It was our first row, and it looked like it would also be our last. It was awful. My heart felt like it was wrapped in barbed wire and tears were coursing down my cheeks.

‘But why, Quent? Why?’ I moaned, refusing to believe what he was saying, wiping at my nose.

He looked annoyed, hard, angry. ‘I’ve told you. I have to go. She’s pregnant. It’s mine. She says it’s from that last time, when I...’ he ran a hand over his face and stood, his feet apart, his eyes spraying a desperate fire. ‘Fuck’s sake, Taryn, stop crying. I have to end this. Just have to. You and I... it was fun while it lasted, but it’s pointless now.’

‘...fun? ...thought you loved me...’ I whispered from between my tears.

‘Shut up, Taz, just shut the fuck up. I can’t think.’ He walked away from me like he couldn’t bear my company any longer, then turned on his heel and came straight at me, trying to say something but not getting anything out. He stopped right in front of me and looked into my eyes, the screen of his anger lifting for an instant. Underneath he was vulnerable, hurting, confused.

I stretched out a hand.

He backed off. ‘Don’t touch me,’ he said, his voice flat and low. I felt his emotions boil and churn, felt that he was close to crumbling. He did love me, I was sure of it. So why, why did he want to end our relationship on just that one phone call from Bree? I had been completely taken by surprise and couldn’t, wouldn’t understand when he’d said that it was over between us. Because she was carrying his child. He wanted to fly back to LA and do the decent thing. Marry her. Marry her after all.

‘But you can’t know for sure,’ I desperately tried to argue one last time. ‘What if it isn’t yours? What if she’s just trying to get you back for the benefit of publicity? What if...’

‘I said shut the fuck up. Why won’t you listen to me?’ he bellowed into my face.

At that, I gave up. We’d been at it for hours, talking back and forth, then arguing. Then me crying and he screaming at me. I couldn’t win this. I didn’t understand his reasons and I couldn’t win. It was over.

I snapped shut my laptop, unplugged it from the socket and began gathering my stuff on the desk.

‘What are you doing?’ he inquired, voice flat again.

‘I’m taking my stuff back to the big house. I’ll stay in the guest room downstairs until I can get my return trip sorted,’ I answered in a voice just as devoid of emotion.

‘You’re going back to London?’ he asked softly, taking a measured step in my direction. There was something of surprise, even fear in his voice, as if it had taken him until now to fully comprehend that ending it meant that I would no longer be part of his life.

‘What do you think, Quentin?’ I said, finally finding my own anger. ‘You really believe I would stay here to watch you get back together with Bree, marry her, have a child with her? You really believe I could bear that? You’re insane, you know that? Fuckin’ nutter, that’s what you are.’

I turned, left the cabin and marched out toward the big house, head held high. I wanted to fall on the ground, claw at the grass, pound my fists and give in to an absurd, debilitating surge of grief, but I wasn’t going to let him see it. I wasn’t!

When I got back to the big house, I found Jo in the kitchen. She saw the state I was in, took the stuff I was carrying from my hands, put it all on the kitchen counter top, hugged me and simply said, ‘...tell me.’

I tried explaining to her what had happened as best I could. The phone call from Bree, Quentin’s decision that he should go and see her right away, and our subsequent breaking up. Jo was looking at me speechless by the time I was finished.

‘He’ll come ‘round, love,’ she said when she found her voice again. ‘I’m sure of it. He can’t be this stupid. He loves you!’ She shook her head in disbelief, trying to reassure me.

‘That’s what I thought, Jo. But I don’t think he’ll change his mind, I think he’ll go through with it. I don’t know why, but I’m certain that’s what he’ll do. His feelings for me don’t really enter into it, I think; apparently it’s something he believes he must do, no matter the cost. I can’t argue against that; I can’t convince him. There’s nothing... nothing I can do.’ I sobbed and sagged in her arms.

She hugged me tight again, then let go of me, grabbed my arms and said: ‘Come on, Taz, I’ll help you get your stuff. Let’s get you settled in your old room, and then we’ll have a quiet brew, you and I. I could go and have a word with him if you want...?’

