by Julie Fison
‘Hey, did you hear about You-Know-Who?’ Antonia said, eyes shining with gossip. ‘She spent her entire year’s trust fund allowance at Chanel – by March. Her daddy was so mad he made her go out and get a job!’ She laughed gleefully at the story. Antonia had once been the daughter of a wealthy English aristocrat but thanks to a family scandal, the money was gone. She didn’t even have a trust fund anymore.
Nik laughed along with everyone else. You-Know-Who was his ex. She had a proper name during the year that they dated, but no-one used it anymore. Not around Nik, anyway. Even her pseudonym made him edgy. It had a Voldemort ring to it that wasn’t entirely inappropriate. Nik was still recovering from the fake pregnancy she had staged to pin him down in the dying days of their relationship. The fictitious termination that followed was also pretty difficult to get over. But it was the massive payout to keep the whole story out of the tabloids that was the final straw. That was when his father had stepped in. It was no wonder he sent Nik to Australia and told him to stay away from girls, Nik thought bitterly. Hopefully he wouldn’t hear about Nik’s skiing trip, or, more importantly, his reason for going.
Nik fiddled with a jewellery box in his jacket pocket as the gondola rose. It didn’t make sense to carry Georgia’s Christmas present, a diamond tennis bracelet from Tiffany’s, zipped in his ski jacket. It was hardly going to be much use to him on the mountain. He didn’t even know why he’d brought it – he couldn’t give it to anyone else because her initials were engraved on it. GLK. Georgia Louise King. As his thumb found the engraving, her beautiful face came back to him. He remembered how crushed it looked when he’d told her the truth.
He had screwed things up, all right – just like he knew he would.
Nik couldn’t blame Georgia for being angry with him. He was mad at himself. He had pushed Georgia away – not because his father had told him to steer clear of girls, but because he didn’t know any other way to behave. Sabotage was something he did really well. He had been so busy trying not to get involved with Georgia to notice that she was the best thing that had ever happened to him.
Nik realised as he thought it over that Georgia was the first person he’d ever met who liked him less when she found out he was a Morozov. She was completely different from every other girl he knew.
He’d only realised that somewhere over the Pacific. It was amazing how clear things could become at 26,000 feet. But by then it was about two weeks too late. He’d had plenty of chances to tell Georgia the truth about his family. He could have told her over dinner. He had actually tried, and then failed. And he definitely should have said something before the waterfall episode. Just thinking about that now turned him on.
If he’d thought it through, things might have turned out differently. But that was the problem. He hadn’t thought at all. He never did.
As the doors to the gondola opened at the top of the mountain, Nik tried to put Georgia out of his mind. He let his friends go ahead and then snapped on his skis. He took in a deep lungful of mountain air. Then, following his nose, he slipped across the trampled snow, over the back of the mountain. Where his friends turned left, he went right, gliding alone into an unspoiled valley.
He breathed in the scent of pines and the smell of fresh, untouched snow. His nose never disappointed him. His eyes deceived him regularly, but he could always trust his nose. An acute sense of smell was one of the only benefits – if you could call it that – of spending three days blindfolded when he was nine.
He drew another deep breath of cold air to erase the old memories. Nothing could beat the mountains on a clear winter day – the pines weighed down with snow, the sun reflecting off the white peaks. Out here, he could forget everything. Well, that was usually the way it worked. But for some reason, today he couldn’t get Georgia out of his mind. And as he sped down the mountain, her words followed him.
With lies you may get ahead in the world – but you can never go back.
That hurt. It was a Russian proverb – just one of the many texts Georgia had sent while he had been away. They’d started peacefully enough with a request to talk, but got progressively more angry, when he didn’t respond, and included a tirade about the virtues of honesty and integrity in relationships. She had put things so eloquently he was actually grudgingly impressed rather than angry at her insults. But it was the Russian proverb that sealed things for him. He knew he was not welcome back in Noosa, and he was pretty sure that Georgia wouldn’t appreciate a Christmas present in the mail, either. He thought of the bracelet in his pocket – at least it gave him something to remember her by. It was a false memento, as she’d never actually worn the bracelet, but it was better than nothing.
