“Melissa. Oh my God, please be OK, please.”
“Hnnuh?”
“Melly, thank God, thank you. Baby, can you hear me?”
“William?”
“Yes. Yes, oh thank you, thank you God. No, don’t move, just lie there for a minute.”
“But—” I moved my legs and tried to roll over, but William’s hands pressed gently against my shoulders.
“Please just lie still. Don’t try to move until you’re fully with me.”
That didn’t sound good. I lay still, quelled as much by that thought and the strain in William’s voice as by the light touch he had on my shoulders. I blinked, becoming aware that my neck and shoulder hurt, as if someone had tried to rip my arm right off. Or maybe my head.
“Hurts,” I said.
“What? What hurts?”
“Shoulder. Neck.”
William lifted his hands off me as if I’d set them on fire. It would have been funny except my neck and shoulder really did hurt. My head too. I blinked again and William’s face stopped being this vague blob hovering over me and came sharply into focus. I blinked again. It was like the time we’d been examining slides in science—fiddling with the microscopes, just about to give up, convinced we’d never get it right. And then, without warning, there was the image so big and sharp and clear it almost gave you a fright.
“You’re upside down,” I said.
Upside down William smiled and his fingers stroked my face. It made me shiver, but then his fingertips left my skin.
“Don’t stop.”
“What day is it?”
“I don’t know.” I frowned.
“Did you have school today?”
“Yeah. Double maths. Only a moron would schedule that on a Friday afternoon. Hey, it’s Friday.”
“Yep. Does anything else hurt?”
I considered. “My hands. But they always hurt.”
A shadow passed across William’s wrong-way face, making him look weird. I wondered if I’d said something wrong.
“Are you sure nothing else hurts?”
“I’m sure,” I said.
“Do you remember what happened?”
“I fell—Jinx! Where is he?” I struggled again to sit up and William quickly put a hand out to stop me.
“He’s fine. Waiting by the gate. Don’t try to sit up yet.”
“No, I need to. Help me up,” I said urgently. I had to see Jinx for myself and make sure he hadn’t stepped on his reins and hurt his mouth or run into a fence or anything.
“Melissa—”
“I’m fine, really. Well, not fine exactly, but you know what I mean. Come on, please?”
“Are you sure? Is your vision blurry or anything?”
“I’m fine, come on.”
William put his hands on my arms and helped me up. As I got to my feet my vision blurred, making me a liar. A tickle of déjà vu from that fall at camp raised the hair on the back of my neck. I blinked and swallowed against a ripple of nausea, even as a lance of pain stabbed briefly into my skull above my ear on the side my neck and shoulder hurt. Bizarre; I could have sworn I’d fallen onto the other side.
“OK?” William asked anxiously.
“I’ll live,” I said as the nausea and the pain subsided just as quickly as it had risen.
I gingerly ran a kind of internal systems check, making sure I really was as OK as I thought. I didn’t want to try to take a step and fall on my face. That would make me look a right idiot in front of William. Bad enough he’d had to come and pick me up out of the paddock. I glanced at him swiftly.
“Where are Dad and Jennie?” The absence of any hovering panicking parent or step-parent was evidence enough they weren’t close by, but they’d be around somewhere. I took a quick look around just to reassure myself but it seemed I’d got lucky in that regard. Where I’d fallen off was hidden from the house by trees and I couldn’t hear any sounds of activity coming from that direction. Or from anywhere else, for that matter. Good. I spotted Jinx waiting by the top gate and scowled. Him standing there in saddle and bridle was enough to hit my family’s hot buttons if anyone did happen to come that way.
“I don’t know,” William said. “I came straight up here and I just found you.”
I looked at him, surprised to see he was pale and, oddly, shamefaced.
“I’m glad you did,” I said softly and his expression changed to one of surprise.
I started towards Jinx, moving faster once I was confident everything really was working properly. Personally I’d have preferred William to secure Jinx first but I understood the rest of the world tended not to think that way. Most people were fixated on the humans first. Certainly humans before horses. And William was a guy. Definitely going to check on me before Jinx.
“Jinx is fine,” William said, effortlessly reading my mind. “I saw him on the way into the paddock.”
