The Barbershop Girl

by Georgina Penney

  ‘Magnificent?’

  ‘Yes. Feel these muscles. Actually, don’t bother with those ones. Feel this one.’ He playfully dragged her hand further down his body.

  Amy desperately tried for a poker face. ‘Is it a functional muscle? It’s not like the ones gym junkies have that look good but aren’t useful, is it?’

  ‘Functional? Functional?’ Ben feigned offence, grabbing her hips and pulling her against him. ‘I must be going deaf, because I could swear I heard you telling the world just how functional I was a couple of hours ago.’

  She suppressed a grin and ran a nail up and down his length, gratified by his badly disguised gasp. ‘That was the wine you forced down my throat. My judgement was impaired.’

  ‘Is it impaired now? Because you know this isn’t a renewable resource, right? Who knows what could happen tomorrow. I may never be able to get it up again, so we better make the most of it.’ He leaned forward for a slow, persuasive kiss.

  Amy let herself enjoy it for a few moments before putting her hands on his shoulders. ‘Tempting, but how about a hot chocolate instead?’

  ‘Only a woman would think a hot chocolate is better than sex.’

  ‘Well, I plan on making a really nice hot chocolate.’

  ‘I’d much rather do this.’ Ben pulled her back towards him, nuzzling her neck and then across her jaw to her mouth. ‘You know you never did tell me how you got this.’ He nuzzled the white scar above her lip, catching her off guard.

  Since that first time he’d mentioned it, Ben had never brought the scar up and she’d always done her best to keep it covered. It was a physical reminder of her past. Lately, it had come to represent just how different her life really was from Ben’s, and her growing fear that he’d realise just how improbable their relationship was. She was terrified that Jo was right. That no matter how far she ran, she was still a hairdresser who’d grown up poor, while Ben’s every word dripped with old money.

  ‘Let me up.’ Amy pushed at Ben’s shoulders.

  He rolled onto his side and propped himself up on one arm, searching her expression. She waited for him to talk, say something funny, but at the same time didn’t know what she’d say in reply. Instead she just sat up and hugged her knees to her chest and looked down at the rumpled bed covers in front of her.

  ‘Amy?’ Ben’s voice, unusually serious and low, startled her back to the present.

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘I meant it about the apology. Have I really been that much of a bastard?’ He trailed a finger down her cheek.

  She leaned into his touch, briefly closing her eyes when they began to prickle. ‘No. I was only teasing before.’

  ‘Well, that’s something at least. So I’m correct in understanding this shift in mood isn’t my fault?’

  She took a few seconds to process his words. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes. It doesn’t involve you so you don’t have to worry.’

  ‘Now I’m really worried.’ Ben sat up and swung his feet off the edge of the bed, giving his stomach a scratch and stretching.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if it doesn’t involve me, but it’s serious enough for you to turn down what would have been spectacular sex, something is obviously wrong.’ His expression was so comically disgruntled, Amy felt her mood lighten a little until he stood up and walked out of the room.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To get started on this hot chocolate, which is supposed to be better than sex, and then to find something to restrain you with.’

  ‘Restrain? What?’ She heard cupboard doors banging open and closed in the kitchen, then the sound of running water.

  ‘Oh damn.’ She looked around the bedroom floor and located one of Ben’s T-shirts. It was black and had fit him quite snugly. On her, it fell almost to her knees. She had a funny feeling that Ben was semi-serious about the restraining her part. On top of all that, previous experience had already shown her the man didn’t know how to make hot chocolate worth a damn.

  ‘Talk.’

  It was fifty minutes later and Amy was curled up with her feet propped on the edge of a pine chair, sipping her hot chocolate and trying to ignore the prowling tiger in the room.

  ‘What about?’ she asked, going for chirpy ignorance. It was mildly tempered with her complete exasperation at not looking her best. She was well aware that the make-up and concealer she’d sneakily applied before bed had worn off and that her hair was doing a pretty good impersonation of a bird’s nest. Never in her adult life had a man seen her so undone so many times as Ben. Before now, the only people who’d ever seen her in any form of dishabille so often had been Scott, Jo and rarely, Stephen. Even Myf, Amy’s best friend, had never seen her without make-up.

