Twelve years.
Shut up! How do you even know that?
It was too long ago and far too much had happened in her life for her subconscious to instantly calculate the number. Especially as the day she’d bought the replacement black stethoscope had been the day she’d moved on from Charlie Ainsworth. At least that was what she always told herself on the infrequent occasions something made her think back to that heady summer a lifetime ago.
‘Stethoscopes are like wands,’ Charlie had said, slinging a red one around her neck and pulling her towards him before kissing her.
She’d gazed up at him, loving his kind and handsome face. ‘They’re magic?’
‘I wish,’ he’d said in a resigned tone, ‘but no. They do, however, reflect personality and you, Lauren Fuller, are the antithesis of boring old black. This one is bright and vivacious, just like you. This is the one.’
Lauren felt herself grimace at the now tarnished memory and immediately noticed Shaylee’s smile fade. Damn. She banished the mothballed memory back where it belonged and forced a smile as she kept rummaging in the bag. ‘The stethoscope looks great on you and, ta-dah!’ With relief, she shook out a red sequined cape. ‘You can be Super Shaylee.’
‘Yay!’ Shaylee clapped her hands as a look of wonder crossed her face. ‘I’m gonna be dressed in red like the other kids.’
Lauren blinked back tears. Why was it always the simple things that undid her? ‘You’ll be totally red, especially when I’ve sprayed your hair.’
* * *
After dropping a very excited Shaylee off at school, Lauren drove to the café nestled under the Norfolk pines on the sweet curve of Horseshoe Bay. Her usual morning routine was a run along the beach and on Tuesdays and Thursdays she added in a yoga class, but the one constant was coffee. This morning it was just coffee.
‘You missed a spectacular sunrise.’ Ben, the barista and café manager, greeted her with his trademark grin.
And I missed you. Sun-bleached hair and with a surfer’s tan, Ben had moved to the Bay three months ago to run the café. Most mornings as she finished her run, he was walking up the beach with his board tucked under his arm and they always fell into easy conversation. Everything about Ben was easy. This was a new experience for Lauren, because the two men she’d thought she’d loved had turned out to be anything but easy. But that was all in the past and not worth revisiting.
As far as Lauren was concerned, she’d wiped clean her slate of disastrous relationships when she’d returned to Horseshoe Bay two years ago. Determined to learn from her twenties, she was older, wiser and ready to live life on her own terms. The last year had been frantic, most of it spent breathing new life into a busy medical practice that had let the twenty-first century pass it by. Now, with her newly minted decree absolute declaring her officially divorced from Jeremy and with her heart encased in a protective layer of reinforced Perspex—visible but crack-proof—Lauren was finally ready for an easy, straightforward and uncomplicated man.
Truth be told, she was ready for sex. Just recently, she’d been waking up at three a.m. hot, sweaty and aroused, and although she was adept at bringing herself to orgasm, she was ready for someone else to do it. She just didn’t want a relationship with its inevitable breakdown and crippling scar tissue as part of the deal. Ben, with his ‘live for the moment’ and ‘no regrets’ attitude, might just be the solution she was looking for.
The stumbling block was that at thirty she’d only ever had sex as part of a committed relationship. Correction; she’d been committed—Charlie and Jeremy not so much—and she was clueless about how to bring up the topic of a no-strings-attached gig. Of course, she could just use a dating app but the two recent cases on the news where women had lost their lives from swiping right warned her she was safer with someone she knew. But in a town the size of Horseshoe Bay, her options were limited.
‘I was on mothering duty this morning,’ she said, pulling out her purse to pay for her latte.
Ben did a double take. ‘I didn’t know you had a kid.’
‘I don’t,’ she said, checking the Perspex around her heart and not letting her mind travel to a memory that always brought a troubling combination of sadness and disappointment seasoned with an unsettling soupçon of relief. ‘I’m looking after Shaylee while my parents are whooping it up in Melbourne celebrating thirty-three years of wedded bliss.’
‘Crikey.’ Ben’s expression was a priceless combination of respect and horror. ‘I can’t imagine what that would be like. My brain refuses to go there.’
‘I know, right? They got married at twenty-three and are still going strong. It’s terrifyingly impressive.’ So much about her parents and their achievements was impressive that she was often left feeling daunted by her own choices. How did one even start to live up to their high-set bar?
He placed the metal jug under the steam jet, frothing the milk for her brewing coffee. ‘I think I’d find marriage claustrophobic.’
Was this her opening? Come on, be brave. Be a millennial woman like the ones you read about and take what you want. ‘Sexually or otherwise?’
He shot her a quizzical look as if he was testing the lie of the land. ‘A bit of both, really. What about you?’
‘Post-divorce, I’ve had a total rethink.’ She swallowed and forced herself to look him straight in his sea-green eyes. ‘What’s your opinion of friends with benefits?’
‘I’m an enthusiastic supporter.’ He capped her coffee with a plastic sippy top and gave her a grin. ‘And we’ve been friends for a while now.’
‘We have.’ For some reason her heart was just beating away normally: lub-dub, lub-dub. Shouldn’t it be bounding wildly out of her chest at the fact that the gorgeous Ben was on board with the idea of the two of them tumbling into bed?
He handed her the coffee and swept the coins she laid on the wooden counter into the till. ‘Call me whenever, Lauren. I’m looking forward to it.’
‘Great!’ She heard herself saying, sounding far more enthusiastic than she felt. For some—probably antiquated—reason, she’d assumed Ben would be the one to contact her. Yet this way he was letting her call the shots and after two disastrous relationships, wasn’t that what she wanted? Demanded even?
Gah! Perhaps she wasn’t as twenty-first-century evolved or as ready for casual, no-strings-attached sex as she’d thought.
* * *
Charles Ainsworth—‘Boss Doc’ to the islanders, Charlie to his friends and on very infrequent occasions to his family—swore as the lights in the operating theatre flickered. ‘Bert filled the generator, right?’ he asked as he slipped a ligature around a bleeding vessel.
‘No worries, boss.’ A dark eyed man with a bush of frizzy hair gave him the thumbs-up from the door. ‘I fill ’em up. No be in the dark this time.’
‘Excellent.’ Charlie might be in what travel magazines called ‘paradise’—a string of tropical, palm-dotted coral islands floating in an aquamarine sea—but from a medical perspective, he was in a developing country and a disaster zone. During the recent cyclone, he’d had to perform emergency surgery on a boy who had been pierced by a stake that had been hurled into his chest by the terrifying and mighty force of the wind. Mid-surgery, they had predictably lost power, but he hadn’t foreseen the generator running dry or him finishing the surgery with Bert and Shirley holding LED torches aloft.