‘I know,’ Lauren told him, pleased to have something concrete to grasp hold of. ‘I often bring in women who have left home with nothing.’
Tom nodded, so much understanding in his eyes she felt like crying, or maybe asking for another hug, but such weakness was definitely exhaustion so she hustled off to get some toiletries and night gear for herself and Bobby. She returned with her haul to find Tom had lifted the sleeping boy and was carrying him along the corridor towards the side door that was closest to his house.
Tom’s house was the official hospital residence, built in the same style as the hospital with wide verandas on three sides, all of them providing glimpses of the ocean. As Lauren walked through the door she tried to think if she’d ever been inside the house before. She’d been to the house often enough, invited to drinks or a barbecue with other friends, but they’d always sat on the veranda.
The living room was comfortably furnished, very neat and tidy, the only thing out of place a folded newspaper resting on the arm of a leather lounge chair. It was off to the left of the central passageway, doors on the right obviously opening into bedrooms.
Tom pushed the second door with his foot and it opened to show a pristinely neat bedroom, a single bed set in the middle, an old polished timber wardrobe on one side and French doors opening to the veranda on the other.
‘Do you want to wake him to do his teeth and change his clothes or should we just let him sleep?’
Lauren considered the question—letting the little boy sleep was obviously the best solution, but he might wake and not know where he was.
‘Not that I want to hurry you or anything but my arms might give way any minute,’ Tom said, and though there was a smile in the words Lauren knew Bobby must have grown very heavy in his arms.
‘I think we’ll let him sleep,’ she said, and she slipped past Tom and his burden and turned down the bed, then, when Tom put Bobby down on the clean sheet, she slid off his rubber flip-flops and pulled the top sheet over him.
Tom came forward and turned on a bedside light, using a button to dim it.
‘All mod cons in this place,’ he said, then he touched the little boy on the head and hesitated for a few seconds before following Lauren out of the room.
‘Your bedroom is this way,’ he said, pushing open the next door. ‘There’s a bathroom just beyond it, towels in a cabinet behind the door. Do you need anything else? Would you like a drink of some kind?’
Lauren shook her head, then common sense dictated she should ask.
‘I don’t suppose you’d have a blow-up mattress or a comfortable lounger? I’d like to sleep beside him in case he wakes up in the night and doesn’t know where he is.’
Tom smiled at her.
‘Great minds,’ he said. ‘I was intending to do just that, but if you’re sure then it would be better for you to do it as he doesn’t really know me except as someone who causes him pain when he lands in the ER after one of his wilder pranks. I do have a blow-up mattress from far-off camping days. I’ll get it.’
He was about to walk away, but Lauren caught his arm so he turned back to her.
‘Why?’ she asked, adding, when she saw the puzzled expression on his face, ‘Why were you thinking of staying with him?’
Tom’s smile was gone, his face now pale and grim, although it would be. It was well after midnight and he must be exhausted.
‘I was Bobby once,’ he said softly, then he slipped his arm away from her fingers and disappeared back along the passage and into what must be the front bedroom.
His bedroom!
I was Bobby once?
What did he mean?
And why was it suddenly very important to Lauren that she find out? Find out all she could about the enigmatic man she’d thought she knew …
Why had he said that?
Lauren was a psychologist—she’d want an explanation for a statement like that.
But would she ask?
Lauren, his friend, would have, but this Lauren was different.
Because he’d seen vulnerability in her for the first time in the eighteen months he’d known her?
Because he felt, not exactly proud, but somehow pleased that she’d trusted him enough to show that vulnerability?
So he’d shared a bit of his?
Oh, please! Enough with the psychological delving.
He reached up on top of his wardrobe for his old backpack, assuming his blow-up mattress would still be shoved inside or strapped to it. He hoped the rubberised material hadn’t rotted. If it had, Lauren was in for an uncomfortable night. Perhaps the reclining lounge chair would be more comfortable for her, although they would probably wake Bobby trying to manoeuvre it into the bedroom, and would it fit?
He tried very hard to concentrate on these nice trivial matters, but in his head the image of a little boy, younger than Bobby by a couple of years, tucked into a strange bed in a strange room—the first of a series of strange beds in strange rooms …
‘Tom? Can I help?’
Lauren was in the doorway and it was obvious he’d dithered for so long she’d had time to have a shower for her hair clung in damp tendrils to her neck, and she was wearing what must be one of the ugliest nightdresses ever created. A vague purple colour, faded from much washing, it had something he assumed were bunches of flowers printed all over it, and it hung, shapeless as a deflated balloon, from her shoulders.
‘Fetching, isn’t it?’ she said, smiling at the thoughts she’d obviously guessed he was having. ‘Maybe the hospital insists on the design—it’d work better than an old-fashioned chastity belt for randy staffers.’
Though not for him, Tom discovered. Standing there in his bedroom door, freshly showered, totally exhausted but still so temptingly beautiful, his body would probably have reacted if she’d been wearing a suit of armour.
‘You’d look good in a wheat sack,’ he told her, hefting the whole backpack down from the top of the wardrobe and turning his attention to finding the mattress, shaking his head in frustration when it failed to materialise.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m so tired I could sleep on a barbed-wire fence. It’s a warm night so if you wouldn’t mind lending me that puffy-looking duvet you have on your bed I can fold it, probably in three—is that a king-size bed?—and it will be fine.’
Looking at the bed was a mistake. He immediately pictured Lauren in it. And it was a king-size bed but right now he didn’t want to think about why he used a bed that size, let alone explain it.
‘Okay,’ he said, realising that the sooner he got Lauren tucked away in Bobby’s bedroom the sooner he could sort through the craziness inside his head.
Could he put it all down to seeing Bobby in that neatly made single bed?
Of course he couldn’t. It had started back with Lauren’s groan, and the strange sensation of … satisfaction? … he’d felt when she’d asked him to stand by her.
Not to mention his determination to find out more about the vulnerability he’d glimpsed in the woman he’d thought was so together.
He’d stalled again, standing in the bedroom, only vaguely aware of Lauren walking past him and hefting the duvet from his bed. He reached out to take it from her, but as he touched her arm she dropped it, and stepped over it so she was close enough to hug.
For him to hug her, although it didn’t happen that way.
It