Getting Real

When Rand still hadn’t shown up thirty minutes before boarding, and wasn’t answering his phone, Jake crouched down by Rielle. He touched her shoulder. “Any idea where he is?”

She lifted her head and coughed out a, “No.”

He took in her self-inflicted misery. She must’ve hit the drink hard after he’d left. He should’ve felt vindicated, but he couldn’t stop the flash of regret. Was he the catalyst for her hangover this time? “How bad do you feel on a scale of one to ten?”

She said raggedly, “Twenty-seven,” and he laughed.

“Have you eaten anything?”

“Are you kidding?”

“Rie, you need to eat.”

She pulled her sunglasses down her nose and squinted at him. “I might not ever eat again.”

He saw bloodshot green eyes. Her real eyes without the contact lenses, the same hue and intensity as Rand’s.

It jolted recognition.

Green eyes, like the girl in the gym, who had a gap between her front teeth like Rand. And just like Rielle, Gym Girl had the build of an athlete and ink in her hairline. He stood up abruptly. He figured under Gym Girl’s sock there’d be a dripping red heart. Under her sweatband a stick figure. Under all Rielle’s multicoloured hair there’d be mostly blonde. And that green garnet in her nose could be removed. Either there was a mystery twin thing going on here or Rielle was Gym Girl without her armour.

God! How she must’ve laughed at him, first in Adelaide and now here. Jake felt his temperature rising. He ground his teeth. What a fool he’d been to fall for her. Because despite her hard lines, her complexity, he had fallen for all her talented, exciting, changeable ways. He looked forward to the moments he spent with her, gloried in watching her, ached to touch her.

Now he looked at her, pale and quiet, curled in her chair and saw the depth of her duplicity and the stupidity of his lust. When he shepherded her onto the plane, he took a perverse satisfaction in seeing how ill she looked and instead of paralysing fear, his anger kept him company on the flight.

Rielle knew. Jake had worked it out. She’d seen it in his face when she’d taken her glasses off. The flinch of realisation, the snap of awareness. Now he truly knew her for the level of her subterfuge, her dishonesty and deceit. She was trapped in her own web of make believe with the one person she cared enough about for the truth to matter.

She went to the bathroom and threw up, bent over in the cubicle, holding onto the walls, sweating, sick beyond the alcohol poisoning. Shaking with the discovery, she was desperate for Jake to understand why she needed her disguise and worse, to accept her for it.

Back in her seat next to Roley, she could see Jake across the aisle. He wasn’t pale or perspiring. He wasn’t gripping the armrests and he didn’t have his eyes shuttered tight to shut out his fears. He was reading the in-flight magazine, sipping coffee, looking relaxed, like he didn’t have a care in the world.

She turned her face to the window, stared at the whiteout of cloud, saw her own failures reflected back at her, and steeled her heart. She was a performer, he was an audience. She could make him understand her, forgive her, love her a little even. She’d think it through, work out a routine, rehearse it and stage it, and fucking well make him cheer her name.

If only she knew how.

Jake wasn’t the type of audience she was used to. He didn’t want a polished performance, he wanted natural and real, he wanted authentic, and spontaneous—all the things she was scared of, and had banished from her life. It was hopeless. She couldn’t have her life and Jake too. That was it. Harden the fuck up, she thought. What did you expect?

She tucked her headphones in her ears. With a snort of irony she chose Sia’s album Some People Have Real Problems and the track Buttons, a song about seeing ghosts in everything. It seemed appropriate.

Harry sat on the broad windowsill, wrapped in a soft, white hotel robe watching the flow of traffic out the window. This wasn’t the first time she’d missed a flight, but it was the first time she’d done it for less than professional reasons.

Her less than professional reason was asleep. Sprawled across the king-size bed, half covered with the sheet. And what wasn’t covered—one long muscular leg, one ridge of hip bone and one incredibly well-muscled torso, inked with bright colours and geometric images that ran across his chest and over one shoulder—was enormously appealing.

After the romantic wasteland of her youth, Harry had made up for lost time. She’d had trysts in various size beds, variously starred hotels, the back seat of a Holden Commodore, a public spa and, shamefully, in the disabled bathroom of a wedding reception centre. But nothing had prepared her for the excitement and mind jolting thrill of being with Rand.

Getting to fourth base had been the singularly most delicious experience of Harry’s life. It bypassed three serious relationships, one live-in lover, one naughty ‘shouldn’t have gone there fling’ and, one proposal. It stood at the top of the heap of her wildest imagining and danced about waving a victory flag, whooping and yelling. Her body was still humming from the way Rand had touched her. And looking at him lying there, abandoned to her gaze, made her want to wake him, crawl all over him and do it all again.

She was in deep trouble. Now there was no debating

it. This thing with Rand was so much more than a hot and heavy infatuation fuelled by their aborted teenage false start. It was a high speed bullet train, a supersonic jet—revving the engines of her desire, and roaring its way into her heart. And there was no getting off it. She was a passenger for life.

Rand had been very clear that what was left of the dawn and the day was theirs. No phones, no limos, no airport, nothing that wasn’t already contained in the walls of his suite or couldn’t be brought in by room service. She hadn’t complained. She’d sent off a text to Ted and shut off her phone.

Now she wanted to let him sleep. He must have been exhausted; the show, the party at Cherry and the intensity of their prolonged lovemaking had to have left him needing rest. It had left her so wired she’d been unable to sleep at all. She felt alive, awake and inflamed, nervously excited for more of his touch.

And damn, he wasn’t easy to ignore. She knew his skin would be firm and warm and supple under her fingers. She knew his lips would be soft and hard and wet and probing. She wanted to slide against the length of him and explore the patterns on his chest with her tongue. She wanted his hands in her hair, on her breasts and dragging on her hips. She hugged herself, pins and needles of lust coursing down her spine.

She checked her watch, another half an hour and she would wake him. Another half an hour and she’d be crazy from waiting for him and imagining what he might do to her, what they might do together.