The Doctor's Mistress

There were two pizza restaurants in Arden, and she picked the closest, able to park directly in front of it because it was early and a weeknight.

‘Whatever you like’ was his preference in toppings.

Helpful! But she didn’t want to push, didn’t want to waste time and energy over something that trivial. Suddenly remembered the pizza nights they’d had after swim meets and confidently told the man behind the counter, ‘Large ham and pineapple, please.’

‘Take-away?’

‘No, to eat here, thanks.’ There! Easily dealt with!

There were four tables at the back. Plastic tablecloths. Postcard-style prints of Sicily on the cheaply panelled walls. Red vinyl tiles on the floor. The place wasn’t glamorous.

And it could have been the bottom of a stairwell full of garbage cans for all Byron cared, Hayley realised.

She was swept with a churning wave of tenderness for him. Perhaps it was the kind of thing you could only feel for the man who used to be the boy who’d given you your first real kiss. They’d never had a falling-out. Life had just swept them off in different directions. Heaps of the girls at swim club had had crushes on him, but he’d been too focused on his goals to even know it, and too honorable to have taken advantage of those silly female hormones if he had.

And now he’d grown up. He was a man in every sense of the word. Thirty-four years old, successful in his profession, with a physique that had more than adequately filled its adolescent promise. He had known a man’s joys, and the unique grief of losing a spouse which didn’t touch most people until they were well into old age.

Without thinking about how he might interpret the gesture, she stretched her arm across the table and covered the back of his hand with her palm and fingers, chafing his warm, smooth skin gently.

‘She must be an amazing little girl, Byron,’ she said. ‘I’m looking forward to meeting her properly at preschool. Maybe Max will have met his match at last.’

‘I’ll believe that when I see it!’

He laughed and gave his hand a half-turn so that his fingers met Hayley’s and actively returned her touch. He squeezed her fingers, then stroked the ball of his thumb back and forth over her knuckles. It was slow and hypnotic. Shouldn’t have been erotic as well, but it was, and suddenly Hayley remembered in exact and vivid detail just how good that kiss of theirs had been, sixteen years ago.

Slow, questing, exploratory. Not a prelude to a more intimate goal, but the goal itself. Just to kiss. Just to hold each other. Just to melt inside. She had mussed up his hair. Those short, dark strands weren’t spiky at all, but soft and slippery and clean.

He had slipped his hand beneath the hem of her top and the waistband of her jeans to touch her skin. It must have taken him half an hour to reach her breast. He’d caressed the neat, firm swell the way he was caressing her fingers now, slowly and without demands.

‘It’s good to see you again, Hayley,’ he said at last. It sounded as if he meant it, but it was clearly an effort all the same.

‘Mmm, it was a good time in our lives, wasn’t it?’ she answered. ‘Those years in swim club? We had fun.’

‘Do you still see any of the others? Any people from that group of us who went to state championships two years in a row?’

‘Craig’s still around. Samantha. Rob.’ She sketched a summary of their lives, and mentioned one or two others as well who’d left Arden and moved to bigger places like Sydney or Melbourne or Canberra.

‘And what about you?’ he asked. ‘You and—?’

‘Chris and I are divorced,’ she came in quickly. For some reason, it was important to get this across very clearly. Important for whom? Byron? Or herself?

‘I’d heard, I think.’ He nodded.

Their pizza arrived, giving Hayley the excuse—she suddenly needed it—to pull her hand away. She felt disloyal to Chris, touching another man’s hand and enjoying the sensation so much. It was crazy. Chris had been the one to leave. He had wanted to ‘find himself’. He hadn’t been able to ‘handle being a father’. She’d ‘sprung it on him’.

His problem. All of it.

She had seen some signs, on her recent trip to Melbourne, that Chris was growing up at last. Maybe he had ‘found himself’ now. He’d started a self-defence school the previous year, called the Cee-Jay International Tae Kwon Do Academy, and was working hard to recruit students. If he kept it up, the school would provide him with a decent income. He still couldn’t manage his accounts or his taxes, but she didn’t mind helping him out with those from time to time. She didn’t want to see him fail. Which meant she still cared. Enough to—?

‘Yes, it’s tough,’ Byron said.

She jumped at his words, and realised she’d been miles away, hardly tasting the salt of the ham and melted cheese and the juicy sweetness of the pineapple. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘I get the impression that the break-up wasn’t your idea,’ he clarified.

‘Uh, no. No, it wasn’t. I’m...stubborn. I don’t like to let things go, or admit defeat before I’ve given it everything I’ve got. And I have Max’s needs to consider.’

He nodded and didn’t pursue it, which she was relieved about. Why had she told him all that?

‘I’m not brilliant company tonight, am I?’ he said instead.

‘I wasn’t expecting you to be.’

‘Thanks for that.’ He pressed his palms against his eyes and let out a gust of breath. ‘When something like this happens—I mean, I miss Elizabeth badly enough at the best of times, but when something like this happens...’

‘I know.’ She nodded.

Although she didn’t, of course. Not truly. A divorce wasn’t the same thing as a death. The pain was focused in different places.

‘I’ve stopped looking for it to go away,’ he said. ‘I used to try and measure it. I’d think, It’s less today than it was a month ago. I’m healing. But I’ve stopped doing that. Because it’s not linear, is it?’

‘No.’ That she could agree with, in full understanding. ‘Not at all.’

‘It goes up and down like—like share prices on a stock-exchange index or something.’

‘Bad today,’ she guessed, and out came her hand again, reaching across to his.

‘Pretty bad,’ he confirmed, and returned her touch for the second time. ‘Four years! Some people have married again after four years.’

He shook his head.

‘Do you think you’ll ever remarry?’ It should have been an intrusive question, but somehow it wasn’t.

Byron shook his head again. ‘No, I don’t expect so. Just can’t imagine that I could ever find that...that totality again. Bits of it, maybe. The physical part. Or the friendship. But not the whole of it, not the certainty of it, not in one person. Not the same.’

‘No, it wouldn’t be the same,’ she agreed, out of that same tenderness she’d felt for him before.

‘I’ve had it, though. I’ve been lucky. A lot of people don’t even get it once.’

‘No...’

Their hands separated and they each ate a little more pizza in silence.

Hayley thought, He’s romanticising. But who wouldn’t, after what he’s lost? He obviously did love her very much, and now that she’s gone, he’s forgotten the tensions they must have had, the disagreements, the disillusionments. Everybody has them!

It was one of the things which made her wonder—uncomfortably—if she and Chris could still have a future together. She understood him, she cared about him, he was Max’s father. What more did she want?

‘I’ve been away from her long enough,’ Byron was saying, and for a second Hayley thought he was still talking about Elizabeth. ‘I don’t want her to wake up when I’m not there.’