The Last Goodbye

by Sarah Mayberry

  She looked so adorable that he couldn’t resist dropping one last kiss onto her nose. Then he stepped away and got a good grip on the tire.

  “Hold on.”

  He walked backward, pulling Ally with him, his arm and leg muscles straining as he took more and more of her weight. Then he let go and shoved with all his might. She let out a whoop of delight as she swung out over the river.

  “Get ready to jump!”

  Ally shifted on the swing, but when the critical point came, she hesitated. “What if I fall on my face?”

  “Then you fall on your face. It’s part of the fun.”

  The tire reached its farthest point and started to swing toward shore.

  “Now! Go now!” Tyler called.

  But again she didn’t let go. And she was coming in, fast.

  Tyler glanced over his shoulder. The tree trunk was directly in her path. He’d pushed Ally with so much momentum there was a good chance she’d hit it before the tire ran out of steam.

  Bracing himself, he stepped into the path of the tire.

  “Tyler. Get out of the way!” Ally called as she swooped toward him.

  “It’s me or the tree, babe.”

  The swing twisted as it approached and she hit him back-first with a hard slap of skin on skin.

  “I’ve got you,” he said.

  His arms wrapped around her body but the tire’s momentum pushed him off his feet and knocked the air from his lungs. He waited for the impact of the tree trunk, but the swing petered out inches shy of making contact then began a more leisurely sway toward the river. He planted his feet firmly and brought the tire to a jerking halt. Ally twisted frantically to look at him.

  “Tyler. Are you all right? My God. You haven’t bro ken anything, have you?”

  She was so comically concerned he couldn’t help but laugh. “I’m fine. But you need some serious coaching on tire swinging.”

  She scrunched her face in self-disgust. “I know. I’m a big chicken. Once I got out there, I kind of froze.”

  “Let me show you how it’s done.”

  He helped her slide off, then he pulled the tire toward the tree as far as he could. He leaped onto the tire and pushed off with one smooth motion, swinging out over the river with one foot braced in the center of the tire, the other on the top. At the farthest point of the arc, he let go and performed a perfect water bomb into the middle of the river. Cold water splashed over him, rushing up his nose and covering his head.

  “That was so cool. I want to learn how to do that,” Ally shouted from the bank when he broke the surface.

  He pushed his hair off his forehead and wiped the water off his face with his hands. “I’m sure we can work something out.”

  He waded toward shore, deliberately choosing to exit where the bank was steepest. He pretended to struggle, watching Ally surreptitiously. As he’d anticipated, she immediately rushed forward to offer him her hand.

  “Here,” she said, bracing her legs to take his weight as she leaned toward him.

  He wrapped his hand around her forearm, then he looked straight into her eyes, not even trying to hide his grin. “Too easy, Ally.”

  Her eyes widened with shocked understanding as he jerked her into the water. She splashed in up to her thighs, her body tensing as she registered the temperature of the water.

  “Oh! It’s cold!” she gasped as the water splashed her torso. “You sneak, let me go.”

  “Come for a swim first,” he said, pulling her deeper into the water.

  “It’s too cold.”

  The water was up to her breasts now.

  “No, it isn’t. Not once you get used to it.” He tugged her arm one last time, pulling her close and wrapping both arms around her. Her skin was warm against his in the cool water, her nipples pebbled and hard against his chest.

  “How old are you? Fifteen?” she asked, but she was smiling and she closed her eyes and relaxed into his body when he kissed her.

  He slid his hands to her backside, cupping her round little derriere and lifting her against him. She sucked on his tongue and pressed closer, her arms wrapped tightly around his neck.

  After a few torturous moments, he broke their kiss. His heart was thundering in his ears and he was painfully hard. Any desire he’d had to swim had been well and truly superseded by another, more urgent need.

  “Put your legs around my hips.”

  She complied readily and he got a good grip on her backside before he started walking toward the bank.

  “Tyler! You’ll give yourself a hernia. Put me down, I’m too heavy.”

  “You’re small enough to fit in my pocket. Lighter than thistledown.”

  All the same, he was straining a little by the time he reached the towels.

  “Still lighter than thistledown, am I?”

  “Got you where I wanted you, didn’t I?”

  He tumbled her onto the towels and rolled on top of her. Her nipples were still hard from the cold water and he tugged her bikini top to one side as he lowered his head toward her. She caught his ears before he could pull her nipple into his mouth.

  “Tyler. Anybody could see us.” She sounded like a scandalized Sunday-school teacher.

  “But they won’t. We’d hear a car coming long before it got here.”

  He slipped free of her grasp, lowering his head and circling her nipple with his tongue before pulling it into his mouth.

  She gripped his shoulders. “Tyler.” It was a halfhearted protest.

  “Think of it as the ultimate form of getting back to nature.”

  While she was pondering that, he tugged her bikini top off and switched his attention to her other breast.

  It wasn’t long before Ally was fumbling at the wet waistband of his jeans, trying to gain access to his erection. The wet denim fought him every step of the way as he tugged it over his hips. When he hooked a finger into the waistband of Ally’s bikini bottoms, she bit her lip and glanced up the slope toward the trail.

