Meet Me in Bendigo

by Eva Scott

  ‘Ed, I’ve got to go.’ Not only because she needed to freshen up before the date but because she needed to clear her head, which was impossible if she stayed in Ed’s presence. Staying would only make things harder for both of them. She turned and began to walk back the way they had come, leaving him where he stood.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ he called after her. ‘I want to ask you something.’ He caught up to her and she stopped to hear what he had to say, knowing whatever it was would hurt.

  He took a deep breath as if steadying himself and she braced for the impact.

  ‘How can you forgive this guy for standing you up the way he did, for leaving you hanging, yet you can’t forgive me for the error of being born into the wrong family?’

  She didn’t know what to say. There was no going back.

  ‘I wish you would.’ He stood there before her, appealing for her to do something she’d already done, something she’d done weeks ago. It still changed nothing.

  ‘I have to go.’

  He took a step back, releasing her. ‘Of course. I understand.’ He nodded once as if accepting his fate with the gesture. ‘I won’t keep you any longer.’

  Annalisa hesitated, hating to leave him this way. She wanted to explain the reason she had to honour her date was not because she didn’t care about him or want him at a cellular level.

  She had to keep her date with GardenerGuy94 because of all they’d been through together, because he’d become her best friend and she had to know if it was the start of something real. She just had to.

  The look on his face as she turned away tore her heart in two and tears formed in her eyes, dashed away by the wind before they could fall. He would never know how hard it was to walk away from him, her body crying for his every step of the way.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Annalisa’s hand trembled ever so slightly as she picked up her phone and read GardenerGuy94’s last message for the hundredth time.

  She’d loved the idea of them meeting for the first time in the Garden for the Future, a place full of promise. Right now, as she waited, she began to wonder if she should have arranged their first meeting somewhere in Wongilly.

  Although then they would have run the risk of interference from Joe and the old guys or even Mel and Garry cruising past casually to check on them. Everyone meant well, she knew that, but there was enough pressure on her without adding any more.

  She tried not to think about Ed.

  An insulated carry basket sat at her feet, packed with delicacies from the bakery and a good bottle of red wine. She hoped the fare would provide an icebreaker while they got to know one another in three-dimensional reality.

  What if Ed was right and GardenerGuy94 was old or Napoleonic? Or worse, a Clive Palmer wannabe. Totally awkward. What would she do then? Feed him and put him back in the car to Melbourne? Even as she planned an exit strategy for the worst-case scenario, she didn’t think GardenerGuy94 was going to disappoint her. Not this time.

  At least they’d have Ripley to distract them through any tough patches. Annalisa was looking forward to meeting the dog she felt she already knew so well. She’d even procured a bone from the butcher especially for him as a welcome gift.

  She shook out her hands, trying to stop the trembles. She paced up and down the garden path contemplating calling Mel or Nonna to calm her nerves then thought better of it. Too many questions she didn’t want to answer. Nonna would probably be with Joe anyway, and he’d ask after Ed.

  Don’t think about Ed.

  She had half an hour to kill, too short a time to start anything and too long a time to do nothing. Groaning with indecision, she picked up the carry basket and the blanket. Might as well go and set up in one of the picnic lawns and wait there. She hoped the fresh air and flowers would soothe her.

  Annalisa picked a spot and spread out the blanket. The same picnic blanket she’d shared with Ed.

  Images of him invaded her thoughts. Ed sitting at the garden table drinking coffee. Ed waving to her from the shop window, where he’d finished painting the walls. Ed waiting for her out in the wildflower field, his sandy hair ruffled by the wind and his blue eyes shining with some joke. The memory of the way he’d lain back on one elbow, languid and sexy, watching her as if he might kiss her at any moment made every cell in her body scream that she was making a mistake.

  Stop thinking about Ed!

