by Giulia Skye
CHAPTER 23
Slow and languid, the usual playfulness of their love making had been replaced by something intense and fierce.
Adam woke some time later, his brain fuzzy and sluggish until he saw Evie lying naked next to him, her hair spilling onto the ground sheet. She anchored him, he thought. Even while she slept.
He needed water. The bottle inside the tent was empty so he quietly crawled outside to fill it from the tank in the truck. He heard something buzzing, and his brain took a while registering that the sound was his phone, vibrating under the seat where he’d hid it following his call with Howie. He’d forgotten to switch it off, the battery almost dead.
Adam picked the phone up but the missed calls weren’t from Howie or his father, like he’d expected. They were from Shane.
“Mate,” Shane’s voicemail began. “Call me when you get this message, okay? Ted was arrested yesterday. Police raided his farm and they found cannabis. The silly bastard’s out now with a court hearing and a massive slap on the arse. But he wants you to know there were these other fellas sniffing around his place asking if he owned a red Toyota. They definitely weren’t police, Mikey, but next day, his farm was raided. Anyways, don’t know if it’s a coincidence, or someone’s just got it in for him, but we thought you should know.”
Adam switched on his Australian phone and saw Shane had left similar texts and voicemails there too. He rubbed his face, digesting the news and trying to make sense of it all.
Skinny Pete’s photo. They’d traced the truck. Saskia must have paid someone to dig up dirt on Ted—which admittedly would have been pretty easy to do—and had wanted to give him hell for helping Adam out.
Shit. Adam held his head, closing his eyes.
If Saskia could make trouble for a man who’d lent him a truck, what the hell would she do to a woman who’d slept with her husband?
The tap on his shoulder startled him awake.
“Why are you sleeping out here?” Evie asked, laughing like she often did when struck by something bizarre. “Are you okay?”
Adam scrabbled for orientation.
He rubbed at the stiffness on the side of his face where it had been pressed against the truck’s door frame. “What time is it?”
“Five past six.”
The sky was heavy and gray.
“Are you still up for the Adelaide River cruise today? You don’t look too well.”
“I’m fine.”
They’d planned drinks and dinner at the inn after the cruise. He knew Evie had been looking forward to what she called the-rare-splurge-of eating out and had joked that it would be their first date.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
The way she looked at him said she knew it was more than nothing. Adam got himself together and told Evie he was going for a run before the sun got higher. When he returned, she was sitting on the ground looking through a river cruise leaflet. She wasn’t smiling when she looked up. “Didn’t you get enough exercise last night?”
Adam stripped out of his sweaty T-shirt.
He’d gotten plenty of exercise, he thought, and last night had teetered him on the edge of falling in love. But after Shane’s message, he’d spent a long time working out how to tell Evie the truth. He should prepare her, warn her about what she was getting herself into by being with him, but how could he? Bringing Evie into his world would be like dragging her into a tornado. She’d be pulled apart and whipped around, and whichever way he looked at it, he knew the easiest thing to do was to part ways.
He’d been a dick all morning and her eyes were boring into him now, drilling out the truth as to why. “Evie.”
She got to her feet. “Please tell me what’s wrong.”
Adam stared at her. Her eyes shining with confusion, her mouth poised to ask more questions and he thought, Everything. Everything was wrong. From the sweat beading on his forehead to the sun burning the skin on his back. The air was thin and insufficient. He needed to escape. He needed to be alone. This was a repeat of his last morning in Vancouver and this was him preparing to take flight.
“Shane called me,” he said. “He and Krista have returned early.” What was one more lie when he’d been lying to her all along? “I—He … I said I’d go see them …”
Evie frowned. “Well, that’s good news, isn’t it? I can’t wait to meet them.”
He said nothing as he watched the light drain from her eyes, her quick, clever mind joining the dots, filling in the blanks.
“Oh.”
“I’m sorry,” Adam said, but she’d already turned away. Which was good, he thought. Better to end it now before they got in too deep. He didn’t fit into her world.
And she certainly didn’t fit into his.
Evie’s heart pounded. There was an instant rush of blood to her head. Her body processed the shock of the news. She’d felt like this the day she’d been told her grandmother had died. Why did Adam not wanting her to meet his friends feel so similar? Why this huge sense of loss?
It was like someone had clicked their fingers and snapped her out of a trance. A trance she’d been in for the past three weeks, a trance in which she’d been so certain Adam would want her with him. Recently, she’d been assuming he’d take her to meet his friends. She’d imagined, in her girlish dreams, spending Christmas with them, too.
But now, despite all they’d done together—despite their intimacy in the Garden of Eden, despite last night—she’d been put in her place.
“I get it,” she said, her back to him. Reality stinging like a bitch. “You don’t want me with you.”
“Evie.” She sensed him coming closer. “It’s not what you think.”
She whirled around to face him. His switching from scorching hot to ice-cold like this wasn’t on and it wasn’t fair. “What is it, then?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Then explain it to me.”
She waited.
Then waited some more.