“Mmm,” I said, not about to say I still needed to check him for myself. My head ached and my shoulder and neck felt all stretched and yanked, but apart from that I felt OK. My hands hurt, sure, but no more than they had before I fell off.
Stupid hands, it would have served them right if they did hurt more, after they’d let me down like that. My skin chilled as the thought tried to intrude that I’d got off lucky this time. I remembered that excruciating but thankfully brief spear of pain into my neck and shoulder when I hit the ground and how I’d gotten it all turned around in my mind anyway. I moved my arm gingerly, but the pain was most definitely and inarguably on the other side of me than the one I remembered actually hitting the ground. Totally bizarre.
“Hey boy,” I said quietly to Jinx as I came close to him. I wasn’t sure if he was still spooky and I didn’t want to startle him, but he just turned to face me calmly and then came to me. He was walking fine and the reins, though hanging down in a big loop on one side, had stayed around his neck rather than going over his head, so he hadn’t stepped in them and broken them—or anything else. Horses can break their legs or even their neck if they gallop on a trailing lead rope or their reins and I felt almost sick with relief that Jinx hadn’t suffered that.
I gave Jinx’s nose a rub and straightened the reins, then gathered them carefully into my left hand. Without even turning my head I said to William, who’d come up behind me, “Can you give me a leg up, please?”
“You’ve got to be joking.”
I did turn my head then, expecting him to be the one who was kidding around. But one glance at his face convinced me he was far from joking.
“I have to get back on.”
“No you don’t. You’ve definitely got a concussion. You need to go to hospital.”
“No way.” I turned all the way round to stare at him incredulously. “I’m not going to the bloody hospital. I’d sit there for seven hours just to have them tell me to take an aspirin and go home. And I haven’t got a concussion, my head doesn’t hurt at all.” Well, it didn’t hurt much. I’d had headaches that were worse.
“You were lying in the paddock barely conscious. You definitely have a head injury and if you’re lucky it will only be a concussion. There is no way in hell I’m letting you get back on that horse.”
I scowled. My neck and shoulder were killing me and my hands throbbed with the bitter sing-song of overuse. I doubted I was capable of getting on Jinx without William’s help and judging by the grim set of his jaw, that help had about a snowfall’s chance in January of being offered.
“I wasn’t completely unconscious, though,” I mumbled.
“Don’t even try it. We’re going to put Jinx away and then we’ll go and tell your parents you fell off and—”
“We can’t do that,” I interjected, aghast. “They’ll ground me for sure and I’ll never get Jinx ready in time.”
“Of course we have to tell them. You could have a fractured skull or a clot or anything.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’d know it if I had a brain haemorrhage.”
“Ever heard of walk and die syndrome?” William asked me.
I pressed my lips together. “No.” I didn’t think I wanted to, either.
“People can seem fine after hitting their head and then a short time later they bleed out and drop dead. You’d have a hard time riding at Goulburn if that happened, wouldn’t you?”
I stared at William, panic rising up to swell my throat almost shut. Not that I might have talk and die or whatever he called it, that was a bit extreme considering I’d ploughed in on my shoulder, not my head. No, I was more afraid that this might be one fall too many in Jennie and Dad’s books.
“You can’t tell them what happened, William. Just say I fell off and you’re taking me to be checked out. Please. If they think I can’t manage Jinx they won’t let me ride him.”
William reached out and unclipped my chin strap. He slid my helmet gently off my head and then held it out in front of me. I looked at the long scrape that had damaged the velvet, the scuff marks on the side of it that most definitely hadn’t been there when I put it on that afternoon. I gazed at this undeniable proof that my head had hit the ground and a cold shiver rippled up my back. I recalled the horrible jolt of pain, the almost crunching sensation that I’d felt in my neck, and wondered queasily just how close I’d come to breaking my neck. Or my skull.
All my arguments ran out of me when confronted by that damaged helmet. I didn’t know what I had left to bargain with.
“Do you remember how you fell off?”
“Jinx spooked at the goat and I lost my balance.”
“Is that all?” William gazed at me with his blue eyes narrowed intently. I swallowed the lie I’d been about to give him.
“I couldn’t get him back. My reins were too long and I couldn’t hold them.”
I looked down at the ground, my eyes stinging with a sudden rush of tears. Frustration and embarrassment overwhelmed me, pushing the tears out even faster, so I had no chance of holding them back.