  Her heart hurt, as if someone had replaced the real thing with a sharp-edged stone, heavy and painful. Twenty-twenty hindsight told her she should not have agreed to brunch with Ed. But he’d asked her before GardenerGuy94 had set a date. Now she’d walked away from him, effectively choosing GardenerGuy94, there was no way he’d stick around. Ed was gone for good.

  Cannot think about Ed.

  Annalisa watched as people strolled around the gardens, all the time trying to pretend the ghost of Ed wasn’t sitting right next to her. She would not have him spoiling her big chance with GardenerGuy94, something that had been a long time coming.

  Smoothing the blanket out, she made sure everything looked perfect as she placed the basket in the middle to provide a kind of barrier if needed. The blooms on the purple mint bush bobbed their heads in approval while overhead swallows dipped and dived without a care in the world. Silence settled around her, as the wind tumbled across the gardens before playfully tugging at her hair.

  Doubts plagued her, tying her stomach in a heavy knot. She could fool herself into believing nerves created the issue, and to a degree maybe that was true. The gnawing sensation in her belly suggested she should have chosen Ed.

  Everything would be okay. Soon she’d be laughing and talking with GardenerGuy94 with as much ease as when they chatted together over their DMs, as if they’d been friends for years. No need to go freaking out before there was a good reason.

  The hands on her watch blitzed her hard-won calm back into a churning mass of nerves. He’d be here very soon. She had to remember to breathe.

  A bark caught her attention. Annalisa watched for someone to appear with a dog in tow, her breath coming fast and shallow.

  A chocolate lab wearing a red bandana came barrelling around the bushes, barking joyfully in the way a dog does when it slips its lead in an on-leash park.

  ‘Ripley,’ a male voice called. ‘Come here.’ An instruction the dog happily ignored as he made a beeline for Annalisa. For one alarming moment, she thought he might knock her flat in his excitement.

  ‘Ripley!’

  And there he was.

  She stopped breathing altogether for a moment.

  A wave of dizziness from sheer shock made her wobble. She was knocked sideways by a whirling tornado of conflicting emotions, one that dropped her like Dorothy into a new world she had no reference for.

  Her hand flew to her heart to make sure it was still beating. Ripley danced around her, barking and snuffling at the basket where she’d hidden his bone, a gift of distraction.

  ‘Hello,’ said Ed, reaching her in easy strides as if walking straight out of her daydreams. The wind tousled his hair, only adding to his magnetic charm.

  ‘I … you …’ Her words got lost between her mind and her tongue as realisation hit. First priority: breathe.

  Annalisa wanted to slap him, kiss him and yell at him simultaneously. Instead, she simply stood with her mouth open staring as if she’d never seen him before in her life, trying to thread together the pieces of the puzzle so they made sense.

  ‘I can explain everything.’

  Annalisa couldn’t process her thoughts fast enough to catch up. Her heart had pounded its way up into her throat, the sound of it blocking out all thoughts but one—Ed Carpenter had played her for a fool. Again.

  ‘How dare you!’ The words didn’t do enough to convey the cesspit of anger and humiliation that had opened up and swallowed her whole.

  ‘If you let me explain, it will all make sense.’ He looked genuinely confused at her reaction which only added fuel to her fire.

&
nbsp; Anger curled her hands into fists and narrowed her eyes, readying her to fight. ‘Did you enjoy stringing me along, laughing at me behind my back?’

  ‘Hang on a minute, I did no such thing.’ He backed up under the force of her anger, holding his hands up as if to deflect her arrow-shaped words from striking home.

  ‘Did you enjoy yourself? You must have been laughing your arse off every day. What a fucking cruel joke.’ Tears crowded her eyes, refusing to take direction to back down. She did not want to cry. She would not give him the satisfaction.

  ‘Whoa! I was not playing a joke on you, Annalisa. Not by a long shot. Like I said, give me a chance to explain and I promise you it will all make sense.’ He looked worried and so he should. She hadn’t even got started yet.

  ‘Give me one good reason why I should waste one more minute of my life in your presence. It’s clear to me now that you’ve lied to me time and time again so what makes you think I’m going to believe anything you have to say now.’

