Regret

by Max Henry

  “Anything,” he calls back. “I’m not fussy.”

  Yeah, only when it comes to how I arrange my kitchen. I roll my eyes at the thought and retrieve the half loaf of bread I have.

  By the time my coffee is finished, I have a plate stacked with options for Mr “Not Fussy”. Jam, peanut butter, Vegemite, and Nutella.

  He turns from where he’d been poised before the French doors, empty mug slung casually from his thumb.

  “Hungry?” he teases.

  “Thought I better cover all bases.” I make sure to hold my pyjama top close to my chest as I bend over and set the plate on the coffee table.

  He points to the seven-piece setting in my dining room. “You have a dinner table, you know.”

  “Exactly. It’s a dinner table. I never eat breakfast or lunch there.” Come to think of it, I hardly eat dinner there either, since it’s been just me.

  Just me …

  “You pick what you’d like first.” He takes a seat on the sofa closest to him.

  I avert my gaze from his taut boxer-briefs. He could have at least wrangled some pants in the time it took me to make us food. Standing, his T-shirt may cover … certain things, but seated …

  “Problem?”

  Smug bastard knows there is. “You’re half dressed,” I say, swirling my fingertip in his direction.

  “And you’re in your pyjamas still … braless, if I’m not mistaken.” Kill me now. He leans forward and snags a peanut butter slice, despite telling me to pick first. “So where’s the problem?”

  I take the one remaining peanut butter and sit opposite. “Are you always this difficult?”

  His eyes lose all trace of humour, the slight tilt to his lips diving into a downward curl. “Eat up, Cam.”

  The fact he picks up on the shortened name those close to me use warms my chest a little. Only a handful of people call me Cam, one of who doesn’t deserve that privilege anymore.

  “What time is the truck coming?” I ask between bites.

  He shrugs, rolling the next slice—Vegemite—into a kind of Swiss roll and shoving it in like a piece of damn sushi.

  “Might pay to find out,” I say.

  “Thought, being a Saturday, the guy might not be at work yet, given he knocked off early yesterday, and all.”

  “True. Try him after breakfast. Knowing Archie, he’ll have his work phone on him anyway.”

  We sit in silence while he polishes off six slices to my two. His eyes track me as I make my final bites, his gaze unsettling in its intensity as he waits on me to finish and then collects the plate. I lean back on the sofa and eye his wide back as he carries the dish to the kitchen and repeats the same process as last night.

  “You know,” I call out. “If you hang around for a few more meals, I might actually fill that damn thing enough to use it.”

  He looks down at the open dishwasher, the plate held steady in his hand. “Do you not?”

  “Nope.” I chuckle.

  “Oh.” His brow furrows adorably as he works out what to do.

  Keeping the plate in hand, he removes the knife I used to make the toast, and the dishes from last night. I kick my feet up as he searches the cupboards for the dishwashing liquid, loving this domesticated vision, even if it isn’t mine to have.

  “Woman,” he growls. “Where the hell is your dish washing stuff?”

  “With the other cleaning supplies in the bottom of the pantry.”

  He groans, dragging a hand over his face before he shuts the cupboard beneath the sink. As much as I’d love to mess with him some more, I need to get dressed if Archie is going to show up later this morning with the tilt-tray.

  “I’m going to run through the shower, okay?”

  “Make sure you don’t slip,” he calls back as I head for the hallway.

  “Pardon?”

  “You said you were going to run through the shower.” His head pops around the corner of the wall, that lazy grin back again. “I’d advise against that on wet tiles.”

  “Smartarse.”

  I leave the room, smiling like a damn fool as I make my way back to my room to get a change of clothes. My heart thumps painfully hard before racing a mile a minute as I come to a grinding halt in the doorway. With a shaky hand, I reach out and brace it against the doorframe as I realise this stranger in my house made me do something I’ve struggled to do for years.

  I just walked down the hall without twisting away from her face.

  And I didn’t even have to think about it.

