Читать книгу The Australians' Brides - Lilian Darcy - Страница 13

The barbed wire had pierced and torn the skin on Jacinda’s palm in four places. It stung and throbbed, and the remaining half mile to the homestead felt like ten times that distance as she thought about taking each cautious step in the dark. She didn’t want to trip again. She needed better shoes. Proper hiking boots or something. And she shouldn’t have stayed out so long, even though she’d needed all that time to think.

I’ll try e-mailing Andy and Tom tonight, on Callan’s computer, she decided as she started walking again. She then spent the next five minutes of carefully trod distance trying to work out when she’d last done so. Could it really be more than two years?

The dogs started barking when she still had two hundred yards of fence to follow. They sounded overexcited and ready for action, but surely they didn’t think she was a stranger?

Someone must have let them through the gate because they came at her out of the darkness with a speed that frightened her, still letting out high, urgent sounds. She saw a circle of light behind them, bouncing in time to someone’s stride, then heard Callan’s voice.

“Jac, is that you?” He raised the flashlight in her direction.

“Yes, and please tell Pippa and Flick that I’m friendly!”

He whistled at the dogs as he came closer and they ran to heel beside him, panting and turning their faces up to him as if they expected a reward. “Yes, guys, well done, you found her,” he told them.

“Found me?” Jac reached them, while Callan was still bending down to the dogs.

“Please don’t scare us like that again, okay?” He pointed the flashlight beam away from her and toward the ground, but it had already shone into her face and dazzled her vision and she had spots before her eyes.

“Scare you?” She blinked, covered her closed eyes with her hand for a moment, but her vision was slow to clear and, when she opened them again, she could still barely see him. She could sense him, though. That big body, that aura of dust and hard work. “Callan, I wasn’t lost or anything.” She peered at him. It was the first time they’d talked all day. “Were you worried?”

Stupid question. He didn’t look worried, she saw at last as the spots faded. He looked angry, slapping the flashlight in a slow rhythm against his hard, denim-clad thigh and narrowing his eyes. “How much water did you have with you?” he demanded.

“I had a big drink before I left.”

“And did you take a jacket? Even a cotton sweater?”

“I only went for a quick breath of fresh air.” She began to guess that these weren’t adequate answers.

“And you were gone nearly three hours.”

“I know. I was thinking about a few things. Time got away from me a bit, and I didn’t turn back along the creek as soon as I should have. I was a bit shocked to see that the light was going.” Instinctively, she touched the sunglasses on top of her head, useless now. She had her baseball cap folded and stuffed into the back pocket of her jeans, equally useless once the sun went.

“Sunglasses aren’t a survival kit.”

He poked at them with a rigid finger, pushing them farther back into her hair—a gesture that could have been tender in other circumstances, but wasn’t this time. It brought him closer, though, and she remembered with every sense and every nerve ending how she’d felt in his arms last night.

“If you’d twisted your ankle on a tree root and had to sit there all night until we found you,” he went on, “you would have been happy in short sleeves without a drop to drink or a morsel of food, with the temperature dropping into the forties, is that right?”

“Well …”

“People who get lost or hurt out here … people who don’t have the right gear … people whose engines break down and they go looking for help instead of staying with their vehicle … they die, Jacinda, and it doesn’t take that long, either.” His voice rasped and dropped deeper. “This country doesn’t forgive mistakes.”

“Shoot, I didn’t think, did I?” she realized aloud.

He whooshed out a sigh, bent down once again to Pippa and gave her a rough pat, his strong hand splayed out in her thick fur. The way he marshaled his emotions was almost palpable. His shoulder muscles moved under his shirt. “I guess I never spelled it out to you,” he said, after a moment. “Too busy giving you a crash course in snake behavior.”

“Which I very much appreciated!” She took a breath. “You’re right, I should have taken water and a jacket. Shouldn’t have needed a crash course in that kind of basic common sense. And I did grab on to the barbed wire, just now, so common sense has definitely deserted me this evening.”

“We’ve both been a bit … yeah … off beam today,” he growled, and she knew he was thinking about last night.

“See, I’ve spiked my hand.” She blurted out, then grabbed the flashlight from him, pointed the beam at her palm and showed him.