‘Oh, no, Jo, that would just be pointless,’ I sniffed, ‘He’ll only end up screaming at you, like he did at me. I think deep down he’s unhappy about what he’s doing, but he won’t allow himself to do what he really feels. Or maybe I’m just telling myself that, maybe it was all a dream, maybe everything that happened between us was a lie...’

‘Shush, Taz,’ Jo said. ‘I refuse to believe that. I’ve seen you two together. My son hasn’t been this happy, this relaxed, this... complete since puberty kicked in and his hormones got the better of him.’ She smiled a rueful smile despite everything and took me upstairs.

Together, we gathered my clothes, a couple of books I was reading... I didn’t have all that much stuff here at Nana. It only took us a couple of minutes to move me out of Quentin’s room and back into the guest room. It was that easy, I mused, to move out of his life again. Just a few minutes time, a few clothes and a laptop.

‘I’ll try to book a flight out tomorrow first thing, Jo,’ I almost whispered. ‘Will you drive me to Coff’s when I’m booked to go?’

‘Course I will.’ Jo said reassuringly. ‘I’ll fly back to London with you if that’s what you want, love, you’re my friend and I can’t believe my son is doing this to you. I could just kick him. He’s a complete idiot and I don’t understand him anymore. Really.’ She sighed and ran a hand over her face, mirroring Quentin without knowing it.

I had a bath, drank Jo’s tea and a stiff whiskey, ate a sandwich and went to bed before it was fully dark. I couldn’t bear to see Quentin right now, and I didn’t feel like explaining anything to the other folks coming in for dinner. It was just too painful. At first, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to sleep, but I sank into a dark, dreamless, merciful pit the moment my head hit he pillow. I was exhausted. An afternoon of fighting for the love of your life will do that to you.

~*~

It was the middle of the night when something woke me up. My room was dark, and for an instant I was disorientated, trying to recollect where I was and what it was that I should remember. Then, reality hit me with a painful surge of adrenalin. Quentin had broken up with me. Bree was pregnant with his child. He was going back to her. I curled in around myself under the covers.

‘Tazzie?’ A soft whisper. ‘Tazzie-luv?’

I turned around and saw Quentin outlined, dark against dark, in the doorframe. His urgent whispering had woken me.

‘You awake, Tazzie-luv? Can we talk? I can’t sleep...’ He took a couple of tentative steps into the room.

I carefully sat up and backed away as he came closer, not knowing what to do or say.

He took another step toward me, and I saw that he only was wearing a tee and shorts. Carefully, he sat on the edge of the bed, head down.

I reached out for the lamp on the night table and clicked it on. Quentin blinked and ran a hand through his hair to get it out of his eyes. He looked harried; dark circles under his eyes, lines around his mouth. He sighed and looked at me, then looked down again.

‘Taz...’ he whispered, ‘I... Fuck, Tazzie, I feel like I’m dying, in here...’ he rubbed at his chest, where his heart was. ‘I wanna tell you, explain to you, but I dunno how, I don’t even understand myself, I, ah Christ...’ A big, big sigh.

‘...you want me to feel sorry for you now?’ I asked, soft yet sharp. After the agony he’d put me through he had no right to come to me looking for comfort, his misery was of his own making.

He shook his head. ‘I don’t want you to do anything, luv, can’t ask anything of you now. I forfeited that right, didn’t I? Just... maybe you’ll give me a listen, maybe I can make you see why... why we can’t stay together, why I have to go back to Bree...’

I folded my arms around my pain and frowned. It was very strange, surreal almost, to have him sit so close by and not be able to touch him. Put my arms around him, lie down beside him. He sounded the same, smelled the same, felt the same. I had to remind myself constantly, we weren’t together any more. It was over. How could that be? How could it feel the same and not be the same? It hurt like nothing I had ever felt before, but if there was any way that I could understand what was happening, I wanted to know.

‘So tell me,’ I said.

‘OK. Right. I’m... fuck, where do I start?’ He raked through his hair like he did when he was insecure. ‘Um... remember I told you about Bree and me havin’ a row while we were on the phone, then the connection got severed, and I couldn’t get her back on the line? And that was the reason I ended up chuckin’ the bloody phone at that bloke?’

