Inconsolable (42 page)

“I love you still.” He said it as though it was the science of futurism, the secret of life everlasting, the untold wealth of conquered frontiers. He had no right to make promises he couldn't keep.

“No you don't, you can't. You want to overwhelm me, buy me, dangle me off your arm, like one of your model girlfriends.” She put a hand to her throat, her anger was throttling her. “Fuck you, buying me a car. I can buy my own car. If you loved me you'd get that. You'd have done anything to come back to me sooner, no matter what state your head was in. We could've worked it out together.”

“Ah Foley. I couldn't risk that. You'd have drowned in my despair. The only way I could come home to you is if I knew I wouldn't hurt you again. If I knew I was strong enough for you.”

“Newsflash. You're hurting me now. It's life. No one can avoid it.” She took a step away from him, he lifted his foot to follow and she put her hand up to stop him.

“All this macho stuff about being strong.” She took another step. Her weight was on the pressure mat that operated the automatic doors. “I was strong enough for both of us.” The doors shushed open. “But here's a new headline,” she took another step and now she was inside the building and the doors were closing and he couldn't make her risk loving him again.

“I'm not anymore.”

36: Consolation

The sliding doors closed on Foley and she turned her back on Drum and fled into the council chambers. He slapped his palm over his mouth. That was the most spectacular collision with stupid he'd ever undertaken, and that included trying to talk his own board out of making money.

But he'd taken one look at her in her tailored work suit with the tiny stud in her nose and rational thought took a holiday. All the things he'd meant to say: how he'd missed her, how he craved her, how he'd find forever too short a time to make up for what he'd put her through, never elbowed past the fantasy of holding her in his arms again.

He looked at the key and winced. She was bang on. He'd hurt her, he'd denied her, he'd made decisions for her, and then tried to seek forgiveness and win her back by surprising her and shoving his privilege at her. He was nothing but extremes in her life from cave to car and he should've understood that.

Fuck
. It was hard to think of a worse way to have handled that.

He wanted to follow her through the glass doors and track her to wherever she'd gone. He'd go to his knees and beg for another chance, but if he got anywhere near her right now, she'd take his head off. And that wasn't the manner he'd figured on meeting his end.

He needed Plan B. He'd have to find a less lame-arse, insulting way to prove he knew how to complete her puzzle. He pocketed the key and brushed his hand over his side, a phantom itch on the mark he might yet come to regret, like she did. It would forever illustrate what he was missing. If she never saw it, he'd only have himself to blame because he'd taught her hesitancy, doubt and abandonment.

And Plan B had better be inspired because after seeing Foley again and that red flare of passion that lit her up from inside, flushing her cheeks and making her eyes shine, there was no way he was going to settle for friendship. They'd gone too deep, too far with each other to go back to tense yearning, the absence of touch, and the distance of separate lives.

He drove to the new house. He'd spent a week camped out in it with a mattress on the floor and a couple of folding chairs. The bare bones kitchen was stocked though. He had a full fridge and food in the old walk-in pantry, but he was essentially still living in a tent, or a very sophisticated cave with boarded-up windows that rattled in the wind and a hot water system that creaked and whistled like an ancient steam train. It would take a lot to make the house a home, and repairs and internal renovations weren't the problem.

None of his properties were ever home-like. They were investments he'd turned over, filled with designer furniture picked from catalogues sight unseen, or professionally sweated over by the girlfriend of the moment. They'd been showpieces, beautiful in their symmetry and occasional softening whimsy, but he'd treated them like hotel rooms, never caring one way or another what they looked like or how they made him feel.

So what the hell made him think he could set up a home, that Foley would want him to have this house she'd sweated over?

Fuck
. What made him think he could win her back?

He'd been a paranoid hermit squatter and now he was a recovering delusional fool.

