by Ally Blake
Stan’s crumbs of praise? To keep her friends out of trouble? The next hapless guy to fixer-up – her version of control over chaos?
Finn was going somewhere.
The thought leapt out at her like a pixie from behind a bush. Yoohoo! Aren’t I cute as a button? Maybe she could find out where he was going. Subtly. In case it was somewhere she might like to end up too.
She cracked her neck, shaking off the ridiculous thought. Her life – for all its dysfunction – was here. Finn was a passing fancy. She fancied him from the depths of his gorgeous brain to the ends of his adorable toes and all the delicious bits in between—
“Is that true?”
April came back to earth to find her mum looking at her with her concerned face. The one that deepened the creases above her nose that had appeared the night her father had left them for good.
“Hmm?” April said. “What was that?”
Erica sat higher in her chair. “I was just telling mum about Hazel’s spot on Sydney Tonite last night.”
“Her what now?”
“You didn’t see it? Wow. It was illuminating. Hazel talked about sex and the single woman. She talked about all three of her marriages. She talked about the lengths she goes to in order to make sure her clients always get what they want. Whatever it takes. She was so convincing, I near shouted ‘Amen!’”
“Am I meant to know of this woman?” Kay asked.
Erica’s eyes were all on April. “Our bright-eyed, bushy-tailed little rebel here signed up to the love preacher’s dating service.”
April gritted her teeth. Where was a distracting pixie when she needed one? “I thought I’d made it clear that that’s not what it is.”
Erica held up her phone and the Cinderella Project website glared back at her in all its sparkly glory. It’s tag line? Modern matchmaking... old school style.
Eyes back on her phone, Erica read, “The Cinderella Project – teaching the young women of today how to nab a good husband, the right husband, a rich husband. Introducing them to the delights of upmarket bars, spring racing, high-roller’s rooms, sophisticated dining and age-old—and near-lost—husband-hunting techniques such as how to work a barstool. Fend off the great unwashed. Tempt a millionaire. Seduce from afar. String them out. Make them beg. And get the ungettable get.”
The silence that followed was so thick, when a fork hit a plate across three tables over, April flinched.
While her mother looked at her like she’d just realised she’d given birth to a Martian. “April? Is this true?”
April cleared her throat. “Okay, so that is one of their functions. But that’s not what I signed up for.”
“But what about—”
“Erica, enough.”
Finn was the last thing she wanted to discuss with her mother. Kay would shred the foundations of the affair, piece-by-tiny-piece, dissecting them until they were mulch. April already knew they were mulch. She just wanted to enjoy the memory of the mulch as long as she could.
“I haven’t signed up to a dating service. I want a promotion. Believing my work image needed updating, I turned to a reinvention program. It’s unique. And rigorous. And it’s working.”
“It also includes a Cinderella-level makeover,” Erica added, oh so helpfully. “You should have seen her! Everything but the glass slipper.”
Kay’s gaze shot to April’s hair which – even with three shampoos – had still not quite gone back to its usual intractable wave. “I knew something about you was different. When you walked in here, I could feel it. Something in the way you walked.”
Erica leaned her chin on her upturned palm and batted her lashes. “That’d be from her all-nighter with—”
“Erica!” It was all April could do not to pinch her sister on the leg.
Ignoring the interplay – nobody ignored things they didn’t want to see like their mother – Kay said, “You hair too. And your eyes.”
The mascara they’d plied her with must have been waterproof, sleep proof, and bomb proof. “It’s just makeup Mum. It’ll wear off. Eventually.”
“It’s not that. There’s something new behind your eyes. Surety? Confidence? Ease? Dare I say happiness?” Only Kay Swanson could say these things like they were signs to be studied rather than celebrated. “As if your odd need for those little rebellions of yours has been swept aside by something greater, thank goodness. For all of your sister’s wild ways, April, I’d always expected the late–night, bail-me-out-of-jail phone call from you.”
“Really?” the Swanson sisters said as one.
“Of course. What your father did to April was inexcusable. Damaging. Psychologically irreversible.”
Erica threw her hands in the air. They’d heard it all before.
But it seemed Kay wasn’t done. She smoothed a single stray hair back into her perfect bob. Then took April by the chin in her I-am-looking-deep-into-your-eyes-because-I-mean-what-I-am-about-to-say move. “I know you missed the last several sessions I set up with Dr. Houseman. Hypnosis might help your situation.”
Erica snorted. “I vote for electroshock.”
At the end of her pretty amazingly long tether, April really needed not to be the centre of attention any more. “Did Erica tell you about her new venture?”
Erica gave April the evil eye. It might have worked when they were kids but now...? Okay, it still worked. But April was drowning here and Erica’s sucky work resume was going to be her life raft.
“New venture?”
Erica sat taller, shaking her long, perfect hair over her shoulder. “I’ve decided that being a travel agent isn’t for me.” It had been a while since she’d deigned to join them on their catch-ups.
Their mother sighed the sigh of the perennially disappointed. And for a second April felt, well like a bit of a cow.
“So, what now?” their mother asked.
