Trevor turned off the alarm and rolled back to face me across the creamy hotel sheets. He gripped my wrist and held it on the pillow between us.
‘I’ve got you.’
With my free hand I thumbed the sun-damaged skin below his neck. I thought of this part of his body, usually hidden by a shirt collar and tie, as mine.
‘I’m going to be late,’ I said.
It was our last day in Sydney. I was due to meet the real estate agent in Darling Point.
Trevor kissed me. As was my habit, I had got out of bed before he woke, to clean my teeth. Now he had my other wrist, and pressed them both above my head, against the padded headboard.
His knee pushed between my legs. A memory of my neighbour, Claire – our last weird encounter – scratched at my brain but was erased by the morning smell of Trevor’s sweat and his skin’s heat as he moved on top of me. My blood rushed in response, and I shifted, arching to meet him.
‘I’ve got to get up.’
‘You’ve got to go,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to go to work.’
After all this time sex could still be a series of negotiations, small advances and retreats over territory. Yes. No. There. Briefly
I floated out of myself to see us from the outside – the linen in the soft morning light, his tousled silvery hair, the thick curve of his shoulders, my blonde streaks spread across the pillow, one leg wound around his hips. The image took me to the edge of an orgasm, but Claire’s face appeared again, distracting me. Go away!
I had a weird feeling of triumph when Trevor came, as if I’d won a fight.
‘Now you,’ he said.
‘Later.’ I got out of bed and stood naked in front of him, watching him look. ‘I’ve got to go.’
We had come to Sydney so Trevor could meet an investor face to face, and I could scout locations to open my first Therese Thorne store in Australia. It was early December, and the city had already attained a heat we wouldn’t feel back in Wellington even at the height of summer.
The open air malls were strung with Christmas lights, the sea burned in electric glimpses between buildings and trees, and that stink of flying foxes hovered in the Botanic Gardens – the sort of hot smell you can’t help sniffing for, like from a marker pen, or a pair of knickers kicked off onto the bedroom floor.
The Darling Point site was an empty retail space in a converted worker’s cottage fronted by frothing jacarandas. The small, low-slung building was the last of its kind on a side street, off a road lined by grand hedges which afforded occasional views of wedding cake villas and airy modern developments. The estate agent’s motorbike dominated the path that led to the front door, a sleek black insect that had waited outside all my viewings that week. I manoeuvred around it, sweating and nervous from the rush to get there, but inside, a respite from the heat, the space was quiet, and smelled cleanly of sawdust…
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