I’d always hated those initial moments of waking up, when your brain computed reality from make believe and you realised what you’d just experienced never happened. Some days that realisation was a good thing, like when I’d wake from a nightmare fuelled by my memories of being trapped in the drain. Those mornings were terrifying and, thankfully, few and far between. Then there were the times when it wasn’t such a good thing, like when I woke with a sated smile on my face because I’d just experienced the world’s greatest orgasm or sweetest gesture. Regardless, I still hated that split second before reality hit, where I’d have to decipher which morning I was to encounter.
Squinting my eyes, I swear my heart forgot to beat, as I experienced that moment I hated so much before quickly realising the smile forming on my face was the result of Elliot’s two, strong, warm arms encasing me from behind. Oh my God! Elliot Parker is hugging me … in bed … in HIS bed.
I slipped my hands down the front of me, feeling for my knickers. Yes, they’re still on. Thank fuck for that. The presence of my underwear confirmed what I’d just experienced before waking was a dream, a really good one.
A safe one.
Wanting to get back to my subconscious bedroom jockey skills, I closed my eyes and willed the scene back to the forefront of my mind but with little success, mainly because Elliot’s rock hard proximity made leaving reality far too difficult.
He’s so warm, and hard, and he smells so good.
I could honestly say that not many people smelled pleasant in the morning; it was basically when we were at our worst. But Elliot … he smelled like clean sheets, firewood, pine needles, and man. Dirty, raw, clean man.
Slowly rotating in his arms, I was extra careful not to wake him, holding my breath and biting my lip each time he moved. When we were younger and he was allowed to stay over one time, I’d woken before him and watched him sleep. Back then, it was perhaps a little creepy … unlike now, because I was just rolling over in bed and keeping my eyes open. It wasn’t my fault that he was in my line of sight.
Smiling, my teeth clamping harder on my lip, I took note of Elliot’s dishevelled hair, parts of it covering his forehead and eyes and other parts sticking up at the back. He looked adorable, a bit like Ernie from Sesame Street sans the orange skin and big red nose. I giggled, and his eyelids twitched.
“You’re awake, aren’t you?” I asked quietly.
He didn’t answer, but I was positive he was fighting the muscles in his face not to smile and betray him.
“Pity,” I sighed. “I can’t seem to find my knickers. They were here just a second ago.”
His eyes shot open.
“Ha! I knew it, ya faker.”
“Do you seriously think I can sleep while you’re moaning and rubbing your arse against my cock?”
“What? When? I did not.” Shit! Did I gyrate him while dreaming?
“Yeah, you did. You’ve been doing it all morning. Want to see the proof?”
I shook my head and pursed my lips. “Your factual bullshit won’t work on me.”
He laughed and kissed the tip of my nose. “Good morning, beautiful.”
I smiled. “Morning.”
He smiled, too, neither of us talking for what felt like minutes, our eyes gleaming and searching one another’s face. I wanted to kiss him, to trace the contours of his jaw with my fingertips. My need and pull toward him was as natural as breathing, and yet … it made me a little sad.
His eyes dulled. “You okay?”
“Yeah. We didn’t fuck. That’s a good thing.”
“Help me understand why.”
I shrugged. “I told you. Friends should never fuck.”
“So, technically, what you’re saying is that you can’t be friends before you become lovers.”
“No. I’m just saying that you can’t be friends after you’ve been lovers. It never works out. I don’t want us to not be friends, Elliot. Ever.”
“So you’re pre-empting a failed relationship if we were to ever start one?”
“No. Well … yes … well...” I rolled onto my back. “I’m not getting lured into one of your cross-examinations. It’s too early in the morning, and I plead the fifth.”
He belly-laughed. “You’re not in America, and I’m not trying to cross-examine you. I’m just trying to understand your logic.”
“My logic stems from experience. Every one of my sexual relationships has progressed from a solid friendship that has been ruined because of sex. Every. Single. One.”
“They probably weren’t doing it right.”
I whacked him in the gut. “They were. And it’s every relationship bar one, actually, and that’s only because I ended the sex before it got out of control.”
“So you’re saying that every sexual relationship you’ve had has ended badly?”
“Yes.” I focussed on his ceiling because Elliot’s judgmental face wasn’t there.
“And you think it’s because you introduced sex into the mix?”
“I don’t think, I know.”