“It’s exciting,” April said, nodding at Erica. Come on. Get in there. “She’s starting up a business hosting children’s birthday parties.”
“Children?”
Yes, mother. You had two of them once.
“Cool stuff. Ballerinas in boots. Fairy punk. Non gender-biased, amazing parties for the discerning, new-age parent.”
Their mother lifted her drink to her mouth. Looked with hard eyes at her older girl. Her older girl who looked so very much like the husband who’d left her in shreds.
Then, from one blink to the next, she turned back to April. “April, what are you so stressed about that it sent you to this woman looking for answers?”
“Here we go,” Erica muttered.
“No,” their mother said, hand held out flat to Erica, like one would to calm a dog. “Let her talk. April, you know that you only go to such extremes when you feel disconnected. Like the time you spray-painted Erica’s phone number on the outside of the public toilets in Hyde Park.”
Erica snorted out a laugh. April was pretty sure she muttered, “Good one.”
Then Erica went back to flicking at her phone, but not before adding, “She has a tattoo, you know.”
“Erica. She does not. She knows I believe tattoos are gateway rebellions.”
“Gateways to what? Bigger tattoos?”
“Erica. Stop stirring.”
“I do,” April said, eyes on Erica who seemed to be getting smaller by the second.
It suddenly occurred to April that Erica’s thinness might be a concerted effort at invisibility.
Kay’s focus shifted fully to April. “Do what?”
“Have a tattoo.”
Kay sucked air through a tiny gap between her teeth. “Since when?”
“Since I’m a grown woman.”
“Amen.” Erica, again. Thought she was back to playing on her phone.
“I beg to differ, April,” Kay said. “Such extremes—”
“Has it ever occurred to you that ‘such extremes’ might be my natural state of being? That the moments I let loose, go wild, aren’t ways of acting out over being aban
doned by Dad but are, simply, me?”
Erica’s phone dropped to the table and she sat a little higher in her chair. She had to be loving this – being on the viewing end of a mother-daughter fight for once.
“What’s gotten into you?”
“A man,” Erica said helpfully. “A man’s gotten into her.”
Kay’s mouth stretched into a thin line. While April felt heat climb her body like a barrel of monkeys.
“That’s the difference in you. This man.”
“Mum,” April said, exasperated.
“Don’t do it, April. Don’t let him change you with his lies and promises he can’t keep.”
“And what if I just don’t care about all that? So what if I want to have a good time with a not so perfect man?”
As silences went, that one was a biggie.
“Mum, has it ever occurred to you that all the time I spend baking cupcakes to keep my hands busy and binge-watching soaps about good daughters are nothing but an effort at being the good girl, for your sake? Never, not ever, for mine?”
Her mother breathed. From the fire in her eyes, it was a miracle smoke didn’t curl from her nostrils. But kicking out the walls of the box her mother had put her in felt good. Freeing. And about damn time.
Kay eased herself elegantly out of her chair. “I think it best we leave it there. Take some time to reevaluate.”
Men’s heads turned as Kay eased through the cafe – young men and not so young. Just as she’d intended. But it was all look, don’t touch with Kay. All men were to pay penance for deeds done badly by one of their own.
She went to the counter to pay. Even after April’s outburst, she’d never expect her girls to cough up. Probably because she refused to allow for a time when they didn’t need her. As if being needed was her supporting beam.
“Why did you have to bring up the parties?” Erica hissed as soon as Kay was outside of spitting distance.
April rolled her eyes, then gulped down half a glass of water. Trust Erica to have no clue that something truly life-changing had just happened. “Ah, because it’s cool.”
Erica shot her a look, searching for the sarcasm. “Well, it’s over.”
“After one party?”
“One of the little girls vomited on the way home. Too much party food was cited in my dismissal. As if it was my job to monitor every tiny teddy that went into their voracious little mouths.”
“So, now what?”
April couldn’t imagine how Erica felt. Staying at her little sister’s apartment because she couldn’t keep her own. Unable to find a job that fit. A mother who looked at her like she wasn’t from their planet. It had to be a scary feeling. Erica had to feel lost.
April opened her mouth to say something, to offer comfort, or support, but Erica got there first.
“Mum’s right, you know.”
April was so shocked her mouth popped open and stayed there. “You did not just say—”
“Finn’s just another man who won’t love you like you want him to love you.”
April’s heart squeezed so hard she actually gasped. “Why do you have to be so cruel?”
“To be kind. He makes me nervous. On your behalf. The men you date are such easy targets. Guys who simper at your feet for having looked their way. Men like that will never hurt you. But Finn... He’s dangerous. Careful. Too slick for his own good. Like that guy in that show you love so much. The hot servant.”
April knew who she meant in a heartbeat, her addiction to Downton Abbey was the stuff of folklore. “Barrow is nothing like Finn. He’s gay for one thing.”
“There is that. But he’s also a bad guy, April. No money on guessing why that appeals.”
April shook her head. “He’s not bad. He’s wounded. And sad. And redeemable. You just have to keep watching. He’ll surprise you in the end.”
The words sparked in the air between them, like hot ash spitting from a bonfire. But as they fell, Erica saw them form into neat, orderly patterns.
