Page 105 of Loving Wild

“Just having a moment,” Dani replies to her question. “You doing okay,” she asks her own.

Lauren shrugs.

“Angry, pissed off. Wishing I’d picked up one of those bottles and hit him right over the fucking head with it, then chopped off his balls with the jagged broken end . . .”

“Fuck me, such violence,” Zac interrupts Lauren’s little rant.

“Essex,” I explain with a shrug.

“Thought birds there were all about dancing around their handbags wearing white high heels and telling each other to shut up?” Zac continues.

“That’s just a myth,” Lauren tells him. “That was all set up to hide the fact we’re secret assassins. Out to rid the world of cuntholes.”

“Cuntholes?” everyone in the room questions.

“It’s a special word she came up with tonight for Summers. She’s tired, that was the best she could do,” I explain as Lauren grins at me.

It’s two in the morning. I want nothing more than to take Lauren to bed, strip her naked, and sleep with her curvy little body pressed against mine, but at the same time, and despite the circumstances, I’m enjoying every second of this time with my family, with Lauren.

We drink more heavily loaded coffee and chat shit until the sun comes up and the kookaburras are laughing at us.

My siblings disappear into bedrooms, except Dani, who Zac throws a blanket over after she crashes on the sofa.

I carry Lauren to bed and don’t even feel a little bit guilty about taking off all her clothes before pulling her into me, so we can sleep naked, skin to skin.

With her back to my front, I bury my face into her neck and breathe her in. She smells like her again, and I fall asleep knowing that’s all I need, her, exactly like this, every day for the rest of my life.

* * *

We don’t leaveour bed on Sunday. I wake Lauren by sliding inside her, slowly moving on top of her until we both come, then bringing her coffee.

It’s after twelve by then, and my family have all cleared out. That’s after they’ve rearranged everything in my pantry and put the brush from the downstairs toilet, handle end down, into a vase full of water.

What a bunch of fucking comedians they are.

After drinking our coffee, we sleep for another four hours, shower, fuck, then order in Chinese, which we eat naked, in bed.

It’s now almost eight in the evening. The bedroom telly has a music channel on in the background, the volume low as we’ve continued to drift in and out of sleep.

Lauren’s on her front as I lay on my side facing her, tracing patterns with my fingertips on the small of her back, watching her skin go goosy at my touch.

We talked earlier and decided today wasn’t the day for sorting our issues. I have a full day tomorrow but will take Tuesday off so we can spend time together and sort through our shit.

“What is it you have on tomorrow,” Lauren mumbles up from where her face is pressed into the mattress.

“Hmmm?”

“You said you had a full-on day Monday. What have you got on?”

I hesitate too long with my answer, just by a beat, but she notices.

“We started work on the Red Hill job Thursday,” I tell her, but she’s already tensed beneath my touch.

“Yeah?” she says, her head still turned away from me.

“Yeah.”

“And?”