admired the way she managed to win the approval of various crusty or supercilious professors without playing teacher’s pet. He’d heard the clever, perceptive, diligently researched answers she gave to knotty medical problems posed in class or during their earnest stints of hospital observation. He’d seen the way she worked and focused, just the way he did. He’d liked the way she smiled and the way she danced, the few times they’d gone out in the same group.
She’d liked his laugh, and the way he would say something funny sometimes when nobody was expecting it. She’d liked the way his questions always pinpointed exactly the areas that other students were unsure about. She’d liked the fact that he never featured in lurid, gossipy stories of drunkenness or womanising.
And then, one critical night ten years ago, after they’d already known each other for six years, casually, as fellow students, he’d let his guard down and they’d spent fourteen uninterrupted hours together at someone’s party and beyond —couldn’t remember the guy’s name any more—and had fallen for each other the way the moon had fallen into orbit around the earth.
Thinking about it, he discovered that it still scared him.
The suddenness of it. The strength. The things he’d told her. The vulnerability he’d shown. The power he’d given her over his emotions, just in one short night. It was as if a lifetime of well-schooled stoicism had broken down all at once. When a dam broke, it didn’t simply spring a leak, it flooded. Everything pent up inside him had broken that night, because of her, and had come flooding out.
With her. To her. For her.
‘I love you, Miranda.’
Unstoppable. Crystal clear. Terrifying.
They’d been drinking, of course, but not that much. He hadn’t been hungover the next day. At the point when he’d really begun talking to her, he had downed maybe three beers in three hours. The words had exhilarated him as he spoke them, like jumping out of a plane with a parachute on his back—terror and freedom mixed like a potent cocktail, making him dizzy and wild. How many times had he said them that night? He couldn’t remember. Three? Five? More?
They’d started in the kitchen. What had she said to him? Something that made him think instantly, She knows who I really am, she knows what I really feel, she’s fabulous. Why didn’t I see any of this before? Within ten minutes they lost all awareness of what was happening around them—the music, the laughter, the people coming and going in search of ice or chips or more beer.
The emotional nakedness and physical hunger between them was wonderful and crippling at the same time. He ached for her, wanted to kiss her and take her to bed so badly, and yet he wanted to listen to her, too. He wasn’t simply possessed by a young man’s hormonal imperatives, his whole heart was melting and singing. He had no idea it was possible to feel this way. Had no idea how thoroughly they’d already come to know each other after six years as fellow students. Had no idea how he’d failed to see it coming.
It was a warm night, summer just started, air fresh and a little salty because they were near the ocean. ‘Want to find somewhere outside?’ he asked her, and she nodded. They sat on some brick steps, knees hunched up, bodies touching. He remembered the sweet smell of flowers. Jasmine, or something. All tangled and lush around the posts and lintel of some wooden white-painted garden arch. It gave them privacy. He kissed her for minutes on end and when he finally pulled away, she smiled into his face and stroked his jaw with her hands, looking at him with a helpless frown on her face as well as the smile, as if, like him, she couldn’t understand how something could simultaneously be so strange and so right.
‘Dad?’ Josh said tentatively, bringing Nick’s focus crashing back to the present.
‘Yes, lit—? Yes, mate?’ Again, he’d almost said little guy.
He didn’t like mate. It didn’t feel right. What else was there? Love. Sweetheart. Darling. Not those either. He hated it that his son was five years old and he didn’t know how to find the right affectionate nickname.
‘Can I please have a snack?’
‘Sure.’ There should be a snack cart coming along soon, but Nick wasn’t going to rely on Josh liking airline food. He was absurdly grateful at the mere fact that his son had spoken to him. ‘You want the muesli bar or the cheese dipper?’
‘Muesli bar.’
‘And something to drink?’
‘Just water.’ He sounded good now, no wheeze left at all.
Miranda appeared. ‘If you need the bathroom, now would be a good time, Joshie. Before the aisle gets blocked by the food service.’
Joshie, Nick thought. That worked. That he could say, without feeling that he was somehow faking his way through it.
Thank you, Miranda Carlisle. Again…
They must have talked and kissed and sat on those steps until two or three in the morning, learning about each other, by which time the party had been sagging and ebbing into the usual late night dark kind of feeling, people leaving in twos and threes, warm bodies slumped together on the couch, a touch-and-go moment when an irritable neighbour might have called the police, only someone shut down the pounding music just in time.
‘Where could we go?’ he asked. ‘I want to be with you. I don’t think I ever want to let you go.’ He meant it, at the time, more than he’d ever meant anything in his life. Lord, in hindsight the nakedness of it still brought hints of blind panic.
‘My place,’ she offered at once. It was a shared house. Fellow med students, but they’d gone north to the Gold Coast, she said, for their version of this end-of-exams party night.
Miranda made it clear that the two of them would be alone—a typical gesture of giving, he thought. No one to overhear, no one to hide from, no one to ever know, no matter how late they slept in.
You’re safe, Nick.
He knew he never would have made himself that vulnerable, offering ‘my place’ as if it was the easiest thing in the world. He protected his own space like it was some kind of dark secret, even though it was nothing out of the ordinary, just a ground-level studio flat next to the garage, beneath his landlord’s suburban home.
The way he’d protected his heart until that night, with her.
When a dam broke, it flooded…
They made love.
He still remembered odd details. They stood out in his mind like bits of coloured glass catching the sun. Miranda’s dark hair sweeping across his chest—it had been longer back then. Her laugh, all creamy and secret and just for him. The confessions he’d made afterwards, while they’d lain in each other’s arms until morning, not sleeping at all.
Those confessions had felt liberating at the time, a huge weight off his mind, gateway to a new freedom he hadn’t imagined before. ‘I’m not sure if I care enough about people to be a good doctor. I have the medicine down, but how do you care the right amount?’ ‘I don’t think I really love my parents the way I should. My father is so…so rigid, and my mother gives in to everyone.’ ‘Stupidity makes me angry. And weakness. And sneakiness. All those things. I pull back. I just don’t deal with it. Is that showing strength, to pull back? Or am I being weak, too?’
He wondered now, as Miranda jumped up once more from the narrow aircraft seat beside him, if she was still as calmly trusting, if she still wore her heart on her sleeve, if she ever said I love you the very first night.
He didn’t.
He never had since.
Where was the sense in making yourself that vulnerable? he’d decided. And yet holding back, the way he had in his marriage to Anna, hadn’t brought him happiness. With any luck, she wouldn’t be seated beside him on the next flight—