I nodded.

‘Well I never told you what it was about, did I? The row.’

I shook my head, still not saying anything. Was this whole thing connected with that big lump of jagged-edged emerald pain that I had always felt burning inside him when we skirted around this subject?

He hesitated, raking through his hair again. ‘I, uh... Bree... She told me... you know I always wanted a family of my own, eh, Taz, always saw myself as a family man. I just never seemed to meet the right sheila – until Bree, that is. I really thought she was the one, right from the start. So when she told me on the phone she had been pregnant, but she had decided to terminate it, I just... It was like a fuckin’ knife in my heart. She knew bloody well how I felt about it, we had talked about it, fuck’s sake, I even... went so far as to tell her straight out I wanted her to have my kids, and she goes and decides all by herself that having a baby at that time in her life is not what she needs. I nearly lost it there and then. Bloody hell,’ he shook his head remembering, ‘you have no idea how much pain it gave me. And then, then she told me... uh, she...’ He faltered. Looked at me. Sighed. Inched forward. His hand crept closer to me.

All by itself my hand laid itself on the bed cover, close to his, palm up, inviting. I looked on in wonder as his hand and mine found each other, fingers intertwining like they had done so often. It felt good. It felt just as good as before Bree had called. I honestly couldn’t get my head around it. How could it be over between us when I felt so much love for him? When being near to him felt so like it was meant to be?

‘Taz?’ Quentin said in his small voice. That always moved me. Now, it wrenched my heart right from my chest.

‘What, sweetness?’ I whispered to him, leaning in until our foreheads brushed against each other. I felt his hair tickle my face, his breath ghosting over my cheek.

‘Bree told me that she...’ he went on, swallowing audibly, voice choking up, ‘ ...she didn’t think she needed to discuss it with me beforehand because she wasn’t... wasn’t sure it was mine, the baby... She’d been with her husband too, during the time that we were seeing each other... she stuck the knife in and twisted it ‘round a couple of time for good measure, fuck her...’ his voice was down to a bare whisper now, ‘...then we got cut off and I couldn’t get her back on the line... Needed to talk to her, I was losin’ it, Tazzie... just losin’ it...’

My other hand came up and came to rest against his cheek. He leaned in a bit more, brushing his lips against my cheekbone, softly pulling me in with his free arm around my waist. His warmth was coursing through me in illegal, heady waves. I wanted him as much as always, but we couldn’t, just couldn’t... it was over. He had ended it. So why was he holding me, why were his lips whispering my name against my skin?

‘Tazzie... I always knew deep down in my heart that that baby was mine. She killed my child once... can’t let her do that again... you gotta understand, if I don’t go, she’ll...’

‘Oh, Quent,’ was all I could manage before our lips found each other and we kissed, drowning in love and lust and pain in equal measures. His hands roamed over my body as his mouth covered mine, his tongue darting over my lips until I opened up with a moan I couldn’t suppress. Slowly, we fell back into the pillows, my hands under his tee, in his hair, on his cheek. He groaned in agony and writhed against my body, separated from his by the duvet. We clawed at it, trying to get it out of the way, trying to get closer.

‘This isn’t happening,’ I whispered desperately, ‘we’re not doing this...’

‘Tazzie-luv,’ Quent sighed, hooking a foot around my leg and covering us both with the bed covers, tucking us in, keeping us safe from the outside world for only a little while longer, ‘c’mere, let’s not talk anymore, let’s just...’

One moment I was wearing my tee, the next it was gone. Quent fell against me, burning skin covering me, aching need washing over me. There was no beauty in it, just the urge to be together. I thought in a split second of detachment: we could be here, pretending nothing had changed, and fuck until the sun came up, but reality would hit us with the first light of the new day. If I had thought we were on borrowed time before, I hadn’t fully understood the meaning of it.

But then all introspection got washed away as Quentin took full possession of my mouth, claiming my lips and ravishing them with his hot, insisting tongue. I felt tingling jolts race through me, my blood pounding, and I grabbed hold of him, my nails into his back, wanting to feel him inside me, now, now, before it was too late.