  ‘I haven’t lied. Everything I’ve ever said to you has been the god’s honest truth.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’ She crossed her arms over her chest, her voice dripping with derision. ‘You pretended to be two very different people. What was the point of making up GardenerGuy94 if it wasn’t to humiliate me?’ Her fury was the only barrier to her tears. Long may it hold.

  ‘I didn’t know you when I created GardenerGuy94. I admit he was invented so I could interact on the Goldfields community page and find out if there was any resistance to the warehouse project. That’s how I met you if you remember.’ Ripley nosed Ed’s hand nervously, and Ed patted his head in a gesture of automatic reassurance.

  ‘So why didn’t you tell me who you were right upfront?’

  ‘We both know you would have blocked me if you’d known I was a Carpenter.’ He looked at her in such a way it felt like a physical touch.

  She turned her head away, unwilling to let him see that he’d made a valid point. Annalisa would have turned her back on Ed Carpenter because of what he stood for. There was no doubt that she would have blocked him on her DMs.

  ‘I knew it,’ he said, his voice containing less triumph than sad validation.

  ‘Then why didn’t you tell me when you walked into my store? Why did you keep playing on my emotions as GardenerGuy94, while flirting with me as Ed? Saw a chance for a bit of a game, to have a laugh at my expense?’

  There was no way she was letting him off the hook for what he’d done.

  ‘Remember that day in the bakery? The day we met?’ Ed stepped closer, his tone earnest. ‘I recognised you from your profile picture. I’d worked out that you were GoldfieldsGirl but you didn’t know me. There were sparks that day, between you and me. You felt them too, I know you did. That was real.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you speak up and tell me who you were?’ She put her hands on her hips, determined to brook no nonsense.

  ‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘I wish I could go back in time and make a different decision, and I can’t. I’ve got to live with the one I made. I came looking for you. I thought I’d make some enquiries around town and surprise you. I didn’t expect you to magically appear. I didn’t know what to say, how to tell you who I was.’

  Ripley pawed at Ed’s leg, no doubt sensing the tension in the air. He rested his hand on the dog’s head and kept talking.

  ‘I had no idea you were a Cappelli until I walked into that store looking for your grandmother to offer her the buyout deal.’

  ‘You could have come clean then.’

  ‘I was shocked when you walked out. I couldn’t get my head around the fact you were both GoldfieldsGirl and the proprietor of Cappelli’s Hardware,’ said Ed. ‘Try looking at it from my point of view: here’s this girl that I’ve been talking to for months, someone I have a real connection with, who turns out to be a business rival my brother and sister are planning to crush like a bug.’

  Annalisa looked away across the gardens, unwilling to yield her anger.

  ‘Tell me the truth, Annalisa. If I’d told you I was a Carpenter right then and there, would you have accepted me as GardenerGuy94 too, or would you have thrown me out on my ear and never spoken to me again? Where would that have left me? Totally out of the picture. Just like in scenario number one.’

  ‘Where the hell do you think the situation left me?’ She could hear her voice rising yet was powerless to stop it. ‘I’m pouring out my heart with GardenerGuy94 while you’re trying to seduce me. How do you think that makes me feel? I thought you were my friend.’

  ‘I am your friend,’ he pleaded. ‘That has always been the case. I had no idea I’d feel so strongly for you until I met you. Do you have any idea how hard it was to keep this secret when I wanted you so badly, knowing how good things would be between us if I didn’t have to separate being GardenerGuy94 and Ed with you? If I’d told you that first day, you would have hauled me over the coals like you are doing right now, and then you would have thrown me out.’

  ‘You bet your arse I would have.’ She punctuated each word with her index finger.

  ‘So tell me, what choice did I have if I wanted to keep you in my life? What was I supposed to do exactly? Seriously, Annalisa, tell me because I spent a lot of time trying to find an answer.’