“We’ll need to take care of that as soon as we get back to the house. Are you up to date on your tetanus shot?”

“Lord, I have no idea! No, wait a minute.” She remembered that she’d had one when Carly was a baby, as part of a routine health check with her doctor. “Yes, I would be.” Thank goodness, one area in which she could impress him as faintly sensible. “Have I upset Kerry, too?” she added, thinking about her earlier conversation with Callan’s mother.

Liz would never have let something like this happen. Gone off without water, food or clothing? Never!

She had belonged here, body and soul.

And yet Kerry considered this to have been a mixed blessing.

“She was pretty concerned when Pete and Lockie and I got back before you did,” Callan said. “She couldn’t tell me what you’d taken with you.” He was silent for a moment. “Sorry I was angry. We didn’t know where to start looking, didn’t want to worry Carly.”

“Is she worried?”

“Mum’s with her,” he hedged. “Dinner’s on the table.”

“She is worried. Oh, hell!” She began to stride back to the house, and Callan and the dogs went with her.

“Best way for you to learn, I guess,” Callan said.

“You’re right. I’ll know next time.”

“Forget it. Forget that I was angry, please. It didn’t help.”

“We’re both tired.”

And what’s the bet that Carly has a sleepwalking episode tonight? Jac added to herself inwardly.

Carly rushed into her arms back at the homestead, as soon as they saw each other. “Mommy, I thought a snake bit you. I thought you were lost.”

“It was my fault, sweetheart. I was fine, but I should have let Kerry know exactly where I’d be, and I should have turned back sooner. I won’t make that mistake again.”

“Gran was worried about you.”

“I know she was.”

Pressed against Carly’s warm little back, Jac’s injured palm throbbed. The decision to contact Andy and Tom felt like less of a positive step than it had seemed a short while ago, and when she asked after dinner if she could use Callan’s computer to send some e-mails, she sat in front of a blank screen for too long before anything would come.

Finally, with her left hand crisscrossed in fresh Band-Aids and still smarting after the run-in with the barbed-wire fence, she typed, Hi, Andy! Guess what? I’m in Australia! Visiting a friend at a place called Arakeela Creek. With Carly, of course. Don’t run to get a map. It won’t be marked. Even though it’s the size of Rhode Island. How are the kids? How’s Dad? You can reach me at this e-mail address until May 13. Let me know how you’re doing. Your sister, Jacinda.

Just in case he’d forgotten her name?

She looked at the words on the screen. She thought about all the other things she could have said. Talked about Kurt? Apologized for not keeping in better contact? At least redrafted it into some slightly more complex and grammatical sentences? With Carly, of course had no verb.

A familiar feeling of panic and dread began to flutter inside her, making Kerry’s fabulous chicken casserole sit uneasily in her stomach, and she knew that for now, these few stilted phrases would have to be enough. She hit Send and Receive, then copied the sent message and pasted it into a new one addressed to Tom, cut the How’s Dad? sentence and replaced it with Any special news?

“And I used to call myself a writer,” she muttered.

When she hit Send and Receive again, she got a system message telling her that the message to Andy had bounced. Checking again after a wait of less than a minute, she was told that Tom’s had bounced, also. In the long interval since she’d last made contact this way, both her brothers’ e-mail addresses had changed.

Coming in to his office to see if she needed any help with his computer and e-mail system, Callan could see her disappointment, she knew, even though she tried to hide it.

“Do you want to try calling them instead?” he asked. He looked to be fresh out of the shower. The ends of his hair were still wet against his neck and his tanned skin looked smooth. He smelled of soap and steam.

She thought about the time difference, and said, “Too early in the morning there.” It was eight in the evening here and Carly was already asleep, which meant six-thirty in the morning on the U.S. east coast. Then she added more honestly, “And anyway, over the phone I don’t think I’d know what to say.”

“That’s too bad.” He looked sincerely disappointed.

In her?

For her?

In her brothers?

Either way, it made her determined not to give up so easily. “But would you have any postcards, or something?” she asked. “I’d like Andy and Tom to at least know where I am, in case … well, they don’t often get in touch, but you never know.”

