Awakened By His Touch

Frustration oozed from his tone. ‘I’d rather you took some credit for yourself from time to time. Who knows? If you impress him enough there might be a job in it for you.’

‘I have a job here.’

‘A better job.’

The presumption that her job wasn’t already about the best occupation a person could hope for really rankled. ‘Why would they hire me, Dad? Not a lot of call for apiarists in the city.’

‘Why wouldn’t they hire you? You’re as smart and capable as anyone else. More so.’

‘How about because I know nothing about their industry?’

‘He’s trained to recognise raw talent. He’d be crazy not to take you on.’

Laney got the tiniest thrill at the thought of being taken on in any way by Elliott Garvey, but she fought it. ‘You don’t just hire someone because they seem generally capable, Dad.’

‘You’re as worthy as anyone of your chance.’

Dread pooled thick and low. Oh, here we go... ‘Dad, promise me you won’t do the whole Laney-sell job.’

As he was so very wont to do. Over and over during her childhood, much to her dismay. But the thought of him humiliating her like that with Elliott Garvey... Ugh.

‘I’ll promise no such thing. I’m proud of my daughter and her achievements and not too shy to admit it.’

‘He’s here to study our operations, not—’

‘I liked him,’ her mother piped up, apropos of pretty much nothing, as she placed a heavy dish on the table with a punctuating clunk. Chicken stew, from the delicious aroma. All organic, like the rest of their farm. ‘He’s handsome.’

Her father grunted. ‘Don’t change the subject, Ellen.’

‘You think everyone’s handsome, Mum.’ Laney lowered her voice instinctively as she and her father helped ferry clean plates to the table, even though she’d heard Elliott Garvey’s expensive tyres on the driveway gravel about twenty minutes earlier. ‘Besides, what do looks have to do with a person’s integrity or goodness?’

‘I can’t comment on those until I’ve shared a meal with the man. So can we please just do that before setting our minds in any particular direction?’

‘You’ll have to invite him first, and he goes home tomorrow afternoon.’ So there went the dinner plan. Conveniently.

‘I have invited him. That’s his setting you just laid.’

She straightened immediately. No. She’d only set the table for the usual four. ‘Where’s Owen?’

‘Chasing some surfer tourist,’ his father muttered.

At twenty-five she might still be a work in progress, but her twin had pretty much stopped emotional development at eighteen. Whatever was Owen’s perpetual outlook. If he was around to give one and not off surfing the latest hot break.

‘He’s taking her for a pizza, Robert. He had his Saturday night shirt on.’

Oh, well...look out, Surfer Girl, then. If her brother had bothered with a clean shirt he was definitely on the make. Girls and surfing were about the only things Owen took seriously.

‘And you didn’t think to just let us enjoy a quiet dinner without him?’ Laney muttered.

‘Elliott has nothing in that chalet, Helena.’

Uh-oh— Helena. Reason had always been her friend in the face of mother voice. ‘The chalets are practically five-star, and I’m sure he has a full wallet.’ And an expense account. ‘He could have easily taken himself for a restaurant meal.’

‘When we can offer a home-cooked one instead?’

‘He went out anyway. He might as well have eaten in Mitchell’s Cliff.’ In fact she’d been sure that was what he was doing as the crunch of his tyres on the driveway had diminished.

‘I’m less concerned with what he does than with what we do. Extending Morgan courtesy to our guest.’

Laney opened her mouth to protest further but then snapped it shut again as feet sounded on the mat outside. An uncontrollable dismay that she hadn’t so much as combed her windswept hair washed over her.

But too late now.

‘He’s coming,’ her father announced moments later.

Elliott had clearly paused in the doorway and was greeting a dozing Wilbur, which meant his disturbed man scent had time to waft ahead. Wow, he smelled amazing. The same base tones as before, yet different somehow. Spicier. Cleaner.

Tastier.

Heat burbled up under her shirt at the thought, but it was true. Whatever he was wearing was tickling the same senses as the stew still simmering in its own heat on the table.

‘Thank you for the invitation, Mr and Mrs Morgan—’

‘Ellen and Robert, please, Elliott.’

He stepped up right next to her. ‘I nicked out to pick this up. Couldn’t come empty-handed.’

