Nobody But Him

by Victoria Purman

  Julia slowly shook her head. No, she knew she wasn’t. They’d been careful, even when it was the last thing they’d wanted to do, interrupting all that desperate, knee-trembling sex.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m certain, Ry,’ she managed to say. ‘I’m not pregnant.’

  Ry let out a deep breath and found her hands. ‘Well, there I go again. Another obviously well-intentioned but non-judgmental conclusion.’

  ‘Why would you think I was pregnant?’ Julia closed her eyes, trying not to get angry about Ry’s assumption. This was all so confusing.

  ‘I heard you and Lizzie talking in the pub yesterday and it threw me for a loop, if you really want to know. I didn’t know what the hell to think. Mostly, I was wondering why you hadn’t told me.’ He held on to her, looked intently into her eyes. ‘Julia, if you are, you would make me the happiest man in the whole damn world.’

  Julia could hear it in his voice and see it in his face. He meant every word. Part of her ached at the knowledge that she was disappointing him. Her stomach flipped and she couldn’t think straight. Her mind was reeling at his reaction.

  What would hers be if it were true? Pregnant? With Ry’s child? The whole idea was even crazier than being in love with him.

  Ry slowly got up from the floor and sat on the bed next to her, reaching one arm around her shoulders. His weight on the bed had her leaning close to him and he held her tight.

  ‘Okay.’ He took in a deep breath, blew it out with a chuckle. ‘You had me convinced, I heard Lizzie say ‘pregnant’ and then ‘congratulations’ last night and then give you a huge girly hug.’

  So he’d heard snatches of that conversation as it had drifted across the bar but, thankfully, not all of it. Her secret about coming home was still safe. For the moment. There were things she had to do before she told him.

  ‘You know Lizzie,’ Julia said, trying to brush it off. ‘She was just glad to hear the news about Dan, that was all.’

  ‘Yeah, I get it. Man, I’ve been a little … you know. Exhausted and distracted and love-bombed. It’s been a crazy few weeks and this morning, when I was out running, I started to think about it and it didn’t seem like such a bad idea, you know, if you were. I figured, what the hell. After what we’ve been through lately, I reckon we can cope with anything the universe throws up at us, right?’

  Julia felt her flipping stomach transform into a tightening knot. What was he saying? Did he really want to have a baby with her? It sure sounded like it. A baby meant a future together and a family and making memories and a history.

  Was this going to be the moment? She lifted her head from his shoulder and looked up at him. His hair was ruffled but his expression wasn’t. He looked completely calm. His eyes were brilliant blue and soft, his mouth was set in a crooked smile and his lips were slightly parted and moving closer to her.

  When they touched hers, Julia knew she had found her home.

  ‘Oh Ry. I was crying, I’ll admit it. But it’s not hormones. It’s being in here, in my old room, trying to pack a suitcase that’s way too small for everything I want to take. It hit me. This is it. This is the last time I’ll sit here.’

  Julia managed a sad smile, blinked back the tears. ‘There’s something about being back in Middle Point that’s made me face things, face myself, for the first time. I left the old me right here in this room when I ran off to Melbourne fifteen years ago. This was my little sanctuary, where I listened to the music I liked and Mum hated, where I read my precious books. Where I hid from everyone when things got tough and cursed at the world for all the unfairness of my life, as teenagers do.’

  Julia took a deep breath. ‘And this is the place I retreated to, where I cried my eyes out over leaving you.’

  Ry stared intently at her hand in his, caressing her palm with his thumb. The heat from his body warmed her through to her core. He raised his eyebrows and smiled.

  ‘That’s not how I remember it. I don’t reckon you even looked back when you drove away in that little red rust bucket.’

  ‘I couldn’t face you after what I’d said, what I was about to do.’

  ‘You were tough.’

  ‘No, I was a good actress. It broke my heart to go, didn’t you know that?’

