Chapter Eight
Ant
I’ve set aside Wednesday morning for sending out my ‘thanks but no thanks’ letters to potential investors, which at least means I can work from home and not in the cramped little office at the factory.
It’s frustrating that not one of the venture capitalist firms I’ve approached has been able to see my vision. If I left it to them, I’d be selling production-line boards out of chain stores. And that is not where I see the business going.
Maybe it’s that frustration that has me so disappointed when Lilavati cancels lunch. By text.
It’s brief and to the point.
Lili: Can’t do today. Aim for tomorrow?
I respond with a thumbs-up emoji, shooting for cool.
I don’t feel cool. I was looking forward to seeing her. To bantering with her. Which is new for me. Normally, I’m happy to have my own space. And God knows I have enough going on right now to keep me occupied.
She cancels again on Thursday, and now I’m fretting.
Is she having second thoughts about our fake dating arrangement?
That bothers me a lot more than it should.
Especially because now that I’m on my own with Beach Road Boards, my plate is not full, it’s overflowing, and taking eight days to relax in Hawaii couldn’t come at a worse time.
But I want that time with Lilavati more than I’ve wanted anything in a very long time.
Which is crazy because I hardly know her. Yet my reactions to Lilavati all seem to be heightened. And I think about her a lot.
When I get the text on Thursday, I decide I need some clarity.
Ant: Everything ok? We still good?
It’s an hour before she even sees the text. But she responds straight-away.
Lili: Yep. All good. You free for dinner with my parents on Sunday night? Sorry to impose, but they’d like to meet you before Hawaii. Feel free to say no!
Suddenly, I feel lighter. Not only has she not changed her mind, she’s committing.
At my age, meeting the parents this early on isn’t usual, but I’m unexpectedly excited.
It should be fun. I’m not sure what to expect.
What kind of people raised a woman who is as spiky as Lilavati, yet who, rather than tell them to fuck off and mind their own business regarding her love life, will go to the trouble of concocting a fake relationship to avoid confrontation?
Since we haven’t been able to catch up again, we haven’t worked out a meet-cute or been able to get to know one another, and it’s clear she’s worried her mother will somehow sniff out the lie we’re telling. So I take pity on her and read the bio she wrote.
It’s pretty dry reading and in no way reflects the fascinating and complex woman I’ve only glimpsed. She’s now a puzzle I want to solve.
Of course, she went to all the right North Shore schools. Was on the HSC Honours List. Got early entry to Sydney Uni for medicine. Graduated second in her class. I expected nothing less.
She lives in a small townhouse in Greenwich, so she doesn’t have a long commute to the hospital. No pets. I’d be willing to bet she doesn’t even have a houseplant.
But it’s short on personal stuff, and I don’t think that’s because she forgot.
I don’t think there’s much to tell. It seems like she has no life outside of work.
Sure, she names a couple of friends, but there are no hobbies.
No interests. And her favourite reading is biographies.
She might not know it, but this woman desperately needs someone like me to spice up her existence.
Because it feels like existing is all she’s doing.
I work damn hard. But I also make time to have a life.
I know it’s not the same for Lili. I can set my own schedule to some extent, whereas she can’t. And my daily decisions are not life and death. But if she doesn’t make room for more than work, she’s going to get to sixty-five and wonder what it was all about. And that would be a damn shame.
On Sunday morning, I contemplate a haircut and a shave.
What would Lili want me to do? On the one hand, meeting the parents would generally require a little effort on the part of a real boyfriend.
On the other hand, I suspect she thinks she chose me as her fake date because her mother and grandmother won’t approve.
I also suspect that’s not the full picture.
Whatever fairy story she’s told herself, I can feel the chemistry between us.
And although she’s still in denial, I’m pretty sure she can too.
In the end, I trim my scruff so it’s more like a two-day growth and attempt, with limited success, to tame my hair with some of the product I have left over from my sister’s wedding.
After more internal debate, I go for my best jeans, a white linen shirt and my new tan boots.
Smart but not too try-hard. Honestly, I wouldn’t do this much thinking over a real date, which says something about how interesting I find Lilavati.
My truck is at the panel beaters thanks to our car park introduction, so I ride my motorcycle to Lili’s. She’s going to drive from there since she thinks arriving on a motorcycle might give her mother a heart attack. It’s a shame because I wouldn’t object to having her pressed up against my back.
Lilavati throws open the door when I ring the bell. Her mouth drops open, and her gaze runs me up and down. Her eyebrows lift when she spots the nice bottle of red wine I’m holding.
“You do know you don’t have to win the parents over in a fake dating scenario?” she asks with her usual acidity before turning on her heel and stalking down the hall.
“I’ll be ready in a second,” she calls over her shoulder as she climbs the stairs.
I wander around the open-plan living room and kitchen. I was right. Not a houseplant in sight.