Another waft of deliciousness hit her as a bottle clacked against the timber at the centre of the big table.

‘Oh, lovely. That’s a terrific local winery—Helena’s favourite.’

‘Really? I didn’t know.’

His voice was one-tenth croak, subtle enough that maybe she only heard it because he was standing so close. But he wasn’t looking at her, she could tell. Plus, she wouldn’t be looking at him if their situations were reversed. On pain of death.

Her mother laughed. ‘How could you know?’

Was he worried that she might read something into that? Laney spoke immediately to put the ridiculous idea out of the question. ‘You’re either a man of excellent taste or Natty Marshall did a real sell-job on you at the cellar.’

‘She was pretty slick,’ he admitted.

‘Sit down, Elliott.’ Her mother mothered. ‘You look very nice.’

The reassuring way she volunteered that opinion made Laney wonder whether he was worrying at the edges of his shirt or something.

‘He’s changed into a light blue Saturday night shirt, Laney.’

Oh, no...

‘Mum likes to scene-set for me,’ she explained, mortified, and then mumbled, ‘sorry.’

‘Blue shirt, jeans, and I combed my hair,’ he added, amusement rich in his low voice.

Was that a statement about her wild locks? Her hand went immediately to them.

Her mother continued to be oblivious. ‘Sit, too, Laney.’

She did, moving to the left of her chair just as he moved to the right of his. They collided in the middle. She jerked back, scalded.

‘Sorry,’ he murmured. ‘Ladies first.’

‘We’ll be standing all night if we wait for one of those,’ she quipped, still recovering from the jolt of whatever the heck that was coming off him, and then she slid into her seat, buying a moment of recovery time as he moved in next to her.

So that was her question answered. She’d felt the strength of his torso against hers. He was solid, but definitely not overweight. Not as youthfully hard as her twin, but not soft either. Just right.

Which pretty much made her Goldilocks, snuggling down into the sensation.

The necessity to converse was forestalled by the business of filling plates with stew and side plates with thickly sliced bread and butter.

‘Home-made bread?’ Elliott asked. Such a charmer. So incredibly transparent.

‘Organically grown and milled locally and fresh out of my oven.’

‘It’s still warm.’

The reverence in his voice surprised a chuckle out of Laney. ‘Are ovens not hot in the city?’

An awkward silence fell over the whole table. She didn’t need to see her mother’s face to know it would be laden with disapproval.

But chivalry was clearly alive and well. ‘Bread starts out hot, yes,’ he admitted. ‘But it’s not usually hot by the time it gets to the consumer. This is my first truly home-made loaf.’

The fact that he needed to compensate for her bluntness at all made her twitchy. And just a little bit ashamed. Plus it made her wonder what kind of city upbringing he’d had never to have had fresh-baked bread before. ‘Well, wait until you taste the butter, then. Mum churns it herself.’

And bless her if her mother didn’t join her daughter in the age-old act of making good. ‘Well, I push the button on the machine and then refrigerate the results.’

‘You guys seem pretty self-sufficient here...’

And off they went. Comfortably reclining in a topic she knew her parents could talk about underwater—organic farming and self-sustainability. Long enough to give her time to compose herself against the heat still coming off the man to her left as they all tucked into the chicken.

Okay, so he was a radiator. She could live with that. And enough of a city boy to never have had home-baked bread. That just meant they came from different worlds. Different upbringings. She’d met people from outside of the Leeuwin Peninsula before. There was no reason to be wound up quite this tight.

She slid her hand along the tablecloth until her fingertips felt the ring of cool that was the base of the glass of wine her father had poured from the bottle Elliott had contributed. She took a healthy swallow and sighed inwardly at the kiss of gentle Merlot against her tongue.

‘Still as good as you remember?’ Elliott murmured near her left ear. Swirling more man scent her way.

Okay, this was getting ridiculous. Time to focus. ‘Always. We have hives at their vineyard. I like to think that’s why it’s so good.’

‘This wine was fertilised by Morgan’s bees?’

‘Well, no.’ Much as she’d love to say it had been. ‘Grape pollen is wind-borne. But we provide the bees to fertilise their off-season cropping. So the bees help create the soil that make their wines so great.’

‘Do they pay?’