  Ben straddled the other chair and regarded her over the top, his chin resting on his hands.

  ‘Did he do that to you?’ He gestured towards Amy’s lip.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘This ex of yours. The one you went to the police about.’

  Without even thinking, she shook her head.

  ‘Then who did?’

  ‘How do you know it’s not just a childhood accident?’ She raised her mug to her lips. The chocolate was still far too hot to sip, but she hoped it covered her scar at least a little bit. ‘Ben, do we really have to do this? I’d much rather snuggle up with you back in bed.’

  Ben cocked his head to one side. ‘Why are you trying to hide it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The scar. If it was a childhood injury, you would have just told me. No one ever tries to cover up childhood injuries. They make for delightful stories, something everyone can cringe and laugh about. This is something you want hidden. You know, I’ve only just realised why you always sleep on the one side. It’s to hide it from me just in case I wake up at night, isn’t it?’

  Amy sighed. ‘You’re not going to let this go, are you?’

  ‘No. It’s a mystery and I’ve never liked them. They niggle at me.’

  Amy averted her eyes. ‘Seriously, it’s nothing.’

  ‘I’ll be the judge of that. If it wasn’t the ex-boyfriend, that means more than one person has taken a swing at you.’

  ‘How do you know it was a person?’

  Ben gave her an exasperated glower. ‘Because you would have told me if it was a wild, rabid, enamoured sheep or any other kind of four-legged fiend. Your story,’ he nodded to Amy’s lip, ‘is one with multiple protagonists; you and at least one other person. I like stories. I assure you, I want to hear yours.’ He took a sip of his hot chocolate and grimaced. ‘You know, this is good but it’s still not as good as—’

  ‘It was my dad.’ Amy was shocked at how small her voice sounded.

  ‘Hmm?’ Ben raised both brows but didn’t say anything else.

  ‘I was twelve and he’d just found out my sister and I went to a Christmas party without telling him.’ She looked over Ben’s shoulder, focusing on a small watercolour picture of an iris. ‘He was drunk and lost his temper and beat me with a glass bottle.’

  ‘And?’ The word was sharp, terse.

  Amy drew a deep breath as Ben’s eyes swept over her features, over the rest of her body, as if looking for any more remnants of that night years ago.

  ‘And we left home,’ Amy continued. ‘Scott helped us. He borrowed some money from his mum and we caught a bus to the city. The rest is history.’ She shrugged again, hoping he’d leave it at that. She felt tears, never far from the surface lately, welling in her eyes, and bit the inside of her cheek in an effort to hold them back. ‘I really don’t want to talk about this.’

  ‘Neither do I.’ Ben spoke in a terse voice that Amy felt all the way down to her toes. ‘It’s not exactly easy to hear that someone I care about has been on the wrong end of violence of any kind. It’s also not pleasant to recall you let me get away with joking about you being beaten earlier today without telling me to shut it.’

  ‘Ben . . .’

&
nbsp; He sliced a hand through the air. ‘Is your father still in your life?’

  ‘No,’ Amy said vehemently.

  ‘Good.’ When Amy jumped at his emphatic tone of voice, his expression softened. ‘Sorry, sweetheart. Care to tell me about this ex-boyfriend now? Since we’re on the topic of violence and why you think he’s enough of a threat to talk to the police.’

  Amy was already shaking her head before he finished talking. ‘No. It’s fine. Can we go back to bed?’

  ‘Please.’

  If he’d tried to crowd her it wouldn’t have worked. If he’d tried to bully her it wouldn’t have either. Although she was known for being far nicer than her sister, Amy had a streak of stubbornness that was bone deep and right now she was pushed to the wall and terrified of what would happen if Ben learned about her past.

