by Nikki Logan
Unless … Was she so desperate to finish the list that she’d thrown in a near-enough-is-good-enough tick? Or maybe she was a good compartmentaliser: transportational sex in one department and the real world in another. Or maybe she’d only slept with him in the first place to get the tick.
No.
Just … no.
He took a deep breath and tossed his remaining coffee out of the tent door. Maybe he was making much more of this than it was worth. Her actions had to mean more than what she wrote down in private.
In her notebook …
Which was virtually a diary …
He straightened outside the tent, and intercepted Shirley’s glance from across the campsite. It was a smile, small and private, much like any other she’d tossed at him on any of their adventures. Yet it suddenly took on so much extra meaning.
Was it the smile of someone harbouring a secret?
Was it the smile of someone trying very hard not to liberate a much bigger, more gushing one?
Was it the smile of a woman who knew that their time was very soon to be over? A weaning-off kind of smile.
Or was it just the smile of someone quietly excited about the day and trying to be cool in front of the experts?
Hell.
He snagged his backpack and hauled it out of the tent after him.
And this was why ignorance was bliss.
It might have been one of the coolest things she’d ever done but it was also one of the dullest. As one half of the least experienced duo on the expedition, Shirley couldn’t have expected to be in charge of anything exciting and, to be fair, the scientists alone were doing their fair share of grunt work, too. They stood as a group at the base of sheer rock face in an ancient eroded gully.
‘This was once a cave system,’ the head palaeontologist told them, ‘before it all tumbled in and wore away to become the plateau we see today. So there’s a decent chance of finding a few bits of interest.’
Hopefully that was palaeontologist-speak for ‘dinosaur’.
That helped motivate her as the hours passed and teams of them spread out over parallel search vectors and combed the desert floor, literally, for anything of note. At first the pressure of not knowing what might be ‘of note’ and missing something significant crippled her, but as hours passed with no one calling for professional opinions Shirley relaxed and let herself just drift, eyes firmly down, looking for anything that just didn’t look quite right.
It gave her lots of time to glance at Hayden one vector over and worry about what was wrong with him.
He’d barely spoken to her the entire drive out here. Lots of smiles—carefully neutral and thin—but not a whole lot of substance. And they never reached his eyes. She’d surveyed the past few days in the same way they surveyed the ancient cave floor, segment by segment with a mind for the smallest out-of-place detail. He’d been fine for the first two days, as chatty as Hayden ever got, and focused on the stories told by the museum team of their past trips.
But come the dawn of day three and he had become a different man altogether, distracted, uncommunicative, hollow.
Anxiety burbled close to the surface. Why was her go-to response to assume something was wrong? That she’d done something wrong? Perhaps he had some kind of threshold for living rough and he’d reached it. Or three days was too much living out of tins and gas cooker coffee. Maybe he was more accustomed to finer comforts than he’d realised.
Those were all much better options than the lingering concern that it might be her.
Or them.
‘Nothing?’ she asked, loud enough that he could hear.
He glanced up. Shook his head. Then went back to studying the earth. Clearly still distracted.
She swallowed the little hurt and the frown and redoubled her efforts on the earth as she walked forward at a speed akin to continental drift.
Rock. Tussock. Earth. Rock. Earth. Bone … She stopped and bent lower, examined it. Nope—too bleached and surface dwelling for something older than a year. That much she had picked up from the professionals.
Tussock. Earth. Rock. Odd-shaped rock …
She paused again, bent. Gently dusted some dirt away from the edge of this particular rock. Rocks, she’d discovered, tended to be roundish or sharpish. A sharp rock with rounded bits in it was noteworthy. A rounded rock with a sharp bit in it—like this one—was equally interesting.
‘Eric?’
She called their floating expert over. He finished marking a site several vectors away and jogged over to her. ‘Whatcha got?’
She pointed to her feet. ‘Weird rock.’
‘Excellent,’ he murmured, forgetting her presence already. ‘We love weird.’
He dropped a circular frame around the rock and stabbed a small red flag into the earth nearby. He pulled out a sand sieve and started to trowel the dirt around the rock into it, shaking the balance free off to one side.
Her job was to continue onwards.
She glanced up and caught Hayden’s sideways look. He returned his gaze to the earth.
‘Is everything okay?’ she suddenly asked, surprising herself as she started forward again.
‘Yep.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Good.’
‘Hayden, you’re way too surly a human being to pull off a convincing “chipper”.’
He paused to stare intently at the dirt and Shirley got the feeling it was faked. He struggled with something.
‘This is our last list item together.’
Her heart emulsified into soggy goo. That he was keeping track. And that he cared. ‘Yeah, it is. I didn’t think you were aware of it.’
A dark flush stole up his neck. ‘I have a numbered list to keep me aware.’
Oh. Right.
He cleared his throat. ‘So what happens now?’
God. What a horrible place to be having this discussion. Forced to remain ten feet apart and surrounded by others with varying degrees of good hearing, including Eric, who was only a few feet behind her, albeit fully absorbed with the excavation of her rock.
She took a breath. ‘What do you want to happen?’
‘We sort of fell into it,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure how we fall back out of it.’