Back to money. Sigh. ‘No. They get a higher grape yield and we get the resulting honey. It’s a win-win.’

He was silent for a moment, before deciding, ‘Clever.’

The rush of his approval annoyed her. It shouldn’t make her so tingly. ‘Just standard bee business.’

‘So tell me about your focus on organic methods,’ he said to the table generally. ‘That must limit where you can place hives or who you can partner with?’

‘Not so much these days,’ her father grunted. ‘Organics is very now.’

‘Yet you’ve been doing it for three decades. You must have been amongst the first?’

‘Out of necessity. But it turned out to be the best thing we could have done.’

‘Necessity?’

Every cell in Laney’s body tightened. This wasn’t the first time the topic had come up with strangers, but this was the first time she’d felt uncomfortable about its approaching. The awkward silence was on the Morgan side of the table, and the longer it went on the more awkward it was going to become.

‘My eyes,’ she blurted. ‘My vision loss was a result of the pesticides we were using on the farm. Once we realised how dangerous they were, environmentally, we changed to organic farming.’

Her father cleared his throat. ‘And by we she means her mother and I. Laney and Owen weren’t even born yet.’

She was always sure to say ‘we’. Her parents took enough blame for her blindness without her adding to it.

‘None of us really knew what they were doing to our bodies,’ her father went on, ‘let alone to our unborn children.’

Well, one of them, anyway. Owen seemed to have got away with nothing worse than a teenager’s attention span.

‘Have we made you uncomfortable, Mr Garvey?’ her mother said after moments of silence. ‘Helena said we should have just sent you to town for a meal...’

Heat rushed up Laney’s cheeks as his chair creaked slightly. It wasn’t hard to imagine Oh, really? in the voice that washed over her like warm milk.

‘No. I’m just thinking about how many worse ways the chemical damage might have manifested itself. How lucky you were.’

Again the silence. But this time it wasn’t awkward. Surprised was the closest word for the half-caught breath that filled the hush. Was he being intensely dismissive of her loss—and her parents’—or did he actually get it?

And possibly her.

Warmth swelled up in her chest, which tightened suddenly. ‘Most people wouldn’t consider it luck,’ she breathed. ‘But as it happens I agree with you.’

‘And, as threatening as it must have been for you at the time, the decision sealed Morgan’s fate. Put you well ahead of everyone else in organics today. It was smart.’

‘It was a life-changer in more ways than one,’ her mother cut in.

Silence again. Laney filled it with the first thing that entered her mind. ‘I gather we’ll be seeing you again, Elliott?’

Elliott. The very name tingled as it crossed her tongue.

‘Really?’ His voiced shifted towards her father. ‘You’re happy to have me back?’

Robert Morgan was predictably gruff. He always was when he dwelled on the bad old days. ‘Yes. I would like to hear what you have to say.’

It didn’t take a blind person to catch his leaning on the word ‘I’.

‘And what about you, Laney? You’ll be doing all the escorting.’

‘Free advice is my favourite kind. I’ll be soaking it up.’ But just in case he thought he was on a winner, she added, ‘And weighing it up very carefully.’

Approval radiated outwards. Or was it pleasure? Either way she felt it. It soaked under her skin and did a bang-up job of warming her from the inside out as he spoke gruffly.

‘That’s all I ask.’

* * *

Three hours later they walked together back towards the chalet, an unharnessed Wilbur galloping in expanding arcs around them, her hand gently resting on Elliott’s forearm. Not entirely necessary, in truth, because she walked this trail often enough en route to the hilltop hives. But she just knew walking beside him would be the one time that a rock would miraculously appear on the trail, and going head-over-tail really wasn’t how she wanted him remembering her.

‘It’s a beautiful night,’ he murmured.

‘Clear.’ Ugh, such verbal brilliance. Not.

‘How can you tell?’

‘The cicadas don’t chirp when it’s overcast, and I can’t smell moisture in the air.’

‘Right.’

She chuckled. ‘Plus it may be autumn, but it’s still summery enough that the odds are on my side.’

He stopped, gently leading her to a halt too. ‘Listen, Laney’ he said, low and somewhat urgent. ‘I don’t want every conversation we have to be laden with my reticence to ask you about your vision loss. I want to focus on your processes.’

