Riding on Air (19 page)

All my arguments ran out of me when confronted by that damaged helmet. I didn't know what I had left to bargain with.

“Do you remember how you fell off?”

“Jinx spooked at the goat and I lost my balance.”

“Is that all?” William gazed at me with his blue eyes narrowed intently. I swallowed the lie I'd been about to give him.

“I couldn't get him back. My reins were too long and I couldn't hold them.”

I looked down at the ground, my eyes stinging with a sudden rush of tears. Frustration and embarrassment overwhelmed me, pushing the tears out even faster, so I had no chance of holding them back.

“Maybe your Dad would be right to stop you riding Jinx. Can't you see that?”

I shook my head, blinking fiercely.

William sighed. “I'm not going to argue with you now. I want to get you checked out. But surely you can see you have to tell them you fell off.”

A glimmer of hope showed itself to me.

“OK, but don't tell them exactly what happened. Just say Jinx spooked at Sheila, they know he hates the sight of her.”

William looked like he was about to insist on the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Bugger upstanding do-the-right-thing boyfriends.

“Please, William? What harm can it do? I promise if there's anything serious wrong with me I'll tell them my hands are bad, I'll tell them I'm having a bit of trouble with Jinx, but not yet. Please, can we just see? I'll work something out. I'll get Eleni or Tash to ride him or something. Please?”

“You promise?”

“Cross my heart and ho—”

“
Don't
say that. Just promise, OK? Even if there's nothing wrong we're going to talk about it. You can't keep riding Jinx when your hands are so bad or you're going to get yourself killed.”

“Alright,” I said, thinking that gave me ample time to think of a contingency plan.

“OK,” William said, a little unwillingly. He took Jinx's reins over his head and led him towards the gate, keeping an anxious eye on me as I walked beside him.

Truthfully, I was glad to let William take over with Jinx. Every minute that passed saw my neck get more stiff and my shoulder was burning with such a deep ache I was starting to worry I really had done some damage. And I was glad, too, to have some time to think about how to get William to agree to me riding Jinx. I had to. If the way my hands had been lately proved anything it was that I really was running out of time. If I didn't get Jinx into the squad this year I didn't think it was likely there'd be another opportunity. I didn't think my hands would be any better this time next year, that was for sure.

As I followed him and Jinx to the tack shed my head started to throb in time to my steps. I squashed any thought of skull fractures of brain bleeds before it could get any kind of grip on my imagination and went to sit on a bucket while William got Jinx unsaddled and put away in less time that I could have unbuckled the girth. On a good day.

William would have got it done even faster, but he kept casting anxious glances at me, as if worried I was going to keel over. His concern sent a little thrill of pleasure zinging through me at this evidence that he really did care. Underneath that, though, was an increasing sense of all not being quite as it should be. My head felt sort of light and floaty and I was starting to feel distinctly puke-stomach, although that was hardly a novelty for me.

Although I'd argued and carried on, I was starting to feel relieved that I was going to the doctor's or casualty or whatever. The longer I sat here the worse I felt and the bigger that fall seemed. Although if I could remember all of it—and I could—then it couldn't have been that bad, really. And I still had to come up with some kind of plan. How to make an over-anxious, over-reacting boyfriend agree to letting you do something he thought was too dangerous. Hmmm.

When William came jogging back from letting Jinx go in the paddock, I stood carefully and let him steer me back up towards the house. Maybe I'd think about that later. I had to run the gauntlet that was Dad and Jennie before anything else and if they totally freaked out then I might need some other plan altogether.

“I told you I was fine,” I said as William parked his ute behind Dad's car on our return from the hospital. William pulled the handbrake on and turned off the engine. He glanced at me sideways and shrugged.

“A happy coincidence.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Last time I looked you didn't have a medical degree.”

“I don't need a doctor to tell me how I feel, William. I've been monitoring myself for years. I know when there's something wrong.”

William slid his hand across the top of the steering wheel and flexed his fingers around the curved leather.

“If that's the case, what were you doing riding Jinx today?”

I turned my head slowly, my neck now painfully stiff, and looked at him curiously. “I have a dressage competition in four weeks. A major competition that could decide whether Jinx gets into the state squad or not. Why do you think?”

“I know
why
you were riding him. I'm not an idiot, so please don't treat me like one.”

I gaped, but William wasn't done. Twisting his fists around the steering wheel he stared straight ahead out the windscreen.

“I meant, if you're so good at judging how you are then why were you riding a horse you aren't able to control anymore?”

“I can so control Jinx,” I said, offended. “Where do
you
get off saying my horse is uncontrollable?”

“I didn't,” William said, his jaw thrust stubbornly forward. “I said you couldn't control him.”

“That's the same thing.”

“No it isn't. If Jinx was uncontrollable then nobody would be able to control him. If he was uncontrollable for you then he would have always been that way. I said, you can't control Jinx anymore and that's exactly what I meant.”

“You're twisting words,” I said crankily.

William shook his dark head and again his blue eyes took that flickering, sidelong glance towards me. “No, you are. Your hands are too bad to hold him. You've fallen off twice that I know of, come awfully close one other time I've seen for myself and god knows how many busters you've had that nobody even knows about—”

“I have not!” I protested hotly, my skin literally heating up with indignation.

“Alright then, but that's still three times. Haven't you ever heard of three strikes and you're out? Or in your case, dead?” William dragged a hand through his hair, leaving it rumpled like a morning doona cover, although I didn't have my usual reflex to want to smooth it down again. I didn't have any desire to touch him when he was attacking me like this.

I didn't understand why. Why was he hassling me about Jinx? And why now when I was sick and stiff and sore?