  Braced for fight then flight as she was, Ben’s polite, single-word plea confounded her. Before she could even think, she heard herself saying softly, ‘Alright.’

  It took her a good half-hour to tell the story from beginning to end. How she’d been ridiculously naïve, never having had a boyfriend through high school because of the need to keep her home life a secret. How it all changed when Jo had introduced her to Liam, an engineer who’d been a few years ahead of Jo at university.

  Trying not to think too much about the words as she said them, Amy told Ben about her first few months with Liam and how he’d tried to control every aspect of her life, getting physical when she fought with him. She shared how she’d broken it off after that one violent episode and how she’d kept it all from Jo – everything up to the present day.

  The sun began to rise over the vineyards outside, bathing the rolling landscape in purples and pinks, and her words finally came to a halt. As she finished, she realised that the tight ball of nerves that had lived in her chest for weeks, maybe years, was now a whole lot looser, unravelling gently with each calm breath she took. She gave Ben a self-deprecating smile.

  ‘Not much of a puzzle, really.’

  Ben didn’t say anything. Sometime in the past little while, he’d started slowly pacing the kitchen while he listened, eventually coming to rest in front of the sink by the window. Amy took in his profile. His features seemed sharper, much more inscrutable than usual. The sleek muscles of his bare back and arms were tensed as he braced himself against the counter.

  ‘You’re a twit, you know.’

  She blinked in confusion. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘A complete twit.’ His accent became more clipped as his words got louder. ‘With the self-preservation of a guppy in a piranha tank. Tell me, when you cross the road, do you look both ways so that oncoming motorists won’t have to deal with the mess you’d make, splattered on their windshields?’

  ‘What? What do you mean?’ Amy asked, stunned.

  ‘You don’t know? She doesn’t know,’ Ben repeated softly to himself and the scenery at large.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Amy said slowly, feeling that fleeting sense of peace she’d experienced only moments ago evaporating.

  Ben turned around and regarded her with incredulity. ‘From what I understand, and correct me if I’m wrong, you’ve just effectively told me that you would do anything to keep the people around you believing that your life is rosy, peaches and cream, all flowers and puppies. Am I right?’

  ‘Yes, well, no. Ben—’

  He held up a hand. ‘So given that you’ve shown quite a bit of affection for me of late, how am I to know you wouldn’t keep me in the dark over something equally serious? If you won’t tell your own sister, the woman that you’ve just admitted means more to you than anyone else, that this Liam,’ he spat the name, ‘is an abusive bully who delights in making you squirm, how do I know that you wouldn’t keep something equally significant from me?’

  ‘This isn’t about you!’

  ‘It bloody well is.’

  ‘No, it’s not! It’s about me and my family, and you asked! All I did was try to make you happy by telling you what was wrong.’

  ‘See? That’s the thing right there, isn’t it?’ Ben resumed his pacing, a lion trapped in a too-small cage. ‘You tried to make me happy.’

  ‘Ben.’

  ‘No, no. I want to explore this.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Amy said tightly. ‘I don’t understand what I’ve done wrong. This isn’t making sense.’ She sniffed loudly and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

  ‘Doesn’t make sense,’ Ben said as if trying to work something out himself. He stopped mid-stride. ‘No, it doesn’t.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t,’ Amy repeated. ‘Can we drop this? I could do with a hug right now. I’m feeling pretty horrible again.’ She gave him a watery smile. ‘See? I can tell you when I’m unhappy.’

  Ben just looked at her blankly before inhaling deeply, looking down at the floor in front of him for a moment, then back at her. ‘Well, I guess that’s something.’

  Amy nodded.

  He ran a hand over his jaw before seeming to come to a decision. ‘You know . . . I’m not quite sure how this is done correctly, but I do believe that if I do this,’ he held out his arms, ‘you’re supposed to fit quite nicely here.’ He glanced down at his chest and then back up at Amy again, his expression intense, his words tight despite the levity they were supposed to imply.

  Amy studied him, feeling a little lost for a few seconds before pushing herself shakily to her feet and into his arms.

