~*~
Three Months Later…
"Am I drunk?" Matt asked stumbling into the flat, his hands full of presents, streamers, balloons and all the other paraphernalia that is usually left over after a party.
Jack and I followed in behind him, our hands just as full, bags hanging from our elbows. "Not especially," I replied dumping a whole heap of the presents I was carting onto the couch. "You're still walking straight."
"Hmph, then I must be so tired I feel drunk," Matt snorted, throwing down his burdens on top of mine. There was an ominous crunching sound and I winced knowing that something had just been broken. "So was I drunk when I organised the leaving do for the night before Jack left?"
I exchanged an amused look with Jack. "I don't know, probably," I replied.
"It was a bad, bad idea, I'm knackered." Matt yawned and stretched. "Ah, what the hell, a good idea is a boring idea anyway. I'm going to bed."
And I watched in astonishment as he stumbled past me and wandered into his bedroom, shutting the door firmly behind him. I had thought for sure that he would want to stay up and spend as much time as possible with Jack while he was still here. Did that mean I was supposed to be all mature and go to bed to allow Jack to get his rest before he did his major journey? I sure as hell hoped not.
"Well," Jack's voice pulled me out of my ponderings and I looked round at him questioningly, "he handled that with better subtlety than I would have thought him capable of."
"Meaning?" I asked.
Jack smiled enigmatically and leant past me behind the couch to reappear with a large folded blanket that I hadn't noticed before.
"Come on." He took my hand and led me back out of the flat and into the corridor.
"Where are we going?" I laughed as he began to take the stairs going up at a bit of a run. I trotted obediently behind him for the two flights of stairs until we came to the heavy metal door marked 'Roof Access' and I felt a wide smile stretch across my face.
Jack held the door open for me and, as I stepped past him, I breathed in deeply. It had been a scorcher of a day and so, despite the sun having set several hours ago, there was still that hum of warmth in the air, that distinctive smell which told you that the next day was going to be just as hot. I loved evenings like this where the clear sky is awash with stars and the slightest breeze brushes past to make sure you don't get too hot.
"I wish the weather had been as nice as this when we had our first kiss," I said, opening my arms to encompass the velvety darkness threaded with silver from the moon and the streetlights. "My hair went everywhere in the wind."
"Did it?" Jack asked with a shrug. "I don't remember, it wasn't your hair that was drawing my attention."
I grinned in return and then slipped off my shoes, delighting in the feel of the warm cement beneath my feet. Who cares how much crud and grime I was probably getting on my soles, not to mention the odd sharp pieces of who knows what? I was too young and the night was too nice to worry about things like dirt or tetanus.
While I was delighting in the balmy weather and drowsy peace of the night, Jack spread out the blanket he'd been carrying on a flat bed of concrete that stuck up about half a metre above the rest of the roof. As he beckoned me over I realised that he'd chosen that spot because it meant we could see over the protective barrier and out across the skyline.
I settled myself down between Jack's knees, my back resting back against his chest, and he wrapped his arms securely around me. It was so late there was hardly any noise drifting up to our rooftop and it felt as if we were the only people left in the world.
As I snuggled into Jack, I tried to ignore the painful, throbbing feeling lodged down deep in my chest which had been there since I found out Jack had won the scholarship and which had steadily become harder and more obvious as the weeks had gone by. On this night, the last one before Jack left me for a year or more, it felt like a huge malignant tumour steadily leaking toxic chemicals out into my body, but I was determined to pay no attention to it. I had promised myself I would remain positive and happy around Jack, there was no way I was ruining the little time we had left together.
We had discussed briefly the possibility of me following him to England, but it’d quickly become apparent how impractical that idea was. For one there was the cost; Jack had been provided with accommodation, tuition and even living expenses money and that was the only way he could even consider affording to live over there. There would be no way I could come up with the money for it. The second reason we discounted my going to live with him was that the scholarship was something Jack needed to do on his own, to prove to himself that he could. This combined with the fact that my whole life was in Australia and that I had my own degree to complete put paid to any wonderfully romantic but ridiculously unfeasible ideas of me following my love across the world.
