by Holly Ford
The first thing that had sprung into her mind as he’d crossed the gravel between his truck and hers was how much she preferred the way he’d looked all day. The way she’d gotten used to him looking, this last week. The tatty, baggy, age-softened work shirt and jeans, the rough shadow around his jaw, the little sheen of dust and sweat on his skin, the unstyled hair escaping his battered felt hat. She was disturbed to find she’d been taking so much notice.
All she could see of him now was the weave of clean denim over his thigh. Shifting into forward gear, Tess fixed her eyes on the road. She’d been careful to avoid wearing clothes that would make her look like anything but one of the boys, and she had a nasty feeling that Nate looked prettier than she did.
The sky up ahead was softening, dangling an idle promise of rain above the thirsty hills. Climbing out of the thickening dusk on the valley floor, the drive back to the main road seemed shorter than she remembered, and the sun was still in the sky when, for the first time in ten days, the HiLux’s tyres hit tarseal.
At nine o’clock on a Friday night, the concrete block pub looked a good deal busier than it had the morning she’d driven by. To Tess’s surprise, there were even a couple of campervans hooked up in the paddock beside the car park. She nosed the ute’s nudge bar up to the tin fence.
Inside the pub, a handful of relaxed-looking locals ranged the length of the bar, a few tourists watching them covertly from the tables around the walls. As the door swung open loudly, Tess saw the little barman’s face light up.
‘Nate!’
Immediately, heads turned.
‘Hey.’ Standing behind Nate, Tess could only see the effect of his smile. From a perch on a barstool, a woman who looked old enough to have witnessed at least one World War gazed up at him adoringly.
‘Doris.’ Nate took her hand. ‘There’s my girl.’ As she stepped down with surprising agility from the stool, he extended both arms, allowing her to spin slowly from one to the other before dipping her gently over his left. Raising a hand to his cheek, Doris giggled profusely.
Having helped her back into her seat, Nate leaned on the bar.
‘Usual, mate?’ The barman picked up a jug.
‘Blonde in the corner.’ Harry nudged Nate’s arm. ‘Six o’clock.’
Nate ignored him. ‘Thanks, Frank,’ he nodded to the barman, before turning politely to Tess. ‘What can I get you?’
She shook her head. ‘I’ll get these.’ In the mirror behind the bar, she could see a strikingly pretty blonde girl and her only slightly less pretty friend sitting at a table in the corner, their open guidebook facedown between them. Both girls were staring at Nate like he was the sight they’d come all this way to see.
‘Can we get four glasses?’ Tess opened her wallet as the barman finished pouring the jug. ‘Thanks.’
He hesitated slightly, his eyes flicking from her money to Nate, reassessing the situation.
‘Frank, this is Tess Drummond,’ Nate said, his voice matter-of-fact. ‘Tess is our new manager up at Broken Creek.’
‘Oh.’ Frank’s expression hardened. ‘Right.’
An awkward silence settled along the bar. So she and Carnarvon were the bad guys again, huh? Tess sighed to herself. No change there.
‘Shall we grab a seat?’ Picking up the glasses, Nate nodded towards a free table across the room.
‘Sure.’ She led the way over, shrugging off the stares. Welcome to the area, Tess. Keeping her back to the bar, she poured the beers.
The silence continued.
‘I got to go take a—’ Stopping himself, Harry coughed. ‘Excuse me. I have to go to the bathroom.’
He made his way across the room, casting another wistful glance at the blonde and her friend as he passed their table.
Reaching into his jeans pocket, Nate pulled out a coin. ‘You want a game?’ he asked Mitch. Tess followed their gaze to the pool table.
‘Against you?’ Mitch sipped his beer. ‘No, thanks.’
‘Come on,’ Nate said. ‘I’ll let you break.’
Mitch sighed. ‘I need a warm-up game first.’ He looked around. ‘Wait till Harry gets back.’
Tess stared at Mitch. ‘You’re saying Harry can play? With one arm?’
‘I’m saying Harry couldn’t play with two.’
Mitch’s delivery was so deadpan it took her a moment to get the joke. As she did so, he gave her a little smile, a twitch of his mouth as his eyes flashed with humour. Tess returned it.