“Maybe your Dad would be right to stop you riding Jinx. Can’t you see that?”
I shook my head, blinking fiercely.
William sighed. “I’m not going to argue with you now. I want to get you checked out. But surely you can see you have to tell them you fell off.”
A glimmer of hope showed itself to me.
“OK, but don’t tell them exactly what happened. Just say Jinx spooked at Sheila, they know he hates the sight of her.”
William looked like he was about to insist on the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Bugger upstanding do-the-right-thing boyfriends.
“Please, William? What harm can it do? I promise if there’s anything serious wrong with me I’ll tell them my hands are bad, I’ll tell them I’m having a bit of trouble with Jinx, but not yet. Please, can we just see? I’ll work something out. I’ll get Eleni or Tash to ride him or something. Please?”
“You promise?”
“Cross my heart and ho—”
“Don’t say that. Just promise, OK? Even if there’s nothing wrong we’re going to talk about it. You can’t keep riding Jinx when your hands are so bad or you’re going to get yourself killed.”
“Alright,” I said, thinking that gave me ample time to think of a contingency plan.
“OK,” William said, a little unwillingly. He took Jinx’s reins over his head and led him towards the gate, keeping an anxious eye on me as I walked beside him.
Truthfully, I was glad to let William take over with Jinx. Every minute that passed saw my neck get more stiff and my shoulder was burning with such a deep ache I was starting to worry I really had done some damage. And I was glad, too, to have some time to think about how to get William to agree to me riding Jinx. I had to. If the way my hands had been lately proved anything it was that I really was running out of time. If I didn’t get Jinx into the squad this year I didn’t think it was likely there’d be another opportunity. I didn’t think my hands would be any better this time next year, that was for sure.
As I followed him and Jinx to the tack shed my head started to throb in time to my steps. I squashed any thought of skull fractures of brain bleeds before it could get any kind of grip on my imagination and went to sit on a bucket while William got Jinx unsaddled and put away in less time that I could have unbuckled the girth. On a good day.
William would have got it done even faster, but he kept casting anxious glances at me, as if worried I was going to keel over. His concern sent a little thrill of pleasure zinging through me at this evidence that he really did care. Underneath that, though, was an increasing sense of all not being quite as it should be. My head felt sort of light and floaty and I was starting to feel distinctly puke-stomach, although that was hardly a novelty for me.
Although I’d argued and carried on, I was starting to feel relieved that I was going to the doctor’s or casualty or whatever. The longer I sat here the worse I felt and the bigger that fall seemed. Although if I could remember all of it—and I could—then it couldn’t have been that bad, really. And I still had to come up with some kind of plan. How to make an over-anxious, over-reacting boyfriend agree to letting you do something he thought was too dangerous. Hmmm.
When William came jogging back from letting Jinx go in the paddock, I stood carefully and let him steer me back up towards the house. Maybe I’d think about that later. I had to run the gauntlet that was Dad and Jennie before anything else and if they totally freaked out then I might need some other plan altogether.
“I told you I was fine,” I said as William parked his ute behind Dad’s car on our return from the hospital. William pulled the handbrake on and turned off the engine. He glanced at me sideways and shrugged.
“A happy coincidence.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Last time I looked you didn’t have a medical degree.”
“I don’t need a doctor to tell me how I feel, William. I’ve been monitoring myself for years. I know when there’s something wrong.”
William slid his hand across the top of the steering wheel and flexed his fingers around the curved leather.
“If that’s the case, what were you doing riding Jinx today?”
I turned my head slowly, my neck now painfully stiff, and looked at him curiously. “I have a dressage competition in four weeks. A major competition that could decide whether Jinx gets into the state squad or not. Why do you think?”
“I know why you were riding him. I’m not an idiot, so please don’t treat me like one.”
I gaped, but William wasn’t done. Twisting his fists around the steering wheel he stared straight ahead out the windscreen.
“I meant, if you’re so good at judging how you are then why were you riding a horse you aren’t able to control anymore?”
“I can so control Jinx,” I said, offended. “Where do you get off saying my horse is uncontrollable?”
“I didn’t,” William said, his jaw thrust stubbornly forward. “I said you couldn’t control him.”
“That’s the same thing.”
