by Ally Blake
Dax gave in and wrapped an arm around hers. ‘I never had that moment with her. Not once. To Caitlyn I’m not a Bainbridge. Not a walking trust fund or a marriageable name. Not a means to an end. I’m just Dax.’
After a few moments of thick silence, Lauren leant away to look at him, and said, ‘Wow. I never thought I’d see the day.’
‘For what exactly?’ Dax asked, knowing he wasn’t going to like the answer, but unable to stop from asking anyway.
‘The day the great and mighty Dax Bainbridge, the human oak, would be brought tumbling down to his knees like the rest of us.’
He levelled her with his stare.
Lauren bit her lip to keep from laughing. ‘Oh, Dax. If only you could see yourself when you look at her. All mush and goo. It’s disgusting actually. But I’m thinking I’m going to enjoy getting used to it.’
He made to tell her there was nothing to get used to, but she gave him a kiss on the cheek and sauntered away, glancing back over her shoulder just in time for him to realise where she was heading. Directly for Caitlyn.
He took a step to stop her, and then realised there was no way without making a big scene. He had no choice but to console himself with the knowledge that whatever happened Caitlyn was a smart woman with a clear impression about what they were.
Not able to watch, he ducked around the tree and took off towards the house. On the way Lauren’s words echoed inside his head.
He could have turned back. Caitlyn had practically begged. But he’d found a ready excuse to stay. Because he’d wanted Lauren to meet her? Wanted to show her off? Wanted everyone to get a glimpse of what he’d found? How he’d changed? Who’d given him reason to?
He was ripped from his reverie by the sound of Caitlyn’s laughter ringing across the lawn as she took off at a sprint, her eyes bright, her mouth wide with delight, her auburn hair flying behind her as she belted over the grass, a handful of mini Bainbridges in hot pursuit, Lauren on the sidelines egging them on.
His feet felt as if they’d been anchored in concrete atop the soft grass. He’d never imagined a future for their relationship. But he was kidding himself if he thought things hadn’t long since gone way past even the loosest meaning of casual. Kidding himself further if he didn’t admit he was glad.
So what now?
* * *
The car ride home the next morning was quiet. Caitlyn figured she had every right to be restrained. She was the one who’d been ambushed, after all.
But while Dax leant his elbow on the open window, his face smooth, calm, as if the weekend away from the city had softened his intense edges, she knew better.
She knew him well enough to know something was wrong. But the real kicker was she didn’t know him well enough to feel as if she had the right to ask what that something was.
The weekend had been like a roller coaster from the moment they’d walked through the massive French doors at the rear of the mansion. From the marble-tiled patio a perfectly manicured lawn stretched away into the distance, broken up by tennis courts, stables, an indoor pool house, even a dinky little gazebo.
The patio itself boasted a huge oak table, long enough to seat twenty without a squeeze. With its gleaming white and silver dinner plates, pale green linen napkins, squat vases spilling over with heavenly pink peonies, it had been breathtaking. The kind of beautiful that made your eyes burn from trying to take in every detail so that you’d never forget it.
Saturday lunch at hers had consisted of plates piled with buttered white bread, and a choice of condiments. They were lucky if each condiment got its own knife. Dax’s family lunch looked like something out of The Great Gatsby.
Then there was Lauren, who had been kind of intimidating actually. Dark and charismatic, just like Dax, but bold where he was quietly confident. She liked Dax’s sister; even despite the moments she’d caught Lauren watching her, looking for what she wasn’t sure.
And then, later that night, long after midnight when the clan had finally retired, some home, several to the other wing of the house, Dax and she had gone back to their room. She’d been wired from being ‘on’ all day. But Dax...he’d been quiet.
They’d slept in the same bed. Snuggled even. But for the first night since they’d been together there had been no sex, sorbet or any other kind. She’d thought it fair enough; the house was full of his family, which wasn’t the greatest turn-on. But even when they’d woken up that morning Dax had been...distant.