“Danielle, have you ever considered that the dissolution of the friendship could be due to the fact that neither of you fought to keep it post sex?”
I sighed. “It’s not that simple.”
“But it can be.” He rolled me onto my side so that I was facing him again. “If the friendship is strong enough, it can survive anything. It will survive anything. That’s us, Danielle; we can and will survive anything.”
“But we haven’t, have we? You’re forgetting that seventeen years is a long time not to talk to one another.”
“Trust me, I’m not forgetting.”
“So what happened, Lots? Why’d we drift apart so easily?”
He moved a lock of hair behind my ear. “I don’t know. One minute you were there, and the next you weren’t.”
I blinked. “Me? One minute you were there, and the next you were taking Maureen Kropf to the year-nine social dance at your new school.”
He blinked, too. Twice. I counted.
“Well, yeah. She was in my class and the only girl who would talk to me. I needed to take someone.”
“She wasn’t the only girl who talked to you,” I mumbled.
“Are you shitting me, Danielle?”
“What?”
“Are you saying that you stopped talking to me solely because I took some random girl to my year-nine social dance?”
“She wasn’t just some random girl, Elliot. She was on my netball team and liked to share detailed information about her ‘dates’. And …” I wiped the tear from my eye before he noticed it. “And she wasn’t me.”
“No, I’m fully aware she wasn’t you,” he said, his tone annoyed.
An awkward silence settled between us. It was strange. Unfamiliar. I didn’t like it.
“Well, I’m glad we established that,” I said, kicking off the blankets to quickly get out of bed. As I went to stand up and escape to the bathroom, a sharp, painful reminder of my sore foot shot up my leg. “Faaaaaaaark.”
“What’s wrong? You okay?” Elliot rushed to my side of the bed and knelt down on the ground before me. “Show me.”
He tried to take my foot in his hand, but I stopped him. “Don’t. It’s fine. It’s just sore.”
He tried to reach for my foot again.
“I said don’t.”
“Danielle, don’t do this.”
“Do what?”
He pointed to me. “This.”
“Me?” I slapped my hand to my chest. “Don’t do me?”
Placing his palms on my knees, he spread them apart then crawled in between my legs, moving his hands to my arse and abruptly dragging me across the bed, my pelvis slamming into his abs. “If you think for one second that I’m gonna let you ruin the past twenty-four hours because of some misunderstanding over a girl back in high school, you’ve got another thing coming. Because, unlike your past boy ‘friends’, I don’t give up easily. And where you’re concerned, I won’t give up at all.”
My chest tightened, and I tried not to let out the sob that was desperate to tear its way through me. But it was pointless, because I was fairly certain that sob had been buried for seventeen years, and now was the time to set it free.
“But you did give up,” I cried, letting it burst out of me.
“Yeah, I did, when I was a kid that didn’t know any better. But I’m an adult now, and I know that giving up on you was the single biggest regret of my life.” He placed his hands on my cheeks and wiped my tears with his thumbs, his touch soft, soothing. “I won’t make that same mistake again. I promise.”
Unable to stop the tears that were now drowning my face, I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and buried my head against his neck. “Please don’t, Lots. And please don’t let me make that same mistake either.”
During the car ride to my house to drop Dudley off before we headed to the garden, I had time to think about how such an inconsequential event could be misunderstood and therefore cause a ripple effect that would last half a lifetime, perhaps even longer had it not been for a series of fortunate events. But then … that was how life worked sometimes, how it challenged us. There were paved paths and roads with flashing, neon lights; options set out before us that seemed the best choice to make. They were easy, unmarred, often convincingly safe, but not necessarily the direction we were meant to take. Because if we looked harder, made more effort, and ignored the seemingly obvious, sometimes, just sometimes, the correct path was the one hidden beneath the security blanket often laid.
“Let me get this straight again,” Elliot said, as we pulled up to the community garden. “You thought I was dating Maureen?”
“Yes,” I drawled while undoing my seatbelt.
“And that’s why you started plucking your eyebrows and hanging out with Kim Blaze and Lisa Clements-Baker?”
“Yesssss.”
“And why you lost your virginity to Joe Webb?”
I snapped my head in his direction. “WHAT? How do you know that?”
“I had my methods for discovery, even as a teenager.”
Glaring, I let out an embarrassed laugh, face-palmed, and groaned into my hands. “It was the worst thing ever. He was horrible. And keen. Super keen. Then again, the fact that he seemed to be trying to win a race was probably a good thing.”