Fall back out.
She did her best not to stumble on the disappointment. He wanted to end things. Just when she thought they might have moved past the whole friends-with-benefits thing. Of course he did. Why had she expected any differently? Tightness in her throat translated audibly in her voice, but she’d be damned if she’d let him see how deeply she was affected. ‘How do you usually extricate yourself from unsatisfactory relationships?’
He looked up.
She looked down.
‘It’s not unsatisfactory, Shirley—’
‘Sorry.’ She smiled thinly. ‘Maybe I should have said “past their use-by date”?’
His lips thinned. ‘Ordinarily, we’d have established that upfront.’
‘So this must be awkward for you then. Most inconvenient.’
‘Shirley—’
‘Though we kind of did, right?’ she barrelled on. ‘While the list was ongoing we could be … ongoing.’
He frowned. ‘And you’re fine with that? Now that the achievable list is over?’
She tossed her head back. ‘Sure.’
‘Meet my eyes when you say that.’
She forced them to his. Glared. Could he hear Shiloh in her tone? ‘Get over yourself, Hayden.’
His own narrowed slightly, clouded. ‘Okay then.’
‘You don’t think this would have been a better conversation to have tomorrow? We have tonight to get through yet.’
‘We’ve managed worse.’
True.
Behind her, a throat cleared. She turned and stared at Eric, confused. How could she have forgotten he was there? He held a partially hacked away chunk of rock in his hands.
‘Shirley, I’m going to take this back to Dave at the van. I think you might have something here.�
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Really? ‘Okay. Bye. Should I just keep going?’
What an inane thing to ask. And why wasn’t she more excited? Maybe she’d just found a species no one else had ever identified.
‘Yeah, you should keep going—’ the bearded Eric laughed ‘—maybe you’ll find more.’
He whistled through two fingers and one of the team marked their progress in the ground, then stopped scanning the dirt to meet him just outside the search zone and examine the rock. They hurried together to the van.
She turned back the way she’d been going. Hayden stared at her. ‘What did you find?’
She shrugged. ‘Dinosaurus shirleii.’
He smiled despite himself and despite the tension of moments ago. Then it turned into a wry chuckle before he returned to ground-scanning, shaking his head. ‘You’re impenetrable, Shirley. Nothing touches you.’
Not if she didn’t let it, no.
The day stretched out with a few promising finds, and then dinner stretched out with more than a few fascinating discussions around the fire afterwards. Her weird rock turned out to be more fossil than rock—a fifty-thousand-year-old middle toe of something called a Thunderbird.
‘Dromornis stirtoni,’ their project leader helpfully added. ‘The biggest bird in Australia. Three metres tall.’
‘Rare?’ she asked hopefully.
‘Reasonably common.’
Of course it was. ‘And not a dinosaur?’
‘About one hundred million years too young for that. But Stirton’s Thunderbird was a contemporary of the woolly mammoth, if it’s any consolation.’
Shirley was struggling to feel consoled by anything much at all this evening, but that piece of news did at least rouse a comment from Hayden, who’d been silent for the best part of the night.
‘Are you saying that Big Bird and Mr Snuffleupagus were hanging out even in the pleistocene?’ he said.
His dry question caused a moment of stunned silence amongst the learned group who would have been forgiven for believing up until now that he was mute, but then they burst into laughter. Even Shirley had to fight the twitch of her lips.
She didn’t want to find him funny. She didn’t want to find him clever or witty or sharp. Or still the most interesting brain in the room even when it was full of bigger brains. She did better when he was being surly and stand-offish. It was easier then not to love him.
She lifted her eyes and sighed. She didn’t quite manage to cover the appreciation in her glance. Hayden’s lips thinned.
Great.
She turned back to the conversation.
The moon climbed higher and then between one conversation and the next it seemed to cross half the sky.
‘It’s late,’ the project leader finally said, tipping the last of his coffee in the fire. ‘I’m to bed.’
Shirley glanced at their distant tent again and knew she’d have to return there eventually. Staying up all night had occurred to her, but she was already wearing every layer she’d brought with her and it wasn’t keeping the cold out any longer.
She shivered even in front of the fire.
‘Come on, Shirley. Let’s get you warm,’ Hayden said.
Let’s … How cosy that sounded.
‘I’m fine.’
‘’Course you are. For a snowman.’ He stood. ‘Come on.’
They left the lingerers to deal with the fire and headed slowly back to their tent. Every heavy footstep bought her seconds of reprieve. At last the moment of truth …
She turned to face him. ‘So, now what?’
His brow furrowed as he lifted his eyes. ‘Now we sleep?’
‘Is that all?’ Or was it just a euphemism?
He grew cautious. ‘Do you want that to be all?’
No. But it had to be. ‘You sound surprised.’
He stared at her thoughtfully. ‘I believed you when you said you knew we’d be over after this trip.’
‘I do know.’
‘So I didn’t expect our final night together to old anything other than a vague poignancy of parting.’
Vague poignancy … That was something, right? She took a breath. ‘It doesn’t.’
Blue eyes challenged her. ‘Liar.’
‘I’m not lying.’
