When I’d slung everything into the boot again, though, and Daisy had slid into the car again, and I’d shut her door again and gone around to my side again, I sat a second and said, “Time to think.”
“No,” she said. “I’ve done enough thinking.”
“Going home, though,” I said. “It’ll be barely half-past eight. Your sisters still awake. My mum still awake. Xena whining outside the bedroom.”
“Oh,” she said. “True. For a man with three houses, you’re oddly lacking in privacy.” Sounding breezy, but I didn’t think she felt that way underneath.
I thought about checking into a hotel. About walking into a room dominated by an enormous bed, about the door slamming shut behind us, about pressure, about nerves. And then I asked her again, “Do you trust me?”
She swallowed, and I saw it, even in the fading light. Nerves. “Yes.”
I leaned across the console, took her head in my hand, and kissed her. Thought about doing it better. About the plumpness of that lower lip, the deep bow in the top one. Thought about sliding my hand slowly inside that filmy little blouse. I drew back, picked up a wayward tendril of dark hair, and told her, “Out here, Outside, we don’t rush into things, not when a woman’s just starting out. We take it slow. It’s not the Joining Hut. It’s not about your duty or my expectations. It’s about your pleasure. Step by step. I think you told me that was your motto. Let’s try that instead.”
“Gray,” she said, “I’m finally ready to do this. I’m not nervous, for once. Or I am, but I’m not freezing up. Don’t you think we’d better do it quick while I actually want to?”
This time, I laughed. And then I leaned back in my seat and laughed some more. I said, “Get it over with, you mean, before the feeling passes? How about not? How about enjoying it instead?”
“Fine,” she said, and now, she sounded cross. She also had her arms folded over her chest.
“Fireworks,” I told her.
“Excuse me?”
“I told my mum, maybe the first day I knew you, that you were fireworks, and I loved fireworks. She told me I didn’t. She said I loved sparklers. They’re pretty, and you wave them around a bit, until they go out.” I reached across again, brushed my thumb all the way down her jaw, my fingers drifting down the side of her neck, watched her shiver, and said, “I’m not settling for sparklers anymore. So you know.” Then I kissed her again, because how could I help it?
“You had this conversation with your mum,” she said, when I’d started the car and we were rolling through the gates, practically the last ones to leave.
“I did,” I said, and headed north. “But then, my mum’s a wise woman.”
“Also,” she said, “you’re comparing me to all the other women you’ve slept with. Poor form, surely.”
“You did some comparing yourself,” I pointed out. “Except that you didn’t. You told me how you felt. That’s what I’m doing, too. Telling you how I felt, and how I’m feeling now. Telling you it doesn’t feel the same. Telling you I want to do it right.”
“So where are we going?” she asked.
“Just wait,” I said. In fact, we were nearly there, taking the rising road at an easy pace in the fading light, my body knowing the curves.
She said, “Oh. Signal Hill. I’ve run this heaps.”
“So have I,” I said. “Seven, eight years ago. Pity I didn’t see you.”
“I wouldn’t have been running it then,” she said. “Also, I’d have been twenty. Trying to make it through nursing school. And you’d have been …”
“Some arrogant arsehole of a footballer,” I said, pulling into a spot in the corner of the Signal Hill carpark, because the drive was all of two minutes from the Botanic Garden. “Thinking he was all that. I’d have noticed you anyway, though. And you’d have sent me on my way pretty smartly.”
“Because I’d have been terrified,” she said.
“Mm. Maybe we could’ve got through this together, though. What d’you reckon? Got you before you had to try with those other blokes. Got me before I got to be any more of an arsehole.”
She unclipped her seatbelt and opened her door, and I said, “Let’s sit a moment instead.”
“Oh.” She shut the door, and I unclipped my own seatbelt.
“This is what you do,” I told her, “when you want to touch her, but you don’t have your own place yet. You come up