‘What I’m trying to say,’ she said, her big blue eyes earnest and unwavering, ‘is that I get it. These moments. Minutes. Hours.’
‘Days...’
But he stopped himself saying the rest: weeks, months... Because he’d realised it wasn’t true. Not now.
Mila realised it too—he could tell. They stood there on the street, staring at each other with a strange mix of sadness for the beautiful, smart, funny, flawed Stephanie they so missed and relief that their lives continued onwards.
‘Are you okay?’ Mila asked again.
He nodded. The ocean had stilled. The wave of grief and guilt and loss had receded.
She still gripped his arm. They both seemed to realise it at the same time. Her touch felt different now. No longer cool or simply comforting. Her fingers loosened, but didn’t fall away. She didn’t step back—but then neither did he.
Her gaze seemed to flicker slightly, darting about his face to land nowhere in particular.
When they’d been about fifteen, Mila had successfully dragged Steph into her Goth phase. Seb couldn’t remember what the actual point of it all had been, but he did remember a lot of depressing music and heavy eyeliner.
‘You have incredible eyes,’ he said, without thinking.
Those incredible eyes widened—and they were incredible...he’d always thought so—and Mila took an abrupt step back, snatched her hand away.
‘What?’
He instantly missed her touch—enough that it bothered him. Although he couldn’t have explained why.
‘I was thinking of all that eye make-up you used to wear towards the end of high school. I hated it. You look perfect just like this.’
Mila’s cheeks might have pinkened—it was hard to tell in the sunlight—but her eyes had definitely narrowed. ‘I didn’t ask for your approval of my make-up choices.’
He’d stuffed up. There it was—that shuttered, defensive expression.
‘That wasn’t what I meant. I—’
‘Look, I really have to go.’ She’d already taken a handful of steps along the footpath.
‘See you at tennis?’ he said. They’d organised it via text for the following evening.
Mila didn’t look back. ‘Yes,’ she said, sounding about as excited as if he’d reminded her of a dental appointment.
Sebastian tossed his empty coffee cup in the skip, then headed back to the building site. He might not need to be here daily to speak to the project manager, but he could find other ways to make himself useful—ideally in usefulness that involved swinging a sledgehammer.
THE VERY LAST glimmers of sun were fading as Mila pulled into the Nedlands Tennis Club car park. A moment after she’d hooked her tennis bag over her shoulder floodlights came on, illuminating the navy blue hard courts and their border of forest-green.
The car park was nearly empty.An elderly-looking sedan with probationary ‘P’ plates most likely belonged to one of the teenage girls warming up very seriously for a doubles match, while the top-of-the-range blood-red sports utility had to belong to one of the two guys around Mila’s age who were laughing as they very casually lobbed a ball back and forth.
Judging by the fluorescent workwear tossed in the tray of the ute, Mila could almost guarantee those guys were wealthy FIFO workers: men—generally—who flew in to work at one of Western Australia’s isolated mines in the Pilbara for weeks at a time, living in ‘dongas’—basic, transportable single rooms—and then flying out for a week or more off, back home in Perth. It was a brutal, but extremely well-paid lifestyle—providing blue collar workers with incomes unheard of before the mining boom.
Mila could never have done it. She’d visited the Molyneux-owned mines many times in her youth, and while she could appreciate the ancient, spectacular beauty of the Pilbara, the complete isolation somehow got to her. Out there you were over one thousand five hundred kilometres from Perth, and not much closer to anything else.
Ivy loved it—she’d married her new husband there, after all. And April did, too, regularly ‘glamping’ with her husband in remote Outback locations and posting dreamy, impossibly perfect photos on social media. But Mila always felt that she must be missing some essential Molyneux genes. The mining gene, or the iron ore gene, or even the red dust and boab tree gene.
Because Mila was never going to follow in her big sisters’ footsteps. Regardless of her uninterest in her education for all of her childhood and the early part of her twenties, it just wasn’t who she was. The industry and the land—that was everything to the Molyneux empire... Mila just didn’t fit.
Seb still hadn’t arrived, so Mila leant back against the driver’s side of her modest little hatchback, the door still warm from the day’s glorious spring sun. The two probable FIFO guys had become more serious, and their banter and laughter was now only between points. She vaguely watched the ball ping between them without really following what was going on.
Mila had long believed that there was a lot more of her father in her than her mother. She even looked like Blaine Spencer—except without the blond hair. She definitely—or so she’d been told—had her father’s intense blue eyes. ‘Eyes that’ll make the world fall in love with him’—that was what a film reviewer had said, in the ancient newspaper cutting that Mila had found in a book years after he’d walked out on them when she was only a toddler.
She’d burnt that review—at an angry sixteen—when her father had once again let her down. Not that it mattered. She could still recall every word.
A car slid into the parking spot directly beside her—a sleek, low, luxury vehicle in the darkest shade of grey. Seb climbed out, turning as he shut the car door to rest his forearms on its roof.
He grinned as he looked at Mila across the gleaming paintwork. ‘Ready to be run off your feet?’ he asked.
The lights in the car park were dim, leaving his face in both light and shadow. Even so, Mila could feel his gaze on her like a physical touch. She shivered as his gaze flicked downwards, taking in her outfit of pale pink tank top and black shorts, and then down again to her white ankle socks and sneakers.
Did his gaze slow on her legs?
She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. Nope. It did not.
Just as he’d definitely meant nothing when he’d said incredible and perfect yesterday.
Mila forced a laugh. ‘Last time I checked I still lead in our head-to-head.’
His laugh was genuine as he reached into his car for his tennis bag. He tossed it over his shoulder as he walked around the car to her. ‘That doesn’t sound right to me.’
He was dressed casually, all in black: long baggy running shorts and a fitted T-shirt in some type of sporty material. It revealed all sorts of somehow unexpectedly generous muscles: biceps and triceps and trapeziums...
The genius of her idea was now clearly questionable.
‘Trust me—’ Her voice sounded high and unlike her own. She cleared her throat. ‘Trust me—you know how good I am with numbers.’
He shrugged and smiled again, and the instant warmth that little quirk of his lips triggered was unbelievably frustrating.
Mila strode towards the courts, opening the door within the tall cyclone fence and barely waiting for Seb to step through before walking briskly to the court they’d hired.
To be honest, she