His gaze grew acute. ‘Then why is tonight any different to any other night we’ve shared if it has no other meaning? Why can’t I draw you into the warmth of that bed, the warmth of my arms and body, and farewell you slowly and thoroughly, like a goodbye should be?’
It literally hurt to push words past her constricted larynx. ‘Because we’re done. We decided that out at the ridge, today.’
‘We confirmed this trip would be our last,’ he allowed. ‘We’re not done until I drop you back at your front door.’
She stared. ‘Seriously? Down to the wire? Just so you can get one more roll in the hay?’
‘This isn’t about sex.’
She snorted. ‘Of course it is.’
‘This is about us meaning more to you than something casual. Because if you truly didn’t care then you wouldn’t have any concerns about sleeping with me now.’
Every muscle squeezed. He was way too close. ‘No. This is about you wanting to milk a good thing for every drop.’
And she’d been beyond foolish to ever set herself up for this.
His expression grew dangerously blank. ‘You think I’m hard up for female company, Shirley?’
She’d never asked him if he was seeing anyone else. She’d never wanted to know. Because asking meant trusting his response and somewhere way deep down inside that she never looked she feared she couldn’t trust him. Not with her heart.
‘I’m sure there’s a queue waiting for their chance at a rich, handsome man, no matter how damaged.’
He pursed his lips and nodded. Then he spoke. ‘Casting stones, Shirley?’
To look at him—his casual stance, his even colour—you’d think he was supremely unconcerned by this awful discussion. But the vein pulsing high in his temple said otherwise.
He was bothered.
She just didn’t know by what.
She held her ground. ‘I’m not damaged.’ Not to the same degree.
‘Oh, please … Look at the extremes you’re going to in order to please a woman who’s been dead for a decade. Your career choice. Your choice in men.’
‘What men?’
‘Exactly my point. And when you did finally relent to one, it’s casual and commitment-free. You’re hiding from the entire world one way or another.’
‘Pot, meet kettle.’ Shirley glared. ‘For someone who hasn’t left his cottage in two years or had a steady relationship ever you’re very fast to spot deficiencies in others.’
‘I know why I went underground. Can you say the same? Why hide behind the job? The crazy outfits?’
Really? Now even her clothes were a crime? She threw her hands in the air. ‘It’s fashion, Hayden. It doesn’t mean I dally in self-harm or dance around naked in a circle of stones when the moon is in its zenith.’
‘It’s a mask. And it fits you so well you’ve forgotten you’re wearing it.’
She locked eyes. ‘I’m having no problem right now understanding why commitment-free seems attractive …’
‘Come on, Shirley, ask yourself. Why do you do all of this? What are you protecting yourself from?’
She stopped, dead. ‘What?’
‘How many close friends did you have growing up?’ he challenged.
The rapid subject change threw her. ‘A few.’ Two. Two tenacious girls who never had been able to recognise subtext. They stayed with her, no matter what.
No matter what you did to ditch them, a voice whispered.
Or maybe test them.
She frowned.
‘What do my friends—’ or lack thereof ‘—have to do with anything?’
‘It’s indicative of you avoiding opening yourself up to people. What is it that you think they’ll find if you let them in?’
Her bunching muscles forced her to shove that away and focus on the man in front of her. ‘I’m confused, Hayden. A few minutes ago you were the champion of keeping things light, now you’re criticising my lack of commitment. You can’t have it both ways.’
Like white blood cells rushing in to swamp an open wound, excuses clustered around her vulnerable heart, making a prickly shield for it. She wanted to be sorry she’d ever agreed to sleep with him in the first place. But she couldn’t. He’d moved her in too many ways. But she certainly could be damned sure it never happened again.
‘This whole conversation is only reinforcing my decision to end things now,’ she said as she started stuffing her belongings into her two backpacks.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Packing. I’m not staying here.’ With you.
‘Where exactly do you plan on going? We’re in the middle of the desert.’
He had a point. She hardly knew the museum crew well enough to crawl in with one of them. The back seat of the troop carrier was looking pretty good at this moment. ‘Not your problem.’
‘Shirley—’
She spun around on him. ‘I found a dinosaur fossil.’ Or close enough. ‘So the achievable list is now complete.’ She flat-lined her hands in front of her. ‘We’re done.’
‘You’ll freeze out there.’ His voice dropped. ‘You can’t leave.’
Damn him for being right. Her hand stopped, mid-stuff. ‘I can’t stay.’
‘Why?’
Her chest rose and fell with alarming regularity. Why couldn’t she be more like the women in his past? Why couldn’t she just enjoy a good physical send-off? Why did she want tomorrow to never come?
‘Because it feels wrong,’ she whispered.
‘You offered a no-strings, casual relationship, Shirley. I just took you up on it.’
Yeah, well … that was before her feelings had changed. Although … maybe they hadn’t changed at all. Maybe she’d had them all along and just saw them clearly now. Because even though she had all the reason in the world to despise him right now, she couldn’t help but be drawn to his sheer presence, still. It was galling.
Lord. Had she fallen for him that very first day? Or had she just never got him out of her system from when she was fourteen?