  He sounded so damn reasonable her palm itched to slap his face and break through that calm exterior, to make him feel what she was feeling right now. Like someone had put all her emotions into a giant agitator and turned it up to high speed.

  ‘I don’t fucking know,’ she said in frustration, as much for being able to see his point of view as for feeling hurt by his actions. ‘Something. Anything.’

  ‘I’m doing it now. I’m telling you now. I know you feel for me and I know you feel for GardenerGuy94. So what’s the big deal if you feel for both of us.’

  ‘You honestly think it’s that simple? You have no fucking idea how much you’ve hurt me. You let me think my heart was safe with someone who didn’t even exist. Someone who ended up standing me up and humiliating me.’

  Those emotions that had swamped her in the car park after that awful Saturday came rushing back. She’d felt so foolish for believing GardenerGuy94 was one of the good guys. Turns out foolish was exactly the right feeling.

  ‘And while we’re at it, let’s talk about how you turned up that day and were super horrible. What was with that? More of your master communication plan?’ That particular memory whipped up a whole fresh batch of anger. ‘How fucking dare you play me like that.’

  ‘Christ almighty’—he threw his hands up—‘how many times do I have to tell you I was not playing you? I was not lying to you. I met you that day with every intention of telling you who I was, right after I convinced you to take the payout deal.’

  ‘Why didn’t you? You had every chance.’ She did not like where this was going.

  ‘Sure I did, and I could have gone ahead and slipped that information in during a break in your barrage of hostility. Would have worked a treat. And now a word from our sponsor …’ He swept his hands wide in a mocking gesture that set her on fire.

  ‘I had every right to be hostile. I’d just found out that you were lying about being a Carpenter, sneaking into my life by pretending to be …’

  ‘What? What was I pretending to be?’

  ‘You said some really mean things that day.’ She changed aim, confident of her ammunition.

  Ed sighed and crossed his arms. ‘We’ve been over this. I’ve apologised and you said some pretty mean things yourself that day.’

  God, she hated it when he was right.

  She took a moment to regroup. Ripley sat near the carrier basket, watching her as if he couldn’t work out if she were friend or foe. She didn’t know the answer to that herself.

  ‘Come on, Annalisa, you can see why things between us didn’t go as I’d planned that day at the café. I turned up fully expecting to get you to agree to the buyout deal then explain who I was. Between my fight with Oliver
and then our fight, things got complicated and intense. I hated leaving you sitting there but what was I going to do? You’d cut me down. You let me know how much you hated everything I stood for. No way were you going to listen to me. I had no choice but to withdraw and try again another day.’

  ‘You didn’t try very hard.’ Her head became a revolving slide show of past occasions he might have broached the subject. The scenarios flipped through her head in quick succession. He could have picked one, any one.

  ‘Truthfully? I was terrified of what my confession might unleash. We don’t have a great track record for good face-to-face communication.’ Ed gave her a sorrowful, lopsided smile that made her stomach flip.

  ‘You hurt me.’ No matter what Ed said, it came back to this.

  It had taken three painful years to rebuild her heart after Ben died, only to have it battered by GardenerGuy94-slash-Ed. Whatever happened, she could not go back to the dark place she once inhabited. She barely survived the experience the first time.

  ‘You hurt me too. Despite what you think of me, I am not heartless. Nor am I bulletproof.’

  ‘I never said you were,’ she muttered. It had crossed her mind on more than one occasion that he might be the most frustrating, complicated and annoying man she’d ever met.

  The idea she might have caused Ed as much pain as he’d caused her hadn’t occurred to her. It scratched and itched uncomfortably, like a poor-quality winter jumper. She wanted to throw it off and go back to her clean, pure, burning anger.

  ‘You’re right, I stand corrected. You said I was the devil.’ He smiled at the memory.

  ‘Nonna wasn’t far off the mark.’

  ‘Annalisa, there is nothing stopping us from being together. Can’t you see that?’ A new earnestness had entered his voice. He may think they’d turned a corner and were entering the final round, but she still had some fight left in her.