Chapter Twelve #2
‘Amelie?’
My name is a question because I shouldn’t be here staring at his Christmas ornaments.
I shouldn’t be here staring at him. I should still be in the mudroom, which is three rooms not one room, because that’s where he told me to go.
Or maybe I should be at the ute with Keith Urban, who’s waiting to go home.
‘Thank you for letting me shower here.’ I link my hands and study them as if they’re new to me. ‘I’d better get back to work.’
‘Do you have another client?’
‘I’m doing my accounts.’
‘Stay.’ Voice gruff, he fastens a button of his shirt. But then he unfastens it because the buttons are out of line. ‘I’ll show you the horses.’
‘I’ve seen a black thoroughbred and a smaller grey horse from my window.’ I want to meet Cameron’s horses, but it’s much too risky to stay. I like him. Possibly more than like. Probably more than like. ‘I should go.’
‘Another time.’ He lifts a hand and drops it.
‘Did you make the ornaments? Did you paint them?’
‘I’m not done yet.’
‘What will you do for the lords and pipers?’
‘The lords will be stars and the pipers will be thistles.’
‘How about the drummers?’
He smiles. ‘You know more about Christmas than you let on.’
‘I don’t.’ I take a step back. ‘I really don’t.’
‘You don’t know about it, or you don’t feel it?’
‘How would you feel Christmas?’
‘People get together, they share a meal, they give gifts if they want.’ He shrugs. ‘It gives me an excuse to make ornaments.’
‘They’re beautiful.’
He plucks ornaments from the tree. A rosella, a cow, a dove. He smiles as he holds them out. ‘Happy Christmas.’
‘I can’t take them.’
‘Why not?’
‘You wouldn’t have the right number of ornaments for the song.’
‘Christmas doesn’t have to be perfect.’ He searches for words. ‘Like I said, it’s a feeling.’
‘I still don’t get it.’
‘People are happier than usual. More patient, forgiving, generous. Christmas gives you reasons to give presents, which is why I want to give these to you.’
The rosella is pale pink. The dove is soft grey. The dairy cow is black and white. I take the ornaments out of his hand and hold them tightly in mine.
‘I’ll hang these in the cabin with the glass ball.’
A slight hesitation. ‘Did you recognise the snowflake design on the glass?’
‘It’s a fractal, a pattern formed by self-replication.’
‘What kind of fractal?’
‘Koch’s snowflake curve.’ I put the ornaments in my back pocket. ‘An infinite number of equilateral triangles. We studied it in science.’
‘Amelie …’ He’s closer than he was. ‘Don’t run.’
I’m frozen with indecision. I like him. I’m possibly falling in love with him. Maybe I always have been in love with him. My eyes go to his mouth and his go to mine and our fingers tangle. My heart thumps so hard that it hurts.
‘We didn’t argue today.’ My eyes are firmly fixed on his chest.
‘I like being with you.’
‘Maybe we were too busy to argue.’
He brings our hands between us so the side of my hand is pressed against the skin of his chest. I’m tingling all over and it’s increasingly difficult to breathe. I move my little finger backward and forward.
‘I like your property.’
He cups my face, tips up my chin. ‘Can I ask you a question?’
‘What?’
‘How many relationships have you had?’
‘Why would you want to know that?’
‘Humour me.’
‘One on and off, but it wasn’t serious. I’ve never wanted that.’
A frown. ‘I’ve had a lot of relationships, but nothing long term.’
I flatten my hands on his chest. Hard and warm. ‘Why did you want to know about relationships?’
‘I want to kiss you.’ His heart is beating just as fast as mine. His eyes are bright green, his lips are slightly apart. ‘But I don’t want to scare you.’
The tingling sensation at the base of my stomach sinks lower. I lift my hand and search for the place where his messy lion hair kinks at his neck and thread my fingers through it.
‘I can kiss you instead.’
When I touch his bottom lip with my tongue, he growls low in his throat and I pull back.
‘Is that all right?’
‘Yes.’ He dips his head and smiles against my mouth.
And then, lips firm but cautious, he explores my mouth thoroughly but carefully.
Passion, yes. Tongue, not yet. My breasts ache.
A wondrous heat pools between my thighs.
When I slide my hands from his neck to his shoulders to his chest, he kisses one eye and then the other.
‘You smell nice.’ My voice squeaks.