“I have to head into Leigh Creek later in the week to pick up some supplies. You can get postcards there, and anything else you need. Have a think about it. Your own brand of shampoo, or any food that Carly likes that we don’t have. We’ll bring her with us. It’s a bit of a drive, but we can have some stops along the way.”

“Thanks,” she said. “That’d be great.”

And if Carly was with them, Jac surely wouldn’t spend the whole drive remembering how it felt to kiss him, the way she was doing now ….

They didn’t quite know what to do or say next, how to end the conversation. Callan picked up some unopened letters from a big pile on the corner of the desk and let them drop back down. Was he planning to apologize again for getting angry at her about her poorly planned walk? She didn’t want that. Nor did she want any more awkward references to last night.

It was gone, finished, done with.

She had to keep telling herself that.

“You’ve got quite a pile of mail there,” she said quickly, to deflect the subject onto something … anything … safer.

“Forwarded from the magazine,” he answered, and only then did she realize what the letters were.

From women.

Hoping Callan was “sincerely looking for an Outback Wife.”

Looking closer, she saw that all of them were still sealed. “You haven’t opened them?”

“I’ve opened a ton of ’em. And I’ve replied. I was e-mailing a couple of them for a while, but that’s tailed off. These are just the letters from the past two mail flights, which I … uh … haven’t gotten to, yet.”

“My goodness! You need a secretary!”

He grinned, and some of that easy, familiar humor between them came creeping back. “Are you applying for the position?”

So they looked at the letters together, and she helped him with his replies. Kerry brought them each a mug of tea and offered her opinion of a woman who stressed the importance of Callan being “visually literate.”

“Whatever that means! Give her a discouraging answer!”

“Want to draft some replies, Mum?” Callan offered.

“Oh, no, thank you! I’ll leave you to it!” She quickly disappeared.

In the next letter they opened, a woman announced that if she and Callan became involved, she was “prepared to live in the wilderness for up to two years before we renegotiate a move to a more urban environment.”

This one received one of the polite “Thanks for your interest, but I’m not looking for anything right now” replies that Callan had become impressively fluent with by now.

A few letters later, a girl called Tracey “hadn’t had much luck with men, because I’m shy, which I know is my fault. I have a good family—two brothers and a sister, my mum and dad—and we’re close, but I’d move away from Ballarat for the right man. I’d want to take things slow, though. I think marriage, or any relationship, is too important to get wrong because you haven’t thought it through.”

“She sounds nice,” Jacinda said. “You should write her a good letter.”

“She looks nice, too,” answered Callan, showing her a simple snapshot of a slightly chunky woman of around twenty-five or so, with a tomboy smile and light brown hair.

Jac leaned closer to see the picture better, and her arm brushed Callan’s. Turning instinctively, she found him looking at her and could read his face like a book.

She looks nice, but right now you’re the woman I want. It’s too complicated so I’m not going to give in to it, but you’re definitely the woman I want.

“Maybe we’ve done enough secretarial work for tonight,” he said on an uncomfortable growl. “I’ll write something back to her tomorrow.”

Jac nodded. “This is more words than I’ve strung together in—well, a while.”

Frustrated, she knew she needed something more, something other than drafting polite lines to people that neither she nor Callan really knew—and, yes, she included her brothers in that. A need was building inside her, demanding release and expression. It made her scared and it made her twitchy, and she’d only ever known one way to get the feeling under control.

She needed to … really, genuinely, seriously … write.

“I’m going to check on Carly,” she told him, even though she knew Carly was asleep. She wanted to see if by some faint chance she had writing materials in a forgotten outer sleeve of one of her suitcases.

“Callan, would you have a legal pad or a notebook I could use?” Jacinda looked a little tense about asking the question.

A lot tense, in fact. Meeting in front of the waistband of her jeans, her fingers zipped back and forth as she rubbed her nails together, making a buzzing, clicking sort of sound that gave out way too much of a clue as to her state of mind. She didn’t seem to notice that she was doing it.

“Even just some scrap paper?” she added, as if she only had a shopping list to write.