  Ry shook his head. ‘I thought I was the only one with the broken heart. But hell, JJ, I was twenty years old. It was all about me then. I felt entitled to have things my way. I’d never had a knock back from any girl I’d ever met. Until you. I felt invincible, until that day you left. You see, I thought if you really loved me, you’d stay. But I was an idiot. Now, being older, wiser, and definitely more handsome, I do realise that things are never quite that black and white.’

  ‘You weren’t the only naïve one. Things were pretty black and white for me back then too. I wanted a big life and I was convinced I’d have to find it somewhere else. Anywhere else but Middle Point. Nothing was going to stop me, not even you.’

  ‘You think I don’t know that?’ he laughed. ‘But I’ve realised some things in the years since, now that I’ve lived a little. Lived a lot. Back then, I wanted you to live my life, to fit into what I wanted. That was never going to work for you and you were smart enough to know it.’

  ‘I had big dreams.’

  ‘You see? That was the difference between you and me. I didn’t have a plan until five years ago when Dad died and I had to step in and save the company. So I get it now, I really do. You’d just finished high school. You were eighteen, for God’s sake, and you’d just lost your father. You didn’t want to be stuck here in Middle Point.’

  Julia leaned up to kiss his jaw, the stubble giving way to smoothness as she pressed her lips to his face again and again. She reached her hand around him and held it on the flat of his belly. His chest rose and fell with each deep breath.

  ‘Meeting you just made it complicated,’ she said.

  ‘Is it still complicated?’

  Julia threw her arms around his neck, working them up into his hair and pressing her body to his. Then she took his mouth, fiercely and urgently. That was all the answer he needed.

  ‘Julia,’ he groaned.

  She tore her lips from his, reluctantly and only enough to say, between panting breaths. ‘We’ve got two hours before I need to catch my plane. And the airport is more than an hour away.’

  Ry stared into her eyes. ‘I’d better get used to that drive.’

  Julia met his eyes. ‘Why is that?’

  ‘I’ll be racking up a few million frequent flyer miles, don’t you think, with all those flights to Melbourne?’

  She looked down and could see he was already hard. ‘We’ve got thirty minutes.’

  ‘Then you’d better get those clothes off pretty fucking quick.’

  CHAPTER

  30

  ‘What’s the address?’

  Julia fought with the wind to pull the taxi door closed, shutting out the frigid Melbourne winter.

  ‘Brunswick, thanks.’ The taxi driver took off into the stream of traffic leaving Tullamarine and Julia sank back in the passenger seat. Already the fumes were unfamiliar and unpleasant, and the traffic of the Sunday afternoon thick and slow moving. She tried to sleep a little, given she’d had so little the night before but as the open spaces became warehouses and discount shopping barns, she tried to remember every minute of saying goodbye to Ry.

  They’d made love with a new intensity. It was different for both of them, she could see it in his eyes as surely as she could feel it in her own heart. The pressure had somehow lifted. They freed themselves from their history, and were able to really understand each other for the first time. They’d barely spoken on the drive to the airport. Julia let her hand rest on his thigh the whole way, he reached out to touch her it wasn’t goodbye, but they didn’t know exactly how their future would shape itself. Ry hadn’t given her a particular date for his first Melbourne trip and she hadn’t asked. She had a huge surprise planned anyway.

  The indust
rial landscape soon gave way to new, crowded suburbs and Julia realised she was on her way back to a place that would soon be a street number in her memory. The white single-fronted cottage situated in a side lane off Lygon Street wouldn’t be home for very much longer and just thinking about that made her grin.

  Home. She was really going home to Middle Point. A wave of contentment bubbled up inside her and flashed through her veins like a drug. Just the thought of her grand plan made her giddy and she giggled. She knew she would make peace with selling her mother’s place. She needed to say goodbye to that house, she knew, and Kevin Higgins was still working hard on the sale. She wasn’t in a hurry. There was time to wait until she got a good deal. Julia knew she would also eventually have the proceeds of her Melbourne place to add to her savings account, for she was going to say goodbye to Melbourne in every way.

