The Near Miss by Fran Cusworth Read Free Book Online Page B

looked as though they might have been picked from nearby front yards; Grace thought she recognised the wattle from the Trappers’ rental.
    â€˜Did you bring them for us?’ Grace took them. ‘How beautiful! Come in, come in!’ Then she stood and saw Melody had brought someone; a man with a shaven head and a leather bikie jacket that gave him the look, in the shadows, of a cartoon super hero; as if he should have a logo emblazoned across his broad chest. He stretched out an arm to shake her hand, and the leather sleeve shifted to reveal tattoo ink on a muscled forearm. The silver rings on his fingers were an oddly feminine touch. His warm and rough hand enclosed her small one, and she felt the physical jolt of contact travel straight from her palm to her thighs. He stepped close to her and smiled. She blushed and glanced around; where was Tom?
    â€˜This is Van.’ Melody dropped a bike helmet onto the step with a clunk. The long beige knots fell down her shoulders and her blue eyes were serious. She wore no makeup and her features were little-girlish: a pert nose, soft-looking cheeks with faint freckles, and a mouthful of what looked like a pre-schooler’s milk-teeth — small and shell-white, slivers of space between each.
    â€˜Fan, was it?’
    â€˜ Van .’
    â€˜As in Morrison.’ God, the voice on him, the sort of spine-tingling vocal damage that tooka lot of drinking and smoking and probably shouting to achieve. A faint American accent. Grace stood back to let him move further into her home, against her better judgment. She leaned to see where he was going and bumped her head on the coat hooks. Whether he attractive or repulsive, she couldn’t quite decide. Where was her daughter?
    â€˜We didn’t get chocolates because they make you fat,’ Skipper told her.
    â€˜Oh, of course.’ Grace blushed and twinkled at Melody over the little boy’s head, and hoped he wasn’t about to tell her she was fat, as only a four-year-old could do. She hastily headed them all off on a tour of the house. ‘Here’s the lounge room. We still have to fix that crack and we’re choosing a colour for the feature wall, but it should be finished by the time we’re ready to move into the old folk’s home.’ She laughed shrilly. ‘Over the hall is our bedroom . . .’ Grace always did this on her house tours: launched into them and then faced the dilemma of whether to include the master bedroom. It always felt a little intimate to show people one’s married bedroom — ‘this is centre stage,’ one bawdy friend had introduced her own boudoir as — but then it was also a little reserved to hold a part of yourself back. And she owed such a debt of thanks to this woman, she would hide nothing, absolutely nothing, even the pile of clothes on the bed, obviously revealing she had tried on at least a dozen outfits. ‘Excuse the mess, I’m just sorting through things to throw out.’ She marched around the bed, determinedly waving at the wall of blankets down the middle of the unmade bed, the cluttered, dusty side tables, and the towels on the bathroom floor. She could see herself through Melody’s eyes; oh-so-boring and middle-class suburbia.
    â€˜Nice curtains.’ Melody stood in the bedroom doorway and fiddled with the zipper of her jacket. She cast a look down the hall. ‘Where’s . . .?’
    â€˜Oh, they’ve found . . .’
    Skipper and Lotte had indeed discovered each other. Their reunion was reminiscent of anold movie; they saw each other down the length of the hall and they ran. Once face-to-face, they stopped and regarded each other from a hand’s width apart, and then Lotte put her hands around Skipper and hugged him. Skipper looked thoughtfully over Lotte’s shoulder while this occurred; he didn’t respond until she went to pull back, at which he raised his fists and squeezed her