Walking Shadows

by Narrelle M. Harris

  Another part of my brain told the first bit to shut the hell up, this was fun, and fun was good. What had all the caution ever got me except awful boyfriends and Daniel, the most devastating missed opportunity of my life?

  Damnit brain, it is high time to get in some frolicking. I simply had to remember to not be intense, or distracted, or brusque, or cryptic. Though Evan struck me as a man who didn't mind a bit of cryptic. I so wanted to kiss him. The idea made me want to run away or alternatively to launch myself across the table at him. The vivid mental image of that held me in my seat. Way to impress the fellers, Wilson.

  I felt like those little kids on the beach, all exhilarated glee-fear. Ready to brave the sea anyway. There was always time to run ashore if it got too scary.

  An expectant pause brought me out of my thoughts and I found Evan regarding me with a mixed air of humour and bemusement. And then I twigged that we were already holding hands.

  "Thinking of your friend again?" he asked.

  "Not this time." I smiled and hoped my blush wasn't too obvious.

  "You seem very intense."

  "I'm not normally like this," I blurted, not entirely clear myself what I meant. Especially since, actually, I am.

  "You said you'd been having a weird weekend," he said conversationally, encouraging confidences.

  "Yeah." I couldn't reasonably expand on that and expect him to keep sitting with me, "It'll pass." I grinned. "Things are improving steadily."

  Another of those crinkle-eyed smiles of his and I wondered what he saw when he looked at me. Intense brown eyes; high cheekbones; flyaway hair; and what? An awkward, pear-shaped girl with attention deficit issues?

  "I want to know more about you." The fervour of his declaration took me by surprise.

  "There's not much to know, really."

  "That's not true."

  "No," I admitted, "it's not. But we only met an hour ago and I don't want to scare you off." Good heavens, the things that were coming out of my mouth.

  Fortunately, they didn't seem to bother him. "I'm not easily frightened, and I find you," he cocked his head a fraction to one side, considering, "fascinating."

  "Oh." I couldn't take my eyes off his. "I've always wanted to be fascinating. I thought I'd have to settle for peculiar."

  Evan lifted my hand and gave it a quick, gentle squeeze. "Let's go for a walk." He folded some notes and coins under the bill that had been left at the table and rose. Trying not to look too keen, though possibly it was way too late for that, I joined him on the footpath.

  The breeze was picking up and the clouds that had been out at sea were heading landward. Ignoring the signs of oncoming weather, we walked along the pedestrian path towards the ferry terminal. Maybe if the Spirit of Tasmania was berthed when we got there, I could convince him to run away with me to Tassie, away from the horrors of my everyday life. Not forever. For a few days, maybe. Or weeks. A month or two at most.

  "So," he said, looking out to sea, "How did you get to know about, you know." Ah. The V-word.

  Flashes of the past year made my muscles tense. "Let's not," I said. "Today I want this," I gestured around me, at the scenery and sunshine, the normality of it all, "Just this."

  A tension seemed to leave him, too. "Yes. That would be good."

  I found myself telling him about Kate and her weekend away with Anthony, and how happy I was that she was happy. I told him that I thought Nanna would have liked Anthony.

  When I told Evan about Belinda and Paul, I studied his reaction. Evan didn't give me any of the usual dramarama I was used to from new friends who finally got the story, but at the end of it he lifted my hand to kiss my knuckles gently, a sweet gesture of understanding.

  "How about you?" I asked.

  "I have a sister, a historian in fact. She lives in Tokyo usually. She's in Boston caring for my father at present. He's not been well this year. It's nothing drastic, but he's getting on. He's not as agile as he once was, and it is making him curmudgeonly. My brother died last year." The faintest hesitation hovered around that statement and I, in my turn, squeezed his hand to let him know I empathised.

  "I have a son, too." This he dropped on me carefully and I studiously did not react while he continued. "Nathan's mother died some 10 years ago." His tone expressed more resignation than sorrow. "He's in senior high in Boston. My father is helping him study."

  "In between being curmudgeonly?"

  Evan laughed. "Oh, during, I've no doubt. They get on well. Nathan's a bright boy, and he refuses to let the old man's temper dampen his spirit. Quite the opposite, in fact. My father appears to enjoy that about him."