“No it isn’t. If Jinx was uncontrollable then nobody would be able to control him. If he was uncontrollable for you then he would have always been that way. I said, you can’t control Jinx anymore and that’s exactly what I meant.”
“You’re twisting words,” I said crankily.
William shook his dark head and again his blue eyes took that flickering, sidelong glance towards me. “No, you are. Your hands are too bad to hold him. You’ve fallen off twice that I know of, come awfully close one other time I’ve seen for myself and god knows how many busters you’ve had that nobody even knows about—”
“I have not!” I protested hotly, my skin literally heating up with indignation.
“Alright then, but that’s still three times. Haven’t you ever heard of three strikes and you’re out? Or in your case, dead?” William dragged a hand through his hair, leaving it rumpled like a morning doona cover, although I didn’t have my usual reflex to want to smooth it down again. I didn’t have any desire to touch him when he was attacking me like this.
I didn’t understand why. Why was he hassling me about Jinx? And why now when I was sick and stiff and sore?
“I can control my horse perfectly well, William. It’s just that I’ve been having a bad bout with my hands and I’m trying to teach Jinx something new and he’s getting confused. It happens in dressage training, you know.”
“It happens in polocrosse training too, so don’t go all snotty dressage queen on me.”
I snorted. “Polocrosse isn’t anything like dressage. You just gallop and catch balls and throw them again.”
“Like to see you try it. No, on second thoughts, we’re not going there. You’re not turning this into an argument about whether dressage is more important than polocrosse, because I don’t care. I only care about you and I’m not going to sit here and let you kill yourself.”
I laughed. “What are you talking about?”
William turned towards me, reached out and circled my wrists with his hands. It was the closest we ever got to holding hands. The stab of regret that tightened my chest was an unwelcome one at any time, but particularly then.
“I’m talking about you staying off your horse until your hands are better.”
I looked at him, the earnest blue of his eyes holding mine. I swallowed the rush of fear that had risen to choke my throat and the words that wanted to tumble out. I wouldn’t permit them. I tried never to think them, let alone speak them aloud. It was like a talisman that kept me safe, that warded off the inevitable for as long as possible. If I just didn’t acknowledge it, then it hadn’t happened yet. I took another tack.
“I’m fine, Will, you heard the doctor. I can ride in 48 hours.”
“Providing you don’t have any other symptoms like dizziness or blurred vision,” William reminded me. “And that’s beside the point. Are your hands going to be OK in 48 hours?”
“Sure,” I said, because I couldn’t say anything else. I had to believe that they would be. It was my rule and it had worked for all these years. No matter how bad my hands were or had been on any given day, when I got into bed that night and was lying there with my joints twisting and burning with that incessant ache, I’d close my eyes and tell myself that tomorrow morning when I woke up my hands would be better. Better, for me, was always relative, not an absolute. Better didn’t mean healed, normal or miraculously restored. Better meant improved. As in, not as bad as they had been today.
I searched William’s shuttered face even as I racked my brain for a way to explain that to him. I could see that he didn’t believe me and that he thought I was just lying to myself and to him. How could I begin to explain how necessary it was for me to keep going? How could I even begin to articulate how his disbelief and his insistence on facts and truth was squeezing my heart so much it hurt?
“William, I know you don’t believe me, but I—I have to believe it.”
“I know,” William sighed, stoking my wrists lightly with his fingertips. A shiver wriggled up my back and my skin prickled all over, but it wasn’t the usual response I had to his caress.
“I can see in your face that you think I’m just saying that,” he continued, “but I do get it. God, I admire you so much that you can be so positive and keep going no matter how bad it is. So I do understand that you need to have hope. But I don’t understand how you can be so stubborn and so reckless and so, so—stupid.”
“Stupid?” I gasped, unable to believe that he had just actually called me stupid to my face.
“Yes, stupid. What would you call it if I drove my ute drunk or rode a green broke horse with no helmet? Or swam in the ocean at night alone, or took drugs?”
“You don’t do any of those things.”
“But if I did, wouldn’t that be stupid?”
“Yes, of course, but I don’t do any of that.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I do not. I don’t do any dangerous stuff like that, because I can’t. I can’t even ride a pushbike to fall off, like poor Eleni.”
William became very still. “When did that happen?”
