by Lily Malone
‘Honey,’ Jake said. ‘I have hives up in one of the back paddocks near the bush.’
‘You keep bees?’ Ella said, and shivered. Bees weren’t on her list of favourite things.
‘Love having bees,’ Jake said. ‘I’ll give you a jar to take home and you’ll be converted. You’ll never want shop-bought honey again.’
Unlike the open-plan trend that took over in the nineties and had never gone away, Jake’s family home was from the era where separate rooms were built for purpose. The kitchen was at the hub of it. A wide opening joined the kitchen to the dining area, and off to the rear of the kitchen where a closed door led, presumably, to the rest of the house.
Ella’s gaze stopped at that door.
‘Shall I give you the grand tour?’ Jake said, teasing lightly.
Ella gave up trying to hide her curiosity. ‘Yes please! Back you go, mate.’ She shuffled Percy into his cage, and then turned to follow Jake.
‘This way, ma’am.’
She had one moment of hesitation. ‘Will the kids be okay?’
‘They’ll be fine, Ella. Ollie knows my rules. Helmets. No speeding. Four wheels on the road at all times. Stay on the tracks.’
She tried to relax. It was awesome that, in dark-haired, olive-skinned Ollie with his cheeky grin, Sam might finally have found a friend, but it was hard to let go too. Sam was a city kid, very lately a townie. Farms were a totally new experience for him. Snakes lived on farms. Farms meant quad bikes, electric fences, rams and bulls; an entire domestic zoo of animals with horns that might charge. And that big, deeplooking dam.
‘Relax, Ella,’ Jake said again. ‘They’re two boys out having fun. What could go wrong?’
Yes. What exactly. ‘Sorry. I know I’m being paranoid.’
She followed Jake, stealing more than an occasional eyefull of his back and butt along with a good sticky-beak at his house. It was t-shirt and shorts weather, for sure, and Jake suited both well.
‘This was my room. That was Brix’s room. This was where Abe drew on the wall with permanent marker and Mum had a fit,’ he said, showing her the faint squiggle of black pen through paint.
The rooms still had all the boys’ junk: boxes of BMX, basketball and football trophies; school reports; photos; and the paintings they’d all done in kindergarten that his mum had never thrown out. ‘She kept every little thing we ever made for Mother’s Day at school and Father’s Day,’ Jake said.
The beds were all made up. Posters on the wall. Nirvana. Metallica.
‘Who’s that?’ Ella said, indicating a gothic-style poster in Abel’s room.
‘Marilyn Manson. Abe went nuts about him.’
This place was too big for Jake. The boys’ old bedrooms were neat and tidy, but they had a closed-up feel, like they’d lost the love.
This house needed a family to fill it with running feet, yelling voices and sticky fingerprints on the walls.
It could be her family, too.
The thought gripped her before she could stop it, and Ella bumped her shoulder on a doorframe because she wasn’t paying attention to following Jake’s shoulders around yet another corner. Her heart had just done one great big bellyflop of want, and the shockwaves of it hammered her insides.
‘And this is the master suite,’ he said, standing back to let her pass. ‘My room.’
Ella waded up the carpeted corridor, still in bellyflop mode. To hide it, she made a show of studying a picture on the nearest wall, and then suddenly it wasn’t a show at all. The drawing was completely different to all the other art she’d seen and she reached out her hand to touch, then stopped with her fingertips suspended short of the surface.
‘Who is this? Did one of the family draw it?’
‘Nah. Honeychurches paint about as well as they sing,’ Jake said. ‘I could give you a singing demo if you don’t believe me.’
She knew him well enough now to know he was hiding something. His voice had changed despite the joke in the words.
Ella studied the picture. It was a portrait of a woman, or a girl more like it. Was it pencil? Charcoal? ‘Who is she?’
‘That’s Cassidy,’ Jake said. ‘A guy on a street in Kathmandu drew this, and we didn’t want to carry it all around Nepal and then Europe so we sent it home. Come on.’
This was the girl who’d broken Jake’s heart.
