—right about here.’ He swiped a finger from one side of his forehead to the other. ‘At first I thought it was all about the money. Then she told me they’d had a fling a few years back and it never really ended. She was . . . confused. So, when he reappeared on the scene twelve months earlier it just happened.’ Aiden’s shoulders dropped, as though the string that had been holding his body taut snapped. ‘How does that even make sense?’ He sighed, ran a hand over his head, down the side of his face and scratched the stubble on his chin. ‘I mean, how does a bloke living with a woman not know when she’s cheating?’

  Paige wanted to tell him then about Robert. She didn’t.

  ‘Neither of them acted like they’d been together before. She said they’d picked up again and, in case I wasn’t bleeding enough, she told me she hadn’t loved me for some time.’

  ‘Oh, Aiden.’

  ‘Yeah, well, the little girl I’d fallen in love with . . . Rene’s little Jess.’ His face snapped into a smile, only briefly. ‘Yep, you guessed it. His from that earlier fling. The bastard had my money, my fiancée, my kid; at least Jess always felt like mine.’

  ‘What happened to Rene?’

  ‘Gone. He left the country for a while, probably strategic. I’ve heard they’re together again. I was on the phone to a mate that first morning you and Mati came down for breakfast. I’d just found out her and him were shacked up playing happy families in a riverside apartment in Perth. I suspect if I Googled Renegade Restaurant I’d find a funky little tapas place somewhere in Perth.’

  ‘You must be so hurt.’

  ‘Hurt?’ he scoffed. ‘Sometimes I wonder how it’s possible to get through the day without being angry. So, on that Richter scale I was talking about . . . The shock of finding out was—’

  ‘Seismic?’

  ‘My word exactly!’

  ‘What did you do?’

  Aiden shrugged. ‘What anyone does after surviving the big one. Try to move forward. Some stick it out, pick up the pieces, rebuild on the exact spot and hope it never happens again. Some move as far away as possible, vowing to never put themselves in the same destructive situation.’

  ‘You came here to start over?’

  ‘Not sure starting over is the right term. Biding my time, maybe. I was one of those who vowed to never expose themselves to the thing that destroyed them. Shocked all trust from me. Losing one person is hard enough. Surviving the loss of Jess at the same time . . .’ He clasped his head in both hands, body hunched over his knees.

  ‘Oh, Aiden, I don’t know what to say.’ Paige draped an arm over his back, her fingers manipulating the muscles at the base of his neck. He took a deep breath in, the same breath shuddering on the way out. But the tension in his shoulders and neck seemed to ease under her fingers.

  ‘I learned it takes a special strength to pull yourself out of the rubble to rebuild,’ he was saying. ‘You hear people tell real-life disaster stories, about hearing the voices of angels while buried under the debris; the voices stopped them giving up. I’d given up the idea of letting myself fall in love. I’d lost all trust and wasn’t brave enough. I truly doubted I’d ever find that connection with another woman until . . .’

  Paige’s fingers froze at that point between his shoulder blades, and as Aiden turned towards her there was no sound, just a sharp gasp of air forced into her lungs, exaggerating the banging in her chest.

  ‘Paige, what I’m trying to say is . . . You’re that angelic voice in my head. Something about you is making me feel brave again. Making me trust again.’

  Without warning he clasped Paige’s face between his hands to draw her close. She met them with her own hands, curling her fingers around them, intending to pull them away, to end this . . . this whatever it was before things got any more out of control. Instead of peeling the determined hands away, Paige held them.

  Touch was the only sensation she fully enjoyed, the one thing she craved, as if it would somehow compensate for her other sensory deficits. The flutter of attraction she’d used as a source of fantasy in bed each night this past week was suddenly a reality and so, so close. Without thought to the consequences, she pulled Aiden into her, mouths locking with a mutual intensity that signalled it had been a long time for him too.

  Unaware what it was that clicked the common sense switch in her brain, Paige sprung back to arm’s length, breath rapid and uneven.

  ‘Aiden. We can’t. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Why are you sorry? I’m not. And exactly why can’t we?’ His face beamed. ‘If you’re under age, you’d better tell me.’

  ‘This is no laughing matter. I think I might have encouraged that and it was wrong.’

  ‘Felt so right to me I wouldn’t mind doing it again.’ His grin had that smattering of self-congratulatory arrogance as he moved to pull her back into him. ‘I’m feeling so bloody brave right now. You’re the right thing to happen to me at the right time. I’m not saying anything will stop me wondering where Jess is or how beautiful she’ll be at twenty-one or in her wedding dress, and I feel sorry for any father when a marriage ends but—’ He stopped, probably due to the expression Paige guessed she wore. Her body stiffened, arms dead weights at her sides. ‘There I go again. Need to engage my brain. I take it Mati’s father is still involved in her life? Do you need to talk to him first? Is that what you meant by “we can’t”? I understand. In fact, I respect you for that. He’s a lucky guy—or a stupid one for letting you go.’ He winked, relaxing his back against the veranda post to take up her hands in his.

  Paige swallowed hard. She hadn’t meant to lie. If he’d asked her outright she would have said straight up, ‘I’m married’. Now, instead of being cheated on, Paige was the cheater, cheating on her husband and, although it had been unintentional, she was deceiving a man who’d just confessed to his distrust of women.

  ‘Aiden, Robert is . . . He’s fully involved.’

  ‘Shared custody. As it should be.’ Aiden nodded, knowingly. ‘I should have guessed you woul
dn’t be the type to do the wrong thing by a bloke.’

  ‘Not shared, Aiden. I mean Robert is . . . He’s still on the scene.’

  ‘On the scene is good for Matilda. A child needs both parents. Jess wasn’t mine, but when she wasn’t in my life any more—’

  ‘Aiden, for God’s sake! I’m married,’ she sprayed the words as if they were poison in her mouth. ‘Robert and I—’

  ‘You’re married, but separated, right?’

  Paige groaned and shook her head. How many ways would she need to say this? Was the guy an idiot?

  No, Paige was the idiot. Paige had let this happen. Paige and her over-active imagination, dreaming of another life, driving all the way out here to pretend she had one and using Aiden as late-night fantasy fodder.

  Aiden’s stare was boring through her, his voice low, wary, his hand tightening in anticipation on her arm. ‘Paige? Married, but separated—right?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Not exactly what? Separated? But I thought . . . I thought you—’ Aiden sprang up from his position next to Paige and she felt the cool air on her hands where she’d enjoyed his warmth. ‘Call me thick, but I’m struggling a little here. If you’re married, what does that make me? An affair?’

  ‘Please, hear me out.’

  ‘And where’s your wedding ring? They work really well for us stupid blokes.’

  ‘I haven’t been able to . . . My fingers . . . They’re—’

  ‘What exactly does your unsuspecting husband think you’re doing out here with his little girl?’

  ‘You’re overreacting.’

  ‘Do not tell me I’m overreacting. I thought I’d seen you somewhere before. I’ve seen you, all right. Too many bloody times. You’re the woman who betrays her husband’s trust, breaks his heart and steals the little girl he loves and wants to protect more than anything.’

  ‘No, it’s not like that.’ Paige shielded her eyes to the harshness of the veranda lights exploding into life and Alice in the doorway wrapping a dressing gown around her body.

  ‘Is everything all right out here?’