  EIGHT

  Duke

  Archie turns out to be an absolute bear of a man. I never considered myself to be on the scrawny side, but next to this monster, I feel as delicate as a Victoria’s Secret model. His beard alone deserves a medal.

  The HQ was loaded easily on his tilt-tray, but not without the guy’s clear disdain at having to come out so far to pick it up. I swear he hasn’t stopped swearing under his breath since he got here, shooting me filthy looks, and asking how long I plan on sticking around.

  The more locals I meet, the more unwelcome I feel.

  “I’ll make some calls, see how long it’ll be to get the part.” He slips the weathered baseball cap off and scratches his head with the same hand as he frowns. “Drop by in an hour, and we’ll sort out how you’re going to pay me. I don’t do payment plans, and I don’t do cash.” He narrows his gaze on me.

  “I’m sure we can sort something out.” I turn to look for Cammie, finding her fussing over the deadheads on the roses at her front door. “Is that okay, Cam?”

  “Huh?” She straightens up, the loose tank she has on doing nothing to hide her gorgeous figure.

  “Archie asked if I could be at the shop in an hour. Would you be able to give me a lift if I spot you some gas money?”

  “Yeah, no worries.” She dusts her hands off, walking closer. “How are the kids, Archie?”

  “Good, thanks, love.” Archie’s lips split into an enormous grin. So the guy knows how to smile? “Dean just started Ripper Rugby, so that’s keeping us all busy.”

  “Awesome. He’ll love that.”

  “They asked after you the other day,” the guy says with a wink.

  I marvel at the way her mere presence has shifted his entire demeanour. He’s gone from brisk and abrupt to relaxed and soft within seconds.

  “Well,” she says with a shrug, “you just tell me when you’d like a night off and I can come babysit again. I’ll bring my popcorn-maker over and the kids and I can have a movie night.”

  “Sounds great, Cammie.” Archie turns to face me as she walks back to her roses, and the smile slides straight from his face, his eyes hard. “See you soon.”

  “Yeah, thanks.” I place a hand to the back of my neck and rub it as he gets in his truck and promptly pulls down the driveway.

  “He’s okay.” Cammie’s sudden statement causes me to flinch.

  I narrowly avoid throwing a fist at her, keeping my arm stiff at my side. “You shouldn’t startle people you don’t know like that.”

  “Oh, come on. I was getting you back for the coffee incident. You can sneak up on people—why can’t I?”

  “Because it’s not the same,” I snap, marching toward the house to get my shit. The sooner she drops me in town the better. I can find somewhere to stay while the car is fixed, get a new phone charger since mine is at home, and put a heck of a lot of distance between this frustrating woman and me.

  Cute, but frustrating.

  “Hey.” She hurries after me. “What was that about?”

  “Nothing,” I mutter, throwing a hand up to ward her off. “I’ll grab my gear and we can go, huh? I’ve got some other shit I can do until I need to be at the shop.”

  “We can have coffee,” she announces, as though I didn’t just snap at her, as though I didn’t come close to punching her lights out. “I’ve got time to kill before the show too. Thought about doing groceries, but we could at least make the trip to town worth it by snagging some of Do
nna’s apple and ginger muffins before they’re all gone. Honestly, you have to try them. She slices it, puts a slab of butter in the middle”—Cammie animates the whole process with her hands as she talks—“and heats it up. It’s so good.” Her voice drops on the last word, her eyes rolling back in her head as her lids droop.

  I should find it funny, amusing at least, but her inane ability to talk the hind leg off a donkey drives me nuts. The phrase “silence is golden” was coined for a reason. Pretty sure somebody out there discovered how peaceful it could be when you were left without the chatter of the world, and he decided to aptly name how precious it was to find such solace; he didn’t just come up with the saying for shits and giggles.

  “I’m sure her muffins are delicious, but you’ve already done a lot. I wouldn’t expect you to waste half your weekend on me.”