No, we had decided to leave things as they were and just see what happened. What with emails and cheap international calls it was hardly as if we were going to be out of contact, it was only the physical contact that was going to be severely lacking.
At this thought I lifted one of Jack's hands and brushed my lips across his knuckles, as if to reassure myself that he hadn't left yet, and felt him drop an answering kiss on the top of my head.
"I think this is my cue to say something romantic like: 'while I'm away look at these stars and I'll look at them at the same time and we'll be connected,'" Jack murmured as we both gazed heavenward. "But we'll be in different hemispheres so they won't be the same stars."
"The moon will be the same," I pointed out helpfully. "Maybe you can say something romantic about the moon."
"Maybe," Jack agreed. "But since the moon won't be visible to both of us at the same time that doesn't really seem to work either."
"I guess you could say 'while I'm away look at the moon and I will have been looking at it approximately 12 hours ago and so we'll be connected,'" I suggested and, even though I couldn't see him, I could hear the smile in his voice as he replied,
"Doesn't really have the same ring to it though does it?"
"No," I agreed, "but who needs the bloody cosmic landmarks to stay connected anyway? I'd much rather rely on email and phone calls."
I felt his laugh rumble in his chest and reverberate against my back and savoured it. Over the last few months I'd seen Jack smile and laugh so much more than he used to, perhaps he was just trying to drag all the happiness out of every situation to give himself good memories when he left, but I liked to think it was because being with me made him happy. That was certainly the case for me. My sometimes seemingly crippling irrationality had kind of faded into the background along with the vast majority of my insecurity about myself. Not that it was all gone, that would be too much to hope for and would definitely take longer than three months, but it was definitely on the wane. I guess security and happiness does that to a person.
"You are the best person in the world, Jack Morgan Whitby," I sighed. "I'm going to miss you so, so much."
"Rubbish, you'll be too busy single-handedly trying to keep Matt under control," Jack replied. "It'll be me that will be missing you."
I tilted my body sideways so I leant back against his left arm and could clearly look up at him. "What did I tell you about telling someone you will or had missed them? There has to be a gap or else it's insincere!"
"Of course," Jack agreed, clearly also thinking back to that time we'd sat in his ute by the beach. "God, that seems so long ago. What lesson were we up to then?"
"Number 3," I said instantly, all those lessons were burnt forever in my memory. "It's so funny how all this started," I continued. "I mean, what if I had just gone home, eaten a whole block of chocolate on my own and cried myself to sleep like a girl is supposed to do when she breaks up with her boyfriend? Do you think we'd have got together?"
"I don't know." I liked that Jack was telling the truth rather than making up some nonsense about how we were fated to get together. "Probably not before I left, I w
ouldn't have wanted to start something before going away. Then again, I probably wouldn't have wanted to start anything with you anyway because of Matt. I guess I would have just dealt with a bit of the unrequited stuff."
"Except it would have been requited, you just wouldn't have known it," I pointed out before grinning and adding, "So what you're saying is that it was actually a good idea of mine to bully you into becoming my teacher otherwise this would never have happened! And there was me thinking it had been a stupid idea."
"It was a stupid idea." Jack pulled me around so that my legs went to the side and I was able to more comfortably curl against him. "It was dumb luck that it all turned out OK in the end."
I ran my hands up his chest and then looped them lightly round the back of his neck. "Hmm, Jack it seems to me that you're the one that now has a lot to learn." I kissed him lightly on the underside of his jaw and continued. "That was luck combined with a whole load of sexual chemistry and perhaps a bit of destiny."
"I don't believe in destiny," Jack said, his voice becoming deeper with desire as I continued to run soft kisses across his throat and jaw.
"Me either." I pulled away to look him squarely in the eyes again. "But I believe in you and you believe in me and I think that'll be enough to get us by."