“One of the boys’ old school notebooks?” Callan suggested. He pretended he hadn’t noticed the tension, or the sound and movement of the fingernails, even though his gaze kept pulling in that direction. “They get a new set every year and some of the ones from last year still have a lot of blank pages. Would that work?”

“It’d be great.”

She looked relieved that she’d managed to ask the question, that he hadn’t asked too many questions of his own in response, and that she’d gotten an easy answer. Her hands dropped to her sides, but the thick denim waistband of the jeans stood out a little from her tightly drawn in stomach, showing the weight she must have lost in recent months, and Callan kept looking there, at the place where the clicking fingernails had been, for just a second or two too long.

“Let me dig one out,” he said, dragging his eyes upward, trying to forget how clearly he’d pictured himself seated in a squashy armchair. He would have grabbed her as she went by. He would have wrapped his arms around that willowy waist of hers, and hugged the tension out of those drawn-in stomach muscles.

He wanted to tell her to put the weight back on so that she filled out the lean lines of the jeans. He wanted to apologize again about coming down too hard on her tonight about going for a walk with no water. He hadn’t exaggerated the potential danger in this country, but he could have skipped the anger, because the anger was far more about … something else.

He wanted to thank her for helping him with the letters. He knew it must have been hard at first, despite the way she’d relaxed into it. Yes, and he wanted to tell her exactly how he came to understand so much regarding her tension and fear about the whole writing thing, even though he’d hadn’t tried to write a poem or a story since high school.

“I’m sorry, if it’s too much trouble at this hour it can wait until morning,” she said quickly, ready to backtrack on the whole writing idea at the slightest excuse.

“It’s fine.”

True, he was about to head off for bed. It already felt overdue after the long day working on the new mustering yard with Lockie and Pete, and the heart-pumping but mercifully short-lived interval when he’d feared that Jacinda might be lost. But he was still racked with guilt and regret about what had happened down at the water hole last night. They should have simply been tracking down Lockie’s Game Boy and getting the hell out of there, instead of watching for wildlife and exchanging life stories and—

Yeah.

Guilt and regret and awareness rushed through him, none of it helped by having sat with her in his office writing polite rejection letters to other women for almost an hour.

It wasn’t Jacinda’s fault.

It was totally, utterly him.

Had he managed to get that across to her? Could finding an old schoolbook of Lockie’s for her, without asking her what she wanted to use it for, in any way make up for the way he’d turned away from her down at the creek, and then again back at the house? Make up for the way he’d barely been able to look at her this morning, hadn’t introduced her to Pete, and was almost sinfully grateful that she’d slept in so that they hadn’t needed to confront each other over breakfast? For the way he’d been angry at her tonight, the moment that first flood of relief at her safety had ebbed away?

Why the heck had he let last night’s kiss happen at all? He’d known it would end that way.

Only maybe he hadn’t known.

Maybe he’d been kidding himself all along.

In his office, he dug out the cardboard file box where he kept the boys’ old schoolbooks. He didn’t know why he hung on to them. Because it was easier than throwing them out? He wouldn’t have said he was the nostalgic type, and yet he did have a problem with change, didn’t he?

Mum had talked about it a couple of times since Liz’s death. Mum’s attitude had been helpful rather than accusing, but there’d been the hint of criticism all the same. He’d never wanted to go away to school, as a twelve-year-old, and it had taken him months—had taken hooking up with Dusty and Brant—for him to settle into Cliffside.

And now here were these stupid schoolbooks he put away every year like a pack rat, because something inside him wouldn’t allow them to get thrown away.

He took out a stack of them and flipped through, finding worksheets about the ocean and weather, and words with sh in them that gave him a little twist inside because of the fact that Liz, who would have been so proud and so interested, had never seen them.

Was that why he kept them? Some stupid, illogical, subconscious, impossible belief that if he kept them long enough, her benign spirit would pay a visit and take a look?

Brrr, shake it off, Callan.

How much working space did Jacinda need? He didn’t want to slight her writing ability with just three pages, or scare her with a whole blank book. He thought he understood too much about her fears.

Jacinda looked nothing like Liz. He’d told himself lately that he’d been looking too hard for Liz in those other two women, three years ago, and maybe he’d seriously believed last night, down at the creek, that with her long dark hair and olive skin, Jacinda looked different enough to cure the problem.