  "It's nice they get on."

  "Yes. I suppose it makes up for me." A suppressed sigh, then. "My father and I respect each other, but I suspect we don't like each other very much."

  "I got on better with my Nanna than with Mum. That's how life is sometimes."

  "Indeed."

  Cue the rain, one of those sudden summer squalls that Melbourne provides to keep things interesting. Evan led us off the footpath to hide under the insufficient protection of a palm tree. Those Victorian-era Melburnians were charmingly optimistic in thinking these would give their southerly colony a more tropical look. The temperature dropped by a degree or two, but the atmosphere remained muggy.

  "Ah screw it," I decided out loud, pulling away to stand in the rain. I grinned at Evan.

  "You'll get wet," Evan cautioned, though I could hear the humour in it.

  "So will you, in a minute. That tree's worse than no use at all." To prove my point, a steady patter of water, having gathered on the broad leaves above, dribbled onto his shoulder.

  "Really, Lissa, you'll get soaked to the skin."

  "So?" I spread my arms wide to feel the drops spatter against my arms and hands, "I won't shrink."

  "No, but your clothes might."

  "It's lucky I wear 'em loose then." Water was gathering in chilly rivulets in my hairline, dripping around my ears and over my nose. My hopeless hair was sticking to my face. "Why don't you come out here with me?"

  He regarded me warily. "And stand in the rain?"

  "Yes!"

  Evan hesitated.

  "Don't you ever feel like breaking out of what everyone else expects of you?" I challenged.

  "Oh, Lissa. Every single day."

  I succumbed to the urge to kiss him, reaching up to take his face in my hands, lacing my fingers behind his sticking-out ears. A hearty, brief pash and I let him go, afraid I'd been too audacious, but he was grinning like a perfectly gorgeous idiot. As we stood there, the rain eased, stopped. Passed.

  "There's a lot of crap in life," I said. "You've got to celebrate the good stuff when it's there, no matter how small, or it's all just mourning."

  "I see." He did that thing again, cocking his head slightly to watch me. Then he bent to press his lips to mine. He began to draw away. I followed him, and he leaned back into me, and the next thing we were wrapped up on the footpath, arms around each other, kissing like they do in the movies.

  Damn, but he was a good kisser.

  A passer-by had to dodge around us, and that made us stop for breath.

  "You're all wet," he observed. "I told you that would happen."

  In response, I shivered slightly, the dropping temperature conspiring with the sea breeze to give me goosebumps.

  Evan drew me out of the way of an oncoming damp and grumpy cyclist, "I'm staying at a hostel around here. If you want to come back. To dry off." His tone was a combination of hesitancy and invitation.

  "Sure." My heart was thudding. "That'd be good."

  As it turned out, by the time we walked to the big red hostel on Carlisle Street, I was at least half dry again, but the temperature had fallen five degrees or so, as it sometimes does in Melbourne. The damp cotton pressed to my skin was starting to chafe.

  Giant posters were plastered along one wall of the hostel's rec-room, promoting the latest Safe Sex campaign aimed at tourists and those
who sleep with them. They were not the most subtle things in the universe; even less so in the current context. Evan and I exchanged sheepish glances as we walked to the lift past the billiard tables and swarms of excitable backpackers. Like we still weren't sure if we were really going to do what we were very obviously planning to do.

  Evan had paid for a private room rather than a dorm, thank the stars. All bets would have been off if we'd ended up in a public forum for enlightened Scandinavians.

  We stuck with the pretence of me drying off - he gave me a clean shirt and turned his back while I stripped off my damp top and pulled on the pale blue cotton button-up shirt instead. On the bedside table I noticed a little bowl of condoms - compliments of the house, apparently, according to the folded sign next to them with more of the Safe Sex for Tourists campaign bumph.

  "I'm sorry about," he gestured at the room. "I'm on a budget and I wasn't expecting to have a guest."

  If he'd stayed in a nice hotel on the off-chance he'd have company I would have been much more bothered. I told him so.

  "You don't think it's, ah, tawdry?"

  "I'm reading this as spontaneous, not tacky."