‘I can’t get hurt if no-one gets near me,’ he mumbled to himself.
So why, he wondered, was he aching like hell?
‘There you are,’ said Galen, strolling into a quiet bar at the bottom of the mountain with Antonia and Zed later that afternoon. Nik was alone at the bar, swigging down a beer.
‘We’ve been looking all over for you,’ Zed said, sitting on a stool beside him. ‘Don’t you answer your phone anymore?’
‘No,’ replied Nik.
‘Don’t be a grouch,’ Antonia said, trying to wave away his bad mood. ‘We want to go to Vegas.’
‘Okay,’ Nik said. ‘I think I’ll stay here. I’m enjoying the mountain.’
‘Oh, come on,’ Galen said. ‘We can’t go anywhere without you.’
It was a fair comment. Nik was the only one with a jet. And even if his friends could scrape together the airfare to Las Vegas, they’d definitely have no money for the tables. There was no point going to Vegas with an empty wallet.
‘Maybe we should stay here,’ Nik said. ‘Bet you’d look good on that mechanical bull.’
Antonia looked around the room and groaned. ‘Oh my god, you’re turning into a hillbilly.’ She gave him a hug. ‘Well, I guess we’ll head back to the chalet. Have fun on your lonesome.’
Nik watched his friends walk towards the door, willing himself to remain seated, trying to enjoy his beer, making himself stay strong. But his legs seemed to get up of their own accord.
‘Hold on,’ he called, swilling the last of his beer. ‘I’m coming.’
‘Yippee!’ Antonia shouted from the doorway, doing a little cowgirl dance. She finished by tossing her imaginary hat into the air.
The barman caught Nik’s eye as he left. ‘You take care, now, y’hear? Don’t go puttin’ the ranch on black.’
Nik laughed. If only the barman knew just how much money he could afford to lose. And anyway, he was more of a puttin’-the-ranch-on-red man.
Sometime the next morning, or possibly afternoon (so hard to tell the time in Vegas, and they had crossed too many timezones to keep track), Nik and his friends stumbled out of the Bellagio. Nik was down close to $300,000, due to some unbelievably bad luck on the blackjack table and a smidge of good luck at poker, which had spurred him on to have one last splash on the roulette table. Roulette had ultimately left him a good deal poorer and missing a shoe. He had a vivid recollection of losing his money, but due to the large amount of champagne he had consumed afterwards, he had no idea how he had lost his footwear.
Nik looked at his surviving shoe. It was Gucci. But it was no use without a partner, so he tossed it in the fountain.
‘It didn’t deserve that,’ Antonia said to Nik, as the shoe bobbed across the fountain. She leant over the side of the fountain to assess the progress of the shoe. ‘It’s trying to swim,’ she said, even though it clearly wasn’t. She pulled off a stiletto and tossed it towards Nik’s shoe. ‘Jimmy will save you!’
But her Jimmy Choo, as she might have expected in a less inebriated state, sank to the bottom without a trace.
‘I’ve got it!’ Zed shouted, hurling a size 12 red trainer at the problem.
‘No, I have!’ Galen added, throwing in a belt.
About a minute later, Nik and his friends were standing by the fountain in their u
nderwear and socks, cheering on a green silk dress, which was the only piece of apparel still floating. About thirty seconds after that, security arrived and Nik and his friends were handed Bellagio robes (that Nik was later charged for) and escorted off the premises.
On the Strip, Nik was not only uncomfortable – because by that time the temperature had dropped to nothing – but he was also embarrassed, because by then he’d started to sober up.
He could suddenly see very clearly that he needed to change. But he would definitely need help.
‘I think you did the right thing,’ Ella said, as the girls sat on the beach eating ice-creams on Boxing Day. Almost a week had passed since Nik had disappeared. ‘You can’t build a relationship on lies.’
Georgia nodded. She knew that Ella was right. But the past week had been one long, sickening emotional roller-coaster and she couldn’t get rid of the gnawing, empty feeling that it had left in her belly. She’d tried filling the emptiness with food, she tried fixing it with running, but it was still keeping her awake at night. She still didn’t understand what had gone wrong.