  It was the faint relaxation in his shoulders that gave him away. She realised he hadn’t known how to come to her, but he was doing his best.

  ‘It works. You do fit.’ He pulled her close and buried his nose in her hair.

  ‘I do.’ She nuzzled his chest. They stood in the middle of the room, holding each other for a long time as the day got brighter and the landscape woke up.

  ‘Promise me something,’ Ben murmured against her hair.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t give a fuck about my feelings. If you’re ever feeling sad or, heaven forbid, in a dangerous situation, think about yourself and for God’s sake tell me.’

  ‘Ben—’

  ‘Promise me or I’m never, ever doing what I did to you yesterday morning again.’

  Amy nuzzled his chest a little bit more. ‘Oh, well in that case . . .’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I promise but—’

  ‘Now this is where you shush and I repeat yesterday’s performance. All you have to do is take off that T-shirt and put on those little pink heels you were wearing last night. Some of that pink lipstick would help, too.’

  BEN’S FIRST IMPRESSION when he opened his front door and immediately switched the lights on was that his house was cold, and the second was that it was empty. It was something he’d never minded before, but now it felt wrong.

  The houses he owned had never meant all that much to him. His happiness had always been supplied by his friendships more than material possessions. It didn’t take a psychoanalyst to work out why. His rather abysmal childhood had taught him that a friend at one’s back was worth far more than a comfortable pillow. After all, the dorm bully could try to smother you with the latter.

  All he could think of right now was that he could really do with that comfortable pillow after all, and someone to share it with.A specific someone in this instance.

  Toeing off his shoes and leaving them by the front door next to his overnight bag, he padded towards the large windows in the living room. The sea was a stormy confusion of dark greys and greens today. Snarling white caps were slamming into the beach and the sky was the darkest and murkiest grey he’d ever seen.

  For the first time since he’d begun visiting Australia five years earlier, he believed all the stories of the rips present just off the coast that could drag an unsuspecting swimmer far out to sea, drowning them if they didn’t know how to get away. He’d avoided them so far during his morning swims, but had listened attentively when he’d been told one had to swim sideways to escape a violent curre
nt.

  The advice was counterintuitive; simple but not the first option someone gasping for breath would consider. So they drowned. Usually they were tourists who didn’t know the rules. Foreigners. He felt like a foreigner in more ways than one at the moment.

  This past weekend had taken him far from shore and despite being a bloody good swimmer, he felt like the more effort he made to keep from being pulled under, the more he stayed in the same place. It seemed Amy had hidden depths. She fooled everyone with that perfect and polished three-dimensional façade she presented – but not him, not now. The clothes, the impeccable make-up, the chirpy personality, were all smooth waters over untold dangers. If you weren’t careful you’d have spent all your time marvelling at the pretty colours on the surface without thinking about what lay below.

  The thought, although fanciful, left him with a cold coil of dread in his gut. The last time he’d even vaguely trusted a woman, she’d plastered details both intimate and fabricated across the British tabloids for the titillation of the masses. That had been a mild irritation. He hated to think what Amy Blaine could do to him.

  Not that she’d intend on doing anything. No, that was the crush of it right there. He knew if he let her, she’d daze him with her pretty surface, keeping everything even vaguely distasteful to herself, to be dealt with alone. Every now and then he’d have a faint suspicion that her sunny smile was a little forced, but it would pass. He’d never know how she really felt, what was really going on. It’d be like that ocean his parents put between them when he was a small boy, only this time more devastating, because this was one he wanted to dive into.

  He snorted. Only a month or so after meeting the woman and he was already forecasting doom and destruction. Not that it was surprising. They were coming up to the two-month mark soon. His past relationships had rarely lasted more than three and he’d ended every one of them. That he didn’t want to lose Amy was giving him the cold shakes.

  ‘Live in the moment, you stupid bastard,’ he said to himself, imitating Ross’s booming voice, taking one last look at the view before stalking to the kitchen to make some coffee.