The Problem.

A cure?

Maybe it was only getting worse. A man hit his sexual peak by twenty. At thirty-four, things could easily have started to slide. The level of need. The frequency. Had losing Liz pushed him so far away from his natural potency that he’d never claw back the lost ground?

Everything had been fine … fantastic … powerful … intense … while he and Jacinda had kissed last night. The chemistry between them was huge, not something you could explain or trace to its source but something animal and instinctive. Water on a thirsty day. A completion. She had tasted so good.

He loved the way she moved. Loved how at first she’d been happy just to wait and feel those motionless, paralyzed lips of his against her neck while he gathered his courage and gloried in his unexpected and almost shocking need.

Oh hell, he’d wanted her so badly and it had felt so good to rediscover how that felt. A little later, he’d loved her moments of hunger and impatience, too. How could a man’s ego not be gratified by that? She wanted him, and she hadn’t kept it a secret.

But then the pressure of her needs and her expectations had hit. He’d felt her heat against him, telling him she wanted more, insisting it with warm, full pressure, and he’d panicked and … oh, hell … deflated and pulled away—hopefully before she could have noticed.

He hadn’t compared her to Liz. He hadn’t—was this wrong?—even thought about Liz while he was kissing Jacinda. Not for a second. And when he’d panicked, it had been about the other women, the two very different blondes, and the excruciating awkwardness that had played out both times when his performance had fizzled.

He could still remember it in painful detail. The girl at the races, with her disinterested Whatever … when he’d stumbled through an apology and hinted at an explanation. After my wife … If the girl had noticed his raspy throat and horrible struggle for words, she hadn’t reacted. She’d already been putting on her clothes, miffed at her disappointing night.

The other woman, the backpacker, had soothed him like a baby at first. He’d felt foolish, so uncomfortable at her sickly reassurance. It was the way you talked to a three-year-old who couldn’t get his pants on the right way around.

Never mind, sweetheart, we’ll keep working on it and you’ll do better next time.

She’d turned the whole thing into a personal challenge. Dr. Birgit, Scandinavian Erotic Therapist, to the rescue. He’d felt as if they were writing a new chapter in a sex manual, full of strenuous gymnastic positions and clinical efforts at stimulation.

None of which had worked.

Oh, jeez!

Stop thinking about it!

Here. How about this book? He flipped through Joshie’s “Journal Writing” notebook from three years ago and saw several pages of painstaking numbers showing the date, and labored sentences summarizing his day. “We wnt to the crek. I rod Sam. His sadel sliped. I staid on. Dad fixded it up tite agen.”

The book had about twenty spare pages left at the end of it. If Jacinda could fill those, she might not feel so tense and uncomfortable about asking him for more.

He hoped she did fill them, because he could tell it was important to her.

He put the file box away, closed his office door and took the notebook along the corridor to where she waited for him in the kitchen. Her hands still didn’t seem to know what to do with themselves. She hugged herself, finger-combed her hair, picked up a cleaning sponge and wiped down the countertop even though it was clean already.

“Oh, you found something?” she said, when she saw the book in his grip. She smiled eagerly, but dropped the smile too soon, as if she didn’t want him to guess that this remotely mattered to her.

Too late for that.

Handing it over, he hid the depth of his understanding and told her, “Just let me know when you need another one.”

“Thanks,” was all she said.

After asking Callan so impatiently for paper to write on, Jacinda left Josh’s old notebook blank that night. She looked at it for a while, standing alone in the kitchen after Callan had gone, fingers and brain tingling to begin, but then fatigue overtook her.

And doubt.

What would she write in it, anyhow?

What was the point?

The simple act of having to ask Callan for it seemed to have doubled the pressure. Even though she’d tried to play it down, he wasn’t stupid. He was a practical man. He’d expect results. He had no idea about writing. He’d want to see six new chapters of her long-gone novel by tomorrow night.

Why had she brought the subject up? She could probably write down all the words left inside her on the inside of her wrist or the palm of her hand. She should have asked for a Post-it note.