Elliot laughed, but his smile didn’t quite reach his eyes as he took my hand in his. “All I ever wanted was to be your firsts.”
“You were, Lots. Many of them.”
“Yeah, just not the right ones.”
I squeezed his hand and went to ask him to elaborate but was interrupted by a rapping of knuckles on the car window beside me.
“You two lovebirds gonna leave the mobile nest, or am I gonna have to enter it?” Mum asked. “We’ve got a lot to do today, so get out of the car.”
Opening the door for me, she stood back and held it ajar as I swivelled in my seat. “Sorry to say, Mum, but I’ll be on light duties today.” I pointed to my bandaged foot.
“Oh, dear, what did you do?”
“I slipped in the bathroom and sprained my ankle.”
“Can you walk?”
“Kinda.”
“Don’t worry, Jeanette,” Elliot said, as he stepped up to my door and once again took my hands in his. “I’ll be carrying her to wherever she needs to go today.”
“You will not,” I stated with absolute certainty.
“Yeah, I will. Either that, or I’ll shove you in a wheelbarrow and wheel you around.”
Mum laughed. “I’d like to see that.”
Two hours later, and that was exactly what Mum was seeing as Elliot pushed me from one point of the garden to another in a wheelbarrow.
“If you crash this thing, I will never speak to you again,” I half barked half squealed.
“Have faith, oh head of chocolate curls, for I can steer this chariot like no other man before me.”
“Shut up, you idiot and watch that bum—”
He hit a small log and the force bounced me a little higher than what was deemed comfortable, my arse landing in the wheelbarrow with a thud. “Owwwwww.”
“Sorry,” he chuckled. “Driving hazard.”
“I’ll give you driving hazard.”
“So, where to, m’lady? Where can I deliver thee safely?”
“To where the greenhouse is going to be built, kind sir.”
He slowed down, almost stopping. “Why there?”
“Because I’m gonna help you build it.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Yeah, I am. I’ll read out the instructions, you follow them. It will be easy.”
He performed a wide turn and pointed us toward where Mum and Helen were constructing planter boxes. “I’m sure our mums could do with more help.”
“Elliot Parker, turn us back around now. I’m not helping our mums.”
“Why not? Look at them, they’re flustered.”
I took in Helen’s confused stance, her fingers lightly scratching her head while assessing the tape measure. Mum wasn’t any further at ease, angrily wrestling with the battery pack attached to the drill. My guilty conscience reared its ugly head —they really did look as if they needed help — but I quickly buried the unwelcome nuisance, knowing that if I helped them, they’d spend more time hassling me about wedding dates and venues and nothing would get done anyway.
“No. They’ll sort themselves out. They always do.”
“I don’t think they will.”
“ELLIOT!” I growled.
“Okay, if you say so.” He steered the wheelbarrow to the right again, pointing us back on course. “This is a bad idea, Danielle.”
“It’s not. We’ll nail it.”
“I’d rather nail you.”
I looked around for something to throw at him, but I was the only thing in the wheelbarrow that could be thrown. “Keep that up and the only thing you’ll be nailing is your coffin.”
“Technically, I can’t nail my own coffin.”
Grrrr.
Technically …
I. Could. Nail. Him. In. The. Eyeball.
“It’s back to fucking front, Danielle!”
“It’s not … oh, wait, it is.” I turned the instructions back up the right way. “This greenhouse is stupid. Shouldn’t the panels be the same on both sides?”
He deadpanned. “No, they shouldn’t. If they were, it wouldn’t be a very good greenhouse.”
“You’re such a smartarse.”
“Thank you.”
“That wasn’t a compliment.”
“Technically, it was.”
I picked up the bag of screws with the intent to launch them at his head, but, instead, I just clenched them tightly and screamed inside.
“I told you this was a bad idea.”
“It wasn’t. You not listening to me and jumping three or four steps ahead is the bad idea.”
“There’s no point in me waiting for you to instruct me when I know what comes next. That’s not efficient time management.”
“But that’s the problem,” I shouted. “You don’t know what comes next. You’re guessing and guessing wrong.”
“I am not. You’re reading the steps in the wrong order.”
“Fuck you!”
“Danielle Uma Cunningham! Language.”