Nate was already on his feet. Grateful for something to focus her attention on as the silence returned, Tess watched him rack up. The girls in the corner, she saw, were watching too. Beside them, Harry was lingering unnoticed, pretending to read a poster on the wall between increasingly desperate looks over his shoulder at Nate, who was still ignoring him, and the girls, completely.
Returning, Nate handed Mitch a cue. Mitch sighed again. As he focused his attention on the cue ball, Tess watched his body language change, sizing up his shot like a hawk sizing up a rabbit. A few heads turned as he broke. He was good, she realised. Bloody good. Right up until he missed his fourth shot.
With a look of resignation, Mitch walked back to join them. ‘There you go,’ he told Nate. ‘All yours.’
Nate gave Mitch a grin. In less than five minutes, he’d cleared the table.
‘Best of three,’ he announced, retrieving the balls. ‘You rack up. I’ll go get us another round.’
Getting up to go to the bathroom herself, Tess came back to see Harry talking to Nate at the bar. She could see Nate shaking his head. Rubbing his hand over his neck, Harry leaned back, defeated. Well, she was certainly ruining somebody’s Friday night. Poor Harry. Maybe she should have let them come out on their own after all.
Passing by the girls’ table, Tess stopped.
‘Hi.’ With the brightest smile she could manage, she dropped to her haunches beside the blonde’s chair. ‘Where are you guys from?’
The girls exchanged a look. ‘Manchester,’ the blonde smiled.
‘England,’ her friend added. ‘We flew in last week.’
‘Yeah?’ Tess raised her eyebrows. ‘Well, welcome to New Zealand.’
‘Everybody’s very friendly here,’ the blonde said, her eyes moving over Tess’s shoulder.
Tess didn’t have to turn around to guess what she was looking at. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘they are.’
‘You’re with those guys playing pool,’ the brunette said.
‘Yeah, those are my friends Mitch, and Nate, and—’
‘Your friend?’ the blonde checked, sharply. ‘He’s not your boyfriend, then?’
‘No, no.’ Tess managed a laugh. ‘The four of us work on the same farm, that’s all. And that’s Harry over there.’
‘A farm?’ the blonde said.
Tess did a quick imperial conversion. ‘Fifteen thousand acres, more or less.’
‘Fifteen thousand?’
The brunette was still looking at Harry. Tess watched her eyes widen.
‘You’re wondering what happened to Harry’s arm,’ Tess said, lowering her voice.
The girl blushed.
‘He lost it fighting a fire,’ Tess told her. ‘Saved four of his mates.’ She shook her head admiringly. ‘Harry’s our local hero.’
She watched the brunette look Harry up and down again.
‘Not that it slows him down at all,’ Tess said. ‘You’d be amazed what he can do.’ Having let all possible implications hang in the air for a while, she gave a wistful sigh. ‘You should see him on horseback,’ she added.
‘He rides horses?’
‘Yeah. Professionally.’ Tess stood up. ‘Hey, Harry! Come here a second.’ She could see him staring at her, open-mouthed, from the other side of the room. Tess waved him over. ‘I’ll introduce you.’
•
Leaving Harry, still unable to believe his luck, settled in with the girls, Tess excused herself, returning to her seat beside Mitch just in time to see Nate clear the pool
table again.
He turned back to Mitch, rack in hand. ‘One more?’
‘No, mate, I’m all done. That shot I played really took it out of me.’
‘Come on,’ Nate grinned.
Mitch held up his hand.
‘I’ll play you,’ Tess said.
They both looked at her.
‘Okay.’ Nate’s smile sparkled briefly before he bent over the table, racking the balls. Straightening, he surveyed his handiwork with a critical eye. ‘There you go.’
With equal care, Tess selected a cue. ‘I’m trying to get any one of those little balls to go into a hole’ – she chalked the tip – ‘right?’
Nate grinned again. He didn’t look fooled. ‘One,’ he said, ‘or more.’
‘Hmm.’ She positioned the cue ball. ‘How about’ – drawing her arm back smoothly, Tess made her shot – ‘that one?’ She stood up as the eight ball cannoned into the side pocket. ‘We’re playing American rules, right?’
‘Shit.’ Nate shook his head in admiration. ‘You got to be kidding me.’