Carly did sleepwalk at midnight that night, after her earlier fear about Mommy’s safety out in the dark. Or was it because she’d picked up on Jac’s own tension over—well, various things? Carly’s emotional radar was scary, sometimes, and Jac wondered how much Kurt’s behavior during the separation and divorce had affected her daughter deep inside where it might never clearly show.

During her nighttime escapade, Carly had a drink of water in the kitchen, went to the bathroom and checked on the dogs sleeping on the veranda, all of it in her sleep. Then, fortunately, she seemed happy to be led back to bed. Jacinda slid gratefully between her own sheets and didn’t lie awake for another hour as she’d feared she might.

And when she awoke the next morning to the sound of Darth Vader crowing in the chook run, heralding first light, the second thing that came into her head after looking across at her beautiful and safely sleeping daughter was the notebook Callan had given her, and its blank pages.

She wanted to fill them.

She did.

It was a hunger that postcards could never satisfy.

Even though every scrap of the doubt was still there, the need was stronger, and wouldn’t go away. She craved the physical act of holding a pen in her hand and moving it across the paper. She needed to think about words, much better words than just, “How’re you doing?” and “Thank you for your letter.” Dressing quickly, she grabbed the book, found the pen she’d taken last night from a jar on the kitchen benchtop and went out to the veranda.

No one else was up. No sounds of movement came from Callan’s room farther along. No light was visible in Kerry’s little cottage across the dusty front yard. It was the coldest hour of the day. Jacinda sat on the cane couch, spread the mohair blanket over her legs and pulled it up over her shoulders. She thought about coffee but decided to wait, not wanting to risk disturbing Callan if he was having a rare lie-in.

She opened the notebook and found the first empty page. The lines on one side were widely spaced, suitable for a child’s first efforts at literacy, and on the opposite side, the paper was completely blank, ready to be filled by a stick figure and a clumsy tree.

Five minutes went by, but nothing happened. She was tempted to doodle. Her fingers tended to make all these elaborate curly patterns and shapes without her even thinking about it on the rare occasions when she wrote by hand. But she resisted the doodling. She wanted to wait for words.

And finally they came.

“I’m sitting here,” she wrote, “watching light seep upward into the sky like the curtain rising on a Broadway show.”

It didn’t rank with classical literature’s great opening sentences, but she told herself not to care. It doesn’t matter, Jacinda. Just keep going. There doesn’t have to be a story, or a direction, or a logical sequence. Not yet. Not ever. You’re not selling this. You’re not showing it to a soul. No, not to Callan, if he asks. So just keep writing.

Her hand had begun to ache and she’d penned four pages when Callan found her. The light was on over at Kerry’s, and she could hear the boys in the kitchen. She must have been sitting here almost an hour.

“Want coffee?” Callan offered.

He stood beside the wicker couch, looking too tall, and she had to fight the need to cover her page because he had a bird’s-eye view and could have read it if he’d wanted to. As it happened, he wasn’t looking at the page, he was looking at her face.

“I’ll come inside in a minute,” she told him, twisting toward him and leaning her elbow over the paper as if it were just a casual, accidental movement.

“No, I can bring it out for you,” he said. “You’re busy.”

“No, I’m—That rooster of yours doesn’t like visitors to sleep in, does he?” she joked lamely. “I’m only filling in time till Carly wakes up.”

“Well, she has.”

So you’re not buying my excuses, Callan?

Could you pretend, at least?

“Oh, does she want me?” She shifted, started to close the book.

“She’s with the boys. She’s fine.” He leaned down and flipped the pages open again, and their fingers touched. He pulled his hand away. “Keep going, and I’ll bring the coffee.”

“No, no, I’m finished. I’m done. It’s okay.”

“You looked like you were still working on it.”

“It’s not work. It’s nothing.”

“Still, keep going and I’ll bring your coffee out,” he repeated stubbornly, for the third time.

“Okay. Thanks.” She didn’t want to argue anymore, because if she argued, he’d have questions about what she’d written, and she didn’t want questions.

He didn’t seem in a hurry to get the coffee he’d offered, however. He just stood there, leaning against the open doorway, making her skin itch and ripple with awareness. His body was magnetic. She wanted to grab his hip or push her face into his chest and smell his shirt.

