AN: Ok, so I'm posting an extra chapter because this was originally part of the previous chapter but there's a lot of dialogue and back story so i decided to split it, not sure if it was the best place but figured it would be less annoying if I didn't make people wait. I don't think the story up to here needs to change much even if I wildly change my mind about what's going to happen next, but this will be it for a while until I figure out how to get past where I am stuck. Hope it's enough to keep you interested :)
Chapter 15
I told Char. You're giving me a lift home.
You know where I'm parked?
I'll find you. Are you in the sports car or the truck?
I chuckle at my girlfriend's complete lack of interest in my expensive machinery.
I'm in the Lexus.
So helpful. I don't care what it's name is. Is it the silver truck or the grey sports car?
It's the silver SUV, the top of the range Lexus Landcruiser!
Ok, Landwhale, whatever, I see it. I'm just going to wait for Ben and Ash to drive off. C u soon.
I'm still chuckling when I hear the knock on the passenger window. "Ok, so the grey sports car is a Maserati GranTurismo—" I have no more words because she has climbed in, grabbed my face and is kissing me like she hasn't seen me in a year. Before I know it she has slid across the padded centre console, and I am pulling her into my lap trying not to touch her everywhere I want to. She breaks the kiss, breathing heavily, to simply say, "Thank you," and then curls her arms around my neck as I inch my hands around her waist and caress the soft skin underneath her shirt. "You're welcome. I don't mind being your in-car entertainment any time you like, but we should probably hit the road before we get some kind of fine for public displays of whatever." She shakes her head, laughing, "That's not what I was thanking you for. I know tonight was a big ask – pretending we're not a thing, when we are a thing, and so I've told Charlotte, though she pretty much guessed." She starts making moves to scoot back to her seat, so I give her a boost off my lap, making sure my hands slip a little lower than strictly necessary for secure transfer. She narrows her eyes at me as she puts her seatbelt on, then sighs dramatically. "I suppose I deserved that for launching myself at you. It was so hard to keep my hands off you all night! We're going public, Fitz, at least with our friends. Are you ok with that? Will you be ok if I touch you in front of other people?"
"Babe, I spent the whole night jealous of everyone else you touched. Yes, I will be ok with that. Thank you for the way you introduced me, I wish I had found a way to do that myself when I was younger. It's so much easier being laughed at when I'm laughing too."
"Babe? Seriously? And no one is laughing at you."
"You call me Fitz, I call you Babe. And, yeah, of course no one is laughing at me because they're laughing with me!" I'm driving out of the car park as we talk. "So, do you want to come back to my place?" She looks at me askance for a moment. "I will keep my hands to myself, I promise!" She smiles and sighs, "Oh, Fitzy, my biggest problem is me, not you! You make me lose my mind sometimes! I'm going to break just as much as you when – if – things don't work out between us. It's been a month, I've seen you what 5-6 times? What are you doing to my hear—" She doesn't finish the word, but she blinks back sudden tears, and presses her chest like she's got heartburn. "Too soon, too fast," she whispers over and over. I reach across and take the hand she has fisted on her thigh. "I'm right here, Elizabeth, and I'm feeling everything with you. You're right, it's too fast, and it's too soon. But I feel it all too. This is as new and as terrifying for me as it is for you, just please don't talk about us not working out. I can't think about that right now."
I don't take her to my place.
We drive west, and I stop along a quiet stretch of empty coastline, between City Beach and Floreat. We walk along the beach that I occasionally run when I want a serious cardio burn. It never fails to amaze me how much beautiful coast we have, so close to the city, that is virtually empty for most of the year. It's another beautiful temperate winter night, cold and clear. The Fremantle Doctor has blown through, and the moon is reflecting off the glassy swell. The two lighthouses on Rottnest Island blink in the distance while I draw her closer to me. I think I finally understand Tim Winton's words, immortalised on a wall of the WA Maritime Museum.
"There is nowhere else I'd rather be, nothing else I would prefer to be doing. I am at the beach looking west with the continent behind me as the sun tracks down to the sea. I have my bearings."
I shake out the heavy rug I brought with me and wrap it around myself, as I sit with her enveloped in my arms and I start to talk about what happened to me.
"I made the mistake of asking Charlotte about Derek. I was just trying to make conversation and get her off talking about you and me. She warned me off you, you know. She's fierce! Anyway, Charlotte mentioned that Derek grew up at Rosings, part of the commune my aunt set up on the estate she inherited when her husband passed away. Lewis de Bourgh died not long before my mother, her baby sister, died, and I think it broke her. She's part of the reason I am the way I am. I lived at Rosings for almost a year after my mother passed away.
"I was 11, grief-stricken, vulnerable and she tried to help me. At least, that is how I have rationalised it to myself. She isolated me when I wouldn't stop crying, tried all sorts of karma cleansing therapy on me and goodness knows what else with her crazy cohort. I was never allowed to play with the other kids on the estate – worker's kids. She called them dirty, never let them near me, and I had to spend all of my time with Anne, her daughter. She was a fragile kid, two years older than me but half my size, allergic to almost everything and unable to play freely. Catherine told me my mother got sick and died because she spent too much time around filthy, common people, trying to help them, trying to save them and that's why she died. For a long time, I believed her. It was only a year, but it had a big impact. It didn't help that my Dad took a nose dive at the same time and absented himself from my life.