  If her grand plan came off, she wouldn’t be homeless for long. Julia knew she was good at plans and, if this particular one was successful, she’d have a home to live in and, more importantly, the right man to share it with. With the proceeds from the sale of both homes, she would have a nice little nest egg to build her own business. But she would have the luxury of time when creating that part of her new life. There was no rush. She felt like she’d been working hard forever and didn’t need to prove anything to anyone anymore. She could take her time and just be.

  That was her plan. And it was foolproof.

  Half an hour later, Julia waved goodbye to the cab and turned her key in the lock, dragging her suitcase behind her over the wooden floorboards of the hallway to her bedroom. Everything was as she’d left it. She’d had the mail held and suspended the delivery of the paper so there wasn’t a pile of things to clear. A quick glance at the computer on her work desk in the corner of the living room and Julia stopped. Before going home to Middle Point, she would have rushed over and turned it on to check emails and the news websites. Not tonight. There was so much to do, and she needed to get a good night’s sleep if she was going to be up at the crack of dawn to get it all organised the next day.

  After a warming shower, Julia sank into her familiar bed, her fingers splayed just under her breasts across her ribs. She wondered at the direction her life had taken. If someone had predicted three weeks ago that she’d be about to pack up her life and go home to Middle Point she would have suggested there were better odds of her riding the winning horse in the Melbourne Cup.

  The recognisable noises of busy Lygon Street hummed through her head as she lay there in the dark in the warm flannelette sheets. Three weeks. Twenty-one days. It felt as if a different person had left this cottage and flown back to Middle Point to deal with her mother’s estate. To finally say goodbye.

  Her whole life had been turned on its head.

  How was it possible that what she and Ry had felt for each other all those years ago was still there? What had lain dormant all the years they were apart had flickered back into life over the space of a couple of weeks? That was the miracle of Middle Point, she realised. Just as the whales were compelled to come back to calve, the pull of the place was primal for her. It was in her bones, in her very DNA. It had been imprinted on her since she took her first steps on the beach, one of her tiny, trusting hands in each of her parents’. She’d fought it for so long. But would fight it no more. Soon, she would be home, would willingly go back there, where she could walk the Middle Point beach every day, and feel in every fibre of her being the throbbing rhythm of the ocean, calming her, grounding her.

  Three weeks. And a crisis that meant those she loved — and those she had grown to love so much — rallying around each other. Like a family. She wasn’t going to go home alone, as an orphan. She was going to go home to be enveloped in the lives and love of Ry and his mother, her dear friend Lizzie, and Dan. That realisation had her heart bursting in her chest.

  Her hands moved with a will of their own from her ribs to the softness of her belly. She went over for the hundredth time Ry’s misunderstanding of her conversation with Lizzie.

  He’d thought she was pregnant.

  If you are, you would make me the happiest man in the whole damn world.

  She’d never imagined herself as a mother. Being an only child herself, she didn’t have nieces or nephews to dote on, the very presence of whom might have excited some latent maternal instinct. Did she want a baby? Up until now, the answer had always been a resounding, God no. But there had never been a man worthy enough in her life for it to be even a remote possibility. And she was only thirty-three. There were plenty of years left on the body clock, weren’t there? Ry’s reaction certainly hadn’t been one of shock or revulsion. In fact, there’d been a gleam in his eye and a killer smile he couldn’t hide when he’d spoken of it. Was it something she wanted? Now that she was going to leave this life behind and go home?

  As she fell into exhausted sleep, a flicker in her heart gave her the answer.

  Ry would have considered himself the luckiest man in the world if he’d never have to walk through the sliding front doors of the Flinders Medical Centre ever again. He’d grown used to stalking the corridors like he was one of the staff but, today, he was relieved at the thought that this would all soon be coming to an end. Dan had been doing so well that he’d been moved into the High Dependency Unit in preparation for the shift to a general ward, which meant that not only was he on the road to recovery, but he was well on the way to getting out of hospital. These were all crucial steps in getting Dan well and Ry was patiently taking them one day at a time. Unlike the patient.

