Chapter 19
Juniper
“Hey.”
“Hey yourself.” Juniper smiled into the phone. God, she’d missed him.
“I managed to get away from the meeting early, so I’m heading back now.”
“Great! Do you want to come over for dinner?” She moved to the back door of the shop, checking that Leah was okay with Billy. She smiled. Billy was sitting in his Tonka truck, gripping onto the sides, while Leah, bent low, pushed him along the driveway.
“Sure. I’d love to.”
She paused, thinking how best to say the next bit. “Billy will be here.”
“Ah, yes, I expect he will be. He’s a bit young to be heading out on the town with his mates.”
She laughed. “No, I mean, you know…”
“I can’t drop F bombs all night long?”
She rolled her eyes.
“I heard that.”
“Heard what?”
“Your eyes roll.”
She laughed again. “It’s just, you know…”
“We can’t have any hanky panky in the house. I know. I can’t trust you to keep the noise down.”
“Well, if I’m noisy, you’ve no one to blame but yourself.”
“A cross I’m willing to bear.”
God, she loved flirting with him. She also loved snuggling with him. She made a snap decision. “I tell you what. You can sleep over if you bring pajamas.”
She heard him clear his throat and said hastily, “I mean, you have to wear them. All night. You can’t just bring them.”
He chuckled. “Dammit, I almost had you. It’s a deal. I’ll be there around five. You’ve got an air fryer?”
“Ah, yes,” she said hesitantly.
“Great. I’ll bring dinner.”
“Oh, that’s not nec—”
“See you at five.” He hung up before she could protest further, and she simultaneously smiled and rolled her eyes.
Her phone beeped and she looked down, seeing a text from him.
She clicked into it: Stop rolling your eyes.
Chuckling, she slipped the phone into her pocket and moved back to the pottery wheel.
He pulled the sleek, black Porsche into her drive just after five o’clock. She watched from the loungeroom window as he got out carrying an overnight bag and two shopping bags.
The late afternoon sun added a bronzed sheen to his dark hair as he walked the few steps to her front verandah and up the stairs. “William!” Billy jumped down from his seat at the table and ran to greet him. Her heart lurched as he dropped his overnight bag and swept Billy up with one arm.
“Hey, big fella!”
“I’m playing with my frogs!”
“That’s great! I want you to do something for me, though. Take all the frogs out of the pond and put them in your room.”
Billy frowned, ready to object.
“Trust me.”
“Okay,” Billy said uncertainly, wriggling to get down.
Once he’d scooped the frogs into his shirt and ran off to his room, Juniper moved forward, relishing the light in William’s eyes as they rested on her face.
“Hi,” she said softly, standing on tiptoe to brush her lips lightly across his.
He snaked an arm around her waist, pulling her against him, turning what she’d planned to be a brief welcoming kiss into a long, lingering one that left her lips tingling when he lifted his head.
“Hi.”
“I’ve put my frogs away!”
“Excellent. Let me put these bags down and I’ll show you what I got for you.
” As he moved to the kitchen, he picked up the pond he’d carved for Billy and took it with him.
Quickly stowing one shopping bag in the fridge, he put the other on the bench next to the pond.
Intrigued, Juniper came over, lifting Billy onto one of the stools under the bench and sitting at the other one.
“Now, this is a very important job. Can I trust you with it?”
Billy nodded solemnly as William removed a bag of chocolate freddo frogs from the shopping bag. “You need to open these and put them in the pond. WITHOUT eating them. Or licking them.”
“Okay.” Taking his job very seriously, Billy started unwrapping the first frog.
Seeing that opening all twelve would be a big job for him, Juniper helped, keeping an eye on William as she did so.
He was taking packs of ready-made blue jelly from the bag, placing them on the counter, and she realized straight away what he had planned.
She grinned at him. It was super cute, and Billy would love it.
“Okay, good job. Now we have to get some glad wrap.” He looked at Juniper enquiringly.
“Third drawer.”
Retrieving the glad wrap, he carefully laid it inside the pond. “Now, open up these jellies and pour them in.”
Once that was done, Billy watched as William added the first chocolate frog to the pond and his eyes went round with wonder and delight. “Chocolate frogs in my pond!” He breathed.
“That’s it. Now you do the rest while I get dinner on.”
Juniper got the air fryer from the cupboard and placed it on the bench, curious to see what William had planned and not setting her hopes very high. He took a bag of dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets out of the bag, reading the cooking instructions carefully.
