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This Is Now

Page 8

by Maggie Gilbert


  There on the bed, laughing with Jay, I could almost imagine everything would be OK. I’d find some way to get rid of Greg, who’d been so smug about my forced apology I almost changed my mind, but thinking of Mum’s future got me through it. There was no way I was letting her marry this particular loser. Jay and I would make a go of it, Anna would take it gracefully and wouldn’t come after me with a knife or something.

  I stopped laughing at that. Not only was all of that the stuff of fantasy land, but there was no way Anna was going to let go of Jay easily. I might have shrugged off Brian’s warning at the time, but it had stuck with me. He was usually a pretty good judge of that kind of thing, he had to be in the business he was in.

  I thought about saying something to Jay, I don’t know, warning him or something, because she didn’t show her moods or make narky comments to him, she was always sweet and accommodating. But I figured whatever I said I’d just sound jealous and I didn’t want him thinking that. I didn’t know if I wanted to get back together with him or not, and while I didn’t know, it wouldn’t be fair or nice to do anything that would make him get his hopes up.

  ‘I’m not ready,’ I said finally. I half lay on the other pillows on my bed, limp and washed out.

  Jay looked at me.

  ‘But you will be. We’re good together, aren’t we? You can’t deny that.’

  ‘No,’ I admitted.

  ‘That’s alright then.’

  ‘It doesn’t mean we’re back together.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Maybe not at all.’

  He grinned.

  ‘Maybe is better than a no. I’ll take it. For now.’ Jay reached over and ran his finger down my cheek, then pushed my hair away from my face and tucked it behind my ear, as he always did.

  And shivers ran all over my skin. Yeah, just like always.

  Chapter 10

  I stared at the screen of my phone, wondering what to make of the message there:

  Have I done something wrong? Haven’t heard from you…?

  Sebastien.

  Was he trying to do my head in or was that just a side effect?

  My thumb hovered over the keys on my phone, but I paused before I could hit delete, frowning, as the other students who’d just been released from an insanely torturous maths class with that arsehole Mr Boyd rushed past me. Stupid teacher didn’t seem to comprehend that ‘I don’t know’ was sincere, it wasn’t code for ‘I couldn’t be bothered’.

  Just like I didn’t know what to text back to Sebastien.

  Had he done something ‘wrong’? Not that I knew of. I just didn’t understand why he was texting me. He’d had his moment if he wanted to make a move, and if he didn’t want to make a move then why would he bother with me?

  I tugged on the end of my ponytail, considering. I mean, I did plan on texting him back, didn’t I?

  I did.

  Just out of class, I typed back. Sorry. Busy @tafe.

  Within about five seconds the phone rang in my hand, with his name showing on the screen in tiny backlit letters. My heart, which had taken a leap when the phone rang, skipped along even faster. That was an awful lot like someone checking their phone every two seconds, waiting to hear from another someone. With a reminder to myself not to kid myself, I answered the phone.

  ‘Hi Sebastien.’

  ‘Jess, hi. You are talking to me.’

  Again, what was it with the dudes lately? They were all acting a bit weird. Maybe it was a full moon or something.

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘I hadn’t heard from you, so you know.’

  ‘Likewise.’

  Silence. Oops. But I bit my lip and managed not to fall over myself apologising. The urge was strong, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to apologise for anyway.

  ‘Jess, I want to apologise.’

  OK. That was a bit freaky. ‘Uh, what for?’

  ‘Can we meet for coffee? Would that be OK? There’s a place that makes a white chocolate mocha that’s the best thing on the planet.’

  ‘You’ve obviously never tried speed,’ I muttered, and could have slapped myself. ‘Sorry, lame joke.’

  ‘OK,’ Sebastien said, and I didn’t have to know the guy very well to tell he knew that I wasn’t joking.

  ‘I only had it once,’ I said hurriedly.

  ‘OK,’ he said again.

  ‘No, really.’ I pushed my hair back from my forehead, practically sweating with anxiety. Kill me now. Please.

  ‘Jess, you don’t need to explain anything to me. I just want to take you for a coffee. OK?’