It’s a nice townhouse. Spacious and bright, even in the fading light of the early evening.
The furniture is clearly expensive, but it barely looks lived in.
The comfy-looking sofa has no indents where Lili’s perfect arse has snuggled down while watching a movie.
The bookcase is full of medical textbooks and a couple of biographies.
No well-thumbed novels or ornaments or photos of family and friends.
There’s no coffee cup upturned on the sink.
Not even a laptop open on the dining table.
No postcards or notes held on the fridge with ugly joke magnets.
And yet, this is the woman who drives a vintage convertible. There’s a creative soul in there somewhere, but for some reason, she’s intent on hiding it. The contradiction fascinates me.
“Nice place.” I raise my voice a little so she can hear me from upstairs, only to turn and find her standing right behind me. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she’d been checking out my arse.
“Thanks. Let’s go.”
We climb into a nondescript rental car since her cute little sports car is also at the panel beaters.
“Okay, so I’ve been thinking,” I start, as she reverses out of the garage. “We should try and stay as close to the truth as possible. That way, we won’t contradict one another or forget what we’ve said. So we tell the truth about how we met, without the part where you checked out my junk.”
Her pout tells me she’s about to argue, but the expression subsides.
“Sure. That will work. Except we need to be vague about when the accident happened. I told Mum on the day it happened that I was seeing someone.”
“So we say ‘a few weeks’ when they ask how long we’ve been dating. But we knew right away it was something special.”
Lilavati huffs a laugh. “It was something, alright. Not sure special is the word though.”
She swings the car onto the Pacific Highway and heads north in the unexpectedly light Sunday afternoon traffic. It comes as no surprise, given how we met, that she’s got a bit of a lead foot.
“Hey, you didn’t seem to mind the view,” I counter.
She snorts and gives me a side eye as she changes lanes, leaving barely a coat of paint between us and the car beside us.
“That was shock. You don’t expect to find a naked man in a car park. Even at the beach.”
It’s my turn to laugh. “That might be your experience, but surfers see that kind of thing all the time.”
“You still haven’t told me anything much about yourself. I need something more than dogs, coffee and autumn.”
It gives me a little warm glow to know she remembered my answers, supporting my theory that she’s not as immune to me as she’d have me believe.
“Potted history, then. Started surfing when I was ten. When I left school, I went on a gap year during which I supported myself by making coffee and serving in bars. Now I make coffee and the occasional surfboard.” None of which is untrue, although it’s only part of the story.
I’m not sure why I don’t want to tell her the rest. Except that it’s not who I am, it’s what I do.
At heart, I’m a surfer and coffee lover.
That I’ve turned my parents’ couple of cafés and my skill at board making into a multi million-dollar business is, to me at least, irrelevant.
If Lilavati is going to like me, I want it to be for who I am. Not what.
Okay, I might also suspect that, since she seems to have chosen me because of my unsuitability, giving her the full story might take the shine off the idea for her.
I don’t want to tempt her to pull the pin.
Not until I’ve had a chance to get to know her a little better and show her we could have a great time together beyond the charade she’s selling her family.
“You make surfboards?” Lili flicks me a look while we’re stopped at the traffic lights.
“Yep. When people ask me to.” These days, lots of people ask me to.
World champion surfers ask me to. And pay lots of money for me to do it.
I have a staff of eight people helping me.
None of which I say. “My favourite colour is whatever colour the ocean is at the time. I have one sister and three nieces. My parents retired to Tasmania two years ago. My best friend, Simon, also makes surfboards. We share a house at Collaroy. Does that give you enough to work with?”
She looks vaguely annoyed. “Why couldn’t you have just written all that down for me last Tuesday?”
“And miss the enjoyment of pissing you off? No way.” I turn my face away and look out the window so she can’t see the grin splitting my face. Except when I look back, her expression says she’s clearly annoyed, and that makes me even more inclined to laugh.
“Lighten up, Sparky.”
“Sparky?” she squawks, voice and expression showing exactly why I’ve called her that.
We turn off the highway and start snaking through the back streets towards Wahroonga. As the streets get narrower, the tension in the car increases.
“You’ve got to admit, you’re pretty salty a lot of the time. But Salty isn’t a very affectionate-sounding nickname. Sparky, on the other hand …”
“I thought we settled the nickname thing. Lili will do just fine,” she huffs.
I suppress a smile at her response. My comment had the desired effect. The tension that had been building in her body language has been replaced by her normal irritated bristling.
“You may have settled it, but I haven’t. Right now, I’m liking Sparky.”
The car pulls through two brick pillars and jerks to a stop on a long gravel driveway in front of a sprawling brick and sandstone house, sporting—I kid you not—a turret at one corner.
“Home sweet home,” Lilavati says. Yanking on the handbrake, she lets out a sigh. The kind that tells me she both loves and hates either the house, the people in it, or both.