Page 87 of Barre Fight
She leant down and kissed him. “No guarantee they’re New York quality, but there’s only one way to find out.”
He smiled against her mouth. “By trying every bagel in Sydney until we find the best ones?”
“Exactly.” She pressed another kiss against his lips.
“And after that the best jazz club?”
“Precisely.” Another kiss.
“And then the best twenty-four-hour Cuban diner?”
Ivy sighed. “That might be a little harder to find here. Maybe we’ll go back to New York for that one.”
“Fine by me,” Justin said. “I’ll go anywhere you want.”
Ten minutes later, the bagels were almost gone and Ivy had drunk most of her coffee. She pulled her phone from her pocket and opened the email app, then took a deep breath. This wasn’t going to be easy.
“I got a message from the mayor of Hillstone overnight. She wants you to go out there and hand the money over in person. Make a little ceremony out of it, with one of those big cheques and everything.”
Justin stiffened. He looked down at the lid of his coffee cup for a long moment, and Ivy watched his profile.
When he spoke, it was to his lap. “I know I just said I’d go anywhere you want…”
“But you really don’t want to go there.”
He pulled his eyes from his coffee and looked at her, his expression almost beseeching.
“I know it would be more good press for the fund, but I don’t know if I can stomach it.”
“I get it,” she said gently. “And the fund already has plenty of good press, and we raised a lot yesterday.”
“We could do more.”
“That’s true. But you’ve already done a lot. I can tell her your rehearsal schedule won’t allow for it,” she offered. “Or you could say yes, but ask to do it later, when you feel ready.”
He looked back down at his coffee, and in the heavy silence, Ivy started thinking of other options. Perhaps his parents could present the cheque on his behalf. Or his cousin, who after all had also grown up there and whose firm had been a key sponsor of the gala.
Justin reached for her, and she slid her hand across the sheet until it found his. He folded his fingers between hers and held tight. “I’ll go. Will you go with me?”
Ivy’s heart swelled and squeezed again, fondness and admiration threatening to clog her throat. He’d said it the way he’d asked to hold her, and the way he’d asked her to help him get to New York. Like it was taking work to ask, to lay himself bare to her, but that he was willing to do it even when it frightened him. Because when Justin Winters decided he wanted something—whether it was becoming a ballet dancer, or helping his hometown, or her—he’d do anything to have it and hold onto it. She lifted their hands and kissed his knuckles softly.
“Fine by me,” she said against his skin, meeting his eyes. “I’ll go anywhere you want.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
And so they went. Ivy, reluctant PR pro that she was, arranged for the local paper and a Blue Mountains TV station to be there when he arrived to meet Miss Mary at what used to be the church hall, and she made sure the mayor found a printer who could make an enormous novelty cheque for them all to pose with. Justin balked at the idea of the giant prop—he had half hoped they only existed in movies—but Ivy insisted they needed one.
The drive into Hillstone was sobering. No amount of TV news footage could have prepared Justin for the emptiness that met them when they turned the car off the highway and onto the two-lane road that led into town.
The bush was gone. The lush green trees that lined the road, and the dense tufts of grass that covered their roots, had vanished. All that remained were thin, blackened trunks, sticking up out of the charred ground like a forest of discarded matchsticks. Usually, when Justin drove this road it felt claustrophobic, not only because his childhood miseries lay waiting for him at the end of it, but because the bush crowded the roadside, and blocked the driver’s view of everything but the road ahead.Now, Justin could see clear across the land on both sides of the car. It was empty, and eerie, and for once he found himself wishing for a little less space.
Ivy sucked in a breath at the sight of all the charred bushland. “I know it’s meant to burn sometimes, but…” she murmured, and she didn’t need to finish her sentence.
The experts were already saying that this hadn’t been a normal fire, because this wasn’t a normal fire season. Natural disasters weren’t truly natural anymore. Fires were hotter now, and they traveled faster and burned longer. And even though the trees had evolved to regenerate after fire, scientists were saying that some species wouldn’t recover from this kind of burning. Some of these trees would never grow back.
Justin fidgeted as the car rolled towards Hillstone, and soon the town came into view. What was left of it. The footy fields had burned, the goalposts still standing but blackened and one of them tilting at a perilous angle. The fairgrounds, a few hundred meters later on the other side of the road, had also burned. Next to them, a cluster of almost-destroyed houses stood huddled together, and Justin swore he could see smoke still rising from the ground around them. The high school and primary school, where Justin had spent his days counting the hours until he could escape to ballet class, had fared better, probably because they had commercial sprinklers. The Country Women’s Association building was burned out, and if Justin hadn’t seen the CWA logo on the wrought-iron gate at the side of the road, he wouldn’t have known what the building had once housed.
“It’ll take years to rebuild all this,” he said, almost to himself. No matter how much money they raised, it would only somewhat smooth the long road ahead. Even if the school buildings were usable, where were those students going to live? What would the town look like years from now, when it was finallydone? How long would it be before there was another unprecedented fire season, and this all burned again?