“Seriously?” she said under her breath.
“I never joke about nuggets.”
“You have the eating habits of a toddler.”
“Are we having nuggets? I LOVE nuggets.”
Juniper gestured to Billy as if to say, See?
William just grinned at her as he put the nuggets in the fryer and turned it on. “Not just nuggets, mate. Dino nugget wraps.”
Juniper burst out laughing. He was just too much.
“Hey, they’re the fancy ones. Tempura batter and everything.”
“Ooh, tempura batter? Why didn’t you say so!”
Laughing, William picked up the pond and put it in the fridge before organizing the fillings for the wraps.
This was just lovely, thought Juniper. The way William and Billy interacted, the light banter, the affection.
It was all just so…She sighed. Always, at the back of her mind was the wondering.
Wondering how much longer William would be staying in Blessed Inlet.
Wondering what would happen when it was time for him to go. Just wondering.
They ate the nugget wraps and although she teased him, Juniper had to admit they weren’t too bad.
Of course, they were a big hit with Billy so that helped.
After that, it was all Juniper could do to stop Billy from eating all the chocolate frogs in the pond at once.
He only gave up trying when William said that if he ate them all now, they couldn’t’ have any in the morning.
“Are you coming back tomorrow?” Billy asked excitedly.
William looked at Juniper. It was best for her to handle this situation. “Ah, well, baby, William’s actually having a sleepover.”
Billy clapped his hands in excitement. “With me?”
Juniper cleared her throat. “No, he wouldn’t fit in your bed. He’ll sleep with me.”
“Oh, like Nana does when she comes without the car house?”
“Yes,” Juniper replied, relieved. “Exactly like that.”
Satisfied with that, and with a promise that he would be able to have breakfast with William if he got ready for bed with no fuss, Billy was in his pajamas, teeth brushed and in bed in no time.
“Well, that was easy,” Juniper said, coming to sit with William on the couch. She snuggled in as he put his arm around her. More loveliness.
“Juniper.”
Something about his tone sent a shiver of tension through her. “Yes?”
“What do you think you would do if your parents contacted you, asking to meet Billy?”
She looked at him in surprise, pulling away. “Oh, um. I don’t know. Probably let them, I guess.”
“Really?”
She thought about it for a very long moment, feeling a wash of hard, painful memories course through her.
“I’m not sure, now that I think about it.
They were just so awful when I told them I was pregnant.
They didn’t know I’d deliberately chosen to have a baby.
” She stopped, rubbing at her chest as her heart squeezed painfully.
“I mean, it’s one thing to not accept me, to always be uncomfortable about how different I am to them.
Their world was just so foreign to me that I never felt like I was standing on solid ground.
I understood that, had learned to accept it.
” She smiled when he took her hand in his.
“But I was so ecstatic to be pregnant and I felt so lucky, so blessed. It just felt so right.” Her smile turned sad.
“Maybe I was a bit na?ve. I thought such a blessing could maybe bring us together. That they might like the idea of being grandparents.” She looked at him, taking comfort in the sympathy she could see in his eyes.
“My father told me to have an abortion.”
The sympathy turned to anger in flash. “What the fuck?”
“I know. That was it for me. The final dealbreaker. It wasn’t like, oh, you’re stuck in an awkward situation, we’ll support any decision you make.
It was, how would this look to their friends?
How would it affect their business? Their useless, hippy, artist daughter is now a single Mum.
Typical. Then my sister said I’d done it on purpose, just to upset everyone and my Mum agreed.
” She lifted his hand to her lips, pressing a kiss to his palm, trying to sooth him.
“I rang Nana straight away, distraught. She was on the next plane to Melbourne, God love her. She tore strips off my parents, threatened to stab my sister with a fork at one point and told them all they were dead to her.” She smiled, feeling lighter and easier at the memory.
“But she looked after me, as well. That’s when we hatched the plan for me to have the baby in Byron Bay.
She flew home to get everything ready for me and the rest is history. ”
“Juniper, that’s just so awful.”
“It is, isn’t it? What a pack of arseholes.”
“So, after all that, if they did want to see Billy, you’d let them?”
“Maybe not. You never know the answers to those sorts of questions until you’re actually presented with them. Anyway, enough of that. It’s too grim.”
She moved to lay her head on his shoulder, but he stopped her, tilting her head up with a finger under her chin. He leaned in to kiss her and she put her hand on his chest. “Hey.”
“Hey, what? No hanky panky. Just necking.”