“I can control my horse perfectly well, William. It's just that I've been having a bad bout with my hands and I'm trying to teach Jinx something new and he's getting confused. It happens in dressage training, you know.”

“It happens in polocrosse training too, so don't go all snotty dressage queen on me.”

I snorted. “Polocrosse isn't anything like dressage. You just gallop and catch balls and throw them again.”

“Like to see you try it. No, on second thoughts, we're not going there. You're not turning this into an argument about whether dressage is more important than polocrosse, because I don't care. I only care about you and I'm not going to sit here and let you kill yourself.”

I laughed. “What
are
you talking about?”

William turned towards me, reached out and circled my wrists with his hands. It was the closest we ever got to holding hands. The stab of regret that tightened my chest was an unwelcome one at any time, but particularly then.

“I'm talking about you staying off your horse until your hands are better.”

I looked at him, the earnest blue of his eyes holding mine. I swallowed the rush of fear that had risen to choke my throat and the words that wanted to tumble out. I wouldn't permit them. I tried never to think them, let alone speak them aloud. It was like a talisman that kept me safe, that warded off the inevitable for as long as possible. If I just didn't acknowledge it, then it hadn't happened yet. I took another tack.

“I'm fine, Will, you heard the doctor. I can ride in 48 hours.”

“Providing you don't have any other symptoms like dizziness or blurred vision,” William reminded me. “And that's beside the point. Are your hands going to be OK in 48 hours?”

“Sure,” I said, because I couldn't say anything else. I had to believe that they would be. It was my rule and it had worked for all these years. No matter how bad my hands were or had been on any given day, when I got into bed that night and was lying there with my joints twisting and burning with that incessant ache, I'd close my eyes and tell myself that tomorrow morning when I woke up my hands would be better. Better, for me, was always relative, not an absolute. Better didn't mean healed, normal or miraculously restored. Better meant improved. As in, not as bad as they had been today.

I searched William's shuttered face even as I racked my brain for a way to explain that to him. I could see that he didn't believe me and that he thought I was just lying to myself and to him. How could I begin to explain how necessary it was for me to keep going? How could I even begin to articulate how his disbelief and his insistence on facts and truth was squeezing my heart so much it hurt?

“William, I know you don't believe me, but I—I have to believe it.”

“I know,” William sighed, stoking my wrists lightly with his fingertips. A shiver wriggled up my back and my skin prickled all over, but it wasn't the usual response I had to his caress.

“I can see in your face that you think I'm just saying that,” he continued, “but I do get it. God, I admire you so much that you can be so positive and keep going no matter how bad it is. So I do understand that you need to have hope. But I don't understand how you can be so stubborn and so reckless and so, so—
stupid
.”

“Stupid?” I gasped, unable to believe that he had just actually called me stupid to my face.

“Yes, stupid. What would you call it if I drove my ute drunk or rode a green broke horse with no helmet? Or swam in the ocean at night alone, or took drugs?”

“You don't do any of those things.”

“But if I did, wouldn't that be stupid?”

“Yes, of course, but I don't do any of that.”

“Yes, you do.”

“I do not. I don't do any dangerous stuff like that, because I can't. I can't even ride a pushbike to fall off, like poor Eleni.”

William became very still. “When did that happen?”

“Uh, last week.”

“Before or after she rode Jinx? She did ride Jinx, right?”

“No. She broke her collarbone before she could come over. You knew that.”

“I did not.”

“I told you.”

“You did not. I definitely thought Eleni had ridden Jinx this week.”

“Well she didn't.”

“That changes things.”

“What difference does it make?”

“You went ahead and rode Jinx even though you knew you weren't up to it. And don't tell me,” he said as I opened my mouth, “how that isn't true because I know you never would have agreed to Eleni riding Jinx unless you absolutely had to. I can't
believe
you.”

“I can't believe
you
,” I echoed him, anger starting to simmer along my veins, heating my blood. I pulled my arms back and he instantly released me, that hair-trigger awareness he had of avoiding hurting me obviously still functioning. At the anxious look that creased his face I felt a stab of guilt—had I maybe counted on it when I jerked back like that?—but I squashed it along with the knowledge that it was mean to scare him like that and make him think he might have hurt me. At that moment I didn't care. And maybe just a tiny bit of me did want to throw a scare into him or maybe even hurt him a bit. After all, nearly every word he'd said in the past 10 minutes had hurt either my feelings or my pride or my heart.

My head was pounding and my neck hurt and I just didn't want to have this conversation anymore. I reached for the door handle, but my fingers let out a severe warning snarl as soon as I tried to close them.

“And there's the proof. You can't even open a car door right now, so how do you expect to control a hot thoroughbred while you try to help him through a difficult training stage?”

“I always have before,” I muttered and could have bitten my tongue off.

“Before? Have you ridden through a patch this bad
before
?”

“Not exactly.” Damn it, why could I never pull off a lie to people who mattered to me? That really
was
stupid because they were always the people who you most needed to lie to so you could stop them from worrying and getting upset.

“So you make a habit of riding when you shouldn't.”

“No.” That really did make me sound as stupid as he thought I was.

“I assume your Dad doesn't know.”

“Of course not.”

“Is there anything else you maybe should be telling me?” William asked, his voice thick.

I frowned, fluttery little qualms of anxiety whipping up the insides of my stomach like a bitter acid brew. “Like what?”

“Like exactly how you've managed to ride when your hands are so bad? Are you sure that was the only time you've taken a painkiller when you weren't supposed to?”

“Now you sound like Dad.”

“That isn't an answer.”

“Fine. No, I don't take painkillers when I'm not supposed to. Happy now?”

“Not at all,” he said, his voice sounding really strange. “Now you're definitely lying to me.”