What?
Fraser passes me a glass of wine, his fingers brushing mine as he tilts his head and looks into my face. Probably because I’ve become nonverbal. And apparently look like I’ve been ravished by the merest touch of his hand.
The rest of them prattle on about pâté and crackers and the outcome of Clair’s job interview and whether or not we should get tickets to the Canberra Writers Festival while, for just a few moments, I let myself pretend this is more than it is.
That he is mine.
That this is our house.
That Parker, upstairs, is the stepdaughter I never knew I wanted.
April says something funny that I miss and taps glasses with Fraser, and his warm laughter fills the kitchen. It’s such an easy rapport, as if we’ve all been friends for years.
Aren’t left-brained geniuses meant to be socially awkward? I didn’t know they liked sonnets. And they have no business looking the way Fraser does, arms crossed, leaning against the bench with the relaxed countenance of a person who doesn’t have a rambunctious Cavoodle to train and eighty assignments to grade.
Oh, God.
I’m drowning.
Rach is all empathy when I dare look at her, knowing it’s written across my face. Fraser is oblivious, absorbed in his post-divorce co-parenting, doing his BBC interviews, saving the world … And here I am right in front of him, brakes failing, tumbling headfirst into every element of what was only ever supposed to be a temporary reset.
During that first book club, I made a plan. I would stay out of his way. Getanyjob and get out of his house. It wasn’t a new plan, by any means. More a reversion to plan A, before I’d inadvertently signed up for the bonus broken-heart package. ‘This is just so in line with your past behaviour, Audrey,’ Rach accused.
‘Ever since university—sinceJosh—you’ve run full tilt from anything good,’ she pointed out. ‘We all have that one guy who hung us out to dry and left the country—yes, literally in your case. But that was years ago! Take arisk.’
‘I did take a risk! Remember Teddy?’
‘The understudy?’ Rach had nicknamed him that. My one long-term boyfriend amongst the duds. ‘He waslovely. Husbandmaterial. But no—you were waiting for some conveniently fictitious, even more remarkable leading man …’
And now, seven job applications, countless swoon-worthy, over-the-spectacles glances, and six weeks after that book club, I’m acutely conscious of Fraser’s proximity. Our socked feet are up on the coffee table and we’re in pyjamas, sharing a block of chocolate and watching a movie about the apocalypse with the lights off. So technically, I’m not so much staying out of Fraser’s way as flinging myself straight into it.
‘You’re the type to watch plane crash films during flights, aren’t you?’ he says, breaking off a piece of rum and raisin and passing the packet.
I take my feet off the table and pull my legs up underneath me. ‘Oh, I’m obsessed with disaster flicks!Contagion,Geostorm,Twisters… give me a race against time and a brilliant scientist and—’
Heis a brilliant scientist. What am I doing, showing my hand?
‘And what is it about the imminent threat to life that you find particularly soothing?’ he asks, tactfully ignoring my slip.
I have to think about that. ‘Probably that their lives are more of a mess than mine.’
‘Come on, your life isn’t that bad, is it?’ He delivers this with a nudge of his elbow that repositions us closer—a situation neither of us bothers to address. The reshuffle leaves me leaning into the swimmer’s biceps and cyclist’s quadriceps that he’s been assembling ahead of a summer triathlon, like the overachiever that he is.
‘Please,’ I reply. ‘I’m in my mid-thirties, after a series of unappealing jobs and even less appealing boyfriends, I’m renting a single bedroom—’
‘Technically you have the run of almost the entire house. I mean, look at you. Look atthisroom alone.’
We cast our eyes at the shopping bags strewn across the doorway, my coat over the back of the armchair, shoes flung haphazardly in the hall. I’ve really made myself quite at home in the last few months, and he’s such an organised person. The kind who washes dishes as he cooks and keeps his tax spreadsheet current.
I open my mouth to apologise, but he says, ‘You were inspired to write a song. I get it.’
Does he really, though?Josh always did. We’d go whole weekends in dizzying episodes of wild creative flow, barely keeping our heads above water as human beings. We couldn’t eat. We wouldn’t sleep …
‘Fraser, do you ever get struck by some brilliant scientific hypothesis and you’re terrified you’ll lose the idea before you can capture it? Or are you all type A and have to do your filing first?’
He takes my wrist and twists my hand palm up, as though he’s giving me something to hold, and I’m surprised at the unexpected touch. ‘Sometimes it feels like sand, slipping through my fingers,’ he says, trailing a finger across my palm. ‘But it’s invisible. I know it’s there. I can feel the weight of it. But I can’t see it. Or understand it yet. It’s this intangible, frustrating, exciting, excruciating possibility, and it’s almost unbearable not toknow, one way or the other …’
I try not to shiver as my gaze travels from Fraser’s invisible idea in my hand, up his torso, to the academic aesthetic of glasses and messy hair. It settles on brown eyes that search my face with a question that I badly want him to articulate as I reach and smooth the frown lines on his forehead, just briefly. So many huge thoughts in that brain. Such massive problems that it’s trying to solve.Does he have any idea how attractive that is?