Now, barely an hour into their long drive home, the silence hung over them like a looming rain cloud, low, dark and ominous.
If only she could read his mind. The rare times she’d seen glimpses of the man beneath the suit—like the night at her place when he’d told her about his family, his regrets, his ambitions—he’d been so deeply engaging. There had been moments of real connection, born of a kind of recognition of experiences the likes of which she’d never felt before.
But now she just couldn’t get a read on him at all.
Maybe he was just tired. Yeah, surely that was all. Having to foist some strange woman on his whole family couldn’t have been easy for him either. Especially someone he wasn’t serious about.
Suddenly cold, Caitlyn wrapped her arms about her waist and looked out of her window, trying her best to ignore Dax’s reflection in the glass. The face that had been a kind of gorgeous anaesthetic and at some point had become as familiar to her as her own.
So familiar she suddenly recognised his expression intimately. The detachment. The effort. She’d seen it on her own face in the mirror a dozen times before.
He’s not tired, she realised. He’s pulling away.
Her heart squeezed while her stomach tumbled into nausea.
When he dropped her off in front of her apartment building a couple of hours later her muscles were as tense as if she’d been holding the same twisty yoga posture the entire way. Her knees actually cracked when she struggled out of the car, but it wasn’t enough to stop her from making a leap for the kerb before the engine even cut off.
When he opened his door to get her bag she yelled, ‘I’ve got it!’ Then she slammed the back door and poked her head in through the passenger window.
‘Thanks for coming,’ he said, a smile on his face that didn’t quite reach his eyes.
‘It was unforgettable,’ she said, trying to smile back, but the pressure of it only made her lungs burn. Awesome. If any more internal organs got involved she was going to be in big trouble.
Then she backed away, fully aware that it was the first time in an age that they’d made no specific plans, no promises to call.
With a casual wave she ran up the steps to her building, pressed in her code and ran inside without a backward glance, her chest actually heaving with the effort at walking away from him.
Heaven help her.
Once inside her apartment, she threw her bags onto her bed, completely lacking the required energy to unpack, then sat on the corner of her bed and stared at a patch of carpet that boasted a blotch of yellow candle wax she’d never got around to getting out.
No time like the present, she thought, sliding to her knees and having at it with her thumbnail. But no matter how vigorously she scraped, or how gently she picked at the edge, it wouldn’t budge. It just stared at her: dense, viscous and unpleasantly translucent.
As she sat back on her haunches, actually sweating from the effort to dislodge the ugly mark, as if a plank of timber smacked her across the head she remembered with a painful flash how it had happened.
She’d been carrying a squat scented candle from the lounge into her tiny en suite bath along with a favourite old horror novel and her iPod set to shuffle through a set of decidedly non-romantic Seattle grunge songs. It had been the night she’d broken it off with George.
Back in the present, something else took her over, pressing her to her feet, tugging her towards her chest of drawers.
She reached for the middle drawer at the top where she kept her passport, old
keys, a box of spare buttons, every letter and birthday card her dad had sent her from the road wrapped in a tarnished blue ribbon...
And at the very back, tucked behind the tattered remains of her childhood teddy bear, were a small black suede pouch, a red corrugated cardboard box, and a white ceramic poodle that hinged in two.
She pulled them out and opened them. Inside? Engagement rings.
Three engagement rings.
Some kind of compulsion took her over as one by one—for the first time since she’d hidden each far from view—she tried them on.
One was far too big for her, dangling on her finger like a hula hoop. Another was a yellow diamond, which looked sallow against her pale skin. The third, George’s, sparkled prettily at her, but its design had clearly been created with a more conservative woman in mind.
As her finger began to overheat, as if it were reacting physically to the very idea of a for-ever-type commitment, she slid them off and dropped them, clattering, onto the chest of drawers. Seeing them together, three in a row, she felt her hands begin to shake. Her cheeks grew pink and hot. Her breaths were suddenly hard to come by.
She slid down to the floor, the handles of her drawers digging into her back, her toes nudging hard against the edge of the sheepskin rug beside her bed.