He changed out of his suit into a pair of shorts that fit and a shirt that had all its buttons. He wandered around and did a few odd jobs, and the more he tinkered, the more he knew he was sunk. Foley was an all or nothing proposition, and he had nothing. There was no Plan B. It wasn't about real estate, furniture or finishes, colours and patterns. He would always be homeless no matter where he lived, how he lived, if he was without her.

He'd come all this way from inconsolable towards reclaiming a useful life and the one thing he most wanted to use it for—loving Foley—was beyond him. That was an unalterably depressing thought.

He took it out of the house. He'd walk it off. It was just on sunset and balmy. He'd get his fill of the salt air and the blue on blue that was his religion and maybe inspiration would strike. Because he wasn't giving up and this was only the beginning. If it took the rest of his new life to convince Foley to walk on the beach with him, he'd consider that a triumph in the face of all he could lose.

It was a conscious decision to walk towards the cave, but he felt no compunction to visit it. The thought of standing on that rock edge made him feel faintly nauseas. He'd thoroughly replaced that danger and discomfort with solid, everyday objectives to make him feel worthy of being alive.

Shadows had lengthened before he reached Marks Park, and when he crossed it to walk to the railing above the cave, he had reason to wish he'd convinced the NCR board to make pills to prevent heart attack.

Foley stood at the railing, at the place they'd met, at the place he'd left her. His feet faltered. He clutched at his chest like cardiac arrest was an acute possibility. She couldn't possibly want to see him a second time today, but why was she there?

He said her name so she wouldn't startle as he came up beside her. She half turned so he caught a glimpse of her face and gravity became an arbitrary force. She looked broken, was so huddled into herself, he found it hard to stay upright. He took hold of the railing because otherwise he would take hold of her and never let her go.

She looked out towards the beach and he watched her, frantically wanting the space between them to dissolve.

She tightened her grip on the railing. “I haven't come here for six months. You were gone, there was no point.”

“But you came tonight.”

“I thought it might help.”

“Does it?”

She took a deep breath. He thought she might turn to him, but she got further away without moving. “Not yet.”

“But you have hope?”

“Maybe that's what I should call it, hope. But it's a flimsy thing. Nothing much to it.” She looked to the sky as a lone black cockatoo flew overhead. A bird less ordinary in a sky full of gulls. “Why did you come?”

He shifted his weight so it was all on the leg closest to her. He'd settle for an accidental touch, a graze of their bodies in the growing dark, because if he initiated a deliberate one, he feared she'd recoil.

“I came looking for you.” He'd been looking for the acceptance and love Foley gave him his whole adult life.

She hissed and turned her face further away and he was bereft she'd found him here, but he might lose her here for a second time.

“You're not a hermit squatter any more. I'm not sure how to feel about that. You were intimidating then; now that you're this, I don't know how to deal with you.”

That she'd come here, that they both had tonight, was a kind of symbiotic reaching for each other beyond his comprehension. Like she was the moon and he was the tide, and they were hooked to each other's inevitable highs and lows. That she was thinking about dealing with him at all, it shook him greater than the surprise of her being here—he could almost make a home on that alone.

“You always knew how to manage me. Support me in all the ways I needed and was too arrogant to ask for. I'm not sure I'll ever be exactly normal. In fact, that's not the idea.” He'd be the black cockatoo flying with the seabirds. “The idea is to do something extraordinary.”

“I heard.”

What Drum heard was frustration. “I'm sorry about the car, about shanghaiing you. I'm sorry about the way I left you and how that hurt, but there was no guarantee I'd make it back, or have anything to offer you if I did, and I couldn't tie you to that.”

Foley was so still, so contained. She was the cold front that replaced the steamy heat of their encounter that morning. She was more lethal this way, because her feelings were crusted by frost and he couldn't find his way to her usual prickly warmth.

She kept her eyes away, trained on the horizon. “How did you do it? How did you fight your way out of the cave, off the cliff?”

