Chapter 11
AUDREY
‘Are you sure we’re not going to distract you?’ I ask Fraser for the second time, several months after I’ve moved in. He’s sitting at the kitchen table in jeans and a long-sleeved white tee, settled in for a night of grading, a glass of red wine and a pile of student papers beside his laptop.
He considers me over the frames of his glasses. ‘It’s a book club, Audrey. How riotous could it get?’
But other than Rach, he hasn’t met my friends. He has no idea how nervous I am about hosting the Bookies here, worried the event will devolve into a soft launch of the dashingly eligible man with whom I have been secretly and temporarily living and I’ll never hear the end of it.
They know that I’m house-sharing for a while, but I left out the bit about living with science’s answer to Anthony Bridgerton.
Two nights ago, after Parker went to bed, we had a meandering late-night conversation about Shakespeare, standing beside his bookshelves.
I can barely recall a word of it, because he reached behind me at one stage and produced a volume of sonnets, his face so close I couldn’t tell if I was intoxicated from the wine on my own lips or his, or by the string of articulate sentences flowing from his mouth while I fell further under his spell.
I’ve kept him a secret because I’m in real trouble here. Madly applying for jobs I don’t want so I can liberate myself from this accommodation-of-convenience arrangement while my heart is still vaguely intact.
He’s newly divorced, Sara would point out. Statistically, you’ll only ever be the rebound.
Technically, even that’s getting ahead of things, casting myself as the lead in his potential rebound fling when he hasn’t made a single move in my direction.
It’s all academic. And unrequited. And endless tossing and turning in the next bedroom …
imagining … wondering … and having him look at me like that over his bloody glasses (why does my stomach flip?) as if he can read my mind!
Sure enough, as the first three book-club members bustle through the front door minutes later, arms bursting with bottles of alcohol and wheels of cheese, they make their way into the kitchen and are silenced by the unexpected sight of my handsome housemate.
‘Fraser, meet the Bookies. This is April and Clair and Jess …’
They’re quite simply gobsmacked.
‘This is Fraser.’ How do I explain him? ‘My, um—’
All four of them turn to me now, very keen for this explanation, and I have to restrain myself from babbling all sorts of nonsense into the growing pause: He’s my flatmate.
And my ex-musical-soulmate’s younger brother.
A former client from that job where I was sacked—you know, over the Antichrist and whatnot? Oh, also, briefly, Rach’s fake fiancé …
I don’t end up saying any of that, because, watching me struggle, he gets up from the table and places his hand fleetingly, but significantly, on the small of my back as he steps past me, unburdens my friends of their provisions, and says, ‘Audrey’s told me all about you.’
The three of them are like those open-mouthed clowns in sideshow alley, heads turning in unison from him to me.
April, dressed per usual to the nines in tailored black pants, boots, a crisp white shirt, a black vest, and a deep red Windsor knot at her throat, steps towards him with her CEO energy, pulls him into a hearty and unexpected hug, and proclaims, ‘She’s told us scandalously little about you! ’
That’s when he offers everyone a drink, because I appear to have lost all my social graces.
I’m still back at the part where he touched me, skin alight from the gentle pressure of his fingertips through my dress.
There he is, pouring cabernet sauvignon and making small talk with the Bookies while I wrangle visions of Shakespeare and candlelight and being properly backed up against his bookshelves next time, while he—
There’s a sound at the door before Rach breezes into the kitchen, all flowing blonde hair in a cloud of sky-blue linen, and says, ‘Fabulous! You’ve all met!’ Then she sweeps me aside and whispers, hopefully not loudly enough for anyone else’s hearing, ‘Why do you look like you’ve just had sex?’
What?
Fraser passes me a glass of wine, his fingers brushing mine as he tilts his head and looks into my face. Probably because I’ve become nonverbal. And apparently look like I’ve been ravished by the merest touch of his hand.
The rest of them prattle on about paté and crackers and the outcome of Clair’s job interview and whether or not we should get tickets to the Canberra Writers Festival while, for just a few moments, I let myself pretend this is more than it is.