‘Easy, luv,’ he hissed, ‘you’re flaying me, I’ll be scarred for life.’

‘You’re mine, Quent’ I ground out, riding a wild wave of anger and possessiveness that I didn’t know was in me.

He entered me in one swift, merciless stroke and kept me pinned under him, growling at me: ‘And you’re mine, forever, fuck, Taz-zie... for-...e-... ver...’ He pounded into me syllable for syllable, and I bucked against him, he grabbed a fistful of hair and pulled my head back, I clawed at his back to get as much of him as I could. We fought our way to release and I heard a sheet rip as finally, finally we fell into that moment of weightlessness, all anger and tension gone, all barriers dissolved.

I sobbed against him. He trembled and clutched me against his chest, breathing in painful little moans. And slowly, slowly, we grew quiet, and we fell asleep.

The next morning I woke up at six and remembered in a flash what had happened. The break-up. The row. The explanation and the lovemaking, desperate and painful. I reached out a hand and carefully felt beside me. No Quentin. My heart went cold, but my hand found a piece of paper on the pillow where he had slept beside me.

Tazzie-luv,

Couldn’t say goodbye, took the ute to Coffs. Don’t know what else to say…

Sorry

Q

I whispered to the piece of paper: ‘…no apologies, Quent…’ then started weeping uncontrollably until I cried myself back to sleep.

~*~

I got sick. I wasn’t sure if it was stress, or perhaps a general weakening of my constitution due to the break-up, or maybe it was just an unlucky coincidence. But the result was the same: I spent about a week with my head in a bucket. I couldn’t keep anything down, not even a cup of tea. My stomach felt so bad I almost didn’t feel the broken heart.

What I did notice, of course, was that Quentin didn’t ring me. I didn’t expect him to – or at least that’s what I told myself. Some part of me however, a part that I didn’t want to name, didn’t want to acknowledge, counted the hours just as before when he came back to Oz, only now the call didn’t come. It didn’t come. And still I hadn’t left for London. But to be honest, at that moment I really didn’t have the strength to go anywhere. I could barely walk from my bed to the bathroom and back, let alone get on a plane and travel halfway around the world.

Jo spent a lot of time with me. She wiped my face when I threw up – and all that did was remind me of how I had done the same for Quentin – she made me drink water with rehydration salts, and as time went on, she brought me little titbits to eat, light snacks to begin with, then more filling stuff, until by the end of the week I was on rice and fish and my strength slowly began to return.

Still no word from Quentin.

I found it nearly impossible to believe that he had walked away from me, from us, just like that; I couldn’t believe he wasn’t suffering like I was suffering. But maybe he wasn’t. Maybe his life with Bree now finally and truly was what he had envisioned all this time; maybe she had changed now that she was pregnant with his child. Maybe they were happy. Maybe they were finally happy.

I mused on the pregnancy. If it really was from that last time they had… well… done it, like Bree had claimed, it had to be very fresh. It was after all only a good six weeks ago.

Wasn’t it ridiculous, come to think about it? Quentin and I had only been truly together for little more than a month, and it felt like a lifetime. I felt profoundly changed by our time together, by knowing him and being with him. My life would never be the same, and from how I was feeling right now, I couldn’t imagine myself with another man ever again. I was, I was….

…when was the last time I had had my period?

The sudden realization hit me like a brick. I couldn’t breathe, I nearly gagged. Where had that thought come from? It had just surfaced in my brain all on its own, and now I was desperately, frantically trying to recall when was the last time that I was… that I had…

I hadn’t had my period the whole time Quentin and I had been together at Nana.

God, no! It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be true that I was pregnant as well. We had been so mad about each other, we had never even thought about birth control. Stupid, stupid! The thought really, honestly had never crossed my mind, I had trusted Quentin implicitly and hadn’t even considered our health, let alone any possible, um, reproductive repercussions. What was I, born in the nineteenth century? Christ, I could kill myself for being so stupid, so lust-ridden, so driven by anything but rational thinking. Still, I silently, quietly laid a hand on my belly. Profoundly changed, my life. Yes indeed.

Chapter Thirteen

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