He leaned forward so he could see her lovely face in profile. “I never stopped thinking about you, Foley. Wanting to be a different man, a better one. Wanting to be worthy of you. I needed a lesson in absolutes, in the value of the spaces between black and white, before I knew what to do about it.”

She grunted in annoyance, a hand coming off the railing to wave the comment away. “That makes no sense.”

“It's so sensible it's my new rule.” Her hand went to her side. He could reach for it. They'd started with a handshake when all they were to each other was a problem. “I bought a house. Not far, it's a renovator's delight. It's called Sereno. I think you'd like it.”

“You bought the Beeton house.” She laughed, but it wasn't a happy sound. “You.”

The most valuable thing in that house was hanging off a bent nail that held a strip of doorframe in place. His mother's engagement ring. He hoped Foley would like that too, if he could earn the chance to show it to her. Why else had he kept it, carried it, keeping it safe from sand traps, teenage gangs and holes in his pockets, if not to bring it back to her?

“I don't recognise you.”

If he could get her to look at him, just once, she might. “Yes you do. I'm not so different. Better clothes, better hair. I'm still type A. Still aggressive, moody and difficult, stubborn and set in my ways.”

She shook her head. “How did you get the scar?”

He put his hand to his cheek. “I fell. Out there on the ledge, the night I lost you.” It'd seemed a small price to pay for the pain he'd caused her.

She snatched a breath and gripped the railing with both hands again. A quarter turn of her face in his direction. “You might've gone over the edge.”

If he moved his hand, not a lot, an adjustment of its placement on the circular steel, he could touch her in a way she might accept. “I was already over the edge about you and I'd just sent you away. I could barely walk from the shock of it.” He moved his hand but before they connected, she took hers away.

“You've been missing for half a year. I got on with my life.”

“You did brilliantly. And I'm so pleased for you.” Was she going to tell him there was someone else? He deserved that pain. But if there was someone else and she loved them more, why was she here? “I'll wait. I'm not going anywhere, unless it's to follow you.” He needed her eyes to read her soul. “The house needs work. I need work. I need you.”

She slammed her hand on the railing. “That's insane. You're a stranger to me.”

“More insane than me living in a cave; than us falling for each other?”

“I can't trust you. I can't be with you.”

“Then I'm homeless again, because nowhere I live will ever be a home without you.”

A shudder tripped through her and she lowered her chin so her eyes were on her feet. “I hate you for saying that.”

“You don't hate me.” She'd have walked away. She'd have torn into him. She'd have made it perfectly clear there was no whiter shade of hope to depend on.

“It might go better for you if you didn't tell me what to do.” She lifted her face but still angled away from him. “I'm not over you showing up with a car and buying my favourite house yet. I'm not over you full stop and that's a problem, because I fell in love with a man who lived in a cave and was a terrible dresser. He had no money and shocking secrets. He took me on the worst dates, made me ride the bus for God's sake, and the absolute shambles of the whole things is, I want that man back because I fitted with him despite how odd that was, how damaged he sometimes seemed, and what a pain in the side he was.”

She could've felled him effectively with a clump of seaweed. There was no density to his muscles, no air in his lungs. He was a lump of barely animated meat, but he had hope and it wasn't flimsy, it was fine, strong silk wrapped around his wrists, connecting him to her.

“But you, with your new house and your big charity deal, you're altogether different and I don't know if I can fit with you. If I'd even want to.”

He was going to shake apart if she didn't look at him. “I want you to live in that house with me. You're not over me. Look at me, Foley. Oh God, please look at me.”

She turned her head. But her eyes were down.

“Let me show you who I am.” He unbuttoned his shirt.
Shit, so many buttons
. Her eyes came up as he pulled the fabric away from his side. She gasped when she saw it. Blue on blue, on sand. Four distinct puzzle pieces formed around an empty centre shaped like an F. Shaped like the day he acknowledged he'd fallen in love with her, in the wind, when she'd challenged him, when he'd seen her vitality and her tenacity, and they'd touched him to his core.