Forever in Lovely Bay
Chapter 1
1
F leur Champion stood at her kitchen window stirring a pot of tea and gazing out at blue-grey waves tumbling onto Lovely Bay’s shoreline in the distance. It was a cosy sort of morning, the air damp from an early drizzle, but with brightness to the sky promising that if things went well the clouds would burn off and sunshine would arrive. You could but live in hope. She stood for ages, waiting for the tea she’d just made to brew, staring out the window doing nothing at all but thinking and thinking and then just for good measure having a little bit more of a think, too. Mornings with nothing too pressing to do were the mornings our Fleur cherished. Not much going on, peaceful, grounded, and the faint hum of Lovely life stirring outside her little seaside cottage. Just how she liked it and wanted it to remain, forever, of course.
She heard Patrick clomping down the stairs and smiled as he entered the kitchen in tartan pyjama bottoms and no top. That was a good way to start a morning; her cherished morning just got a little bit better. Blinking a few times, she couldn’t quite believe what was in front of her eyes or that Patrick, mmm, mmm, was actually part of her life. Nudging around the kitchen table, he looked out the back door as Fleur took bacon, eggs, and sausages out of the fridge and pottered around getting a pan from the cupboard. ‘Morning.’
‘How did you sleep?’
‘Well. Apart from that downpour and thunder in the middle of the night…’
‘It scared the life out of me.’
‘Me too.’
‘I didn’t think you’d woken up.’
‘I did.’
‘It was so loud.’
Fleur held up the box of eggs. ‘I thought I’d do a fry up and then we’d go for a walk. Fancy that?’
Patrick chuckled. ‘I’ve had worse Saturday morning offers. Sounds right up my street.’
Fleur laughed to herself. Out of the two of them she knew whose Saturday morning was better. ‘I know you love a good fry-up and it gives me an excuse to pretend I’m only having it because you are. Plus, it has to be better than the fruit and yoghurt I’ve been eating all week.’
Patrick shook his head and frowned. ‘Is there really anybody who doesn’t like a full English? Asking for a friend.’
‘There can’t be, surely?’ Fleur unwrapped a packet of bacon from the deli and dropped it into the pan. As it sizzled away to itself, she sliced bread into triangles for fried bread and watched Patrick as he stood on the terrace outside the back door with a mug of tea in his hand. He’d now been around for a while, and to be frank, she was surprised by that. She’d half-thought somewhere in the depths of her mind, that he might have done what her ex-husband had done; gone off her by now, traded her in for a better model, called it a day, but so far, so good. He still gave her goosebumps every time she looked at him, which was a very good bonus when he was standing half naked just outside your kitchen. When she let herself revel in the fact that he’d given her a ring to document whatever it was that they had she’d felt like a teenager in the first flush of love. Holding her hand up to the window, she turned it this way and that so that the diamonds sparkled in the light. As she watched the glimmers, the little swoony jump thing in her heart that always happened when she thought about Patrick made itself known.
The world had turned in mysterious ways for our Fleur. She’d gone from being serially on her own, through a slow-moving but persistent line of not very fabulous relationships to being a significant other to someone she loved very much. Sometimes she actually thought that none of it was true – not Patrick, nor the cottage, nor Lovely. That she would wake up alone still in the house on the green, rummaging around in humdrum, not really sure what was going to happen in her life and not all that happy, either.
If that had been the case and all of this was indeed a dream, her dad would still be alive, her mum wouldn’t be living van life, her sister would not be Down Under, and she would still be floating around in the monotony of life. There would be no other words for it but mildly miserable with a side of bored thrown in for good measure. Not that she’d thought she was miserable when she’d been in the house on the green before moving to Lovely. Not at all, actually. Then, she’d thought she was okay. Now, she really was okay. The hunk of a man directly in front of her standing shirtless in her garden looking down at his phone told her that well enough. Gulp.
As Fleur cracked eggs into the pan, she glanced at Patrick and smiled. His head was bent slightly, light catching on bed hair and he was frowning a touch and leaning forward with a bit of a furrow on his face. She’d learned the look well and she would have laid money on it that he had a problem at work. Watching him type away furiously with his thumbs, it hit her how utterly unexpectedly glorious it was to have him in her life. Solid, dependable, quietly funny, Patrick who now seemed as much a part of her world as the cottage itself. Shifting the eggs around the pan with a wooden slice, she mused the situation as if in a little delicious private daydream for one.
