‘Thanks! Toss it here,’ I suggest, preparing to catch it.
Instead he flicks the plastic lid as he wanders over, squirting lotion into his hand. ‘Turn around,’ he commands when he meets me at the step of my caravan.
‘It’s okay. I’ll do it—’
‘Are you a contortionist?’ He waits for me to capitulate, knowing I will, as reaching the raw skin on my back is impossible.
‘Wow, how did we let this happen?’ he asks, fingers slipping gently under my straps, edging them off my shoulders carefully.
‘Well, I am a middle-aged woman, give or take. It was probably on me not to be this careless.’
I shut my eyes, inhaling sharply as cool lotion hits hot skin, and I lift my hair from my neck as his fingers brush my shoulders. He steps closer, pulling the fabric away from my back, dipping his hand underneath it, tracing the outline of my swimmers from memory until I have to grip both sides of my caravan’s doorway. Scorched skin, desperate for this touch, floods my brain with a swirl of conflicting sensory signals, and my heart throbs, head spinning—quite certain he’s rubbed aloe vera onto the skin of so many women it’s probably tabloid-magazine canon by now, hopelessly convinced, nonetheless, that it was never quite like this. As if he is inside my head, extinguishing a trail of sunburn that lights a new blaze.
‘Over your writer’s block, then?’ He knows exactly what he’s doing, spinning me gently by the hip, resting a hand flat on the metal of my caravan as he leans against it, satisfied smile in his eyes.
I seem to be overeverysort of block, if he must know. The man has set me on fire in every conceivable way. Creatively. Emotionally. Physically. And now the sounds blasting through my mind are urgent. They’re hopeful. The melody so fresh, so unexpected, and my desire to capture it so intense, I’m almost scared of it as visions flash of the way our legs touched on that rock face yesterday. How it thrilled me and scared me to tumble towards him like that …
‘I’ve had an idea,’ I announce.
‘You look like you’ve been ravished by ideas.’
I adjust my straps and fidget with my top and my hair, trying to straighten up, attempting not to dwell too long on the word ‘ravished’, as uttered from those particular lips.
‘Don’t do that,’ he says, nodding at my hair, taking my hand, and leading me off my step, into the space between our vehicles. ‘Frenzied creativity suits you.’
I suspect it would also suit him. I imagine him deep in concentration, perhaps with a pair of reading glasses and a strong black coffee steaming in a mug beside him while he writes. If he’s this attractivenot writing, I can’t begin to envisage the impact of Beau Davenport with a laptop, impressive thoughts tumbling into a document while he writes some award-worthy script.
‘I want to help you with your screenplay,’ I announce, not just because I really want to see him in that state. I’m eager to shift the conversation away from me and how frazzled I look, and onto him and how genuinely I want to help.
He smiles. ‘Oh yes? How would you do that?’
‘Come with me to Canberra,’ I say. Confidence has overcome me in some sort of delirious, post-creative high, convincing me it’s worth asking the eligible screenwriter, who seems to divide his time between high-rise Sydney and LA, if he would like to tag along on a trip to the nation’s capital.
‘What’s in Canberra apart from the prime minister?’
‘A rehearsal room at the School of Music, for starters,’ I explain. ‘I’m hiring one to use the piano for a few days.’
He tosses some kindling and a couple of big blocks of wood into a rusty metal drum for tonight’s fire before he looks over, catches me staring, and says, ‘Where do I fit in?’
My brain produces an instant collage of all the ways …
‘Bring your story,’ I say, preventing that train of thought from going any further. ‘Tell it to me and I’ll set it to music. I don’t mean officially—I’m sure you’ll have already locked in a composer for the actual film—’
‘Harlow and I had another email from him this morning, asking if there were any content concepts we could send through yet.’
Harlow?‘I thought she was an actor.’
‘She is, but she’s also shadowing me in the writers’ room. She wants to move in that direction. I guess I’m mentoring her, unofficially. In return, she’s been helping out with some of the project-management stuff, emails and so on,while you’re off being creatively brilliant, Beau, she said. I haven’t been entirely open with her about how dire things have been on that front.’
His frustration is palpable, standing here, arms folded across his chest.
‘Yesterday I was just as stuck as you,’ I remind him, leading us to the camping chairs. ‘All it took was for you to let me play my piece in a new place, and that changed everything.’
‘You had a bigger story stopping you,’ he says. ‘I don’t have the same excuses.’
‘Being somewhere different could help, though. Showing a new person. Staying here hasn’t worked for you, has it?’
‘Why waste your time on my stuff?’
