Page 49 of Reckless

I shook my head again, and Alastair reached out and put a hand on my knee. Squeezed. And didn’t say anything else at all.

“It’s quiet here,” Alastair said later, lifting the kettle onto the stovetop. “It takes some getting used to after the city.”

He hadn’t asked me to come back to his place with him. I’d just gone, like a baby goat following its mum on wobbly legs. And now I was sitting at his kitchen table, waiting for whatever came next. Tea, by the looks of things.

I scratched an invisible line along the top of the table. “You from Sydney?”

“Melbourne,” he said.

I didn’t know why that surprised me. Plenty of big cities on the mainland. But I wasn’t expecting the pang of guilt that came with not knowing. It was something I could have asked long before now, and maybe I should have? Except we hadn’t been anything before this, and I’d always been shit at smalltalk.

Just, I had to adjust the mental picture I’d built of him. Imagine him on a tram instead of a train or something when I thought of him back in the city. It was stupid, and it didn’t matter, except in the ways it sort of did.

Alastair put a mug of tea in front of me, then sat down across from me. He folded his fingers around his mug. He looked tired, but not in a sad way. It had been a long day, was all.

“I should probably tell you that I wasn’t in love with my husband,” he said, and I jolted. He took a sip of tea. “I’m aware of how dreadful that sounds, but if Neal was here, I think he’d tell you the same thing. I did love him, of course, at one time, but it went away, I suppose, and neither of us worked very hard to try to prevent it from happening. It wasn’t dramatic. We didn’t fight or anything. We were indifferent, which is even more awful in some respects.” He shrugged. “We couldn’t even summon up the energy to hate each other. When he died, I grieved the man I fell in love with, but that wasn’t who he was in the end. I’m not trying to blame him; I wasn’t who he fell in love with either. The one consolation, if there is any, is that we were both equally to blame.”

My guts had twisted into knots. I curled my fingers around the mug until they burned. “Why are you telling me this?”

He leaned back in his chair and let out a long breath. “There’s an assumption that I’m a grieving widower. That I’m like Archie. And I’m not. And I can’t pretend to be, not around you. I need you to know that when I told you I’m not trying to replace Neal, that’s not just some sort of platitude. I mean I don’t want another Neal, not any more than he would have wanted another me.” His mouth tightened for a moment. “Again, I’m aware of how dreadful that sounds, how heartless, but it’s the reality of the situation, and you deserve to know the truth.”

Warts and all, Mum used to say. This was a warts and all truth, and it was mostly warts. But I didn’t mind, because it was what I wanted. Alastair had done a lot of talking since I’d known him, about a whole lot of shit I would have preferred to keep to myself, but this, this was what I thought he would have preferred to keep to himself. So it meant something, didn’t it, that he was offering it to me?

Wasn’t dramatic, he’d said. Nothing about Alastair was dramatic. He was too analytical for that, too shrewd. But that was okay, because I wasn’t great at figuring out what went on behind the things that people said, in their tone, or their glances, or their silences. And Alastair got that. He got more about me than I did, probably, which should have rankled, but it didn’t. Not tonight, not after the day we’d had.

Because if there was a day that I really didn’t want to hear bullshit, it was on the day Dauntless had farewelled one of its daughters.

“Can we go upstairs now?” I asked, pushing my untouched tea away. “Not to—just to...just to be here.”

Alastair’s mouth softened into a smile. “Yes, I’d like that. Let’s go upstairs.”

Chapter 16

ALASTAIR

I followed Robbie up the stairs, my hand hovering at the small of his back, close enough to feel the warmth of him, but not quite touching.

“You’re favouring your right side,” I said.

“It’s fine.”

“Your ribs.”

“It’s fine.” His voice was soft, tired. “It’s better.”

Better was relative, but I let it go. We weren’t downstairs in the clinic now, and Robbie wasn’t here as a patient. He was here as himself, and I owed him the same honesty. And I could tell myself I only had his welfare at heart, but that wasn’t entirely true. I wasn’t so much putting on my white coat by commenting on his ribs as I was hiding behind it for one last moment, because this was new and my instinct was to try to maintain the power dynamic. Every other time Robbie had come upstairs with me, I’d stripped him naked, both physically and emotionally, but I’d never allowed him to do the same to me. And I owed him that. I also owed it to myself. So I let it go.

Robbie walked into my bedroom and stopped. He stood at the foot of the bed, his head tilted and his hands hanging loose at his sides. He reminded me suddenly of Gerty, and the way she stood patiently hitched to the cart when Robbie unloaded a delivery. Just waiting, quiet and obedient, until the next instruction came.

I moved past him and turned down the covers.

Robbie took his shirt off, moving a little stiffly. The bruises on his ribs were yellow and brown, one last lurid hurrah before they finally faded. He unfastened the button on his jeans, tugged the zipper down, and slid the faded denim down his legs. Then he stepped out of the jeans and sat on the edge of the mattress, darting a look at me.

I crossed to the windows, pushing them open a crack to let the salt breeze inside. The noise of the ocean came with it, tiny wind-caught waves slapping against the harbour wall. I could still hear the faint sounds of music coming from the old church. It made the quietness of my bedroom seem more profound.

I undressed in the dark. Not because I was shy—I’d long since stopped caring about modesty—but because the motion of pulling off my shirt and stepping out of my trousers felt ritualistic in the darkness and the quiet, like shedding the day.

I looked over at Robbie, unable to stop the strange thrill I felt when I saw that he’d climbed under the covers. I slid into bed beside him.