Wounded men. Misunderstood men. Men she could redeem, help, fix. Her father had gone before she’d been given the chance to help him. To make him happy enough to stay.
Anger and fear and pain coalesced in April’s belly, turning her chocolate croissant into a ball of lead. “Like you’re so perfect.”
Erica elegantly pulled herself to standing. “This isn’t about me.”
“So the fact that you date indiscriminately without ever having an actual long-term boyfriend has no relation to Dad?”
Erica raised a solitary eyebrow, a sure sign verbal venom was a coming.
But April was not to be deterred. “You do realise that you’re substituting one kind of therapy for another?”
Erica shook her hair off her shoulder. Glanced at their mother who was arguing over the bill with the poor, young guy on the counter. “A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do to get by in this world, sis. And if that means kidding herself that she’s not falling for a man who’ll never fall back, then so be it.”
And then she was gone.
Leaving April feeling so boxed in she could barely breathe.
Chapter Eleven
Knock-knock. Knock-knock-knock.
April stood outside Finn’s apartment door, knocking for the third time.
After the disastrous family breakfast, she’d been completely off her game at work. Answering the phone all wrong. Snapping at poor Clara for, well, being Clara. Signing off on one of Smith’s nutty staff morale ideas, she’d nixed a half dozen times over the past eighteen months.
But fixing all that was tomorrow’s problem.
This evening’s problem was bigger. It pertained to the fraying of the fabric of her actual life. Somehow, in the past weeks, all the neat and tidy had been tipped upside down. She’d become the mean sister. The back-chatty daughter. She’d put worry in the eyes of her landlady. She was the girl everyone was talking about at work.
None of which had ever happened until she’d signed up with the Cinderella Project—
So why wasn’t she banging down Hazel’s door?
Knock. Knock... bang-bang-bang!
“I know you’re in there, Finn! Joe told me so!”
Thankfully, the at the security desk had remembered her and let her in the lift. “He never has ladies over,” he’d said behind a whispering hand. “Just so you know.”
If Joe hadn’t let her up, she was so wound up she might have scaled the building. Such was the extremity of the urge to see the man.
Extremes. Urges. Her mother would have a field day with the internal workings of her mind.
April lifted her hand to knock but the door sprang open, momentum propelling her through the doorway. She pulled herself about an inch short of her intended victim.
Finn. Naked, bar a skimpy white towel wrapped around his waist. Hair dripping into his eyes. Blue eyes. Not altogether happy blue eyes. Belonging to naked – nearly – Finn. Right up inside her space.
“April,” he said, a hand reaching out to stop her from ploughing into him. He sounded exasperated. Well, sure, she’d just forced him out of the shower with her infernal knocking after promising she was all fine and dandy about them spending just the one night together.
“What are you doing here, April?”
Good question.
“I could pretend and say I’m here to ask how the contract’s going if that made you feel better about things, but that would be lying.”
A muscle worked in Finn’s cheek. “Would you like to come in?”
“Sure. Thanks.” April tucked her hair behind her ear then scooted around his glorious, wet, near–nakedness, pretending to be more interested in his glimpse views of the harbour.
The apartment looked different in the late afternoon light. Emptier. Sadder. Even though it wasn’t yet exactly the home she hoped it could be, her place was at least filled with flowers and colour and books and light and clutter.
But now was not the time for distractions. She had things t
o say. She spun on her heel, hair flicking around her head—
To find Finn’s gaze slinking from her fitted Wonder Woman t-shirt to her tight, red jeans. So she’d gone home and changed before charging over there. She needed back up. Fierce back up. If Wonder Woman couldn’t do it, nobody could.
“Eyes on mine, buddy. I have things I need to say and I need to know you’ve heard them.”
Finn’s mouth jerked. He licked his lips and did what he was told.
Which meant she had to keep her eyes on his too. Not easy when he was wet. Naked (nearly). And Finn. “I’ll give you a minute to put a shirt on.”
“Second time you’ve asked me to do that,” he said, not moving an inch.
Okay so his chest muscles might have moved. Twitching one after the other.
“It’s distracting.”
“I don’t care.”
Her breath hitched when his towel slid an inch down one hip. “No need to be rude.”
“Coming to my apartment without invitation, somehow conning my security guy into letting you up in the lift, then banging down my front door isn’t rude?”
She held a hand up in front of her and closed one eye so she could see his face but nothing else. “We’ll get to that. My turn to talk, remember.”
He readjusted. Through the gaps between her fingers the towel flapped open. Half a second at most. Still, she got a load of thigh, knee, more. Her mouth went dry.
“You kissed me,” she croaked. “The other day.”
“I did a lot more than that.”
She flushed. Inside and out. But she was not to be distracted.
“I mean at the car. You kissed me. Like you meant it. Like you didn’t want to let me go. I know you said all the words necessary to make me believe it was a one-time thing. But your words don’t match your actions, Finn. Your words don’t match your eyes. Your words don’t match the way you touch me. The way you look at me. The way you kiss me.”
His eyes grew dark. The muscles in his neck tightened. His nostrils flared. And he white knuckled the towel.