"I was always a fastidious kid, I had my own way of doing things, and how I liked things to be. Mum was always working on pushing me to break my own rules, to be more flexible, to help me manage the compulsion, at least that's what I remember, but then she got sick. It was cancer. They only found it because it showed up when she had an ultrasound because she was pregnant with Georgie. It was stable, so she chose not to have any chemo or radiotherapy. It's better now, more targeted drugs, but back then, there weren't many options, and Mum was adamant there would be no termination. She'd waited 10 years for Georgie, there was no way she was going to terminate. They took out what they could, but she refused any treatment that might affect her baby. But as Georgie grew, so did the cancer. Her final scan, just before she delivered Georgie, showed her at Stage IV. It had metastasized everywhere. She had the c-section, saw Georgie once, long enough to name her and hold her, and then she went into a coma and never woke up. I saw her the day she went into hospital to have her. She was so happy that she was going to meet Georgie. I never saw her awake again."
The tears are silently tracking a pathway down my cheeks while the words come out in halting sentences, in between long, shuddering silences. I have never spoken of these events to anyone outside my family. It was my aunt and uncle who shared the story with me. My father could never speak of it and by the time I was old enough to consider asking him, I had lost so much respect for him, it didn't seem to matter anymore. It is one of my biggest regrets. I scold myself back to a semblance of calm, already sick of the pointless emotional expenditure. She does nothing but squeeze the forearms I have wrapped around her, drying her eyes on my shirtsleeves before she rests her beautiful face next to mine. How did I live without this for so long?
Too soon. Too fast.
"So, I came back to live with Dad. He'd managed to put himself back together enough to get on with his life, but he was never the same to me and he couldn't be what we needed anymore. Basically, we lost both our parents when we lost Mum. He had 24/7 nursemaids and nannies for Georgie, and I couldn't look at her for a year without crying or having a panic attack. I loved her the first time I saw her, she was the cutest baby, and it hurt to see Dad just dismiss and ignore her. It probably helped me deal with my misplaced anger, to see how badly Dad was dealing with it. I couldn't abandon G the way he abandoned us. I couldn't be angry at Dad about that and also do the same thing to Georgie. I was basically home schooled for a year, and then went to board at Scotch College, where I hit puberty early, and had to navigate the hell of adolescent male socialisation, all of which just seemed to multiply the OCD. It coloured all of my interactions and the only way I could see to survive was to be a bigger prick than everyone else in the room. I called the shots and what I did was the way it had to be. I survived, but it looked like I thrived.
"It's not like the worst thing to have ever happened to a kid, and I'm lucky. I got the best education money could buy and was smart enough to finish an accelerated Agribusiness degree at UWA so I could fit in an MBA from Monash while learning the family business. Then the shit hit the fan with Wickham's dodgy backroom deals, he took down some corrupt politicians, my Dad's reputation and half the company with him before he was through. DG International went into serious bankruptcy negotiations. Richard's decision to come clean to the ACCC investigators meant we could clean our own house, without a Royal Commission looking over our shoulder, and concentrate on salvaging what was left of the business, sell off most of the international assets, start paying back our creditors and think about investing again. To the regular person, we've always been ridiculously wealthy, but more than halving our capital and cash flow was a serious step backwards. We're still working on resurrecting the company image, diversifying into renewable energy, trying to tap into the South Asian and Chinese wholesale agricultural markets to find buyers for our premium meat and dairy, and I want to claw back our coal and iron ore assets. It's been three years of hell starting with Dad's suicide, and I was enjoying day one of my first week off since then, when you turned the other cheek to my cheap shot and turned my world upside down."
"I really did a number on you, huh?" She wriggles around so she's facing me, her back resting on my bent leg, huddling inside the cocoon I've made her with my body and the blanket. "You have made some serious progress on your own, Fitz, which is a testament to the good heart, the good principles your parents instilled in you before everything went pear-shaped. But you need to talk to a professional."
"I know, I know, I promised I would."
"Have you called one of the numbers I gave you? You have some options because I want you to find the right person. You need help getting to a place where what we have isn't the only possibility of relationship and connection for you. Your dad is a prime example. He fell to pieces when your mum died. I won't have that on my conscience, ok? I can't be responsible for that."
"I know, I get it. I'm on it." She can hear the reluctance in my voice. "Fitzy, I won't make it conditional to our relationship, but I'm serious about this. I can't be responsible for your mental health or your future stability or the welfare of your family or anything, ok?! I will have my own heart to worry about, unless I'm dead, but one of us has to be thinking about the future."
"Baby, the only future I am thinking about is my lips on yours." She snort-laughs, "Nice detour into sleaze-ville there, Fizzy… nope, even I can't stand that one." I decide to make sleaze-ville our destination, and everything else just melts away. We stay in our lip-locked cocoon for a blissful kind of eternity, both of us knowing reality will eventually intrude.
