by Lily Malone
Ella put her hands on her knees and sucked in a few huge breaths. Then she put her hands on her hips and kept walking.
‘I thought you said Sam could swim?’ Jake said.
‘He’s been in a pool a couple of times with Erik. Not a dam on his own with no adults around.’
There was a gazebo built on the house-side of the dam that morphed into a short jetty jutting out over the water. The quad bike was parked in front of the gazebo. Two helmets gleamed in the sun, one slung over each handlebar.
‘How deep is it where they are?’ she asked Jake.
‘Pretty deep.’
Ella lurched into a run-jog.
Jake said, ‘Ella, look at them there; they’ll be more at risk of falling in if we burst in on them and scare them.’ But he started jogging too, keeping pace with her. ‘They’re just kids. Kids having fun. We were down here all the time every summer when I was a kid.’
‘It won’t be fun if one of them drowns.’
‘Ollie can swim.’
She rounded on him. ‘And Sam can’t. Not properly. I told you that. I never wanted him in the water. I never wanted to get back in the water myself. None of that matters now anyway.’
Ella got a foot on the gazebo decking and flung her voice as far as she could.
‘Sam Erik Brecker, you paddle that thing back here right now!’
Two boys’ heads flung up, and Ella could see Sam’s face, all what’s Mum gonna embarrass me about now? She didn’t care if she embarrassed him. All she wanted was to have him safe.
He jabbed his kayak paddle into the water, wobbled as he cut it too fast and the oar sliced free before he was ready. Sam swapped the oar to the other side and pushed through the water, and the nose of his kayak clipped Ollie’s and made both boys’ kayaks rebound.
Ollie laughed, put the tip of his oar to Sam’s kayak and pushed it away, but the momentum made Sam lose balance.
Ella toed her right sandal off, then the left.
Sam slapped at the water with his oar.
Ella stripped her blue blouse up and over her head and let it fall from her hands. ‘How deep is it at the end of the jetty?’ she asked Jake. ‘Deep enough to dive?’
‘He’s wearing a lifejacket.’
‘Is it deep enough to dive, Jake?’ she said, dead calm.
His breath hissed out on a frustrated, ‘Yes.’
Ella ran the length of the jetty and leapt, suspended for a second above the silent surface. She cut her arms hard out in front, wrapped her hands in a racing dive, arched her back, looked for the centre of the dam where Sam was going over, going in, and Ella broke the surface of the water like a torpedo.
* * *
The kid was about to get a dunking.
Unlike Ella, Jake had confidence in the lifejacket. He was more worried about losing the bloody oar. He was more worried about Ella, quite frankly. He’d never seen her panic like that, and he didn’t understand it.
‘Ollie, grab the oar, mate,’ Jake yelled.
Sam came gasping to the surface, shaking hair out of his eyes. He flung an arm out for the overturned kayak, got it, hauled himself across it up to the armpit and hung there like a drowning man might cling to a log.
Ollie’s white teeth flashed in a belly laugh. ‘Suck it, Sambo. Wetcha pants, didja?’
‘You’re the one who sucks, loser, you pushed me in,’ Sam said, bedraggled, indignant, but otherwise fine and laughing too. Sam scooped water in the hand that wasn’t holding on to the kayak, and tried to send a huge splash as far as Ollie.
Ollie retaliated by splashing water with the oar, and Sam got another dunking.
‘Wow, Sam. Your mum can swim,’ Ollie said.
‘What did you say?’
‘Your mum. Look. She can really swim.’
Sam turned to see Ella coming like a mother whale on a mission from God, and his eyes went wide as saucers.
And shit, did Jake agree with Ollie.
Ella was magnificent. Ella was amazing. Jake stood high and dry on the last board of the jetty, admiring the figure cutting through the water, part dolphin, part flying fish in a black bra and short shorts, and she was there in a flash. His dam wasn’t the size of the new one Pickles was building, but it sure wasn’t small, and she got to the boys in a flash, flipping the kayak right way up, boosting Sam into the seat.
‘Are you okay, Sammy? You promise?’ She said it over and over as the poor kid kept saying, ‘Yeah, Mum. Yeah, Mum. Mum, I’m fine.’