‘Mate,’ Mitch laughed, ‘I think you just got hustled.’
‘Best of five.’ Nate’s eyes met hers, just a hint of steel below the mischief. ‘My break, this time.’
Tess watched him circling the table, shoulders relaxed as he took his time. Again, he didn’t miss a shot. Without haste, he remade the rack and rolled the cue ball down the table to her.
‘Make that break again,’ he said. ‘I dare you.’
Tess raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh,’ she said, lining up the pack, ‘I don’t know. It gets kind of boring playing that way. I think I feel’ – she sent the two ball into the side pocket – ‘like a game this time.’
She heard Nate’s breath whistle out as she made her next seven shots, downing the eight ball on a three-rail kick to the corner pocket.
‘Okay.’ He looked at her as she stood up. ‘Where’d you learn to play like that?’
‘Where did you?’ she countered, looking him straight in the eye. Oh god. Was she flirting? Was he? Hurriedly, Tess dropped his gaze, inserting another dollar into the slot.
‘A friend of mine at uni had a job in a pool hall,’ Nate said. ‘Nobody else ever came in.’
Tess set the balls back in the triangle. ‘My first job out of Lincoln,’ she said, ‘was on a dairy support unit. No accommodation. I ended up sharing a flat with a couple of guys the manager knew. It was supposed to be furnished. When I got there, all they had were three beds and a pool table.’ Tess lifted the rack. ‘It rained a lot that year.’
Both Mitch and Nate were staring at her. ‘Lincoln University?’ Nate said. ‘As in our Lincoln?’
Tess laughed. ‘My mum’s a Kiwi. I spent a lot of time in Christchurch growing up.’
‘Does your mum live there now?’
‘No.’ Tess settled back on her stool. ‘She stayed on in New South Wales after she and Dad split. I don’t think Mum’s been back to Christchurch since my nana died.’
Mitch gave her a look. ‘But you decided to go to uni over here.’
‘Yeah.’ Tess raised her eyebrows at him. ‘It seemed like a handy distance.’
Nate paused, pool cue in hand. ‘So where’s home these days?’
She smiled. ‘Wherever it needs to be, I guess.’ It was a question she got asked a lot, and Tess hadn’t had a good answer to it for seventeen years. Shortly after the auctioneer’s hammer had fallen on the Drummonds’ farm, the earthmovers had rolled in, and the valley that had been home for the first half of her life was unrecognisable these days. Much like her parents’ marriage, which got bulldozed a couple of years later, it only existed in memory and old photographs now. No going back there.
She saw Harry look their way briefly as Nate broke again. In short order, his second game went the same way as his first, and it was Tess’s turn to shake her head. For god’s sake, how many shots in a row was that now? Surely he couldn’t make many more. He had to miss sometime. Didn’t he?
‘What’s the score?’ Harry, on his way back from the bar, three shot glasses balanced between his fingers, paused beside Mitch.
‘Two all,’ Nate grinned.
‘This is the decider,’ Mitch told him. ‘Tess’s break. Looks like Nate’s about to lose.’
‘Nah, mate.’ Harry put the shot glasses down. ‘Nate doesn’t lose.’
Smiling to herself, Tess sank the five ball off the break, bringing the white back nicely to make the seven into the side pocket, then rounded the table to sink the two, three and six.
‘Neither does she,’ she heard Mitch say.
With two more balls to run out before she could take a shot at the eight, she sized up her options. They weren’t looking so easy. As she lined up another two-rail kick shot to take out the four, there was movement behind the table. Harry’s girls, it seemed, had gotten impatient for their drinks. Tess paused, waiting for them to clear the handle of the pokie machine she was using to reference the spot she needed to hit on the bottom cushion. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the blonde sidle up to Nate.
‘Hello,’ Tess heard her say.
‘Hey.’ Tess could imagine Nate’s smile. ‘How’s it going?’
Focusing her attention back on the target, Tess took her shot. Fuck. As soon as she’d hit it, she knew it was wrong. She stayed bent over the table, willing the shot to go in anyway. For a second, watching the ball ricochet off the first and second rails to head straight for the pocket, she thought she’d gotten away with it. But sure enough, the ball slowed, kissed the side of the pocket, rolled back, and stopped.