In a way, it felt quite alien to be part of something, a unit, to be someone else's significant other, if that indeed was what it was. For so long, she’d told herself she was perfectly fine on her own. More than fine. Absolutely marvellous. Not in need of anything at all. She’d convinced herself she didn’t need anyone to help with the messiness of life or indeed the anything of life. She’d raised Lucy, handled her divorce, and rebuilt her world bit by bit without a lot of fuss and froth and a whole lot of gritting of teeth. And yet, here was a man who had managed to slip into her life, as if he’d always been meant to sit around, drinking tea and reading his phone while she fried bacon on a Saturday morning. Niceeeee.
As Saturday morning companions went, he wasn’t too shabby, better than the last one, anyway. It was strange how love had crept up on her when she most definitely had not, like not, not, not , been looking for it in any shape or form. She’d been so busy surviving, trying to keep things together and getting on with the gigantic move to Lovely Bay that the idea of being with anyone let alone someone like Patrick hadn’t even been in her peripheral. In actual fact, it had seemed like some far-off fantasy that she would be part of a relationship unit ever again. Stranger things and pigs flying, though, because here she was doing just that. Flying up there with the pigs was oh-so nice and how very, very pretty those pigs were up there. With fab, sculpted abs on.
The man poking his head around the back door told her that he was not a fantasy and very real. And breathe. ‘Need a hand with anything?’
Fleur shook her head, smiled, and joked. ‘No, I’m fine. You sit there and look pretty.’
Patrick laughed and went back to his phone. She glanced over at him again as she waited for the bread to brown. Sometimes she wondered why he was with her and that he was the one getting the short end of the stick. Punching? Wasn’t that what they called it? There was nothing particularly dazzling about her existence or her, for that matter. The razzle-dazzle of Fleur from days gone by was long gone. Just plain old Champo bobbing along in life – single mum, notebook maker, and occasional overthinker. What was it, exactly, that had drawn him and her together? Why and how did they click? Whatever it was, from her side of the fence, it worked. There would be no boat rocking going on.
‘Do I have something on my face, or are you just admiring me?’ Patrick winked.
Fleur startled, realising she was twirling and whirling and lost in her own thoughts. She fired back as quick as a flash. ‘You wish.’ If only he knew how much she’d been admiring him. By the truck load.
‘What’s going on in your head? You look as if you are deep in thought.’
‘Nothing. Just thinking about breakfast and I don’t know, stuff.’
‘Stuff, right. The breakfast smells amazing. How is it that frying bacon smells so good? I think I could live on it. Add fried bread and life couldn’t get any better. It’s a good job I’ve done a lot of work this week or it would be going straight to my arteries.’
Fleur flipped the bread over in the pan, letting it soak up the last of the bacon grease before plating everything up. Two heaped plates of fried bread, bacon, eggs, and sausages. She carried them over to the table, tried not to think about the calories and put one down in front of him. ‘There you go. One full English for your arteries and cholesterol levels.’
Patrick rubbed his hands together. ‘You spoil me.’
‘Someone’s got to.’ Fleur chuckled and thought about how nice it was just to have companionship . She hadn’t realised how much of a gaping hole not having someone to share the everyday with had been until it had been filled by the man sitting opposite her. She turned her hand and let the diamond forever ring catch the light and then sat lost in her thoughts as she tucked into her breakfast.
‘You’re doing that staring thing again.’
Fleur shook her head. ‘Just happy, I suppose. After those few manic months with Lucy and Mum and this, that, and the other. It’s nice to just sit down and breathe, right?’
Patrick tilted his head. ‘Yeah. It’s nice to be happy…’
‘It really is.’
Fleur nodded as she popped another forkful of bacon into her mouth. The funny thing was that she was forever happy, not just day-to-day happy, or regular happy, or yeah happy, but tightly happy, stay-with-me happy. One thing she knew for sure; she wanted it to remain.
Let’s hope that what was in our Champo’s future would keep it that way. That the cards dealt in the next part of Fleur’s story would be good ones. Our Champo wasn’t sure if she should hold her breath.