‘Sam can’t swim, Ollie. He shouldn’t have gone into the dam without me or Jake here.’
‘Mum,’ Sam hissed. ‘I can so swim. I did the swimming lessons at school.’
‘Not well enough to be out on the middle of a dam,’ Ella said, clearly not getting the boy’s message.
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to push him in,’ Ollie said, and Jake could tell by the way Ollie’s teeth stopped flashing that the kid was feeling bad too. ‘Sam, here’s your oar.’
‘Thanks,’ Sam said, accepting the oar with his chin tucked into his chest. Jake thought the boy might cry. Ella floated out near the pair of kayaks, watching Sam like a hawk, or a leopard seal. Take your pick.
‘I was giving him lessons with the oars, Ella,’ Ollie said. ‘I showed him like Jake showed me. I made sure about the life-jackets.’
‘He shouldn’t have gone in without me here, Ollie. Sam knows that.’
‘I’m not a baby. I know how to do it.’ Sam demonstrated by pushing his oar in the water, taking a few strokes, then cutting the oar across his front and changing to stroke on the other side. Not without a wobble, it had to be said. ‘See?’ Sam pleaded.
He might have imagined it, but Jake thought the set of Ella’s neck and shoulders relaxed, just a bit. A miniscule bit, but it was there.
Ella might be embarrassed too, about her overreaction— because surely now she could see that’s what it was—and he needed to find a way to ease the situation.
‘Hey, you lot out there.’ Jake cupped his hands to his mouth, calling across the dam, and three faces turned his way. ‘How about you boys race Ella back here. Kids in kayaks get a head start.’
‘Yay. You’re on!’ Ollie said, driving his oar into the water and surging forward.
Sam copied him, and out in the water, Ella sent Jake a wave. Just two fingers, flicked together sideways above the water, but he’d take it that she was grateful.
‘Okay, swimmers are go,’ Jake yelled. ‘Go, Ella!’
‘Oh, crap,’ Ollie said, digging his oar through the water faster.
‘You better move it,’ Sam said, trying to spike the water with the same skill as Ollie, but giving up when the kayak lurched. ‘Mum was in the Olympics. Well nearly.’
‘Coming, ready or not,’ Ella called.
Jake watched her dive once and come up, but not like before. Last time she’d put her head down and gone for it. This time she swam freestyle with her head above water, checking the two kids on kayaks were okay, slow enough that she stayed in Sam’s wake the entire journey. It was Ollie who let out a victory whoop when his kayak hit the bank first.
* * *
‘Ella?’ Jake said later, as they sat on the gazebo deckchairs, Ella wrapped in a blue-green sarong that Nita had found among his mother’s clothes. Her hands were curled around a chicken and salad roll that Nita had made and packed for them in a picnic basket. Jake had already finished his roll.
Her eyes met his.
‘You’ve got to teach swimming lessons. You’ve at least got to get them started, even if you hand it all over to someone else when it’s all up and running. Seeing you out there just now, it’s convinced me. We’ve got to get the town pool open again. You’re a natural. I’ve never seen anything like the way you swam out there today.’
‘I don’t know.’ Ella dropped her gaze to stare instead at the two boys doing bombies off the shallow side of the jetty. ‘Maybe.’
Jake had already watched her check whether Sam could touch the bottom an
d even then, she eyeballed the boy’s every jump and her shoulders only relaxed when Sam’s head popped up from the water and he’d thrash across to get a hold on the ladder.
Both boys still wore the lifejackets, and Sam and Ollie had changed their shorts for swimming boardies.
After they’d got the kids out of the kayaks and off the dam, Jake had sent Ollie and Sam up to the house for towels and dry clothes. He’d left his t-shirt for Ella, then rode the quad bike up to the house to give her some privacy, even though he’d been busting to see her emerge from the dam in that black bra, water streaming … every man’s wet dream, but definitely his.
Now her shorts, bra and knickers hung drying over the side of the jetty deck along with Sam’s shorts and shirt, Ella’s blue blouse, her sandals and a laundromat of beach towels. The day was so hot her hair already had dried enough to wisp around her face.
‘Boys? There’s lunch up here when you’re ready,’ Ella called.