I snapped my head around to find Mum and Helen, standing behind me, Mum’s hands on her hips, Helen scowling at Elliot.
“What’s going on here?” she asked.
“Yes, why are you two arguing? The whole neighbourhood can hear you.” Helen added.
I glared at Elliot and the bastard glared back.
“Oh, don’t worry, it’s nothing,” I said, faux-laughing it off. “My stubborn schnookums is trying to finish the job too soon.”
Elliot matched my contrived chuckle. “Honey, you should know I never finish a job too soon.”
“Elliot!” Helen gasped.
Mum giggled. “Oh my!”
Me? Well, I could’ve nailed his coffin shut for him. In fact, I knew just how to do it.
“Speaking of finishing jobs … Mum, didn’t you need someone to fix Jackson’s kennel?”
“Yes, it’s leaking.”
“I thought so.” I lifted my leg and placed my foot on the ground. “Elliot will do it, won’t you, babe?”
“What? I will?”
“Sure. We’ll stop by on the way home.” I fired him a ‘sucker’ smile.
“Oh, wonderful!” Mum clapped with joy. “I have a roast lamb defrosting on the bench. I’ll cook us all a lovely dinner.”
“What an excellent idea!” Helen chimed in. “I baked a sponge cake last night. We can have that for dessert.”
I went to butt in and diffuse the unplanned dinner and dessert situation, but Elliot beat me to it, except he didn’t diffuse anything. He only lit another fuse instead.
“Sounds perfect, doesn’t it, honey? And maybe we can share some wedding plans, too.”
What. The. Actual. Fuck?
“So what do you plan on saying at the dinner table when they ask us about our so-called wedding plans?” I hissed while simultaneously admiring his jean-covered arse, which was poking out from Jackson’s dog kennel.
Jackson wagged his pompom-like poodle tail and sniffed Elliot’s butt, for probably the fourth time.
Elliot jerked and hit his head on the roof of the kennel… for probably the fourth time. “Danielle, seriously? Get that dog away from my arse!”
I snorted, trying to stop myself from laughing. “Sorry. My bad.”
“Yeah, you got that right.”
Crawling out backward, Elliot sat back on his heels and rubbed his wayward black hair. He looked both adorable and delicious, and definitely on the grumpy side.
“I’m gonna need a shower,” he said, screwing up his nose. “I smell like wet dog.”
I rolled my eyes. “Suck it up, princess.”
He rose to his feet and stalked toward me, his eyes unwavering as they pinned me to the spot. I hobbled backward, my eyes wide, the backdoor to the house coming into contact with my heels. “What are you do—”
Elliot grabbed my hips and pressed me against the door, holding me there while he nuzzled my cheekbones with his nose. It was weird as fuck until I realised what he was up to, the stench of wet dog inadmissible.
“Yuck,” I said, pushing him back “Get off me. You stink.”
“Suck it up, princess,” he replied, smiling.
I skip-hopped away from him toward the lemon tree, hoping I’d be able to use it as a barrier between us. “Stay there.” I held out my hand, my fingers splayed.
His smile grew and he looked up, as if he’d spotted something in the branches above. “It all started here, you know.”
“What?” I looked up, too, squinting but unable to pinpoint what he was referring to.
“Here. Behind this tree.” He walked around to where I was standing.
“What are you talking about?”
“I proposed to you here.”
The memory of Elliot and I sitting on the ground at the base of the tree trunk, eating Cheezels from the box we’d stolen out of the kitchen cupboard came careening into my mind. We’d been giggling and scoffing them as quickly as possible, cheesy orange crumbs covering our hands and faces.
“Yeah, you did,” I said, smiling, a fuzzy feeling warming me all over.
“You placed one on your finger and took it off with your mouth then tried to whistle through the hole.”
I laughed. “I still can’t whistle.”
“Really? Damn it. That was gonna be another dare for you to do last night.”
I playfully whacked his arm. “Ha ha.”
Reaching up, I grabbed a lemon and twisted it clean from its branch, a question on my mind that I wanted an answer to but not quite sure I wanted to ask.
“Dinner’s ready!” Mum yelled, banging on the kitchen window to get our attention.
Elliot waved to her and went to head back to the house when I reached out and grabbed his arm, finding the courage to ask him what I wanted to. “Lots, why’d you propose to me that day?”
He stopped, glanced over his shoulder, and slid his hand into mine. “Because I knew you’d say yes.”