Detained

She needed to tell him how she felt about it now. It was off, she wasn’t doing it. He didn’t need it, and neither did she. And if the network couldn’t accept she’d tried and failed to land her big fish, they could turf her out or she’d quit. Regardless of what happened, it was better than pretending she could interview Will dispassionately and professionally.

She couldn’t even look at him that way. There was no chance she could school her eyes not to undress him, no way to sit across from him under studio lights pretending she wasn’t madly, completely, in love with him.

She’d asked him almost every tough question she could think of. She’d made him limp over old sores; poked a stick in new wounds, until he was drained of the energy to lift his head from her shoulder.

After that first time, they’d gone to the creek often, to swim, to laugh, to end up with coarse sand in awkward places, and to snooze in the shade after a Bo inspired picnic.

He’d even shown her where Norman was buried. An unremarkable patch of the paddock near a massive tree stump.

To go back to being conservative, polite and businesslike with him would be an insult after he’d handed her every pain and fear he’d ever had: from the death of his grandmother when he was five, his time in group homes and with various foster families, until his arrival with the Dunns in Tara, a teenage boy with an easy to fix learning disability, and hard to scratch off attitude problems.

The only question she hadn’t asked him was the simplest and the most terrifying. What next?

And on that topic his silence was so loud it made her ears ring.

He was in the kitchen. She could see him standing over the kettle from her position in bed. He watched it come to the boil while she watched him. He had a spectacularly well-worn pair of shorts on, neither zipped or buttoned and resting precariously low on his hips. He was tanned and strong, so remote from the crushed and broken man he’d been after Quingpu. He made tea for her, strong coffee in a plunger for himself, and brought it back to bed.

“Why didn’t you set the clock?” he said, putting his cup on the bedside table.

“If that’s code for please don’t leave me tomorrow, point me to the clock.”

He gave her a quizzical look. “On the oven. I wondered why it was flashing. You could’ve helped a guy out.”

He was making no sense, and from the smile on his face clearly enjoying it. He plumped a pillow and leant back on it, hands behind his head, a self-satisfied look on his face that made her want to rumble him till they were both happy to let their drinks go cold.

“Did you read the oven display or are you guessing it says to set the clock?”

His grin just about split his face in two.

“You read the digital display?”

“‘Please set clock and timer’. My adult version of ‘see Spot run’.”

She leant over him, hands flattened on his ribs. “Oh, my God, Will.”

He passed his hand up her back and into her hair. “I’ll be doing such classics as ‘choose correct cycle’, ‘defrost now’ and ‘delicates only’, before you know it.”

He brought her mouth to his and kissed her deliciously wetly. He’d cleaned his teeth, so he tasted of spearmint and coffee.

But she was too excited, too nervous to get carried away. She pushed off him and scrambled out of bed.

“Something I read?” he quipped, laughing at himself.

She rummaged in her overnight bag. She’d noticed when she arrived there was no reading material in the house. Not a book, a magazine or a trace of Will’s Kindle. She’d taken the cue and kept a couple of business magazines she was carrying tucked away. She whipped out a copy of Fast Company and turned the cover to him.

“‘The Secrets of Generation Flux’,” he said.

She flipped it open and spun a double page spread to face him.

“Seriously?”

She frowned, moved to flip to another page.

“No, I’ve got it, ‘What Teddy Bears, Picture Frames and Condoms have in Common’. Do I need to know?”

She dumped the magazine and jumped on him. “How did this happen?”

He flexed his hips under her. “Who cares? It’s back.”