Several times he tried to speak but didn’t. Eventually, he placed his hands on her shoulders, but she shrugged them away, the damage already done. “You don’t want to carry on with this, with us, do you?”
“We were only meant to last until Darwin.”
“But that was before.”
He sighed. She could detect the annoyance beneath his calm. Impatience bristling under the surface as if he was loathed to point out the obvious fact that whatever they’d had together was always destined to be a temporary arrangement. “I didn’t plan for any of this to happen.”
“But it did happen.” She fixed her eyes on his. “Why not continue and see where it goes?”
“How could we ever last? We have different lives, on different continents. Did you really think this relationship would go somewhere?”
“I don’t know,” she said, looking at the space between them. “But I’m willing to try. I’m willing to see where this is all going. Aren’t you?”
She looked up and held her breath, begging for scraps. Please-say-yes-please-say-yes. His eyes clouded, a storm of ifs and buts, pros and cons.
Please-say-yes.
“No.” Adam hung his head. “I’m sorry.”
CHAPTER 24
Evie focused on the scorched highway on their way to Darwin. He was driving too fast, she thought. But who the hell cared out here? No speed cameras, no police. He could drive as fast as he liked. The faster he drove, the quicker she’d be free of him. The prick.
Humiliation kept her eyes trained forward on the pools of heat haze that spilled across the tarmac like liquid glass, evaporating as the truck soared closer.
“Was it just sex for you?” she’d asked earlier. The sex had meant something to her. He hadn’t answered her question but it no longer mattered because she knew the truth. She’d laid herself bare—p
hysically, emotionally—and it hadn’t been enough. She wasn’t enough. Enough for him to say, Yeah, I’d give us a go.
She wasn’t enough even for him to introduce her to his friends.
Having vowed to herself never to look at Adam again, she was now stuck sitting next to him for another fifty kilometers—because he’d dumped her in the middle of nowhere. The bastard. Her back and neck ached with the effort of looking straight ahead.
Anger seeped beneath the hurt. Couldn’t he have waited until they got to Darwin? Couldn’t he have taken her out for a meal and explained properly that he no longer wanted to see her? Wasn’t she at least worth that?
“You’re an idiot,” she snapped.
“I know.”
Evie reached for her music player and plugged herself in.
“It’s for the best,” she heard him say before she’d had a chance to turn up the volume. But she had no time for his patient parent tone, worldly-wise and full of one-day-you’ll-thank-me bollocks. Who was he to say what was best for her?
She blocked him out with loud music and stared out of her window. The scenery was unchanging. Flat wide plains of gold and orange; bushes and trees scarce. She willed to see the first signs to Darwin, mentally planning the next stage of her travels. Alone. She tried not to let the thought depress her. The world is my oyster. She’d said the same thing to Zac when he’d pulled out of their plans, and yet, here she was, one year later, still a rejected passenger. Just as alone and scared as the day she’d walked through Heathrow departures.
She was too angry to cry. Too humiliated. She’d been a fool to think what she had with Adam would last—maybe not forever, but at least for a few more weeks, a few more months.
Even though Evie had clearly read the situation wrong, it was hard not to analyze why she hadn’t been able to sustain his interest, unable to keep it even until they got to Darwin. Everything that had happened between them replayed in her mind, her whirlpool of memories tumbling together. The shower in Broome. The café. Wanna ride? That first ridiculous night on the highway and the last delicious night in his tent.
How had she read Adam so completely and utterly wrong?
Whatever had changed his mind was his business and not her problem, Evie told herself. But by the time they reached Darwin’s city limits, doubt seeped through like a crack in a dam. She was forgettable, unremarkable. Her own father hadn’t wanted to know her. Zac had moved on the moment the door closed behind him. And cheap alcohol was all it had taken to lure that guy, Kiwi, away from her in Airlie Beach.
She unplugged her earphones and pulled out her map.
“What will you do in Darwin?” he asked.
She thought about answering with something churlish and bitter, like, What the fuck is it to you? But it wasn’t her style.
“I’ll book a trip to Kakadu, of course. That’s next on my list.” As well he knew. Evie would plow through her agenda with or without him. She’d see amazing landscapes, meet interesting people, and make herself believe she was having fun by herself—alone—when really, all she wanted was Adam by her side. A companion. A special someone to share experiences and adventures.
Admitting this made her despise her own weakness. It sounded so small and needy, and Evelyn Blake was neither of those things. She didn’t need a man to feel complete. She didn’t need a man to have a good time. She didn’t need a man to see the world.
But she was a sociable creature with a loving soul who wanted one, wanted to be part of a couple, to be part of something good and honest, solid and everlasting.
“Drop me off anywhere,” she said. “It seems the city center is only a few streets deep.”
“I’ll take you to a hostel.”
“There’s no need.”
“I want to.”
“Why?” she said, truly confused. Adam pulled up at a set of traffic lights, the first she’d seen for thousands of miles. She stared at the red light and felt his eyes drilling into the side of her face.
“I want to make sure you get a bed some place. Contrary to what you’re thinking right now, I’m not going to dump you on the side of the road like some puppy in a sack.”