  “Trust me. This is more private than your backyard,” he said.

  She lifted her hips and he pulled her bikini bottoms down. He surveyed her, all pink and cream in the dappled light, her dark curls beckoning enticingly.

  “You look good enough to eat. Strawberries and cream.”

  She gave a muffled protest as he started to kiss his way down her belly. He pushed her legs wide with a gentle hand, caressing her inner thigh soothingly.

  “Relax. Count to ten,” he said with a half-smile. “It’ll be over before you know it.”

  She remained tense until he lowered his head and took the first long, slow taste of her. Quickly she turned to liquid in his hands, moaning and quivering and digging her fingers into his hair and shoulders until he slid up her body again and plunged deep inside her.

  Her head dropped back and she closed her eyes as he started to move, her breath coming in choppy little pants. He caressed her breasts and her hips and the smooth skin of her belly, loving how soft and warm and womanly she was. Loving the feel of her around him, beneath him.

  She came silently, her breath catching in her throat, her hands clutching at his backside. He let himself go, too, riding her shudders to his own completion, looking into her eyes as she dazedly came back to earth.

  He rolled away afterward, breathing heavily. Ally lay languid and supine beside him for a full twenty seconds before she remembered where she was and scrambled to pull one of the towels over both of them.

  “You realize we broke about ten different decency laws, don’t you?”

  “I counted eleven. But you might be right.”

  “You’re a bad influence, Tyler Adamson.”

  “That’s what my mother used to say.”

  She fell silent for a moment, then propped her chin on her hand. “You never talk about your mother,” she said.

  He could hear the unspoken questions in her voice. “Neither do you.”

  He had some questions, too.

  “That’s differen
t.”

  “Is it?”

  “If you don’t want to talk about her, it’s okay.”

  “I’m fine talking about my mother, but there’s not much to tell, to be honest. She wasn’t a very happy woman. Her and Dad used to fight a lot, especially when we were younger. She was stuck at home with two little kids all day, and he’d stay at the pub after work. I think she resented the isolation. Resented us.”

  He waved a fly away with his hand.

  “She never did anything to stop him hitting you?”

  “Never. She used to tell us it was our fault, that if we were good boys Dad would never have to lay a finger on us.”

  “Did he ever hit her?”

  He shook his head. “They’d just go at each other verbally. One of the clearest memories of my childhood is my mother crying at the kitchen table. It was practically a nightly event.”

  Ally pressed a kiss to his shoulder, resting her cheek against him for a long moment in wordless sympathy.

  “What about your mom?”

  She stared at him as though she didn’t know where to begin.

  “You told me the other day she was an artist,” he prompted.

  “That’s right.”

  “What sort? Painter, sculptor?”

  “Painter. She worked mostly with acrylics. I guess you’d say her style was post-modernist.”

  “Would I know any of her work?”

  “Probably not. She had a bit of success in the early seventies, but mostly she relied on friends or boyfriends to give her somewhere to live and help her get by.”

  “Pretty precarious way to live.” Especially with a child in tow.

  “Yes, but she was very charming and she never outstayed her welcome. She was always flitting around. New York, Paris, London, Sydney, Spain. She even lived in Rio for a while. She was the ultimate free spirit, really, and I think it’s safe to say I was the unplanned mistake of her life.”

  She gave him a dry look.

  “My aunt told me once that my mother was devastated when she found out she was pregnant, especially since it was far too late to do anything about it. Very typical of my mother, not even noticing she was pregnant until it was staring her in the face.”

  “What about your father?”

  “Never knew him. Don’t even know his name.” She shrugged as though it made no difference to her.

  She sat up and reached for her bikini bottoms, shuddering as she pulled them up her legs. “Is there anything worse than putting on a wet swimsuit?”

  Tyler could think of worse things. Like being told you were a mistake, for instance, and never knowing your own father.

  “I take it your mom stopped traveling when she had you?”

  “She tried. But she couldn’t handle it. She hated being tied down, hated ‘sublurbia,’ as she called it. So she left me with my grandmother when I was about six months old.”

  She grabbed for her bikini top and put it on.

  “I don’t remember Gran very much, although I always feel as though I should. She died when I was five.”

  “What happened then?”

  “My mother came back for me and I started traveling with her.”

  Ally sank to the ground beside him, lying on her belly while she plucked at the grass.

  “So you were an international jetsetter at five?”

  “For a while. I didn’t like it very much. I used to freak out at all the different places we stayed in. Sent my mother crazy.” She laughed, shaking her head.

  “There was this one place in New York, a big old apartment in SoHo or somewhere. It took up a whole floor, but it was completely empty, utterly desolate, except for the bedroom where we stayed. I used to have nightmares about all those dark, empty rooms and wake up screaming. Then there was the place in Provence, with the scary outdoor toilet. More nightmares. And so on. Finally my mother talked her sister into looking after me.”

  She plucked a couple of bluebells from amongst the grass and started braiding their stems together.

  “How old were you then?”

