Chocolate Cake for Breakfast by Danielle Hawkins Read Free Book Online

long strides he bent his head and kissed me.
    At age twelve, or thereabouts, I had spent quite a bit of time envisaging that magical first kiss from the handsome stranger. I would be looking my best, obviously, gowned in cornflower blue and slender as a reed. The setting varied from an orchard white with blossom, to a candlelit ballroom, to a lonely shore where little waves broke hissing against the shells. (It’s probably unnecessary to say that my idol, at twelve, was Anne of Green Gables.)
    I hadn’t planned to be dressed in khaki overalls and have one red eye. Neither had my imagined perfect kiss involved the handsome stranger saying conversationally, when at length he let me go, ‘You smell terrible.’
    I laughed. ‘Well, so do you.’
    ‘True,’ he said. ‘I’ll try to wash before tomorrow. What should I bring?’
    ‘Nothing. I’ll ring you if I get called out, but if you make it here before me there’s a key to the back door on a nail at the top left-hand side of the doorframe.’
    ‘Thank you. It seems a bit rough that you’re on call two weekends in a row.’
    ‘It’s usually only one in five,’ I told him. ‘And two in five over spring. But I swapped weekends, because I’ve got to go to Taupo in a few weeks’ time.’
    ‘I see,’ said Mark. ‘I thought perhaps being on call was a handy excuse when some dodgy bloke asks you out and you don’t want to go.’
    I shook my head, and he pulled me back up against him.

5
    ‘ SO, HOW WAS YOUR EVENING WITH MARK TIPENE? ’ ALISON asked the next day as we marched along the road past Broadview Nissan. A salesman paused in the act of polishing a car bonnet to admire Alison’s pert lycra-clad bottom, then realised she’d noticed and began to polish with renewed vigour.
    ‘It was really nice,’ I said. ‘Which is surprising, since we spent it doing a disgusting rotten calving for Joe Watkins.’
    ‘How romantic.’
    ‘It was. Especially the bit where Mark got to put his arm into the cow up to the shoulder, when he had no overalls or gumboots.’
    ‘Where was Joe?’ she asked.
    ‘Inside watching TV,’ I said. ‘Horrible old coot.’
    ‘I’m not actually telling you this because it would be a breach of client confidentiality, but he comes into the medical centre every couple of months for an injection and he’s got a tattoo of a topless girl on his bum.’
    ‘Is it a nice tattoo?’
    ‘No,’ she said decidedly. ‘Very tasteless.’
    As opposed to all those really tasteful tattoos of topless girls that you see around the place. I had a hopeful thought. ‘Is the injection for some fatal disease?’
    ‘I’m afraid not,’ said Alison. ‘But it is a painful injection, if that makes you feel better.’
    ‘It does. Thank you.’
    ‘You’re welcome. So, are you seeing your All Black again tonight?’
    ‘No.’ I aimed a kick at a pebble, and missed. After two years of junior soccer, during which my parents spent their Saturday mornings watching me pick buttercups in my corner of the field, I was allowed to go to singing lessons instead. ‘He was going to come for tea, but he rang this morning and said the guy who was supposed to be playing number four tomorrow had just fallen off his motorbike and dislocated his thumb, so he’s gone to Dunedin to play rugby instead.’
    ‘Damn,’ said Alison.
    We strode on past Alcot’s Farm Machinery, waving to Sam, who was deep in conversation with a farmer in front of an enormous self-unloading trailer.
    ‘He kissed me goodnight,’ I said to my feet.
    ‘ Did he?’ Alison is a most satisfactory friend; when you make some momentous announcement you can be quite confident she’ll treat your news with the attention you feel it deserves. She never responds with, ‘Cool. Hey, guess who I saw this morning?’
    ‘How was it?’ she asked.
    ‘Lovely,’ I said. Thrilling. Perfect, in fact, smell notwithstanding. Anything less like kissing the previous model – which was pleasant and familiar and