She kept her eyes on lights that wouldn’t turn green. A puppy in a sack was exactly what she felt like. “I’m going to try the Brown Lizard. It’s on Mitchell Street.” She glanced down at her map, checked the road in front. “It’s a right turn after the next junction, then second left.”
A few minutes later, they pulled up outside the hostel. Through the railings, she saw the hostel’s swimming pool, bright blue and sparkling in the early afternoon sun. There was a bar area too, girls and guys in groups, laughing, sunbathing. Tapping on smartphones. Wi-Fi! Her savior. She’d email her friends, catch up with the world. Tell her mum she got to Darwin. Tell everyone back home about her latest adventure across Australia’s last frontier. It had been fun, hadn’t it?
Besides the emotionally repressed man she’d fallen for. Besides the fool she’d made of herself, screaming out orgasms as if she was some sex goddess.
“We can still keep in touch, right?” he said.
Had she heard him correctly? She turned her head, forgetting her vow never to look at him again. “Like Facebook friends?”
“Yeah. Sure. If you want to.”
She snorted, got out of the truck and slammed the door.
“Let me at least grab your email address!”
“Are you serious? Either you want me or you don’t.”
For fuck’s sake, she didn’t want emails from him! She didn’t want to see his name in her inbox. She didn’t even want to see his face again. Didn’t want a reminder of his deep, green eyes and the lips that had been all over her like the red outback dust. Why had she fallen for a man who didn’t want her?
Why wasn’t she the type of woman a man worked hard at to keep?
She grabbed her backpack off the back seat, her pain a lit match igniting her anger. Adam picked up her day bag before Evie did. She took hold of the strap, her hand small and delicate against his.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “if I’ve hurt you in any way.”
If? She shook her head not wanting to hear it. What was the point?
“Goodbye, Adam.” She tugged her bag. He let go. Of course, he did. “Thanks for the ride.”
CHAPTER 25
It was happy hour at the Brown Lizard and Evie felt anything but. She sat under a huge umbrella in the crowded outside bar area, sipping a lemonade through a straw she’d already chewed to bits. In the pool, three guys splashed around, trying to drown each other as they showed off in front of squealing girlfriends. Bursts of laughter and screeches of delight. They looked so young. Gap year kids. This place had its fair share of them.
Ceiling fans whirled above her head, the juke-box music stopped and on came another reggae track. Evie hated reggae, and her patience for the things she hated had become tissue paper thin. She jumped out of her chair, dug around for some change and chose ten tracks of her own. Fleetwood Mac, Bee Gees, The Stone Roses, Crowded House. She’d mix it up a bit, teach these kids a thing or two about music. The tracks she’d ordered would buy her twenty minutes, and that’s all she needed to finish the emails she was typing out on her phone, telling her friends all about the Kimberleys and what she was going to do next.
At first Evie had attempted to write about Adam, but then deleted all mention of him. She didn’t want anyone to know she’d been falling in love with someone who hadn’t felt the same, not when her feelings for him were still so jumbled up and raw.
Not when she still couldn’t bloody believe he’d dumped her.
“Do you mind if we sit here?”
Two girls stood at her table, indicating the empty chairs. She supposed she should call them women, but they looked barely out of their teens. “Of course not, help yourself.” Evie shifted, pulling her drink closer.
She smiled at them as they sat down. “Where are you from?”
“Germany,” the one with the very short hair said. She looked like a pixie experimenting with punk.
“That explains the perfect English, then.”
“Are you from England?” the girl with the straight blond hair asked.
Evie nodded. “Near London.”
And so began the string of usual questions. How long have you been traveling? Where have you been? Where are you going next?
Have you ever been dumped for no reason by a guy you really connected with?
Now that would be an interesting conversation. They could all analyze and dissect the story of Adam and Evie, conjuring up all sorts of theories to soften the blow and hide the bottom-line fact; he didn’t want to be with her. Perhaps they’d explore his commitment issues, his fear of falling in love, and all the other rubbish that made it his problem and his loss, while Evie sobbed and wiped her nose on her clothes.
“Are you going to the disco tonight?” Punk-Pixie asked.
“The one here?” Evie had seen the chalkboard sign. She didn’t really fancy it, but other than mope about on her dorm bed, what else would she be doing? “If you’re going, can I join you?” I’m a likable human being, she wanted to add. Though not likable enough to make a certain Canadian stay.
“Of course,” Blondie said.
“Would you like to come shopping with us too?”
Evie smiled at Punk-Pixie, wondering if she’d sensed her low mood. Perhaps she looked as miserable as she felt. “I’d love to, thank you.”
Shopping and dancing. What better way to forget a man?
It was six o’clock and dark. Adam lay in his hot tent in a campground on the outskirts of Darwin’s city center holding the note he’d found wrapped around $400.
Your fee. You’ve earned it.
He sat up, telling himself he’d done the right thing. One day, when things returned to some sort of normality for him, he’d track her down and explain. He’d already found her on Facebook, but in order to contact her, he’d need to create a new account under Adam’s name and he couldn’t be bothered, his fake profile as empty as he now felt.