  ‘OK.’ I said.

  I refused his offer to pick me up, and listened carefully to the name of the café and where it was, because my brain was so rattled I was afraid it would just dump the information straight in the reject bin. As soon as he hung up, I frantically typed all the info into my phone. Then, tucking it into my pocket, I hoisted my backpack with my books more firmly over my shoulder and headed out to the street to wait for a bus. I would not act like an idiot at the café. I would not act like an idiot, would not, would not.

  I was still muttering that to myself when I opened the door of the café and went inside. I looked around, and at first I thought I’d beat him there (or he’d stood me up, the evil inner bitch whispered gleefully) but then he stood up from a table near the back.

  I stood frozen, my stomach slowly flipping over. Heat rushed out from my stomach, along my arms and legs, and burned along my skin. It had only been a couple of days since I saw him, but in that time I’d pushed him so hard from my thoughts I seemed to have blurred his edges, like a drawing gone wrong in art class that I was trying to erase.

  He was just so spectacular, he took my breath away. And the way his face changed when he saw me had my knees shaking. Maybe, just maybe, it hadn’t all been as one-way as I thought.

  ‘Jess, hi,’ he said. He met up with me in the middle of the café and slid my bag from my shoulder, and gestured for me to go ahead of him to the table. Any other guy, I’d assume this was so he could check out my arse, but with Sebastien I suspected it was more to do with the good manners Mrs Bell had drilled into him. She seemed the type.

  I glanced quickly over my shoulder and nearly walked into a table. He was looking at my arse. Oh. Yay! Oh, wow. I had suddenly forgotten how to walk, I was so aware that he had been checking me out. I practically stumbled into the other chair at the table he’d been sitting at. I immediately peeled off my jumper, because I was boiling. Hot in here.

  Sebastien tucked my bag under the table and sat opposite me. He looked at me without saying anything.

  I looked at him.

  He continued to stare.

  I struggled to hold his gaze, even as I wildly tried to think of something to say. Nope, nothing. My fingers found the ends of my pony tail, and twisted the strands anxiously. When his gaze shifted to my hair I realised I was twiddling, and made myself stop. Michelle would kill me if I split the ends. She was planning something spectacular at the next hair expo that was coming up.

  ‘You have amazing hair,’ Sebastien said.

  OK, not unexpected, considering where he’d been looking. And yeah, I really wouldn’t have preferred his conversation opener to have been ‘you have an amazing arse’ and although I imagined Pippa Middleton had heard that one more than once, I was totally not in her league. But it was weird. My hair was crimson, for God’s sakes. And it was a murky faded shade of its former admittedly almost neon magnificence. Michelle had been as proud as a new mama when she took out the win in the colouring class with it. I think she said later she worked out she’d used about $200 worth of chemicals. I did have a lot of hair. I was a bit over it now, but Michelle had threatened me with pain and a slow agonising death if I did anything to it before the next comp. And hey, who was I to argue with the lady who supplied me free salon quality shampoo and conditioner?

  OK, and now who was the weird one, who’d been staring across the table for ten minutes while
she went off on a little hair fantasy side trip.

  ‘Uh, thanks.’

  Sebastien seemed about to say something, but he was interrupted by a waitress, come over to take her order. I checked her out. If she turned up to work at my restaurant with her hair hanging in her face like that she’d be sent to the bathroom for bands and bobby pins or told to bugger off. I knew that for a fact, unfortunately, from back in my early days. The manager said at the time that I’d used up my one and only free pass, and no way was I blowing that. I now had bobby pins and hair clips and hair bands stashed in my wallet, my handbag, my book bag and secreted on the top shelf of the stores cupboard at the restaurant.

  Sebastien ordered two of the white chocolate mochas and the girl nodded and scribbled on her order pad without much interest, no smile, no thanks, nothing. I watched her go, disapprovingly. When I glanced back at Sebastien he was staring at me again.

  ‘What?’

  ‘If looks could kill, that girl would be a goner.’

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘Professional judgement?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Sebastien grinned. ‘Cello players do it too, don’t worry.’