  "Spontaneous. Yes." Evan pulled me close.

  The kiss was fantastic. The feel of his lean body was too, and his big knobbly-knuckled hands splayed across my back, one sliding up through my hair, holding my mouth hard against his, the other down to my backside, holding our hips together even harder.

  A tiny bit of my brain gave a final what-do-you-think-you're-doing-young-lady? before it gave up with a happy sigh. After not only the last two days, but the whole last year, it was intoxicatingly good to be with someone tall and lovely who liked and wanted me. Someone who knew and understood about vampires and the dark but didn't need to talk about it. We'd met only met two hours ago, yet it felt like we knew each other in all the important ways.

  The clean shirt I was wearing fell beside my discarded top, followed soon by his shirt, my bra, shoes, jeans… everything. The bed was, of course, a terrible hostel bed. I can't say that we noticed anything but each other's taste and touch and voice.

  I'd always been with guys my own age before. Evan was wonderfully different; more assured, less frantic, behaving like the sensuous kisses and lingering touches were a main event all by themselves instead of merely a necessary prelude. He made me feel like I was beautiful, that I was worth all the attention.

  Evan had a newish scar across his ribs, long and narrow and still faintly pink, indicating months rather than years since he'd earned it. I ran my fingers along the ridge, then across his back. It didn't bother me. We all have our scars somewhere, inside or out, and if he didn't mind my body then I certainly had no problems with any part of his long, slender, muscular physique.

  He had an enticing way of gasping and arching his back when I ran my tongue across his nipples and my blunt fingernails against the inside of his thigh. I liked the way his large hands felt sliding along my hip, over my breasts, cupped against the back of my head when he kissed me.

  The time arrived for frantic at last, with my legs wrapped around his hips and his mouth hot against my throat. I wasn't quite with him - almost but not quite. After a moment to catch his breath - made longer when he kept kissing my neck and collarbone and cheeks and forehead - he shifted alongside me, one long leg draped over mine. He slid one hand over my belly and thighs, and then between my legs.

  It wasn't like my ex then, either, half irritated that I'd failed to cross the finish line with him and rubbing so firmly that it felt like he thought if he pushed hard enough a buzzer would go off and he'd win a prize. This was slow and sexy, still main event, still wonderful.

  Afterwards, I might have felt embarrassed about my surprisingly vocal enthusiasm, if Evan hadn't been grinning at me like the smuggest cat who'd caught the tastiest canary on the whole damned planet. I laughed breathlessly instead.

  More kissing. Then he spooned behind me with his arms wrapped around me, hands linked with mine. I snuggled against him with a contented sigh. Maybe it was older men. Maybe it was just Evan.

  I wondered if I should tell him that was the best sex I'd ever had in my life.

  He was stroking my forearm with his thumb, dropping kisses onto the back of my neck. I reached back to run my hand along his thigh.

  "I don't usually do this, you know," I said at last.

  "Nor me," said Evan, "I'm a bit surprised at myself."

  The sound of his voice was lovely and I wanted to keep hearing it. "Do you surprise yourself often?"

  "Sadly, no. Though there was this one time, in Berlin, in 1989 when the Wall came down. I ended up on top of that wall with a friend of mine, chipping at that damned concrete with a penknife. There's no describing the atmosphere. We felt like anything could happen. The world was changing in front of our eyes."

  "Yeah, I saw that on TV," I said. "My dad had been there for a tennis tournament the previous year, so I took his trophy to school next day for show and tell."

  Evan's expression, I soon realised, wasn't mock horror. "How old are you?"

  "Twenty-four." Or I would be soon, so it totally counted.

  "I, I thought you were older."

  "I'm well legal." I prodded him in the ribs. "How about you?"

  "Ah. Forty."

  More than I'd thought, but not by much. "You're legal too then."

  "I suppose I am at that."

  "You're not regretting me already, are you?" The moment the words were out I held my breath, afraid it could be true.

  "Oh, certainly not." Evan shifted down the bed to kiss my arm, then lower still to kiss my bare hip. I smoothed my hand over his short hair, pausing to fondle his earlobe, then continued running my hands over his triceps and across his back.