At first she blamed Nik for keeping secrets, then she blamed herself for not giving him a chance. But after a bit more research into the Morozovs, she blamed Nik’s father for creating a spoilt brat. If anything, Nik had actually underplayed his family’s ridiculous wealth.
He’d also played down the extent of his social misadventures. Nik’s partying was regular tabloid fodder – wild nights all over Europe and the US, and a girlfriend for each day of the week, it seemed. One of them seemed to appear more often than others – an English girl with a double-barrel surname who looked suspiciously like the girl Georgia had seen in Nik’s Ferrari a week earlier, but then again, there did seem to be a look he went for. It wasn’t anything like Georgia.
She also found the Morozov name linked to a chemical spill in Siberia the year before that had killed 115 people. There seemed to be some doubt about who was to blame, but it made for sombre reading, whatever the specifics. So did a strategic alliance that the Morozov family had formed with a Latin American country with massive mineral reserves and an extremely dubious record on human rights.
Mei licked a dribble of white-chocolate ice-cream from the side of her cone. ‘I thought he was pretty vulgar – driving around in a Porsche one day and a Ferrari the next. You’re way too good for that. I think you should stay clear of billionaires – they clash with your ethics.’
Georgia laughed. ‘It’s so hard to find a billionaire that matches Médicins Sans Frontières scrubs.’
It was a pretentious thing to say, given her experience in the field of medicine (none) and the number of worthy things Georgia had done for humanity (none), but at least she hadn’t been involved in any purported crimes against humanity, either.
‘That’s the spirit,’ Ella said, licking her mango-and-macadamia ice-cream. ‘You’re better off without him.’
Georgia nodded. ‘You’re right. I wish I’d never met him.’ She wasn’t sure that she really meant that. She said it partly to keep her friends happy, and partly to convince herself. Discovering the truth about Nik had crushed Georgia, but she only realised that things were actually over when he failed to respond to any of her texts, even to tell her to stop sending them (and she’d sent forty-five in the end). ‘He can drive his stupid Ferrari into the ocean for all I care.’
Georgia definitely didn’t mean that, but she felt a tiny bit of hurt lift off her heart as she said it. And the girls both laughed, so Georgia continued with more ways to punish Nik for leaving her, even though at the back of her mind was the nagging knowledge that she’d told him to.
‘You know, I wouldn’t save Nik even if he was being mauled by a shark,’ Georgia scoffed. ‘I’d just stand up to get a better view.’
Ella and Mei laughed again.
‘Maybe he’ll get one of those burrowing fish in his wang,’ Ella joined in.
‘Those toothpick fish? I don’t think you get them in Australia,’ Georgia pointed out. ‘But maybe he’s in the Amazon – they have them there.’ She did an over-the-top mime of a guy peeing, then discovering a fish had swum up into his willy – hamming up the surprise, confusion and complete look of agony. Ella and Mei nearly fell over from giggling so much.
It was Mei’s turn. ‘I hope he falls into a woodchipper and gets minced into tiny little pieces so you can feed him to Mitzy the cat.’
Ella and Georgia laughed, but Mei’s joke was almost too gruesome to be funny. They sat in silence for a moment.
Georgia idly wondered what Mitzy would make of minced human flesh in his cat bowl. Mitzy was a pretty fussy eater. She was about to raise the subject with Mei when a voice broke in from behind.
‘Must be a pretty terrible guy, if you want to feed him to the cat.’
The statement hung in the salty air. Georgia froze – too terrified to turn and confirm what she already knew to be the truth. Mei and Ella spun around at his voice, but were too shocked to speak.
Nik waited a few seconds for a response and, when nothing came, he moved in front of the girls, so Georgia couldn’t escape. ‘You must really hate that guy.’
A tide of hot, prickly embarrassment surged across Georgia’s face. She opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out. She closed it again and tried to swallow, but a giant lump of guilt was stuck in her throat.
‘Nik,’ Georgia managed. ‘We were just talking about … terrible ways to die.’