Finally, mercifully—after probably a whole six seconds had elapsed—he asked, “Did I give you enough? I mean, are there enough pages left in the notebook? Because there are a couple more I can give you. And I have printer paper, too. Or if you want to use the computer again …”

“For the moment, I’m fine with this.” She laid her hand across the half-filled page.

It was, seriously, years since she’d written this much by hand, and yet she hadn’t even considered Callan’s computer, she realized. Somehow, this was the method that felt right for now, this filling of white paper with blue scrawl. She liked the physical act of scribbling out a wrong word, or jetting an arrow across the page toward a sentence added in after further thought.

Callan still hadn’t left.

“I’m guessing you don’t plan to show me right this minute.” He smiled, but she wasn’t in the mood to get teased on this.

“No.”

“No?”

She covered the page protectively with her arm once more. “It’s nothing. It’s terrible. It’s just—It’s not a story, or anything. It’s just little snatches. Impressions.”

“Like a poem.”

“Not even that. Sort of like a poem.” Unnh! “I might turn some of it into a poem later.”

“And then you can show me.” He gave her a sly look, and there was the promise of a grin hovering on his face.

“No! Please don’t … Please don’t treat this like a joke, Callan, or like tasting a batch of cookies I’ve made. It’s not like that. I couldn’t—I’m sorry, I don’t have a sense of humor about it, and I can’t explain that, I can’t explain why it’s important, I just—”

“Hey … hey.”

Oh crud, now he’d sat down, frowning and concerned. Now she’d really turned this into something. She should have fobbed him off, just agreed that, yes, it was a poem and that, sure, yes, she’d show it to him when it was done, and hope that the whole thing would drop from his mind because surely he had better things to think about.

“I’m not treating it like a joke, Jac,” he said.

His blue eyes were fixed on her, as motionless as the surface of the water hole at night, as deep and bright as the midday outback sky. The old, sagging couch pushed them closer together, the way it had on her first night here, as shameless as a professional matchmaker. Go on, it said, feel his thigh pressed against yours. Don’t fight it. You like it.

“I’m not laughing at you about this.” His voice had a husky note in it. “I wouldn’t. I know it’s important.”

“It’s not important.” She pushed her hand against his upper arm and tried to shimmy her butt sideways so the matchmaking couch didn’t get its wicked way. Callan leaned back, respecting her need for space, still watching her. “It’s stupid,” she said. “Writing really doesn’t matter. If I never wrote another word in my life, the universe would not be a poorer place.”

“You don’t believe that.”

She laughed. “No, I don’t, but I should! Because it doesn’t make sense that it’s so important. I’m not expecting you to understand any of this.”

“Give me some credit.”

“No, I didn’t mean that you’re not smart or—You’re not a writer, that’s all.”

“Do I have to be? Isn’t there only one thing I need to understand? Without it, you’re incomplete,” he said simply.

She nodded silently, stunned at the words.

Yes.

She’d never heard it put so plainly.

Without it she was incomplete.

“You just said it,” she stammered. “Y-you’re so right. How—?”

“Everyone has things like that. Their kids, their work, their land. Their gardening, their guitar playing, their sport.” His tone had changed, sounded more distant and defensive, like a lecture. But then he couldn’t sustain it, and seemed to give up the attempt. His voice dropped again, the pitch low and personal. “You don’t need to ask yourself or anyone else why writing is important, Jacinda. You just need to know—I have to have this in my life to feel complete. That’s okay. That’s no big deal. The bad, impossible part is that if something takes it away, it kills you, doesn’t it? It cripples you, torments you, until you find a way to get it back.”

“How did you know that?” It was almost a whisper. Barely aware of her action, she grabbed his hand, let the couch lean her in closer to him. “Just hearing you say it is … great, such a relief … thank you. For taking it seriously. For saying it. But how did you know about the torment?”

His body sagged. His eye contact dropped as if the thread of communication between them had been sliced through. He looked as if he was talking to the floorboards or to his shoes, not to her.

“Hell, Jacinda! D’you honestly think you’re the only one it’s ever happened to?” he muttered.