‘You’re just the person I wanted to see,’ he said.
‘You just saw me a little while ago. Don’t tell me you’ve twanged that hammy again?’
‘There’s more to me than a strained hamstring and a pythonriddled shed full of trestle tables, you know.’ He was joking when he said it. But he also wasn’t. He was also aware that for a very long time, he hadonlywanted to be … not a trestle table guardian, precisely, but someone who was thought of as publican first, person second, single bloke a very distant third. He’dwanteddistance—from others, but especially from himself, because guess what? Being close to a person came with vulnerabilities attached, and he hadn’t handled his own vulnerability very well. Or at all, if he was being honest. He’d ignored it well … but he hadn’t handled it. Losing a patient who had put his trust in Will had left him so raw and abraded he’d never wanted to expose himself to being a repository of someone’s trust ever again.
Now? Now, he wasn’t sure what he wanted, just that he wanted more … and now was his chance.
‘I wanted to ask you something,’ Jodie said.
‘Sure, but what say we ditch the pub and the endless demands of the Twilight Markets committee divas this arvo and do something. You and me.’
Her eyebrows raised ever so slightly. Her bottom lip disappeared for a second as she considered his words. ‘You and me,’ she echoed.
‘Yeah. We could go for a walk by the river, maybe. See if Hoges at the servo has any Golden Gaytimes in his freezer. Talk about whatever you want to talk about.’
Was he imagining an extra touch of pink in her cheeks? It was a mid-December day and the thermometer had to be pushing thirty, so maybe she was just hot and annoyed. It’d been a long time since he’d asked someone out, so his ability to judge such things was rusty.
‘You don’t know anywhere around Clarence where we could go for a swim?’ she said finally. There was a glow in her face, definitely. And he was pretty sure it wasn’t the weather. ‘A creek. A rock pool. A waterfall …’
He blinked. ‘Uh, sure. There’s a great place up past Dunoon that the locals go to. I haven’t been there in years, but we could go check it out.’ He dropped his eyes to her footwear. Strappy sandals with little beads and leather flowers, they looked like a torn hamstring waiting to happen on a trek through the scrub. ‘You might want sturdier footwear.’
‘How about I run back to Carol’s to change, and I can come back in my car. See you in the car park in ten minutes?’
‘It’s a d—’
‘Oh. And I really did need to talk to you about something. I’ll tell you on the drive.’
‘Sure,’ he said, watching those tanned legs whisk their way out of the pub’s garden. That unsaid word,date, hung in the air, and he wondered if he was the only one who could feel it.
From Clarence, the road to Dunoon traversed a bridge, passed the gate to his brother’s macadamia farm and farm-stay business, and wound its way up over rounded hills so the views were of plantations and grassy paddocks, and down through narrow roads in secretive valleys where the trees to either side formed a forest canopy overhead.
Jodie drove like a nervous L plater. A stop sign felt more like a wait-until-a-week-has-passed sign, and he wasn’t sure if they were ever going to make the right-hand turn necessary to leave town. Her hands had a grip on the steering wheel like it was a life buoy.
‘What?’ she said, reading his mind.
‘I was wondering if I should have offered to drive. Country roads are a little less orderly than in the city.’ Which was his tactful way of saying,Why the hell are we driving so slowly?
‘Sorry. I thought I was back to driving like a normal person.’
He frowned. That made no sense.
‘Back to?’
She cleared her throat, took her eyes off the road for a nanosecond to look at him, then said, ‘A year ago my business partner died in a car crash. You know I’m from the Blue Mountains, right? Well, there’s this known blackspot there, he was speeding a little, oncoming traffic, rain, et cetera, his car went through the guardrail and—’
‘I’m sorry.’
She nodded. ‘He was alive when they cut him out of the wreckage, but he didn’t make it to the hospital.’
Will winced. That word. And he had no trouble at all imagining the ambulance worker, the lights and sirens, the desperation to see a rise and fall in the line on the electrocardiographic heart monitor.
‘It messed me up for a while there. I may still be messed up, in fact.’
‘I know a bit about that.’
‘Wait—Carol told you? But I’ve barely told her.’
‘No. I mean—I know a little bit about being messed up. On a personal level. Me, I mean, not you.’