Mei coughed nervously.
‘I know what you were talking about,’ Nik said, putting his hand in his pockets.
Another wave of embarrassment washed over Georgia.
Nik’s eyes flitted from her to Mei and Ella, and then back the other way. He looked like he wanted to be anywhere but where he was standing. And if he had overheard their conversation, it was surprising that he was still there. But regardless, Nik seemed committed to staying. ‘Can I talk with you … alone?’ he asked Georgia.
She looked at Mei and Ella. Their eyes shouted: No, he’s no good. He’ll just hurt you all over again. Georgia knew they were right, but Nik’s eyes were pleading with her to get to her feet, to walk with him, to hear what he had to say.
With great difficulty, she managed to overcome the urge and let her head rule, for once. ‘No,’ she said, as firmly as possible.
Nik looked down at a line of hairy caterpillars that had found their way onto the boardwalk. He studied them for what seemed like forever.
‘Well?’ Mei said.
Nik looked at Mei, then Ella, obviously uncomfortable that his private confession had become some sort of group therapy session.
Nik’s eyes settled on Georgia. ‘I just wanted you to know … I’m sorry. I’m really sorry I lied to you. I know how important honesty is to you and I know you can’t forgive me for what I did, but I wanted to tell you anyway. And also to give you your bracelet.’
Nik pulled a piece of jewellery from his pocket and held it out for Georgia. She took one end and let the chain dangle in the air. The bracelet caught the strong afternoon light, almost blinding her and causing Ella to gasp (quite loudly), while Mei made a choking sound. Was it embedded with diamonds? It was the most beautiful thing Georgia had ever held.
‘It’s not mine.’
Nik nodded. ‘It is. Sorry, I left the box in Aspen.’
‘Aspen?’
‘In Colorado. I went to the mountains to clear my head.’
‘Oh.’ Georgia looked at the bracelet again. ‘Well, I’ve never even seen it before.’
‘I know. I was going to give it to you for Christmas, but …’ he shrugged. ‘Anyway, it’s yours; it’s got your initials on it.’
Georgia studied the bracelet. So this was how Russian billionaires formally ended their relationships – with diamond-encrusted jewellery.
‘No strings attached,’ he said.
‘It’s so beautiful,’ she said. Georgia knew she couldn’t take a present from Nik – after all the heartache he�
�d caused her with the lies he’d told. She wanted to tell him to keep his stupid bracelet, but instead she watched, mesmerised, as Nik did it up around her wrist.
‘I love it,’ Georgia said.
Mei jumped to her feet, her eyes trained on her bracelet. ‘You’re not going to bribe your way into her heart that easily,’ she fired.
Georgia hid her arm behind her back in case Mei decided to rip off the bracelet to prove a point – she was easily capable of that.
Nik ignored Mei and pulled Georgia to her feet. ‘I’ve missed you, Georgia.’
His eyes dragged her in – as seductive as the sea on a hot day.A girl could drown in there, she thought in a daze.
‘I want to try again. I want to be … normal,’ Nik said.
Mei laughed, and Ella hit her. Maybe Ella had decided that Nik deserved another chance. But Georgia kind of agreed with Mei on this one. She knew what Nik was saying was totally insane. He couldn’t be normal if he tried. Most people went for a run to clear their heads; Nik went skiing on the other side of the world. Who was he trying to fool?
‘I’m going to give up everything I own,’ Nik said. ‘And then things will be different. Then I’ll be different.’
Georgia shook her head. ‘You can’t.’
‘I can.’
‘The skiing holidays?’
‘Sure.’
‘The designer clothes?’
‘Easy.’
‘Your personal resort … the championship tennis court?’
‘Yep.’
‘What about the helicopter?’ Ella chipped in.
Nik nodded.
‘I bet you couldn’t give up your Ferrari,’ Mei said.
‘Ferraris,’ he corrected.
‘How many do you have?’ she asked.
‘Twelve.’
Mei just laughed.
Nik shrugged. ‘I’ll give them all up.’
‘Prove it,’ Mei said.