‘Yes!’ she heard Harry say, behind her. So much for gratitude, huh? As Tess turned around to face him, he knocked back his shot with a guilty look. ‘Bad luck there,’ he added gruffly.
Tess looked at Nate. ‘Your shot.’
With a grin, he picked up his cue.
‘Come on, Nate,’ Harry barracked, as Nate sauntered over to the table. Mitch shot Harry a warning look, but he looked happy too. She sighed to herself. Nate doesn’t lose. The world was back in its right order.
She watched Nate circle the table, chalking his cue as he made his plan. At least she hadn’t made it easy for him. Her four ball was still blocking the pocket, and she’d left the white hard on the rail. Tess sipped her drink. Maybe he’d miss as well. She stole a sideways look at the blonde, whose big blue eyes were following Nate’s every move with an expression that suggested she’d like to peel that tight checked shirt right off his flexing shoulders.
Tess looked back at the table. For some reason, the blonde continued to prey on her mind. She found herself studying Nate through the English girls’ eyes as he leaned in to take his shot, fixated, suddenly, on the supple way he was drawing back his cue. He’d make a hell of a memory, that was for sure. Gently, Nate stroked the cue ball off the rail and into the nine, which trickled obediently into the corner pocket.
‘Go, Nate,’ Harry yelled.
Tess gave herself a small shake. Unlike the blonde, she wasn’t only in town for one night, and Nate McAdam was going to be a lot more than just a memory tomorrow.
As he proceeded to pot the next six balls, she practised her gracious face. It was only a game of pool, for god’s sake. Just a friendly game. And even if, in the last couple of frames, it had turned into a little more than that, it wouldn’t kill her to let the Broken Creek boys have their day. After the last few months, they were probably due one.
‘Here we go,’ Harry said. ‘Come on, Nate!’
With casual confidence, Nate lined up the black. It was a tough shot – one of the toughest he’d had to make all night. As he gave the ball his full attention, Tess took the opportunity to study his face, watching his eyes seek out the sweet spot, the little flare in them as he found it, the almost imperceptible way they narrowed as they locked onto his target. Nate drew back his cue. If her own eyes hadn’t been compelled to travel with it to his hips, she would never have seen what happened next.
He
moved his hand. As he ran the cue forward to strike the ball, his right hand, on the base, changed its angle infinitesimally. Tess blinked.
‘Whoa,’ Harry said, as the eight ball glanced the pocket and ran away down the rail. ‘Shit, Nate, she made you choke. It’s the World Cup final all over again.’
‘Harry,’ Mitch said, ‘just shut up, would you, mate?’
Nate stood up slowly, every bit the defeated man. With one final, rueful look at the ball, he walked back. ‘Your shot,’ he said.
Tess got up. Her second-to-last ball had remained where it was, a sitter for the pocket. Still trying to process what she’d just seen, she knocked it in without thinking, failing to consider her next shot, her interest in the game fading. Nate had let her win. Why? Because she was a girl? Because she was his boss?
The cue ball rebounded to just about the worse place it could, and Tess tilted her head, half expecting a sledge from Harry. There was only respectful silence behind her. Tess eyed the eight ball stonily. She didn’t need somebody – anybody – to let her win. She underlined her point with an unnecessarily complicated shot, bouncing the cue ball off three cushions to pocket the black in the corner.
‘Shit,’ Harry said again, his voice full of admiration this time.
‘That was a hell of a shot,’ Mitch said, as she walked back.
Tess smiled.
‘Well played,’ Nate said.
‘Yeah.’ She paused, looking at him. ‘You too.’
The English girls, she noticed, had drifted off. She could see them over his shoulder, deep in discussion at the bar.
Harry laughed. ‘She kicked your arse, mate.’
‘Yeah,’ Nate said. ‘She did.’ With a grin, he picked up the empty jug. ‘I guess the next one’s on me.’
Tess watched him walk away. As he stood at the bar, the blonde drifted back to his elbow.
‘How’d you learn to do that?’ Harry hoisted himself onto a stool. ‘Can you teach me that shot?’
‘Mate,’ Mitch said, ‘God couldn’t teach you that shot.’ He looked over at Tess, the spark of humour back in his eyes. ‘Show him the eight ball break.’