A chorus of ‘okay’ and ‘thanks’ floated from the water and Jake judged Ella had relaxed enough for him to ask the questions that kept getting jammed in his head.
‘How did it feel to dive in the water just now?’ he asked quietly, and she stopped chewing. He pressed on, speaking fast. ‘The other night at your place you said you hadn’t been swimming since the last day you climbed out of the pool.’
She took a sip of water before she answered, and her gaze rolled to Sam, who was climbing up the ladder. Ollie took a flying leap and bombed. His splash soaked the jetty and made Sam laugh.
‘It felt good,’ she said. ‘It felt really good.’
‘Then maybe it’s time you got back in the water. If you enjoyed it.’
She shivered like the day wasn’t forty degrees, but all she said was, ‘You don’t understand.’
‘Then help me work it out. You panicked before, Ella. Really panicked. I’ve never seen you like that.’
‘It’s my fault Sam can’t swim. I should have taught him. I didn’t want him to go in the water … I didn’t want to be reminded …’
He had to press her. ‘Reminded of what?’
‘Of all sorts of things,’ she said, way too vaguely for his liking. ‘What it felt like to swim fast. What I’d given up.’ She contemplated the chicken roll for what felt like an hour. Then she put the half-eaten roll on her chair and tucked her hands under her thighs. ‘I never wanted Sam to think I regretted giving up swimming to have him. I didn’t want him to think I resented him for making me stop, for missing the Olympics. I never wanted him to think he came second to a gold medal. Not for a minute. And he’s not second. He’s first. Always has been from the moment I felt him kick when I was pregnant with him.’
‘I get that.’ He did. Kind of. ‘But I don’t know why you didn’t want to teach him to be safe in the water. Why didn’t his father teach him? I’d have thought Erik would have leapt at any opportunity to teach his son to swim.’
‘I—’
‘Where’s my lunch?’ Sam interrupted, Ollie a step behind, the two kids arriving like a cyclone. They shoved at each other and jostled through the picnic basket.
Ella’s gaze slid away, and the moment was gone.
‘My turn for a swim, I reckon,’ Jake said, standing and brushing breadcrumbs from his board shorts. He put his hand out to help Ella from her chair. ‘Coming in?’
She didn’t take his outstretched palm. ‘I’ve had my swim for the day.’
‘I could throw you in, but I think you might get angry. I don’t think I’d like you when you’re angry. Not in the water.’
He was rewarded with a smile.
‘You know where I am if you change your mind,’ he said.
Jake took a few running steps and dove off the end of the jetty, feeling the shock as the cold water hit him at depth, sculling underwater as far as he could before coming up for air. Up here it was warmer, and he floated first on his stomach and then on his back, staring up at the blue sky, feeling good about the world.
Jake heard the splash as a vibration in the dam, and shifted his weight to be vertical in the water.
Ella swam towards him, and his heart did that goofy balloon thing.
She ducked her head before she reached him, coming up with a practised flick to get the water out of her hair, all slicked-back and beautiful.
‘Thought you’d had your swim for the day,’ he said.
‘A girl can change her mind.’
‘My t-shirt looks good on you,’ he said, reaching for her.
Ella backpedalled, swift as an otter.
The shirt clung to her body like nobody’s business. Man it just … it clung.
‘I was getting too hot sitting up there.’
‘Hot day,’ he agreed.
‘You can’t stay out here too long, Jake. You’ll get burned on a day like this.’
‘Okay, Mum.’ He edged closer.
She splashed water at him, kicked away, and he got the message and stopped. Would she ever stay?
But Ella stopped too, floating just beyond his reach. ‘What would be involved in getting the town pool up and running? Harvey seemed to think it would be simple?’
‘I guess a call to council would be the first step,’ he said, thinking about it.
‘Would it get used, though? We’re heading into autumn in another few weeks, then winter.’
‘Too cold for it in winter without some kind of heating. When the football club got it started, I reckon they had some kind of solar cover that kept it a bit better than freezing, but the footy players used it as an ice bath anyway.’ He thought it through a bit more. ‘If we could get some kind of cover over it, that would be ideal.’
‘You mean a shade sail or something?’
‘No, a proper structure. Build a structure around it, heat the water, so it can be an all-weather thing.’
