Page 2 of Chasing Blue
“On Thursday?”
“Can’t do it Wednesday if you’re working,” I said with my own shrug. “Pick you up around six-thirty. We’ll drive up to Harmony Bay. You like steak? There’s a new steak place there I’ve been wanting to try.”
She stared at me wide-eyed but didn’t speak. My heart was hitting the wall of my chest so hard, I wondered if she could hear it.
She didn’t know this, but I’d never in my life asked a girl on a date. Until recently, I’d been seeing the same girl since we were in year ten of high school, so we’d just gone out, and the girls since then . . . I definitely hadn’t dated. Fucked, but not dated. I didn’t even know the name of some of the women I’d been through over the previous three months, but Scarlett, she was different.
I’d watched, I’d tried to stay away, but here we were.
“You gonna say something, Blue?”
She blinked a few times before shaking her head.
“Steak’s good. I know the new place you’re talking about. I heard it’s good,” she finally said with a nod.
“So does good and good equate to a yes you can pick me up at six-thirty? Put me out of my misery here. Say, yes, Jack, I’d love you to take me out, would you, babe?”
That earned me another smile, this time she didn’t look away. Her eyes met mine and held them captive for an unsettling amount of time.
“You want my address?” she finally asked.
“You live with your brother, right?”
“Yeah, but how . . .”
“I know where that is. I’ll pick you up at six-thirty. Bring an empty belly.”
She smiled, licked her lips, and then turned her attention to whoever had just moved in next to me and took their order.
* * *
“You comingto the beach party Saturday?” I asked Scarlett, making sure my lips brushed against that sweet spot behind her ear as I spoke.
We’d been seeing each other for a couple of months, and I was falling hard and fast for this girl. Her curvy little body and flame-red hair were the complete opposite of the tall, lean, athletic, sun-bleached blonde surfie chicks I usually picked up at the beach. And her bubbly personality was a welcome change from the toxicity of my last relationship.
Eden, my ex, had been calling me for two days straight now, probably because she’d heard I was seeing someone.
There’d been others since I’d finally called time on our relationship, lots of ‘others’. But they’d all been one-night stands, fuck and runs, blowies behind the shower block at the beach. The toxic kind of sex I thought would help me forget the toxic relationship I’d been in with my ex since the age of fifteen.
And that had been the way I’d planned on spending the summer of two thousand and two, and then I’d walked into Foamies, my usual place to drink or hang out when I wasn’t working or in the water, and there she was, Scarlett O’Brien, my Blue, looking like all the things I didn’t know I wanted.
Like me, she was a local to our small surf town of Palmers Bay, on the East Coast of Australia. We’d even gone to the same school. Because she’d only just turned eighteen, and I was twenty-one, much to my regret, she’d never been on my radar. As soon as I set eyes on her, though, I made it my mission to rectify that mistake.
A useless piece of information my brain had somehow retained came in useful the very first time she’d served me a drink at her brother’s bar. For some reason, that apparently goes back to the eighteen hundreds, redheads in Australia are often referred to as Bluey. Scarlett’s hair is red, so I’d called her Blue as I thanked her for my change, she hit me with a smile that made both my gut and my balls pull tight, and I think I was done from that moment on.
And now, here we were. Two months of seeing each other almost every single day or night, and I was quite willing to let her lead me around by my dick, and I did not give a single fuck who knew it.
Maybe it had been because I knew her presence in my life was only temporary. She was leaving for Sydney to attend University in February. After the disaster that was Eden and me, I’d sworn off anything long-term again. Scarlett now had me rethinking all of that.
I enjoyed every second of her company and worked out ways we could keep what we had going once she left for Uni.
“I’ll have to meet you there. I have work tomorrow night.”
I pulled away so I could look at her pretty face, her creamy skin illuminated by the light beside the front door of her brother’s house.
“You can’t get the night off?”
Her blue eyes danced across my face as she gave a small smile and shook her head.