The girl in the portrait was beautiful in an elusive, restless way. If a picture could look windswept, that’s how Cassidy appeared, like one good puff would blow her away.
Maybe that’s what happened. Maybe, for Jake, she would always be the girl who got away.
‘Why do you keep her picture, if it hurts to look at it?’
He shrugged. ‘It doesn’t hurt me anymore. I hadn’t thought about it. It’s just there.’
‘But, you told me about the baby, Jake. If that’s what you think about when you see it …’ Ella shivered. That would be awful, being reminded of a child that would never be, every day.
‘That’s the decisions some people make, isn’t it?’ Jake said, digging his hands into the pockets of his shorts, waiting near the door to his room. ‘Who can say why people do what they do? Cassidy made her decision not to have the baby. You made your decision to keep Sam. I guess there was a lot of pressure on you to make a different decision too, for different reasons. What’s done is done. It affects me—of course it does—but I can’t change it, so I move on.’
‘But it’s not moving on, is it? The picture’s still here. You keep it here.’
‘I like the picture. It’s not about the girl.’
‘It’s about what might have been,’ Ella said softly.
She looked at the picture again, Jake’s words in her head, weighing heavy on her heart. She lost her patience with Sam sometimes, but she wouldn’t be without him. So many of her fears around telling him the truth about Marshall revolved around the possibility of losing him. Marshall was rich, in the media, famous. Meanwhile, Ella was starting on her own, all over again, living in a rental house that wasn’t big enough to swing a disco ball.
What could Marshall offer Sam? That’s if Marshall wanted him now, of course. He’d never wanted to know about Sam before but maybe he’d changed?
Come on, Ella. This isn’t about Marshall. She didn’t care about Marshall, or Marshall’s feelings, but she was being incredibly selfish keeping the opportunity to know his father away from Sam.
Gooseflesh snuck up the back of Ella’s arms and onwards, up her neck.
‘Ella?’ Jake said gently. ‘Are you okay? This picture means nothing to me. I don’t think about Cassidy that way anymore, ever. I promise. Okay?’
‘It’s not that,’ she whispered. ‘Just some bad memories. I’m fine.’
Jake stepped closer. ‘Bad memories of what?’ He stroked the raised flesh of her arms. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’
So quiet, here in the halls of this old house, and Jake’s voice felt almost hypnotic. Surely she could tell him some of it? Just not the worst parts. Not yet.
‘When I got pregnant with Sam, my parents were so angry. They didn’t want me to have him. They said they’d sacrificed all those years to drive me to and from the pool, and they’d paid for lessons and elite coaching, and they’d swapped jobs and sold houses to be nearer the pool. They said I’d cost them everything they had and I was an ungrateful little bitch. So that was the first thing I did with my first sponsorship cheque. I sent it to my mum. I sent quite a few after.’
Jake pulled her into him, wrapped his arms around her and held tight.
‘When they kicked me out, Erik saved me from ending up on the street. I had no other skills except swimming. I had no other place to go.’
‘So he should have, Ella,’ Jake said. ‘You and Sam were his responsibility.’
Of course he’d think that. It all came back to that same old lie. People assumed Erik was Sam’s dad. Why wouldn’t they? Certainly, neither she nor Erik had given anyone reason to doubt it.
&n
bsp; ‘My parents hated Erik, after that. They wanted him barred from coaching because they thought our relationship was … inappropriate.’
‘Ella, you married him when you were just a kid. I mean, I can kind of see your parents’ point of view.’
Ella tensed, and Jake hugged harder and muttered, ‘Sorry,’ into her hair. ‘But it’s true.’
‘I wasn’t as young as people think when I got married. It wasn’t like I got pregnant at eighteen and had a shotgun wedding, but you wouldn’t know that from what was in the magazines. It makes a better headline that way. I hadn’t swum in the Brecker squad for two years. We didn’t get married till after Beijing. Sam was more than a year old. Erik and I weren’t …’ She ducked her chin. ‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter. It’s old news now.’