She’d tried to give them back. She really had. But all three had flat out refused. It seemed she had the knack for finding genuinely great guys. They’d not hated her for how badly she’d let them down. Or maybe they’d hated her so much they hadn’t wanted to see the rings ever again.
Her face fell into her hands.
She was a nice person. A good friend. A great girlfriend. And a pretty good casual lover, or so she’d thought, until she’d managed to turn even that into something else inside her head. Because she clearly had if the thought of never seeing Dax again had her trembling as if she were in shock.
Hadn’t she learned a thing? Was she right back there again? The exact same place?
She took a deep breath, several times over, and cleared her mind of the flurry and fear beating against the inside of her skull. Then she let herself own what she felt for real. When she thought of the others, she felt a dull mix of fondness and regret. When she thought of Dax her whole body came to life like a fuse the first time it met fire.
No. It wasn’t the same. Though for the first time it didn’t feel like a good thing. It felt terrifying.
In the end it was enough to get her off the floor. She tucked the old rings back out of sight and grabbed her sheepskin rug from the side of her bed and threw it over the candle-wax stain.
That night, with some old black and white movie playing unwatched in the background, she painted her toenails inky dark purple.
She could only imagine what Franny might think about that. Probably something along the lines of, ‘Caitlyn, my sweet, I think a storm’s a coming.’
* * *
‘I’ve screwed up,’ Caitlyn blurted.
Franny laughed so hard she came to a complete stop on their late afternoon power walk along the banks of the Yarra, pressing her hand into a sudden stitch.
‘What did you do this time?’ Franny asked after she found her breath.
‘It’s Dax.’
‘Tell me you didn’t dump that man!’
‘God, no!’ Caitlyn’s vehemence shocked even her, but then again she had pretty much felt like a walking time bomb since she’d last seen him several days before. There’d been no saucy little midday texts. No late-night phone conversations that had her drifting into the steamiest dreams of her life. It had left her shaky and moody and itchy all over. Her poor body was going through withdrawal.
Power walk clearly not doing a thing to help burn off surplus energy, Caitlyn flopped onto a sloping patch of grass by the river and stared up at the sky. Soft puffs of white cloud meandered slowly across the pale blue sky, while sunlight flittered softly through patches of new leaves on the trees overhead.
Usually the path before her had been so clear. Delicious dating, which led to the exquisite rush of a new relationship, which led to the pure bliss of a proposal, and then...pure and unadulterated panic. Because she knew better than to think anything good could last for ever.
With Dax the path was meant to be clearer still. Sorbet sex then...nothing. But sorbet sex, then dinner, then a double date, then sleeping at his place, then that night at her place when it had felt more like making love than anything she’d ever known in her life, then meeting his sister...then nothing?
She wondered if even her dad would have relished that much excitement and adventure. Lying there on the grass all she felt was a need to lay a hand on her tummy to quell the nausea.
When Franny flopped beside her with a grunt, Caitlyn said, ‘I thought he liked me,’ the words feeling as if they’d been pulled from her by industrial-strength pliers.
‘Duh,’ Franny said succinctly. ‘And you like him right on back. Yeah, I see the problem.’
Caitlyn threw a hand over her eyes. ‘We weren’t meant to like each other. He was meant to be sex without strings. A way to wipe the slate clean.’
‘Cait, you do know that sex might make you forget about the world for a few blissful minutes, but it won’t make it go away. When you come to you’re still you, and he’s still him.’
‘Yeah,’ Caitlyn said, scrunching up her face. ‘Yeah, I know.’ The cool river breeze slid through her light clothing, turning her beads of sweat cold. She shivered.
The whir of bicycles whizzed by on the path behind them, the sporadic call of Stroke! Stroke! Stroke! from the teams of rowers sculling their way towards the city echoed in her head.
‘So where has all this angst come from? Has he professed his undying “like” of you?’
Caitlyn shook her head.
‘Has he written you odes? Sky-written limericks?’