  I slid my hands under the table and folded them in my lap, keeping them out of sight and away from my hair.

  Sebastien looked at me for another really looong moment, and then he seemed to brace himself for something.

  Oh jeez, here we go.

  ‘I want to apologise if I gave you the wrong impression the other day.’

  My heart, fluttering, dropped like a shot bird. Dead. I hunched in on myself, wishing I didn’t have to hear this. The white-chocolate-whatever-it-was had better be good.

  ‘Jess, honestly, I’m so sorry, I wasn’t planning what you thought I did. When I took you to my house the other day, I know you thought, the way you ran out the door —’

  ‘I was hardly running,’ I managed to get out.

  ‘You left like your pants were on fire.’

  Weirdly, he went red when he said that. Maybe this was all too hard and he’d shut up now. Please.

  ‘The thing is, Jess. Ah,’ he stopped, as a different girl appeared at the table and delivered two steaming drinks and a big smile. She at least was an improvement and a welcome interruption. And actually the drink looked and smelled pretty good.

  As soon as she’d moved out of earshot, I tried to head off this train wreck of a conversation.

  ‘You know, you don’t have to say it, Sebastien. I get it, really. No biggie.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’

  ‘You believe me, don’t you?’

  ‘Uh,’ I said, caught. I was starting to feel like there was a conversation going on here, but not exactly the one I thought. I ran a mental rewind over everything he’d said since we sat down. Nope. Not getting it.

  ‘Jess, I swear I absolutely did not invite you to my house to try to get you into bed.’

  I stared at him. What the hell?

  ‘What made you think I thought that?’

  ‘Like I said, you ran out as though your pants were on fire. Or you thought someone was trying to get into them.’

  ‘It never crossed my mind,’ I said faintly, and with 100% truthfulness. It hadn’t. The thought had definitely crossed my mind that I wanted to kiss him, but I managed to snap my mouth closed without sharing that one.

  ‘Oh.’ He looked at me doubtfully. ‘So why did you take off?’

  I shrugged, and fiddled with the sugar bowl. ‘Just, stuff. Home, school, you know how it is. Like I said, I had a big fight with my Mum.’

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh. OK.’

  I realised that had come out a bit harsh. ‘There’s nothing to tell, that’s all. It’s sorted now.’ Like hell it was, but again, this was not something I felt I could share with Sebastien.

  ‘So. Are you, ah, seeing anyone?’ The spoon sitting on his saucer rattled against the cup, and I glanced down, and saw his hand tapping the end of it. Maybe he was as uncomfortable as I was.

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘No.’

  ‘Do you want to?’

  ‘So you do want to get into my pants,’ I said, and grinned. I almost stood up and did a football cheer. I did a joke! A flirty joke! Go me!

  Sebastien knocked the spoon off the saucer. He fumbled for it, and I reached to grab it before it could fall off the table, just that waitress reflex, nothing calculated, but somehow I ended up with my fingers tangled in his and the spoon disappeared over the edge. My skin felt like it was about to lift off, such was the electricity of the contact.

  ‘Maybe I do want to. Eventually. If that was OK with you.’

  I sat for a moment, senses zinging.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Eventually, of course.’

  The waitress, coming past, bent and retrieved the spoon, and offered to get a new one, and Sebastien sat back and picked up his cup. It wasn’t the smiley waitress, it was the other one, and I could have killed her for her ill-timed attempt at doing her job properly. But Sebastien just smiled and told her we were all good, for now. And he kept his fingers loosely threaded through mine.

  I don’t think I’ve ever been so aware of such a tiny part of my body.

  I spent the next couple hours torn between being careful and just taking that plunge off the cliff after him, with his 500 questions about everything, and his proposal to go see a movie. With me. As in a date.

  I think I agreed to see a movie, but I couldn’t be totally sure. I did say he could drive me home, but only because I was pretty sure everyone would already be at the pub (it was raffle night), and it was already dark when they basically hustled us out the door, most of the chairs already upended on the table. Normally I’d feel guilty, I knew what it was like when two lousy customers couldn’t get the hint that you wanted to go home. But my focus had narrowed, as I tried to duck some of Sebastien’s questions about my family, and what they did for a living (I could hardly say deal drugs and sell stolen car parts) by firing back at him with the same questions.

