Chapter Three
For a moment that had seemed both fleeting and yet endless, Jodie was fifteen again.
She’d been in the black bikini that Mum didn’t know about (and would absolutely freak out about when she did) and she’d been at the rock pool.
Yes, the rock pool, the one just outside of some little place in the hills above Clarence, and she’d grown tired of sunning herself and being ignored by her brother, who’d driven them both here to the rock pool on his newly minted provisional driver’s licence, and who had no interest in anything but his textbooks.
When she had managed to drag him into a conversation, all he could do was mock her for winning the typing prize at the end-of-year assembly.
Then she’d said, I’d rather be a prize typist than a prize dickhead, dickhead .
And now they hated each other. Maybe forever but probably only for an hour or so, because that’s how long their squabbles usually lasted.
Besides being annoyed with her brother, she was also hyper aware of the group of teenagers lounging around on the great flat rocks on the far side of the rock pool.
They reminded her of kangaroos at ease in a paddock, propped up on their elbows, all long limbs and sleek hair, and she was only slightly very much envious of the girls in their midst, who were on such friendly terms with the boys.
Boys who were—not that she’d been ogling them from behind her sunnies or anything—much nicer looking and fitter than the zit-riddled idiots she went to school with.
Especially the one with the surfie hair and the boardies. Jodie had tried to listen in to their conversations but the waterfall spilling down into the rock pool was too loud to see if he was hooked up with any of those fabulously lounging girls.
She stood and walked over to the edge of the granite slope where she and Nathan had set up their towels.
The rock pool was deep; she knew it was, because the other kids had been horsing around in it.
Taking a breath, she leapt up to cannonball in, and then she was splashing down, down, down into water that was way colder than she was expecting.
She also wasn’t expecting the water to be moving .
A current? In a rock pool? She spun over—or rather, the water spun her over—and she struck out with her feet and her hands to find rock so she could push her way back to the surface because her lungs were burning. But the water was deep, and—
The hands gripping her around the waist came out of nowhere, but she didn’t fight—she had no breath left to fight—and then she was at the surface, her legs tangling with those of the boy who’d jumped in to rescue her.
‘There’s an undertow down there,’ he said, flicking his hair out of his eyes. Brown eyes. Warm, trusting, brown eyes, in a face that had a few freckles and a laughing mouth and was just right there. The boy with the surfie hair.
That was the summer romance moment. The fall-deliciously-in-love moment.
For her, obviously, not for him, because instead of gazing into her eyes a little longer and looking all adorable and flustered (like she felt), he just said, ‘You okay?’
She shivered, then, because falling in love is intense , right? But he must have thought the shiver meant she wasn’t okay, because he hauled her to shallower water, picked her up ( gasp! ), and carried her over a shallow rocky ledge like she was precious.
He is heroic , was her first fluttering thought. This falling-in-love business was thrillingly, blushingly awesome …
Until he said, in that same casual, you-mean-nothing-to-me way, ‘See ya,’ plonked her on her feet and left her near her towel.
That was it: her first heartbreak. The one she’d thought about a little over the years, but a lot about lately, when heartbreak—true, messy, earned heartbreak—crashed into her life.
But here? Now? In the garden of some old pub? The eyes looking into hers were the same as all those years ago. The smile was the same. The bare chest wasn’t a comparison that could currently be made because country publicans didn’t rock up to work with no shirt and wet boardies, but—
This was Hero Boy, in the flesh. And he was currently staring up at her as though he was expecting her to do something other than reminisce about the distant past.
‘Did you say hamstring?’ Jodie said finally, when a corner of her brain reminded her that ordinary people didn’t live their entire lives as a running monologue in their head.
‘Yep. Felt a ping.’
Oh, a ping wasn’t good. But then neither was heartbreak. And yet, did the world care? Had the earth just hiccupped in its orbit around the sun? No. Nobody cared, not about hamstrings or blighted hopes, or even about the fact Jodie’s mother had sent her up here to Clarence on a wild goose chase.
Working on autopilot, Jodie put her arm into the crook of the publican’s, grabbed his bicep and used her body weight as a counterbalance to get him to his feet.
‘Can you walk?’ she said, uncomfortably aware of just how close they were standing. She didn’t want to be close to anyone. Ever again. Physically, mentally or any other way. Especially not someone about whom she’d had dreamy on-again, off-again what-if thoughts since she was an adolescent.
‘Let’s find out,’ he said, taking a tentative step, then almost, but not quite, buckling. ‘I can walk. Perhaps two ibuprofen and a liedown will sort me out.’ He started tentatively off down the path in the direction of the grand old weatherboard pub.
Jodie opened her mouth to start parroting on about small hamstring tears versus ruptures, ice to combat swelling and post-injury soft tissue massage to inhibit scar adhesion, but then she remembered she was a mess. She couldn’t help anyone, even Hero Boy.
‘Perhaps it will. See ya,’ she said. Did she mean to parrot the (slightly dismissive) words he’d said to her all those years ago? Surely not. Surely she wasn’t that petty. Surely a person who was emotionally raw and abraded didn’t even have petty left in her arsenal.
But she did say those words. And—here’s the weird thing—she remembered Carol hugging her in the little house on Lillypilly Street and the glimmer of good she’d felt then for the first time in what seemed like forever …
Saying See ya to Will ‘Hero Boy’ Miles and then strolling off?
It felt kinda good, too.