‘No. Thank God.’ But then neither had he bought her flowers, or chocolates, or jewellery. He’d never romanced her the way the others had, full-out as if they’d sensed she craved mega-wooing. He’d just been, well, him, which to that point had turned out to be more than enough.
‘Has he introduced you as the love of his life, the woman of his dreams, his girlfriend even?’
Caitlyn thought back to the weekend at Bainbridge Manor, trying to remember how Dax had introduced her to Lauren and the rest, only to remember that he hadn’t. She’d lumbered on in as she always did, introducing herself, not giving him a chance.
‘Then relax!’ Franny said, slapping her on the arm. ‘Maybe he doesn’t like you at all.’
Caitlyn shot Franny a glare, which was more than she deserved. Until she realised that Franny had stumbled upon a possibility she hadn’t even considered.
What if Dax really was that ambivalent? What if, seeing her with his family, he’d realised it was time to end things before they got messy? What if it was already over and she was just waiting for the fax on Bainbridge Foundation stationery telling her ‘It was fun while it lasted’?
All sorts of feelings swirled unimpeded to the surface, so fast she couldn’t hope to shut them down. Feelings of loss and sadness and loneliness she’d done her all to block from her life. It was ridiculous! She shouldn’t be feeling so blue, so hollow, as if she’d lost something important, because she’d never actually had it at all.
‘Franny,’ she said, her voice hoarse. ‘This is serious. I’m... I think I might...’
Then her phone rang, vibrating against her hip. She lifted her butt off the grass and snuck her phone out of her bum-bag.
It was him.
Dax’s devastatingly handsome face smiled back at her from the picture she’d taken of him when he’d first given her his private number all those weeks before—face softened with sleep, eyes dark with desire—and just like that the tension building within her for the past three days disappeared. Or more truthfully it didn’t disappear. It liquefied, heat flowing through her as if her blood had turned to melted chocolate.
She an
swered, and pressed the phone—and his picture—hard against her ear.
‘Dax,’ she said on a sigh. ‘Hi.’
Franny pinched her side. Caitlyn looked across at her friend to find her holding her hand to her heart and batting her lashes ferociously.
She swatted Franny’s hand away and hugged her knees to her chest. But even she’d heard the longing in her voice.
‘My place,’ he said, his voice hoarse, as though he too had felt every minute they’d been apart. ‘Tonight. Nine o’clock.’
Her skin warmed as if the sun had shone through a cloud for her benefit alone. She nodded. Then realised he couldn’t see her. ‘I’ll be there.’
‘With bells on?’
A smile crept onto her face. ‘Kinky.’
She heard his soft rumbling laughter before he rang off.
She lowered the phone and stared at the blank screen. The urgency in his tone had been unmistakeable. His voice had vibrated with it. He wanted her still. As much as she wanted him. Which was a truckload and then some.
The knowledge was empowering. Whatever had sent him into his cave, Dax couldn’t keep away from her even if he tried.
Then the obnoxious clearing of Franny’s throat reminded her she wasn’t alone with her rampaging thoughts.
Franny raised an eyebrow comically high. ‘Plans? Kinky plans?’
Caitlyn gave Franny a shove before leaping up and taking off back down the path, a second wind putting wings beneath her feet.
CHAPTER EIGHT
FINALLY, it was the night of the big Z9 launch and Caitlyn had done it! She’d managed to pull off the logistical nightmare of having a circus set up in the middle of the iconic Melbourne Cricket Ground.
Massive red and gold sails flapped above her, while
trapeze artists, magicians and fortune tellers roamed amidst the hundreds of gorgeously groomed guests. Laughter echoed through the lofty space alongside the happy sound of tinkling champagne glasses and noisy chatter.
Caitlyn stood in the middle of the floating polished-wood floor with the star of the show, a sleek, shimmering ocean-blue Pegasus Z9. The sports car reposed gracefully on her slowly turning base, all restrained energy, like a jungle cat preparing to pounce. At the right angle it actually looked as if it were on the move.