‘I want you, Amelie.’ The pulse in his jaw beats as frantically as my heart. He slides his mouth against mine, but his shoulders are tense, as if he’s holding back. I put my hand on the side of his face and touch his mouth.
‘You don’t have to take care of me, Cameron. You don’t have to be careful of me.’
‘I think I do.’ He’s so very serious.
This time I touch his top lip with my tongue. ‘I trust you.’
Blue eyes on green, we stare at each other.
And then he takes control. No more careful kisses, no more cautious exploration.
This kiss takes over not only my mouth but my body and my thoughts as his tongue goes to places that I didn’t know a tongue could go.
I must be breathing more than just through him, but how could that be when his lips are on mine and his tongue is circling my own?
When his hand slips from my waist to the side of my breast, my knees wobble.
He stills. ‘Can I touch you here?’
‘Yes.’ When I lean into him, he slides a leg between mine. My breath hitches and I hold back a moan. After freeing my lip from my teeth, he kisses me again, a long wet kiss in which the strokes of his tongue echo the strokes of his thumb on my breast.
‘Cameron …’
He lifts his head and searches my face before lifting me onto his workbench as if I weigh nothing. When I open my legs, he steps into the space and I wrap my legs around his waist.
‘Is that better?’
I wriggle even closer. ‘Yes.’
He kisses me again, a slow and searching kiss as I explore his chest and shoulders and down his back.
I’ve stood on my own two feet for such a long time but he said he wants me and he doesn’t lie, so just for a little while I can lean against him.
His breathing, his mumbled endearments, his groans when I trail kisses from his throat to his sternum to his chest. I’m a tangle of feelings and a mess of sensations and maybe he is too.
‘Amelie …’ He pushes back my hair. ‘Sweetheart.’
I like how he makes Christmas ornaments and gives them away. I like how his expression softens when he talks about his farm and his stock. He’ll wash our blue shirts together. He must have the same soap in the mudroom as he has in the bathroom in the shed because we both smell of lemons and—
‘Cam! Where are you? Amelie?’
Cameron buries his face in my neck. ‘Fuck.’
I stroke his hair for the count of one, two, three. And then he straightens. His mouth is damp. I touch it.
‘Cam!’ Anna’s voice.
A string of curses as Cameron stands back, puts a hand either side of my waist and lifts me off the bench and onto the ground. ‘Sorry.’ He takes my hand, lifts it and kisses a knuckle.
He’s sorry we were interrupted. What am I sorry for? Not the kiss, I couldn’t be sorry about that, but now I’m not crazy with craving there are other things to think about. Saying goodbye. Leaving him behind. My heart hurts with thinking about it and so does my head.
‘I have to go.’
His eyes narrow a little. Concern. Suspicion. He relinquishes my hand for only a moment before taking it again and threading our fingers. ‘Anna is here to look at paint colours. She won’t stay long.’
Paint colours for his beautiful house. His beautiful house in Summerfield on the land where he works with his cattle. There was a reason I’d never ventured down the driveway. I don’t belong here. I never could.
I pull my hand free. ‘I can hose off my clothes before taking them to the laundromat.’
He thinks long and hard about what I’ve said. Then, ‘Amelie—’
‘I’d prefer it that way.’
‘I said I’d wash them.’ His mouth firms. ‘I will.’
‘Okay, then. Thanks. No hurry.’ The words tumble out. ‘Whenever.’
He lifts his hand before dropping it to his side. ‘When do I see you again?’
‘What just happened wasn’t, didn’t …’ I shake my head. ‘Let’s just forget it.’
‘How the fuck …’ He lowers his voice. ‘How does that add up?’
‘I don’t want complications.’
‘You said you’d had an on-and-off relationship and it wasn’t serious.’ His jaw is tight. ‘I want on, Amelie. I want serious.’
Anna calls out again, closer now. As Cameron fumbles over doing up the buttons of his shirt, I skirt around him.
‘Amelie! Don’t you dare.’
Cameron catches up by the time I reach the door but Keith Urban, tail wagging wildly, has found me too. Leaving Anna and Tara behind, he scoots across the gravel and I crouch down.
‘Hello, boy.’ My eyes sting, my throat aches.
‘What have you two been up to?’ Anna releases Tara’s hand and the toddler runs to Cameron and clings to his leg.
When Cameron says nothing, I’m forced to speak. ‘We’ve been vaccinating, castrating, things like that.’ I stand and shove my hand in my back pockets. One is empty. The other …
A dove, a dairy cow, a rosella.