That he is mine.
That this is our house.
That Parker, upstairs, is the stepdaughter I never knew I wanted.
April says something funny that I miss and taps glasses with Fraser, and his warm laughter fills the kitchen. It’s such an easy rapport, as if we’ve all been friends for years.
Aren’t left-brained geniuses meant to be socially awkward?
I didn’t know they liked sonnets. And they have no business looking the way Fraser does, arms crossed, leaning against the bench with the relaxed countenance of a person who doesn’t have a rambunctious Cavoodle to train and eighty assignments to grade.
Oh, God.
I’m drowning.
Rach is all empathy when I dare look at her, knowing it’s written across my face.
Fraser is oblivious, absorbed in his post-divorce co-parenting, doing his BBC interviews, saving the world …
And here I am right in front of him, brakes failing, tumbling headfirst into every element of what was only ever supposed to be a temporary reset.
During that first book club, I made a plan.
I would stay out of his way. Get any job and get out of his house.
It wasn’t a new plan, by any means. More a reversion to plan A, before I’d inadvertently signed up for the bonus broken-heart package.
‘This is just so in line with your past behaviour, Audrey,’ Rach accused.
‘Ever since university—since Josh—you’ve run full tilt from anything good,’ she pointed out. ‘We all have that one guy who hung us out to dry and left the country—yes, literally in your case. But that was years ago! Take a risk.’
‘I did take a risk! Remember Teddy?’
‘The understudy?’ Rach had nicknamed him that. My one long-term boyfriend amongst the duds. ‘He was lovely. Husband material. But no—you were waiting for some conveniently fictitious, even more remarkable leading man …’
And now, seven job applications, countless swoon-worthy, over-the-spectacles glances, and six weeks after that book club, I’m acutely conscious of Fraser’s proximity.
Our socked feet are up on the coffee table and we’re in pyjamas, sharing a block of chocolate and watching a movie about the apocalypse with the lights off.
So technically, I’m not so much staying out of Fraser’s way as flinging myself straight into it.
‘You’re the type to watch plane crash films during flights, aren’t you?’ he says, breaking off a piece of rum and raisin and passing the packet.
I take my feet off the table and pull my legs up underneath me. ‘Oh, I’m obsessed with disaster flicks! Contagion, Geostorm, Twisters … give me a race against time and a brilliant scientist and—’
He is a brilliant scientist. What am I doing, showing my hand?
‘And what is it about the imminent threat to life that you find particularly soothing?’ he asks, tactfully ignoring my slip.
I have to think about that. ‘Probably that their lives are more of a mess than mine.’
‘Come on, your life isn’t that bad, is it?
’ He delivers this with a nudge of his elbow that repositions us closer—a situation neither of us bothers to address.
The reshuffle leaves me leaning into the swimmer’s biceps and cyclist’s quadriceps that he’s been assembling ahead of a summer triathlon, like the overachiever that he is.
‘Please,’ I reply. ‘I’m in my mid-thirties, after a series of unappealing jobs and even less appealing boyfriends, I’m renting a single bedroom—’
‘Technically you have the run of almost the entire house. I mean, look at you. Look at this room alone.’
We cast our eyes at the shopping bags strewn across the doorway, my coat over the back of the armchair, shoes flung haphazardly in the hall.
I’ve really made myself quite at home in the last few months, and he’s such an organised person.
The kind who washes dishes as he cooks and keeps his tax spreadsheet current.
I open my mouth to apologise, but he says, ‘You were inspired to write a song. I get it.’
Does he really, though? Josh always did. We’d go whole weekends in dizzying episodes of wild creative flow, barely keeping our heads above water as human beings. We couldn’t eat. We wouldn’t sleep …
‘Fraser, do you ever get struck by some brilliant scientific hypothesis and you’re terrified you’ll lose the idea before you can capture it? Or are you all type A and have to do your filing first?’
