Page 154 of Begin Again Again

“I’ll miss you too.”

“I wish…” She looked around for bystanders. “There was somewhere private, but maybe not super private, where we could say goodbye?”

Byron stilled. “Really?”

“I mean maybe once it gets a little bit darker? Maybe something big and brick? Somewhere like a sporting pavilion maybe…?”

He hugged her close, kissing her cheek, her neck, her shoulder. “I think I can help you.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“Although there’s something we could do while we wait.”

“What?”

Byron leant over to his backpack and unzipped it.

“If it’s more cookies, I think I’ll die,” Beth said.

He grinned that blinding white Thomas smile. “It’s not, it’s something we can do together.”

“I told you I’m not outdoor sexing you until it gets dark.”

“It’s not that either.”

He pulled a big scarlet ball from his bag.SHERRIN, it said on the side.Official ball of the AFL.

She gasped. “Is that?”

“It is.” He stood, rotating the ball in his hand. “Should we have a kick?”

Beth stared up at him, so proud and stunned. Then she pressed her face into her hands.

“Don’t cry, Horoscopes,” Byron said, bouncing the ball. “You’ll throw me off my game.”

She jumped to her feet and punched his concrete slab of an arm. “Don’t tell me what to do!”

He laughed. “Okay. Cry if you want to, baby.”

She tried to glare at him, but he was so tall and handsome, so at home with the red ball in his hands, that tears burned in her eyes again.

He’s mine, she thought, her heart feeling so thin it might pull apart.

Byron kissed the top of her head and sprinted toward the main oval. His legs ate up the grass as he bounced the ball, catching it smoothly as he ran. He turned to look at her, his face wild and young and beautiful. “Come on, Horoscopes! Come learn how to play a decent sport!”

Beth wiped her eyes, stood and ran into the afternoon with Byron Thomas.

Epilogue

Pink sand and salt air whipped through the air. Both were probably damaging her laptop, but she couldn’t not work outside, not when the day was this beautiful. She checked her phone. Byron was at after-work drinks, twenty minutes away at least. She put her fingers to her keys but found herself staring into the waves. Steak for dinner, maybe? Risotto?

The wind blew and the scent of the pine trees rolled in. It reminded her of Thursday afternoons at school—ham sandwiches, and clock biscuits, finger painting and picking books in the library and gluing felt to other felt…

She blinked and glanced at her phone. Five minutes had passed.

“Yeah, no, we’re done here.”

Irritated but resigned, she closed her laptop. She was six months into her purely creative career and Beth still didn’t know how to get everything she wanted done in a day—but she did know when her brain was collapsing in on itself like souffle.

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