  And the hot-chocolate-whatever might have been delicious, as great as he said it was, but I didn’t know that either. I didn’t taste a thing.

  Chapter 11

  I waited in the mall outside the cinema, antsy and so nervous I thought I might vomit any minute. When I left home earlier that night my bedroom looked like a bomb had gone off in my wardrobe, with clothes draping every surface, including a pair of skinny jeans, a butterfly t-shirt and a Mango hoodie jumbled together to form a tangled mess on the floor. I didn’t have a huge amount of clothes, but then my room was pretty small. It wasn’t even a bedroom, really, just an odd little leftover room tucked at the back of the house, that allowed the real estate agent to upgrade the description from three bedroom to three bedroom with study. Study. As if.

  I was early, but the wait still made me anxious that Sebastien might have bailed. Or that this was just a really committed version of some kind of revenge joke Anna had cooked up with her brother as accomplice. I wished for a cigarette, then reminded myself I had quit, and tried to take some steadying breaths. He would come. I was just being paranoid. Should have given up pot sooner, yeah, yeah.

  For the tenth time since I’d got there, I checked my phone, but there were no messages. And the tiny little numbers, 6.53, just mocked me, a reminder that we were supposed to be meeting at seven. How could you panic about a no show when the clock hadn’t even started yet?

  I wondered if my hair was holding. I’d spent so much time trying on outfits and peeling them off and then trying something else that I’d had hardly any time for hair and makeup. Normally, the need to do full makeup would have trumped hair, no contest. But Sebastien had said he liked my hair. So, minimal makeup for leaving of the house (eyeliner, mascara, bit of smoky eye makeup rubbed hurriedly on the lids, bit of blush so I didn’t look like a ghost) and then I’d taken the time to twist the sides of my hair into s
wirls and pin them up on my head, with the rest hanging down, freshly straightened. Which reminded me, I needed to take that straightener back to Michelle. It was worth about $300 bucks and I was dead meat if it got damaged. Or if someone discovered where I’d hidden it and hocked it.

  I looked at my phone. 6.55. No way. Had it stopped?

  Of course it hadn’t. Phones didn’t stop. If the battery was dead the whole phone would be dead. I stared at it until the numbers changed until 6.56. Never hurt to be sure.

  Phone in hand (no point in putting it away ’cos I was surely going to be staring at it again any minute) I had another look around to see if I could spot Sebastien. In some kind of local conspiracy, the mall was packed, people heading to or from the Woolworths to do their shopping, others straggling past with a coffee from Gloria Jean’s, which shut officially at six but was nearly always still serving until 6.30. And the rest, which seemed like about 90% of the population, were strolling past me and lining up for tickets. I wondered if something special had opened or something, because there seemed an awful lot of people around, even for a Friday. But not one of them was Sebastien.

  The next time I looked at my phone, I got a nastier shock: 7.10. The movie was supposed to start at 7.30 and if he didn’t get there soon we were going to be lucky to get tickets. And we might have to sit up the front, and I hated that. It always gave me eyestrain and a sore neck.

  At 7.15, about half the people killing time in the cinema lobby disappeared through the entrance towards where the theatres were, handing their tickets to the staff standing there.

  At 7.25, there was hardly anyone left, and I was moving beyond anxious and into nauseous. Despite all my paranoid freak-outs I hadn’t really thought Sebastien was the kind of guy to stand a girl up with no message, no call, nothing. So that meant something had happened. I just hoped it was something non-lethal.

  At 8.00 I gave up. Whatever had happened, he wasn’t coming. I swallowed against the thickness in the back of my throat, and held my eyes open very wide to hold the threat of tears away. I would not cry. Either there was a good reason for him not being here, in which case, fine, we could go to the movies another night. Or he really was an idiot at best and a bastard at worst and had forgotten about it or just deliberately blown me off.

 

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