  He smiled at me and nipped my thigh. So I tickled him. Things got sillier from there. At one point I was fending him off with a pillow until, with a slither of poorly tucked-in sheets, Evan slid right off the bed and onto the floor with a startled 'oof!' I heaved myself across the mattress to look at him in the tangle of bedding on the floor.

  "You okay?"

  "For a man of maturing years who just fell on his bare arse, I'm doing very well."

  "I could kiss it better for you."

  "I bet you could."

  "Here." I wriggled further across until, half off the bed, I leaned down and blew a raspberry on his belly. He grabbed me and wrestled me the rest of the way onto the floor while I laughed even harder.

  I stopped giggling long enough to catch him looking at me like I was made of gold dust. "I like it that you laugh so much," he said.

  "You're not all worried that I'm not taking you seriously enough?"

  "Not at all. I'm delighted that you fail to take me seriously at all. Sex should not be solemn."

  "Good sex is far too much fun to be solemn." I was mostly in his lap now. "Oh, lookee here, we've awoken the sleeping giant!"

  Evan roared with gratified laughter and tumbled me to the floor beneath him for a while before the hard surface sent us back to the more forgiving mattress.

  Afterwards, sated and relaxed, we fell briefly asleep. I felt shielded. I felt happy.

  I never learn.

  CHAPTER 12

  I woke from the mini-sleep feeling remarkably unabashed about this wild fling. Certainly it was too soon to call it anything else. One thing was clear - the old cliché about sex being a life-affirming act was utterly true. Death, undeath, all of it, vanished in the now of gasping breaths and skin on skin.

  But after the now comes another now, and another, and before long we're thinking ahead of the now to next and later and tomorrow.

  Not that it made me sad. The sun, angling warm again through the high window, fell across our bodies and made me feel contented and strong. Next was Kate and Oscar coming home. Then I could deal with the darker stuff - the threat to Gary.

  Evan moved sleepily beside me as I stretched. Gently, I untangled myself from his arms and went into the bathroom tucked
into the corner of his plain room. I chucked the used condoms in the bin there, went to the loo, then showered. If Evan heard me and wanted to join me, that was fine too.

  He didn't. I heard voices while I was drying so I knew he was awake. The exchange was too quiet for me to hear anything except snatches, and then only Evan's distinctive low voice.

  "There's enough for now," he said at one point, and then, "I'm seeing the agent first thing tomorrow, I'll get the keys then." Finally, sounding cranky, he said: "That's none of your business." Both voices became inaudibly low, so I waited until the sounds ceased before cautiously opening the bathroom door.

  "Is it all right to come out now?"

  Evan's troubled expression vanished in a smile. "Relatively speaking. No-one here but us chemists." He had pulled his jeans back on and was standing by the window, shirtless, pale and lovely.

  And of all things, this was when I felt shy.

  "Um. Can you pass me my…?"

  He'd come over all awkward too, scooping up my knickers and bra and handing them to me before making another pass to collect my jeans and shirt. "Here you go." I dressed in the bathroom then came out to look for my shoes.

  "Who was that?"

  "When?"

  "A minute ago. I heard voices."

  Evan frowned. "Oh, my cousin. We're travelling together."

  He didn't sound like he wanted to talk about it. I remembered the irritated comment I'd overheard and decided not to pursue it. I wasn't ready for this warm, fuzzy feeling to go away yet.

  Evan busied himself with stacking our few dishes. "I'd really like to spend the afternoon with you, Lissa, but I made an arrangement with my cousin."

  "That's fine."

  "No it isn't." He placed his hands on my waist. "I want to spend more time with you. Today. Right now. But I can't."

  I stretched up to kiss him on the cheek. "Seriously. It's fine." And seriously, it was. "You're not leaving the country yet, are you?"

  "Not for a while." The skin around his eyes creased with amusement. "What are you doing tomorrow?"

  "Working, alas," I told him. "Well, not really alas. I love my job." Reluctantly I moved away from his hands to swoop my bag off the floor. I fished around for my pen and notepad and wrote down my mobile number. "In case you're at a loose end. Call and we can meet up. Though you'll probably be sightseeing." I tore the page out and handed it to him.