  She frowns, twisting her lips to one side. “Well, if you’re sure. I mean, I don’t get much opportunity to go there anymore. Work keeps me busy during the week, and between the theatre and the odds and ends I volunteer for, Sundays are pretty much the only time I have to myself outside of errands and she’s closed then.”

  Again with the talking. I pinch the bridge of my nose and sigh. “Whatever, then. Would you like me to give you something for the food last night and this morning?”

  She slices a hand through the air with a huff from between her velvet-red lips. “Don’t be silly; you were my guest.”

  The entire fifteen-minute car ride continues in the same fashion. She chats incessantly about pointless shit that stretches from the reason why she chose to have no colours in the house, to why she prefers to listen to old-school grunge rock on Spotify over the modern songs played on the radio. Yet, as I sit quietly in the passenger seat, watching her gesture wildly and crumple her face in a stern expression, it doesn’t escape my notice that she avoids the obvious elephant in the coupe: why she’s single when clearly, once, she wasn’t, and what the hell all the kids stuff around the place is about. Last I checked, young unattached females didn’t have entire children’s dining sets in their kitchen cupboards, child-sized food items in their fridge, and pictures of toddlers with them in their hall unless they were a mother.

  Cammie doesn’t once speak like she is. In fact, the only family she makes scarce mention of in her chatter is her parents, who are separated.

  It’s intriguing, meeting a person who keeps secrets just as I do and viewing it from the other side. I wouldn’t know half her struggles if I hadn’t been in her house, listened to her talk. Is this how I appear to people I meet?

  “Archie’s shop is over there.” She points out the windscreen at a flat-roofed garage across the intersection we’re currently stopped at. “Your car’s probably inside. He doesn’t like leaving them out in the yard; thinks people are going to randomly vandalise them.” She rolls her eyes as she says this, as though the thought of anybody doing such a thing is too ridiculous to believe.

  I eye the place as she pulls around the corner and glides us into a parallel park on the roadside. It seems tidy enough, as though the guy takes pride in his workspace, which is always a bonus when it comes to tradesmen. A messy workshop could mean the same lack of care spilled over into his job, and while I know the HQ isn’t some fine supercar, I still expect to be paying for quality work.

  “Donna’s café is usually packed on a Saturday, so be forewarned that space might be at a premium if you want to eat in.” Cammie kills the engine, and removes the keys.

  “Takeaway’s fine with me.” Wide open spaces are also fine with me, so if she wants to eat out in the street, I’m all for it.

  She opens her door and rises from the car, promptly reaching between the seat and the door pillar to retrieve her bag from where she’d slung it behind the driver’s seat. “Come on,” she singsongs when I don’t move. “Don’t know about you, but that toast has worn off and I’m famished. There’s also a tall cup of coffee with my name on it.”

  I sigh as she closes the door with a thud, and reach for my handle. She needn’t worry about me staying in the car too long: the shift in the air as she exited and closed her door was enough to spike my heart rate. There’s a reason why I travelled most of the way with the HQ’s window down, the same reason why for most of this journey I kept a hand securely gripped to the seat between my legs.

  I needed to anchor myself in the storm, find stability to cling to while I ride out the crazy rollercoaster of anxiety I live with now.

  Cammie fusses with her hair, smoothing down wayward tresses as she stands on the sidewalk waiting for me to join her. The woman really is a sight for sore eyes. Her skin is flawless, her kissable lips painted a dark shade that pulls my eye to them every time, and those lashes—dark and framing her eyes perfectly. But I don’t sense that she spends a lot of time on her appearance—rather she’s been doing this look for so long that it’s second nature to wrap herself up in the cloak of invisibility before she steps out into the world each day.

  You look at her, and she’s a pretty girl. She’s not a woman hiding a deeper pain. She blinds people with her visual appeal so that they have something to stop at, a reason not to dig any deeper to find satisfaction from being in her presence.

  I wonder if distraction is the reason why she’s so damn talkative, too.

  “I’ll pay for this,” I tell her as we start toward the café.

