Chapter 4 Damien
Chapter four
Damien
Ilooked into Zoe’s big blue eyes and I struggled to maintain my frustration with her.
Fuck knows what she was thinking when she told my family she was my girlfriend.
It felt like we’d just created a huge mess, but I wasn’t going to deny it in front of my family who’d been pestering me about getting back into the dating world since my ex and I amicably parted ways.
I was supportive of Libby finding love. I knew early on that we didn’t share the same kind of love that my parents did, but I had been content with what we’d had.
We were mates, in the same Oz Tag team, and in a small town where you just paired up with someone and stuck with them, I thought that was enough.
Mariah came along as a surprise and although we both loved our baby girl, it was the trigger for Libby to let me know that she didn’t think she was straight and she needed some time to figure things out.
She moved to Canberra to be closer to her job, and I moved in with my parents who helped me look after Mariah.
Libby would come home on weekends, stay with her parents and take Mariah. One weekend she brought home a woman named Sara and it hit me. Libby and Sara looked at each other in the same way my parents have looked at each other my whole life and I was happy for them.
Personally I was a little relieved. The friendship side of my relationship with Libby was always easy, we were mates.
The romantic side always felt like hard work though and when I saw Libby and Sara together, I knew that relationships weren’t for me.
Well, I didn’t rule them out completely, I just put them on the back burner because unless I could be with someone who I looked at like Libby did with Sara or my parents did with each other, it wasn’t worth the time or heartache.
I had Mariah to look after and she was my number one girl from then on.
Over the years, my mum had tried to set me up with various women.
Nice women. Pretty women. Women from her church or women from the Country Women's Association. There was nothing wrong with those women, but there was also nothing remarkably right about them either. I’d settled once for a lukewarm relationship and I didn’t want to do that again.
The problem with Zoe? She was gorgeous. Seriously stunning. The first woman to ever make my pulse race and my cock stir just by being in my vicinity. She was kind and generous. Great with Mariah and everyone loved her.
But she was only here in Hartwood Bay temporarily. Bella had mentioned that she’d moved here to take up a maternity relief position. One year and she’d made no plans beyond that.
I didn’t want to put Mariah through the heartache of getting attached to someone who was just going to run back to Melbourne in the next couple of months. I didn’t want that for me either but my baby girl was my top priority.
Zoe looked nervous as I closed the door to the granny flat. All bravado vanished from her face as soon as she was alone with the one person who knew what a big fat lie she’d just told.
“I’m so sorry, Damien!” she pleaded. “Your mum was just relentless and I know what that’s like, I get it twice a week from my mum, and so before I’d even thought about it, the lies just kept escaping from my mouth. I understand if you’re angry and you want me to move out…”
“I don’t want you to move out,” I assured her. “I’m not angry. To be honest it would be nice to have my mum stop with the constant set ups. But I am a little confused though. How will this work?”
“Ummm, I just thought that they’d leave you alone if they thought you were seriously dating someone…” she started to shrink in on herself, like she was almost expecting me to tell her it was a terrible idea.
“Yes, but now they’ll expect you at all the family dinners, Mum will drop in to see you at random times and Mariah—” I started to elaborate.
“Is old enough to understand that dating doesn’t mean forever.” Her voice was even.
I chose not to contradict Zoe, she was already upset and although I didn’t need her telling me how to raise my daughter, that was a conversation for another time.
“How do you plan to get us out of this?” I crossed my arms over my chest.
“I haven’t thought that far…” she sighed, then collapsed onto the lounge.
“Clearly,” I scrubbed my hand over my beard with frustration. “The way I see it, we can go one of two ways, either go out there and tell them that you were just trying to save me some grief or two we go along with this farce.”
“I’m all for going along with this farce, it will buy you a little time…” Zoe looked at me sheepishly. “Plus, it would get my mum off my back for a little while too.”
“What do you mean?” It hadn’t occurred to me that she would have an ulterior motive for this.
“My ex-fiancé is getting married and she just keeps pushing me to move on,” she sighed.
“Are you still hung up on your ex?” I didn’t know why I needed to know that.
“No,” she snorted. “Very much over him, just don’t want to jump into another relationship.”
“I know how that feels,” I replied. I paced the small kitchen space and looked back at her. “So we’re doing this?”
Zoe nodded, her shoulders dropping as the anxiety visibly left her body.
“If we’re going to do this, we need to sort some basics out, my mum will want to know the details.” I dropped onto the lounge next to her and we sat in the granny flat figuring out a few things so that her lie didn’t bite us both in the ass.