A year was a long, long time. So much could happen in a full twelve months, look at how much havoc and mayhem I'd caused in only two! Still, that had turned out alright in the end. Could we make it work? We had no idea. But we were going to muddle along and give it a go anyway because, if there was one thing I'd discovered through all this, it's that, in the end, life and love is all just one big educational experience. You just have to be prepared to learn along the way.
Epilogue
From: Jack Whitby
Sent: Tuesday, 30th June 2011 2:30 pm
To: Glenn Whitby
Subject: Update
Hello Dad,
A lot of time has passed since I've tried this but some recent events have prompted me into taking another shot at getting in touch with you. I'm sorry you didn't feel you could come to my graduation all those years ago, it was a good day and, despite what you might think, you were missed.
There is so much to cover here, I'm kind of at a loss for where to start. I suppose I'll stick to the basics for now. I know in that email I sent you previously I mentioned that I had applied to serve my internship at Preston and Wise Architecture. The day after graduation I found out that I got it and I'm now in my fourth year of working with them having been promoted to Assistant Junior Partner. I am the youngest architect they have ever employed in this position and I recently won the Young Australian Architect of the Year Award. I'm not telling you this to brag but rather because I hope that you will appreciate the hard work and dedication I put in to get where I am. Perhaps in the back of your mind you might even be proud of what your son has accomplished.
I consider my status at work to be a major achievement but I'm not so arrogant to imagine that I'd have made it on my own. I know you brought me up to think that steps in life should be undertaken alone with only yourself to rely on but I can't believe that this philosophy has done either you or me any good. I'm not discounting your experiences, I'm just trying to explain my own.
As I said in that email I sent you before, Talia Davenport has been instrumental in my success as I pride myself in being for her. We got together just before I left for England in January 2006. However, although we tried hard to make our relationship work, the distance combined with the opportunity offered to me to study a second year at Cambridge prompted us to decide, towards the end of my first year away, that we should try to just be friends. Yet, on my return to Australia in December 2007, it became apparent that neither of us had been happy with the split and we made the decision to get back together, a decision which I consider to be the best of my life. We rented a flat together the next year sharing with Matt Davenport and his girlfriend, Kristin.
We lived in the university district a further two years until Talia finished her degree and began working at a legal aid agency. The agency takes on cases pro bono for those who can't afford legal representation and Talia loves it there, despite how draining it can be. Her tenacious, occasionally confrontational, nature ensures she often gets what she wants and she's such a formidable opponent in the courtroom it has often been joked that it's a good thing she decided to use her powers for good instead of evil.
I'm not sure how I’ve ended up telling you so much about our jobs because the very purpose of this email is to explain how our careers have taken a backseat over the last few months. This is because, in the November of last year, Talia discovered she was pregnant, despite how careful we’d always been. I can't really explain how scared, confused, delighted and overwhelmed we were when we found out. It seemed like such awful timing as Talia had only been working for 10 months, I was still getting myself established at Preston and Wise and we had spent all our savings in buying our house. Still, our relationship was, and is, stable and loving and we knew that we could make a good life for our child even if it was earlier than we had anticipated.
We had our dark days when it all seemed too much, but from the first scan, a lot of those worries just faded away. This is odd considering that the scan should have increased our worries two-fold, after all we found out that we were having twins.
Two days ago Talia gave birth to your twin granddaughters. Georgie Paulina and Caitlin Elizabeth were born, and continue to be, whole and healthy and they, along with their trooper of a mother, are going to be released from hospital this afternoon. It has been their birth, more than anything, that has prompted me to attempt contact with you again after all these years. I don't want my daughters to never know their grandfather, or see the property I grew up on.
I can't believe how lucky I've been, my life with Talia has turned out better than I could have ever imagined. My estrangement with you is the one black spot and I'd like to rectify that if I can. Understand that Talia and I aren't asking anything of you, just that you get in touch. If you don't feel that you can, then I understand and I just want you to know that, despite everything, I'm happy.
Jack.
~*~
The end.
Other novels by Jessie L. Star:
The Do-Gooder
Private Lives, Public Property
Saving from Monkeys
Lighthouse Charlie
https://www.facebook.com/jessielstar
So Much to Learn Page 61