‘Do you mean like showers, toilets, change room facilities? Lifeguards? A pool manager? That starts getting expensive, Jake.’
He nodded and gently finned himself nearer her. ‘There’d be sponsors interested, though. We could apply for a grant. There’s that royalties for regions thing and, to be perfectly honest, I think it’s a safety issue too, now that Pickles has this plan in for a water ski park. Kids around here need lessons. The school can’t do swimming lessons because of the distance to the nearest pool at Mount Barker. Forget about the ocean.’
He was close enough to touch her now.
‘That doesn’t look very comfortable for swimming,’ he said softly, reaching for his way-too-big t-shirt where it floated near her thigh.
‘It’s not. It’s bloody uncomfortable, actually.’
‘You could take it off.’
‘Yeah, course I could. You, me in the raw and two young boys. That’s a great plan.’
He chuckled agreement, but his gaze scanned towards the gazebo where the two boys ate lunch in the shade, feet dangling off the deckchairs. They weren’t paying any attention to the adults in the water.
Jake hooked his fingers in the t-shirt material and heard Ella’s next breath come out on a shiver.
‘Jake …’ She put her hand on his wrist.
Stop? He waited. He didn’t think so.
Jake’s heart pounded a tattoo under his ribs. He moved his hand to the skin of her thigh, treading softly back and forth in the water to keep buoyant. Her skin was all wet silk and cool glide, and he ran his palm higher. Then it was his turn to shiver because he realised something huge.
‘You haven’t got any knickers on, Ella Davenport.’
‘They were wet.’
‘Like that makes a difference if you’re gonna jump in a dam.’
He eased his finger from the bone of her hip towards her belly button. They were very close in the water now, close enough for his knee to knock hers, her thigh to nudge his. Forward and away, forward and away, in long lazy kicks.
Jake’s hand drifted lower, his fingers tangled in the first neat hairs of her pubic mound, and Ella groaned, ‘God, Jake
, what are we doing?’ but her hand came off his wrist, and she slung that arm up and over his shoulder, the other sculling the water at her side.
His eyes were on hers when her thigh nudged his and his universe waited on the next kick of her leg. Her big brown eyes widened when his hand slipped lower still, searching for that sweet, wild place at her centre, and when he found it with one slippery, warm stroke, it jolted Jake like nothing ever had.
He kissed her to smother the noise Ella made as she unravelled in the water on his fingers.
‘I’m falling for you, Ella. I’m falling hard.’ The vow came all the way from his toes, dredged up from the deep layers where the water felt so cold. Through thighs and torso, heating, until it raced up and out past heart, lungs and throat on a breath hot as steam.
‘Hey, Jake!’ Ollie’s shout from the jetty interrupted them, and Jake tore his eyes from Ella’s. Ella pushed herself away.
‘What’s up?’
‘Someone’s coming up your drive.’
Jake squinted towards the road where a dust cloud rose. ‘Terrible bloody timing.’
‘Who is it?’ she asked, swinging to the road so she could stare for herself.
‘That’s Abel, come to pay a visit.’
Abe’s car stopped part way along the drive.
‘He’s seen us,’ Jake said.
Ella frowned. ‘You say that like it’s a problem?’
‘It might be,’ Jake said, beginning an easy stroke into the jetty. ‘But it could be a good thing too. If Abe asks you anything about Nanna’s house, just follow my lead. Okay?’
‘Um, okay? Is there anything I shouldn’t tell him?’
Plenty probably, but it was all a bit late to explain now.
Abe must want to know what was happening with Nanna Irma’s house, and maybe, finally, Jake could get his brother to talk about why he needed to sell it so much.
CHAPTER
26
In the five minutes it took Jake and Ella to swim in, climb the jetty and towel off most of the water, Jake’s brother had bounced across the paddock in a dark blue sedan that looked mean and fast, and nothing like a farmer’s car.
He cut the engine, and Jake jumped off the gazebo deck and strolled out to meet him. Ella just had time to wrap the sarong around Jake’s wet t-shirt to cover herself, but not time enough to pull on her now-dry knickers. She picked up her discarded blouse and dropped it to hide her underwear on the deck. Then she got busy packing up the last of the lunch things into the picnic basket. The basket was much lighter now.
