Page 12 of Forever Summer

I couldn’t raise enough energy to apologise or care for anything other than storming back toward the restaurant, my mobile still burning into the palm of my clenched hand.

I half-expected him to be sitting there, waiting with an innocent, ignorant smile, completely unaware of what a massive cock-up he had just committed in a two-point-five second moment of stupidity. But Rory was none of those things; I spotted it even from across the other side of the restaurant. His face was illuminated by the centred lamplight of our table; his anxious and guilty eyes rested on me. Gone was the self-assured cockiness of the man that had picked me up in his red sports car, gone was the sexy alluring smile of before; instead, it was replaced by the ‘oh shit’ look as he gingerly moved to stand up from the table, at a guess, trying to be gentlemanly or just out of an idea of what to do as I approached in a long, determined line toward our table. Unlike Rory, who couldn’t disguise the look of being busted, even though he desperately tried to. I was not too concerned on him reading exactly how I was feeling, I wanted him to see it my eyes, my burning, seething gaze that told him that his unease was completely justified. That in a two-point-five second lapse of concentration he had turned my confident, awesome feeling into a plunging hole I wanted to bury myself in.

A bit dumb but nice ass.

Yeah, I showed him my hurt and anger through my stare; I made no apologies by looking straight back into his sheepish eyes. I also made no apology for my hand grabbing my wine and throwing it into his face.

“Enjoy the duck, you dick!”

Giving no time to enjoy Rory’s humiliation as he wiped the glorious red stain from his eyes, or the gasped horror and whispers of the diners around, I shoved my clutch under my arm and strode a determined line to the glass doors. Pushing myself out onto the street, basking in the cool night air that felt glorious against my flamed cheeks. My eyes burned, not from the crisp, cool night, but with the ebbing adrenalin and the fury that bubbled under my skin.

Don’t cry, Ellie, don’t cry. The dickhead is not worth it.

But no matter what I chanted internally I could feel unmistakable angry tears welling in my eyes. I needed to get out of here. My heels echoed on the dampened footpath. I concentrated intently on the sound and my breaths, wrapping my arms around me to minimise the chill from the night air.

I would have walked forever in the same direction my quickly blistered feet were taking me, no clear focus other than to best stop at the red light that flagged my attention and prevented me from walking out into traffic, even though in that very moment it was precisely what I felt like doing. Dramatic? Perhaps, but after the week-long build-up of excitement and my first date in what was, well, forever, I had never planned on my night ending quite like this, nor did I expect myself to jump out of my skin as my phone chimed to attention and buzzed in my hand. The fright irritated me more than the car that in the same moment sped past, flicking up the edges of street water filth upon my ankles.

Okay, now I’m pissed.

And without missing a beat I slammed my thumb on the button.

“Listen, arsehole I’m—”

“Arsehole? Wow, Parker, do you speak to your mother with that mouth?”

My mouth gaped for several seconds, my brows lowering in confusion as I pulled the phone away from my ear and did what I hadn’t had the chance to do. I read the name on the screen. An incredulous smile lifted the corners of my mouth as I slowly put the phone back to my ear.

“Adam?”

Five

“How’s the date?”

Adam’s words jarred me from momentary shock; actually they pushed me into an all-new deeper kind of shock.

“How do you know I’m on a date?” I asked, genuinely confused. Our last text message had been over a week ago and had been so uneventful I couldn’t even remember what it had been about.

“Tess told me. Rory Franklin, hey?”

I stopped in my tracks, gritting my jaw as I looked up at the night sky, blinking back my angry tears and praying to the gods above.

No-no-no-no. Not now, not this.

I refused to talk about this with Adam. The humiliation was far too raw, as in five-minutes-ago raw. In the movies, Rory would have come running after me, chasing me down the street in the rain, swinging me around dramatically as he confessed he had been an utter fool, and then of course giving me a perfectly logical explanation about the text before crushing his mouth to mine. We’d then live happily ever after raising a boy and a girl in a beautiful, affluent, leafy suburb of Maitland. Instead, I stood in the middle of the street with Adam on the phone asking me a question that had me feeling like an utter loser, and that was something I hadn’t felt since that night rereading my old diaries whilst on a wine binge. I made a promise that I wouldn’t let myself feel like that again, not ever. And yet, with one simple, harmless question, I had been plunged back there all over again.

I hated feeling this way and more importantly I hated Adam adding to the feeling; there had been a time when Adam would be able to cheer me up, but at the very sound of his voice, all the old feelings hit me in the gut again. So I did what I had to do: I had to lie through the skin of my teeth.

“Ah-ha, he is AMAZING!”

“Really?”

“He took me to this place where they served the most incredible duck, and ordered the most delicious red off the menu.”

“Wow, he can read?”

“Shut up,” I snapped; he was ruining my lie.

“He just dropped me off actually, in some red sports car, nearly gave me a heart attack, talk about powerful.” Which wasn’t exactly untrue: the way Rory had zipped around the city streets in his Porsche had made me feel rather ill.

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