  She screwed up her face, thinking. “I don’t know. Six? Maybe seven. I don’t remember exactly, but I hated being left behind. With a passion. Which probably explains why Aunt Phyllis was more than happy to hand me back to my mother when I was nine. I don’t think I was a very grateful niece.”

  She shot him an amused look, inviting him to laugh at the misbehavior of her juvenile self.

  “Doesn’t sound as though anyone cut you much slack,” Tyler said carefully.

  Maybe he was misinterpreting Ally’s words, putting a too-dark slant on them, but the childhood she was describing sounded far from ideal, being shunted from pillar to post, palmed off from mother to grandmother to aunt.

  “Well, my mother was too self-interested to cut any one but herself any slack. And Aunt Phyllis did her best with what she had. Which wasn’t a lot, because I’m pretty sure my mother didn’t send child support payments from whichever villa or loft or atelier she was crashing in.”

  She smoothed her thumb back and forth over the braid she’d made.

  “It was better the second time around, though. I made friends with the houses we stayed in the moment we arrived, so the nightmares weren’t a problem anymore.”

  “How do you make friends with a house?”

  “It’s very simple. You do a tour, and you find the door that groans and the window that rattles and the stair that creaks. Then, on the first night, when you’re lying in bed and the house starts making its nightly settling noises, you tell yourself ‘that’s the window in the second bedroom’ or ‘that’s the third stair from the bottom’ or whatever. Works a treat. Comes in handy when you’re house-sitting, too. I can get the lowdown on a new place in half an hour these days, no problems.”

  Her tone was light, her expression untroubled, but Tyler felt a stab of empathy for a little girl who’d been so afraid of being left behind again that she’d forced herself to stare down her fear in order to overcome it.

  “How did your mother die?”

  Ally’s expression became sad. “She was staying at a friend’s place in Spain. They were renovating, and some of the electrical work wasn’t up to standard. There was a fire. The coroner said she’d been drinking, which was probably why she didn’t make it out.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Ten years this June. I was backpacking in America when I got the news.”

  She was quiet for a moment, then she threw the bluebell braid into the long grass and pushed herself to her feet.

  “Enough sad stories. Come on, rudey-nudey man, you promised you were going to teach me to jump off the tire swing properly.”

  She tossed him his cutoff jeans, then started across the grass toward the tire swing.

  He stared after her, still processing everything she’d told him, trying to reconcile what he’d learned with what he already knew of her. He thought about the stash of home decorating magazines she had hidden under her bed and the advice column she wrote and her inexhaustible supply of pajamas. Then he remembered the way she’d warned him that first night he’d kissed her. I’m a girl who leaves, she’d said.

  “Are you coming or not?” she called, squinting her eyes against the sun.

  Tyler rose and wrapped one of the towels around his waist.

  “Try and stop me,” he said.

  Then he went to teach Ally how to jump.

  THE NEXT TWO WEEKS SLIPPED through Ally’s fingers like water. Apart from three occasions when Tyler had to return to town to take care of business matters, he slept in her bed by night and worked in her study by day, occasionally disappearing into Bob’s shed to work on his table. Between the two of them they cared for his father, preparing his meals and cleaning the house. Bob held on to his sullen defensiveness for longer than she would have thought possible, but eventually they all settled into a routine of sorts and she found herself exploring a new kind of happiness and contentment with Tyler by her side.


  He was a wonderful lover, selfless and sensual and insatiable. He was also a wonderful conversationalist—not chatty, by any means, because he would never be a garrulous man, but when he chose to say something, it was always smart and witty and to the point. He made her laugh a lot, and he made her think. Most of all, he made her feel complete, in a way she had never experienced before.

  Quite simply, she felt as though she’d come home. Which was crazy since Tyler was only in Woodend for as long as his father needed him and she had no idea where she was going once Wendy reclaimed her home. Her life was as up in the air and temporary as it had ever been. And yet it had never felt more solid, more grounded.

  Sitting in the living room on a sunny afternoon, Ally doodled on her notepad as she allowed herself to imagine what might happen next. She’d stuck staunchly to her live for the moment rule most of the time over the past weeks, but with Wendy due home soon she figured it would be smart to put some thought into her immediate future.

  Normally she would have another house-sitting job lined up by now, but she hadn’t so much as taken a second look at the two prospects she’d bookmarked at the beginning of the month. It felt wrong to think of moving on when Tyler still needed her.

  She made a rude noise at her self-deception. She was so pitiful, so terrified of what was happening between them that she couldn’t even admit it to herself.

  Grow a set, Bishop.

  She took a deep breath. Then she finally acknowledged the truth to herself: she’d fallen in love with Tyler. And she suspected—no, she knew, in her gut and in her heart—that he loved her, too. It had been the elephant in the room for the past week, the topic they danced around every time they lay in each other’s arms or caught each other’s hands when they walked down the street or simply made eye contact unexpectedly.

  But she had a feeling the elephant’s days were numbered. She sensed there was a conversation on the horizon—and she had no idea how she was going to handle it when it finally arrived, what she was going to say if Tyler said the things she thought he was going to say and asked the things she thought he would.

  Panic tightened her chest as her mind ran over the options open to her—stay or go. She wasn’t sure which terrified her more.