  Ry entered the High Dependency Unit carrying a take-away coffee for himself, a new iPod and a stack of men’s health magazines.

  He heard Dan before he saw him and laughed to himself. His friend was lying back on the hospital bed, one arm behind his head, his broken leg still elevated inside a wire frame covered with a sheet.

  At a glance, he looked like any ordinary patient. There were no more monitors, and the only thing he was attached to was the television remote control. Which explained the swearing.

  Ry sauntered over and dumped the magazines and the iPod on the narrow table that straddled the bed. Dan was jabbing at buttons on the remote and cursing the screen.

  ‘I swear, mate, daytime TV is a form of torture designed to make me want to get the hell out of here as fast as I fucking-well can.’

  ‘Hello to you too.’ Ry grinned and settled his large frame into the plastic chair by Dan’s bedside. He leaned back, stretched his long legs out in front of him and took a sip of his coffee. Dan looked like his old self, which Ry found hugely reassuring, except for the purple-yellow bruises under his eyes. His face still needed some time to get the life back into it, some decent food to fill out his cheeks again and some sun to shift the pallor of his skin. All that would come. But the return of the attitude? Ry figured that was a good sign.

  ‘You here to piss me off? It’s working.’

  ‘What charming bedside manners you have, Danny Boy.’

  Dan managed a rueful smile. ‘I need to get out of here. I’m going nuts.’

  ‘No shit.’ Ry nodded to the table. ‘I got you a new iPod and loaded it with some music. Thought it might help you pass the time in here.’

  Dan reached over for the box, and Ry tried not to react when he saw his face contort in pain.

  Dan struggled to exhale. ‘Aah, and it’s not even my birthday.’

  ‘I loaded up some good stuff. You like Justin Bieber, don’t you?’

  Dan raised a solitary middle finger before unpacking the device and flicking it on. He scrolled through the music, checking out the songs Ry had chosen. Then he slowly unscrambled the headphones, plugged them in. He fiddled with the device a bit more before speaking.

  ‘My old one was trashed in the accident.’

  Ry sipped his coffee, tried to be casual about the next question. ‘What’s the latest from the cops? Any word on the truck that sideswiped you?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Dan stilled, his face gr
ew serious. ‘Turns out the driver had a heart attack at the wheel. He wouldn’t have known what was going on. They reckon he was dead before he hit me.’ They sat in silence for a beat. Neither of them needed to say out loud how close Dan had come to dying.

  ‘Well, that sucks for him. Pretty bloody awful all round really.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Dan said.

  ‘So how’re you feeling?’

  ‘You know. Like I was hit by a truck.’

  ‘Funny.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t hurt so much to cough now so I figure the ribs are healing. I’m not pissing blood anymore so that’s a good sign. But I’ll be stuck with the damn cast for about a month more.’

  ‘That’ll put a serious dent in the skirt-chasing.’

  Dan winced. ‘They won’t be staring at this face anymore. I don’t reckon my nose will ever be the same. I look like a boxer.’

  Ry made a point of assessing Dan’s face. ‘You’ve got some interesting bruises going on there but hey, women love a crooked nose. It adds character. Look at Owen Wilson.’

  Dan chuckled and then moaned, his hand coming to rest lightly on his ribs. ‘Mate, don’t make me laugh. It still hurts like hell.’ Dan winced and held his breath while he reached over to his metal bedside cabinet. As he pressed a remote, the headrest lifted so he was almost sitting upright.

  ‘How much longer you gonna be in here? They given you your parole date?’

  ‘A couple more weeks, maybe. So c’mon, distract me. What’s happening with the business? Where’s Windswept up to? Has it all fallen apart without me?’

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself. The surveyors have been down at the site this week.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘It’s been raining some. Rains a lot on the south coast in winter, actually.’

  ‘Fascinating.’

  ‘People at the pub have been asking after you.’

  ‘They have?’ Dan looked surprised.

  ‘The local paper ran a story about the accident.’

  ‘Shit, I’m a celebrity. Do I get groupies?’ He grinned. ‘What else?’