Was that his way of saying he didn’t want to look like an idiot in front of her any more than she did in front of him? Her breath tightened a tiny bit more.

‘Why don’t you just ask me now? Get it out of the way.’

‘Is that okay?’

‘I’ll let you know if it’s too personal.’ She set off again, close to his side, keeping contact between their arms but not being formally guided.

He considered his first question for a moment. ‘Can you see at all?’

‘No.’

‘It’s just black?’

‘It just...isn’t.’

Except for when she looked at the sun. Then she got a hazy kind of glow in the midst of all that nothing. But she wasn’t even sure she wasn’t making that up in response to the warmth on her face. Because she sometimes got a glow with strong emotion too.

‘It’s like...’ How to explain it in a way that was meaningful? ‘Imagine if you realised one day that all other human beings had a tail like Wilbur’s but you didn’t. You’d know what a tail was, and where it went and what its function was, but you just couldn’t conceive of what it would be like—or feel like—to have one. The extra weight. The impact on your balance. The modifications you’d need to allow for it. Useful, sure, but not something you can’t get by without. That’s vision for me.’

‘It hasn’t held you back at all.’

‘Is that a question or a statement?’

‘I can see that for myself. You are more accomplished than many sighted people. You don’t consider it a disability?’

‘A bat isn’t disabled when it goes about its business. It just manages its environment differently.’

Silence.

‘Are you glaring or thinking?’

‘I’m nodding. I agree with you. But there must be things you flat-out can’t do?’

‘Dad made sure I could try anything I wanted—’ and more than a few things she hadn’t particularly wanted ‘—so, no, there’s not much that I can’t do at all. But there’s a lot of things I can’t do with any purpose or point. So I generally don’t bother.’

‘Like what?’

‘I can drive a vehicle—but I can’t drive it safely or to a destination so why would I, other than as a party trick? I can take a photograph with a camera, but I can’t look at it. I can write longhand, but I really don’t need to. That kind of thing.’

‘Do you know what colours are?’

‘I know what their purpose is. And I know how they’re different in nature. And that they’re meaningful for sighted people. But, no, I can’t create colour in my head.’

‘Because you’ve never seen it.’

‘Because I don’t think visually.’

‘At all?’

‘When I was younger Dad opened up the farm to city kids from the Blind Institute to come and have farm stays. As a way of helping me meet more children like myself. One of them had nothing mechanically wrong with her eyes—her blindness was caused by a tumour in her visual cortex and that meant she couldn’t process what her eyes were showing her perfectly well. But the tumour also meant she couldn’t think in images or conceptualise something she felt. She really was completely blind.’

‘And that’s not you?’

‘My blindness is in my retinas, so my brain creates things that might be like images. I just don’t rely on them.’ She wondered if his pause was accommodating a frown. ‘Think of it like this... Mum said you’re quite handsome. But I can’t imagine what that means without further information because I have no visual frame of reference. I don’t conceive of people in terms of the differences in their features, although I obviously understand they have different features.’

‘How do you differentiate?’

‘Pretty much as you’d imagine. Smell, the sound of someone’s walk, tangible physical features like the feel of someone’s hand. And I have a bit of a thing for voices.’

‘How do you perceive me?’

Awkwardness swilled around her at his rumbled question, but she’d given him permission to ask and so she owed him her honesty. ‘Your strides are longer than most when you’re walking alone.’ Though, with her, he took pains to shorten them. ‘And you smell—’ amazing ‘—distinctive.’

That laugh was like honey squeezing out of a comb.

‘Good distinctive or bad distinctive?’

She pulled up as he slowed and reached out to brush the side of her hand on the rough clay wall of the chalet for orientation. ‘Good distinctive. Whatever you wear is...nice.’

In the way that her favourite Merlot was just ‘nice’.

‘You don’t do the whole hands-on-face thing? To distinguish between physical features?’

‘Do you feel up someone you’ve just met? It’s quite personal. Eventually I might do that if I’m close to someone, just to know, but ultimately all that does for me is create a mind shape, address a little curiosity. I don’t rely on it.’

‘And people you care about?’

Did he think you couldn’t love someone without seeing them?

She pressed her fingers to her chest. ‘I feel them in here. And I get a surge of...it’s not vision, exactly, but it’s a kind of intensity, and I experience it in the void where my vision would be when I think about my parents or Owen or Wilbur. And the bees. Their happy hum causes it.’