  “Rubbish.” She stares straight ahead, her gaze locked on a real estate office across the street. “I said you don’t need to pay me back anything,” she protests, but her focus is clearly on that realtor.

  “You looking?”

  “Huh?” Her eyes burn bright as she snaps back to the present.

  “The realtor. You were staring at it. You want to grab our bite to eat and go check out the listings in the window?”

  “No,” she snaps.

  The terse response takes me by surprise.

  I hold the door for her, and she hesitates, an apologetic smile pursing her lips. “I’m sorry, Duke. There’s just … stuff going on, and I shouldn’t have taken it out on you like that.”

  “Duck’s back.” I brush it off with a flick of my chin toward the counter. “Quick, while there’s only a couple of people at the till.”

  She weaves her way through the small round tables—all wooden with mismatched chairs—to the cabinet displaying the baked goods. A couple of people greet her as she passes, and I hang back a few steps so I can watch her interact.

  It’s curious, the way she clearly knows so many people in her small community, and yet her home life demonstrates she’s probably one of the loneliest people I’ve ever met.

  “Do you have particular tastes?” she asks as we stop at the counter. “Or are you willing to try the apple and ginger?” Cammie nudges me with her elbow, a smile reaching her eyes as she looks up at me.

  “Whatever you suggest,” I answer.

  She goes ahead and orders, remembering how I like my coffee when she picks a flat white for me. Our drinks come in brightly coloured takeaway cups, the muffins individually bagged in brown paper, ready to go. Cammie walks ahead as we leave the café, oblivious to the sneaky stares we get as I follow. I glance back at the people, unassuming types including an older lady with a blue rinse, a white-collared man who stands at the leaner by the front window reading the morning paper, and a mother of twins, who watches us walk out as she absently talks to one of her children. Nobody’s threatening. Nobody seems to offer ill will. Simply people from a town small enough that everybody knows each other’s history and habits.

  People who look out for one another.

  People like I used to be.

  Since I’ve been back in civilian life, I’ve retreated into my head, building a carefully constructed thick shell around me. The shit that happened overseas affected me worse than I’ve ever given it credit for. It changed me so significantly that there wasn’t much of the old me left inside to recognise the difference.

  I’m a completely new guy. And th
e new guy is a douche.

  “So,” I start as Cammie leads us past the car toward the intersection. “You mentioned you spend a lot of time in theatre. Are you a nurse? A doctor?” I swallow back the unease wedging in my throat at being the one to initiate personal conversation. With a woman who gets under my skin, no less. But hey, if I can practice with her, maybe it’s the first step towards being the old non-douchey Duke again?

  Fingers crossed.

  She laughs at my question, handing me the bags of muffins so she can use her free hand to push the pedestrian button. “Not that kind of theatre, although I can see why you thought that with how I said it and all. That’s kind of funny actually. I should tell Mum, she’d get a laugh out of it. Me: a doctor. Like that would happen.”

  Once more with the runaway tongue.

  “I meant thespian theatre,” she continues. “The drama club in town here do one major show a year, and some smaller street-performance style events in between. I’m part of the crew.”

  “The crew. Like backstage?”

  “Yeah.” She flashes me a sweet smile as the walk signal buzzes.

  I shake my head in disbelief as we start across the road. If somebody had shown me a picture of Cammie and asked me what I thought her pastime was, I would have stabbed a guess at one of those YouTube makeup bloggers you see chicks sharing all over Facebook.

  Acting? Backstage? Never would have picked it.

  “Explains the black clothing, I guess.”

  She drops a short “Ha” before taking a deep breath to prepare for her next verbal marathon. “Not quite. I’ve always been into that kind of look. I was a Goth in high school, if you can believe it. I guess it sort of spilled over into the rest of my life; but I suppose you could tell that by my house, huh?” She peers up at me as we approach the low timber railings that surround the local parkland. “Although, it’s not just my house. I co-own it with my ex, Jared.” Her face falls, and I get a sense that this is the stuff she said was bothering her before. “He wants me to sell it so we can wrap up our separation.”