He takes my wrist and twists my hand palm up, as though he’s giving me something to hold, and I’m surprised at the unexpected touch.
‘Sometimes it feels like sand, slipping through my fingers,’ he says, trailing a finger across my palm.
‘But it’s invisible. I know it’s there. I can feel the weight of it.
But I can’t see it. Or understand it yet.
It’s this intangible, frustrating, exciting, excruciating possibility, and it’s almost unbearable not to know, one way or the other … ’
I try not to shiver as my gaze travels from Fraser’s invisible idea in my hand, up his torso, to the academic aesthetic of glasses and messy hair.
It settles on brown eyes that search my face with a question that I badly want him to articulate as I reach and smooth the frown lines on his forehead, just briefly.
So many huge thoughts in that brain. Such massive problems that it’s trying to solve.
Does he have any idea how attractive that is?
‘You’re a trip hazard, Sullivan,’ he observes, removing my hand from his face.
Not ‘Sully’. Sullivan. A grownup, elegant, proper version of my surname that thrills me as it seems to shift us one tiny step closer.
‘Maybe you need to take more risks?’ I reply.
The dare leaves my mouth and seems to spark in his eyes, closing the space between us, nerve endings alight where our hands are still touching.
I have visions of him taking my instruction literally.
Pushing me back on the couch and kissing me just as the tsunami crashes into the city on the screen, skyscrapers crumbling while he picks me up and grants me access to the last off-limits room in his house.
‘What’s stopping you?’ he says, pulling me from the fantasy with serious eyes. Am I supposed to make the first move?
‘Stopping me what?’ I ask, the weighted words falling into a half whisper.
‘Why aren’t you chasing music the way you want to?’
Oh!
He’s reversed us out of the flirtation zone and turned career coach. I remove my hand from underneath his.
‘Probably fear,’ I hear myself say before I can properly editorialise a response. ‘Everything else is just an excuse.’
I don’t know what it is about Fraser—what magic hold he has over me—but for once I haven’t dished up my default answer. I always blame ‘the situation’ or the way I was wronged, rarely taking any responsibility myself.
‘Someone stole my music,’ I divulge, slipping back into familiar territory. ‘The major composition I’d been working on for my PhD.’
He reaches for the remote, shuts off the television, then turns on the table lamp beside him and looks at me the way Rach does when I’m about to spill the tea.
Except she acts like she’s Parker’s age on Christmas morning.
Fraser is patient and distinguished, as if we’re about to apply academic rigour to my past.
‘I was so young. So ill-equipped …’ Shame catches in my throat as I falter through this.
Failure. Rage. The poisonous cocktail that I force myself to swallow every time my memory dishes this up.
‘And here I am, further from my dream career than ever. I associate classical piano with my piece, and that piece with ditching my PhD, and pulling out of the doctorate with running away, and running away with failure. Whenever I hear it, and the way he claimed it and mangled it and—’
Fraser’s chestnut eyes darken, muscles tensing in his jaw. ‘What exactly did he do?’
My heart rails against the déjà vu. An almost identical conversation on a different couch more than a decade ago. Youthful vulnerability rushing through my veins, seeping through flushed skin on my face as I dared make the accusation.
Sully, I’ll keep your secret safe …
If I’m trembling now it’s in quiet rage. My secret was never safe once I exposed it to Josh. It was ablaze in his hands. I’d assumed the buckets he promised were filled with water. I thought he’d extinguish it, not accelerate it …
‘What’s scaring you?’ Fraser asks, reading the agony on my face.
I’m terrified my secret will wedge itself here, between us.
I’m afraid of how messy this is. That his brother’s blistering betrayal will make me bolt from this room in coltish fear that this conversation will go as badly as the other one.
And then I will lose this. I will lose him. An outcome I’m increasingly certain would devastate me, not just professionally this time, and that’s the part that scares me most …
‘I’m afraid history will repeat itself,’ I say, blinking back tears, rising to my feet. ‘And that I won’t survive it twice.’