And the sun, when she stared into it. Which was often, since her retinas couldn’t be any more damaged.

‘That sometimes happens spontaneously when I’m with someone, so I guess I could tell people apart by the intensity of that surge. But mostly I tell people apart by their actions, their intentions. That’s what matters to me.’

‘You looked me right in the eye after we shook hands.’

‘Only after you spoke. I used the position of your hand and your voice to estimate where your eyes would be. And the moment either one of us moved it wouldn’t have worked until I recalibrated. I don’t have super powers, Elliott.’

His next silence had a whole different tone to it. He was absorbing.

‘You’ve been very generous with your information, considering what an intrusion my questions are. But it felt important for me to understand. Thank you, Laney.’

‘It’s no more an intrusion than me asking you what it’s like being tall.’

‘How do you—? The angle of my voice?’

‘And the size of your hand when I shook it. Unless you have freakishly large hands for the rest of your body?’

‘No. My hands are pretty much in proportion to the rest of me.’

Cough.

Not awkward at all...

Wilbur snuffling in the distance and the chirpy evening cicadas were the only sounds around them. The only ones Elliott would hear, anyway.

‘I’m tall because my father was a basketball player,’ he volunteered suddenly. ‘It means I spend my days looking at the bald spots of smaller men and trying very hard not to look down the cleavages of well-built women. My growth spurt at thirteen meant I made the school basketball team, and that was exclusively responsible for turning my high school years from horror to hero. It taught me discipline and focus, sharpened my competitiveness and gave me a physical outlet.’ He took a breath. ‘Without that I’m not sure what kind of a man I might have grown into.’

His words carried the slightest echo of discomfort, as if they were not things he was particularly accustomed to sharing. And she got the sense that he’d just given her a pretty fair trade.

She palmed the packed earth wall of the chalet and opened her mouth to say Well, this is you, but as she did so she stepped onto a fallen gum nut loosed by the wildlife foraging in the towering eucalypts above and her ankle began to roll. Her left fingernails bit into the chalet’s rammed earth and her right clenched the fabric of Elliott’s light jacket, but neither did much to stop her leg buckling.

The strong arm that slid around her waist and pulled her upright against his body was infinitely more effective at stopping her descent.

‘Are you okay?’ he breathed against her hair.

Other than humiliated? And way too comfortable in his strong hold. ‘Occupational hazard’ she said, when she really should have been thanking him. ‘Happens all the time.’

He released her back onto two feet and waited a heartbeat longer as she tested her ankle for compliance. It held.

‘I’m sorry, Laney. Guess I don’t have Wilbur’s years of training as a guide.’

Guilt saturated the voice that had been so warm just moments before. And that seemed an ungrateful sort of thanks for his catching her before she sprawled onto the ground at his feet.

‘It wasn’t you. My bottom and hip are peppered with bruises where I hit the dirt. Regularly.’

Talking about body parts suddenly felt like the most personal conversation she’d ever had, and it planted an image firmly between them that seemed uncomfortably provocative.

She released his jacket from between her clenched fingers. ‘Thank you for those basketball-player reflexes.’

‘You’re welcome,’ he breathed, and his smile seemed richer in the silence of evening. ‘Are you okay to get yourself back?’

She whistled for Wilbur, who bounded to her side from out of the night, and then forked two fingers to touch his furry rump in lieu of a harness. ‘Yep. I’m good. I walk these paths every day.’

Not that you’d know it by the wobble in her gait.

Then she set off, turning for the house, and Wilbur kept careful pace next to her, making it easy to keep up her finger contact with his coat. But she wasn’t entirely ready to say goodnight yet, although staying was out of the question. Something in her burned to leave him with a better impression of her than her being sprawled, inelegant and grasping, in his arms.

So she turned and smiled and threw him what she hoped was a witty quip back over her shoulder.

‘Night. Sorry about the possums!’

CHAPTER FOUR

IT WASN’T THE possums that had kept him up half the night, though they’d certainly been having a ball, springing across his chalet’s roof in a full-on game of midnight marsupial chasey. Kiss chasey, judging by some of the sounds he’d heard immediately afterwards.