She stilled at the contact for half a second, before he felt her give. Moving to meet him. Melting in his arms.
Then her hands delved slowly into his hair, sending shards of heat down his spine. And he knew he wasn’t alone in this. In the connection, or the missing. In the disarray, or the realisation it was what it was. Change or not, they were who they were.
Yet the kiss remained slow. Tender. Tinged with yearning.
Their lips brushing. Lingering. Tasting. Sipping. Offering. Relearning the shape of one another. Lost in a kind of hazy bliss, yet teetering on a knife’s edge. As if it could tip over into an inferno any second.
A few seconds later the kiss gentled, and they pulled apart.
Sable’s eyes took several moments to flutter open. The surprise, the wonder, the heat in her gaze, the way she remained plastered against him, struck something deeply primal inside.
Inevitable.
“What was that for?” she asked, but there was no castigation in her tone. Merely wonder.
“I heard they’ve been mean to you.”
“They?” she asked, her eyes still not quite focussed.
Rafe cocked his head towards the old men on the park bench outside the barber, then the women with their noses against the window of Wanda’s Cakes and Stuff.
“The wool-store lady, thing?” She waved it off. “I’ve been on the receiving end of far worse.”
“Janie told me about the photograph.”
Her brow furrowed before smoothing out as she began playing with a loose thread in his shirt. “Oh. That. That kind of thing used to happen all the time. I hated it, but had become...accustomed.”
He tried to imagine having to inure himself to having strangers come at him, in vulnerable moments, and sell the spoils for entertainment. “How do you get used to something like that?”
“It’s fine. Well, not fine. I used to smile and try to move on. This time I felt like taking her phone and dropping it in my drink.” She shot him a smile that he felt, right in the solar plexus. “But it was clarifying. Made me realise I didn’t belong in that space, and neither did I want to. Which made me really think about what I did want. And...here I am.”
“That doesn’t make it right, what Trudy and Wanda pulled. This was your home, once upon a time. You are one of us, no matter where in the world you might be.”
She blinked up at him, her eyes coming over a little glossy. Before she swallowed and shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. They’re just looking out for you. Which makes me appreciate how far they’ve come. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if a couple of those women have shrines to you in their basements—”
And from one blink to the next her gaze cleared.
“Hang on a second. Is that why you kissed me like that, in front of the whole town? Because you were trying to protect me? Just like our first kiss all over again?”
Was it? Partly. And partly because he couldn’t not kiss her. Which was becoming a problem. One he was apparently willing to take on.
“I can look after myself, Rafe,” she said, her face mutinous. “I’m not your responsibility.”
But he refused to be pushed away. Not without the chance to have his say. He tucked her in closer. She glared up at him. But made no move to disengage. Her finger was still playing with the loose thread near his heart.
This push and pull, this constant humming tension, it had been their hallmark. For their relationship hadn’t happened overnight—it had been built over years. Layers and layers of discovery and demand, differences and insecurities, trust and surrender. Some of which had been swept away by her departure, but not all. The foundations had been too well laid.
That foundation had been the one thing that had kept him upright when she left. For all that her leaving had shattered him, the fact that she’d been in his life at all was the reason he’d come as far as he had. She’d seen such good in him, with her ability to see beauty in places others saw only despair.
Would he ever have been able to realise his dream without her?
Without him would she be able to realise hers?
Her finger slid out from the grip of the cotton and laid over his chest. Her fingers curling gently against his shirt. He felt his heart thump, once, twice, a solid, sure, steady decided beat. A response he’d learned to trust when he’d had nothing else to rely on.
And he heard himself say, “Yes.”
“Yes? Yes, I can look after myself?” Her eyes widened. “Or yes, as in...?”
Rafe glanced over Sable’s shoulder to find the over-sixties walking group standing in a clump, gawping at them. The men in the barber shop had now spilled onto the footpath as well. Bear was out there, trying to hustle them all into The Coffee Shop, but they were all far too immersed in the show playing out before them.
“Can we go for that drive?” Rafe asked.
“Don’t you have to get the car to Melbourne?”
“I’ll get someone else to finish the trip. In a bit.”
“Oh.”
“Shall we?”
She nodded, her eyes still wild and wide, her head bobbing like a marionette. When he moved her aside just enough to open the passenger door, she spilled bonelessly inside.
While Rafe felt as if the next hour might well determine the course of his life from that moment on. Not only regarding the possibility of a child out there in the world, but the woman who’d stormed back into his life.
With the roof down, the wind was bracing. But Sable barely noticed for her mind was all a spin as Rafe drove out of town, up into the hills, round and around, till she lost her sense of direction.
Rafe, elbow resting on the windowsill, a finger sliding back and forth over the seam of
