a truckload if she’ll take it. What you’ve done…’
‘It’s okay,’ Zoe managed. ‘Enough with the medals. Doug’s right, I just need to go home.’
She wanted to go home but she didn’t want this man to take her.
She wanted, more than anything, to slide behind the wheel of her car, drive back to Gold Coast Central, sneak in the back way and find a bath and bed.
But there was no ‘back way’, no way to get back into the hospital without attracting attention, and Doug was right, she and her car were a mess.
Sam was taking her home?
He ushered her outside where his Jeep was parked next to her car and she thought…she thought…
This guy was a doctor? A colleague?
He was still only wearing board shorts. Unlike her, though, he didn’t look gruesome. He looked like something from the cover of one of the myriad surfing magazines in the local shops.
The Gold Coast was surfing territory, and many surfers here lived for the waves. That’s what this guy looked like. He was bronzed, lean, ripped, his brown hair bleached blond by sun and sea, his green eyes crinkled and creased from years of waiting for the perfect wave.
He was a doctor and a surfer.
Where did dog owner come into that?
He grabbed a T-shirt from the back seat of his Jeep and hauled it on. He looked almost normal, she thought, even after what had happened. His dog was fixed and he was ready to move on.
She glanced down at her oversized theatre gown and the bloodied jeans beneath them and something just…cracked.
For hours now she’d been clenching her emotions down while she’d got the job done. She looked at the mess that was her car, her independence, her freedom, she looked down at her disgusting jeans—and control finally broke.
‘Let’s go,’ he said, but she shook her head.
‘What were you thinking?’ she managed, trying hard to keep her voice low, calm, incisive, clear. ‘Leaving her waiting on the beach? Leaving her alone? To be so far out and leave her there…If I hadn’t been there she’d be dead. You have a dog like Bonnie and you just desert her. Of all the stupid, crass, negligent, cruel…
‘Do You know how lucky you are to have a dog? Of course you don’t. You’re a doctor, you’re a healthy, fit, surfer boy. You can buy any dog you want, so you just buy her and then you don’t care that she loves you, so she lies there and waits and waits. I was watching her—and she adores you, and you abandoned her and it nearly killed her. If I hadn’t been there it would have! She nearly died because you didn’t care!’
So much for calm, incisive and clear. She was yelling at the top of her lungs, and he was standing there watching, just watching, and she wanted to hit him and she thought for one crazy moment that it’d be justifiable homicide and she could hear the judge say, ‘He deserved everything that was coming to him.’
Only, of course, she couldn’t hit him. Somehow she had to get herself under control. She hiccuped on a sob and that made her angrier still because she didn’t cry, she never cried, and she knew she was being irrational, it was just…it was just…
The last few days had been crazy. She’d spent her whole life in one small community, closeted, cared for. The move here from Adelaide might seem small to some, but for Zoe it was the breaking of chains that had been with her since childhood.
It was the right thing to do, to move on, but, still, the new job, the new workplace, the constant calls from her parents—and from Dean, who still couldn’t understand why she’d left—were undermining her determination and making her feel bleak with homesickness.
But she would not give in to Dean. ‘You’ll come to your senses, Zoe, I know you will. Have your fling but come home soon. All we want to do is look after you.’
Aaagh!
She did not want to go home. She did not want to be looked after.
But neither did she want to yell at this stranger or stand in a theatre gown covering a bra and jeans, looking disgusting and feeling tears well in her eyes and rage overwhelm her, and know that somehow she had to get back into the hospital apartments, past strangers. Plus she’d intended to buy milk on the way home and…and…
And she would do this.
She fumbled under her gown to fetch her car keys. She had to lift the thing but what the heck, this guy had seen her at her worst anyway. She grabbed her car keys from her jeans pocket but Sam lifted them from her hand before she could take a step towards the car.
‘We go in my car,’ he said in a voice that said he was talking her down, doctor approaching lunatic, and she took a step back at that.
‘I’m not crazy. I might have yelled too much but you deserve it.’
‘You think I don’t know it? I love Bonnie,’ he said. ‘I deserve everything you throw at me and more, apart from the accusation that I could just buy another dog because I never could. I am deeply, deeply sorry for what happened. The fact that Bonnie has been watching me surf since she was a pup twelve years ago doesn’t mean it’s okay now. The fact that it’s a secluded beach and the guys in the buggy were there illegally doesn’t mean it’s okay either. Years ago Bonnie would have watched the whole beach. Tonight she just watched me and she paid the price. Zoe, you’re upset and you have every right to be but I can’t let you go home alone.’
‘You can’t stop me. It’s my car. Get out of the way.’
‘Zoe, be sensible. Get in the car, there’s a good girl…’
He sounded just like Dean—and she smacked him.
She’d never smacked a man in her life.
She’d never smacked anyone in her life. Or anything. Even in the worst of the bleak days, when the first transplant had failed, when she’d heard the doctors telling her parents to prepare for the worst, she’d hung in there, she’d stayed in control, she hadn’t cried, she hadn’t kicked the wall, she hadn’t lashed out at anything.
Not because she hadn’t wanted to but it had always seemed that if she did, if she let go of her relentless control, she’d never get it back. She’d drop into a black and terrifying chasm. She was far better gripping her nails into her palms until they bled and smiling at her parents and pretending she hadn’t heard, that things were normal, that life was fine.
And here, now, the first week of her new life, standing in the dusk in a veterinary surgeon’s car park, with a doctor from the hospital where she wanted to start her new life…
She’d hit him.
The chasm was there, and she was falling.
She stared at him in horror. The yelling had stopped. There was nothing left in her and she couldn’t say a word.
His face stung where her hand had swiped him in an open-palmed slap. The sound of the slap seemed to echo in the still night.
She