She could hardly tell Jake that she and Erik had never slept together before they got married, and not for a while after. They’d become great friends, they’d worked together and she’d hoped that marriage might fill that space in her heart that cried out for something more than the peace and security Erik’s friendship offered. She’d hoped, and Erik deserved that chance.
‘There was a court case,’ Jake prompted. ‘I remember it in the news.’
‘A tribunal. The hearing went nowhere. Erik was cleared.’
‘Something bothers me about you two, Ella.’
She tensed. ‘What?’
‘You say he’s your best friend. You talk about him saving you when your parents kicked you out, more like he’s a father figure? So why did you get married? Why take that step?’
‘He asked me.’
‘You don’t say yes just because someone asks you. You’re allowed to say no.’
‘It was what Erik wanted. I didn’t mind.’
‘You didn’t mind? You didn’t owe him, Ella.’
She put her palms on Jake’s chest and pushed to clear a space. ‘We shared a life together before and after my swimming career finished. It just happened that way.’
He let her push him away, but he didn’t give up his questions. ‘Getting married doesn’t just happen. It’s a big decision. Or it should be.’
‘Jake … it was a long time ago. Who can say why people do what they do?’ She repeated his words back to him. ‘I can’t change it, so I move on.’
His expression told her he knew what she’d done, what she was doing, but maybe he recognised how intense they’d become, standing before a picture of this girl from his past, the ghost of those decisions between them.
‘Anyway, weren’t you about to wow me with your room?’ Ella stepped in front of Jake, crossing the threshold.
‘It’s the only bit of renovation I’ve actually finished. I have plans for the whole house but I need to get Mum and Dad sorted in a new place first, and so far they haven’t been keen to leave. Lucky they got the caravan. That keeps them out of my hair. Hardest thing ever has been to get Dad to let go of the farm.’
Ella turned a circle. ‘I’m impressed. It’s beautiful.’
If the rest of the homestead had stayed traditional, this room was contemporary to the extreme. Two sides of the room had windows, one to the garden, another with a sliding door to a secluded suspended deck with a view all the way to the purple shadow of the Porongurups.
Ella wanted to open the sliding door and step out onto the deck, but first she ducked her head into the bathroom … because that was what real estate agents did.
The ensuite was massive: double showers, double vanity and a skylight that poured daylight into the room like water.
‘That is some bathroom,’ Ella said.
‘Thanks. I like it.’
She shivered because Jake’s voice came from right behind her, and when she looked up, she could see him in the enormous mirror. His eyes captured hers and those words rumbled from his chest in a way that made her swear she felt each one as a stroke along her spine.
Very gently, maddeningly slowly, Jake’s hand collected the hair at the side of her neck and swept it back. His mouth grazed where he’d exposed her skin.
She got warm breath, warm lips, shaven skin and the scent of Jake. Ella gripped the door, held on and tried not to let her bones melt.
Jake put his hand over hers and tugged her fingers loose, and as Ella lost her anchor, he tucked her close.
‘Take a chance on me, Ella,’ he murmured against her neck. ‘I won’t let you fall anywhere unless you’re falling for me.’
God.
What did women say to stuff like this? Who could think when your brain turned to mush, and your body wasn’t doing much better?
Jake’s fingers cupped her right breast over her clothes and his gaze held hers in the mirror while he did it, until Ella’s eyelids drifted shut. Her head came back, easing into Jake’s collarbone like it was the softest of pillows.
* * *
If he didn’t end this now, while he still could, Jake would be down on one knee declaring ever-lasting love and puppies and rainbows because those were the thoughts flaring like Disney fireworks in his head.
No woman, ever, made him feel like Ella did.
She got him hot, cold, jealous, powerful, protective, weakall-over, plain dumb stupid … and all she had to do was breathe and be there.
If she arched her back a little bit more, he’d be gone to heaven with her breast in his hand. His fingers ached to roll her nipple, pinch it out, make it stand to attention like he knew it would, and knew he could.
He nuzzled the line of her collarbone. His lips touched the hollow there, and Jake got that hotbed Ella scent of apples and apple blossom. Ever-lasting love, puppies and rainbows exploded in his brain again.
Her cheeks were flushed and soft pink. She looked dewy and delicious in the mirror, and her eyes, when they opened, were more than a little stunned.
He remembered watching Ella that afternoon of the Home Open and thinking of her like his favourite toy in the box. The one all wrapped up and put away that he wanted to take out again.
Now she was so much more to him than a toy.
He turned Ella in his arms, took her hand and held it against his heart between them, so she could feel the wild thump trying to scramble from his chest.
She acknowledged the drumming beat, then took his hand and moved it over the rapid thump of her own heart, pressing his hand to her chest.
They stood like that, not speaking, just breathing, and he tangled his fingers with hers, and bent over her until his forehead rested on her clear cool skin.
‘Come and I’ll show you the view, then we’ll find those boys,’ Jake murmured.
‘Okay.’
He led her from the bathroom, fingers still tangled, and opened the screen door to the deck. Ella stepped through, hugging her arms about her tummy as she walked to the guardrail and stood there.
He was watching Ella, not the view, so he saw the exact moment she stiffened.
Every line of Ella’s body set in panic, as if she’d seen orange flames and clouds of smoke roaring towards them across the hills, and Jake swung his body to the east, hunting the threat.
He found it at the same time as Ella turned from the railing and was off, through the double doors into his bedroom, and away.
The two boys were at the dam. Dark-haired Ollie already in the water paddling out into the middle on a kayak and blond Sam standing bent over the kayak, one foot on the bank, one foot in the small boat, ready to follow his new mate.
CHAPTER
25
‘Ella!’ Jake’s shout came from behind her, echoing through the corridors and corners.
Ella didn’t stop.
Jake would catch her, he was faster and he knew the house. He’d get her to the dam and he’d help her make sure Sam was okay.
She should never have let Sam go. She should have insisted the boys stay at the house or at least stay where she could see them.
A sob caught in her throat. Wrong way. Here she was in the bloody kitchen again.
‘Ella?’ Jake’s voice.
‘How do I get out?’ Don’t panic. Don’t panic. It will all be okay.
‘What’s happening, love?’ Nita Kinworth poked her head into the room.
‘The boys have the kayaks on the dam,’ Jake said, appearing like Superman to save the day. ‘Ella, they’ll be fine.’
‘They’ll have lifejackets on,’ Nita said. ‘It’s one of Jake’s rules. Ollie knows it, love.’
‘Sam doesn’t know the rules and Sam can’t swim and I didn’t see any lifejacket,’ Ella choked.
‘This way then,’ Jake said, taking charge. He led Ella back a little way up the corridor, opened a door that led through the laundry and then out into a heat that glared off the limestone and seared Ella’s lungs. ‘Quickest if we run.’
Ella ran after Jake, down limestone steps, across gravel and through a gate into a paddock. His thongs slapped. Ella’s sandals slipped and slid on the smooth brown summer grass and dust. It was hard to get any purchase, like those nightmares where you tried to run fast and you couldn’t, and everything slowed you down.
All downhill. Thank God. Because her lungs were going to burst and her jaw ached with the strain, and it was like the last hundred metres of Erik’s sprint training drill, only worse because at the end of a training session you knew you could get out of the pool. At the end of this run, Ella had no idea what she’d find. Sam at the bottom of the dam?
She put her head down, and she didn’t look up until Jake’s voice finally cut through and she realised he’d been talking for a while.
‘See. Ella. Please look, honey. There they are. Okay? They’re on the kayaks and they’re fine.’
‘Can you see Sam?’ she demanded.
‘I can. I can see both boys. They’re both wearing lifejackets. They’re good kids. Ollie knows he isn’t allowed in the kayaks without a lifejacket on.’
Ella dared to look beyond the hair flopping in her eyes, while the exhausted haze of fear and exertion turned her legs to jelly.
They were less than a hundred metres from the dam. Close enough that now she’d stopped running she could hear Sam and Ollie talking, their excited voices carrying clearly. Ollie telling Sam about how he’d caught a huge marron once. ‘It had a hole under that rock right there …’