“Uh, last week.”
“Before or after she rode Jinx? She did ride Jinx, right?”
“No. She broke her collarbone before she could come over. You knew that.”
“I did not.”
“I told you.”
“You did not. I definitely thought Eleni had ridden Jinx this week.”
“Well she didn’t.”
“That changes things.”
“What difference does it make?”
“You went ahead and rode Jinx even though you knew you weren’t up to it. And don’t tell me,” he said as I opened my mouth, “how that isn’t true because I know you never would have agreed to Eleni riding Jinx unless you absolutely had to. I can’t believe you.”
“I can’t believe you,” I echoed him, anger starting to simmer along my veins, heating my blood. I pulled my arms back and he instantly released me, that hair-trigger awareness he had of avoiding hurting me obviously still functioning. At the anxious look that creased his face I felt a stab of guilt—had I maybe counted on it when I jerked back like that?—but I squashed it along with the knowledge that it was mean to scare him like that and make him think he might have hurt me. At that moment I didn’t care. And maybe just a tiny bit of me did want to throw a scare into him or maybe even hurt him a bit. After all, nearly every word he’d said in the past 10 minutes had hurt either my feelings or my pride or my heart.
My head was pounding and my neck hurt and I just didn’t want to have this conversation anymore. I reached for the door handle, but my fingers let out a severe warning snarl as soon as I tried to close them.
“And there’s the proof. You can’t even open a car door right now, so how do you expect to control a hot thoroughbred while you try to help him through a difficult training stage?”
“I always have before,” I muttered and could have bitten my tongue off.
“Before? Have you ridden through a patch this bad before?”
“Not exactly.” Damn it, why could I never pull off a lie to people who mattered to me? That really was stupid because they were always the people who you most needed to lie to so you could stop them from worrying and getting upset.
“So you make a habit of riding when you shouldn’t.”
“No.” That really did make me sound as stupid as he thought I was.
“I assume your Dad doesn’t know.”
“Of course not.”
“Is there anything else you maybe should be telling me?” William asked, his voice thick.
I frowned, fluttery little qualms of anxiety whipping up the insides of my stomach like a bitter acid brew. “Like what?”
“Like exactly how you’ve managed to ride when your hands are so bad? Are you sure that was the only time you’ve taken a painkiller when you weren’t supposed to?”
“Now you sound like Dad.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“Fine. No, I don’t take painkillers when I’m not supposed to. Happy now?”
“Not at all,” he said, his voice sounding really strange. “Now you’re definitely lying to me.”
“The hell I am.”
William’s face went stiff. “I know about your stash.”
“What?”
“Bottle of pills in the medicine box in the tack room? Your Dad know about that, does he?”
I sat there with my mouth hanging open and no words coming out. “What the hell? What were you doing looking in there?”
“When I put Jinx’s gear away after your fall I was looking for the fly spray you use. I just hadn’t had a chance to ask you about it yet. How many have you been taking?”
I stared at William with tears welling up to sting my eyes and clog the back of my throat. I swallowed anxiously, my skin gone hard and cold, numbness creeping across my tongue.
“What’s with the inquisition?” I choked out eventually. “You think I’m stupid and a druggie?”
“Of course not.”
“How can you think that? How can you say that? And why did you ever bother with me, if that’s all you think of me? God!”
I fumbled for the door handle. Stuff the consequences; there was no way I could sit there with him for another minute. Not for another second.
“Ow,” I cried, tears spilling over my lower lids when I banged my swollen fingers against the door.
“Stop it. You’ll hurt yourself.” William’s fingers plucked at my sleeve, trying to draw my arm away.
“Leave me alone, what do you care?” I sobbed, distraught and humiliated and just plain horrified. How had it come to this? How could I lose control like this and let him see me crying like a baby? I could excuse myself and blame it on being sore and tired, worried and confused, but it didn’t make me feel any better. Who wants to fall to pieces in front of their dream guy? Not me.
William’s hands gripped my arms and his fingers dug into me so strongly I gasped, shocked into gulping back the latest rush of tears. He was never rough with me, never, not in fun, not accidentally and definitely never on purpose. But he grabbed me now and held me firmly, not enough to cause me any actual pain, but definitely enough to shock me out of my panic.
“I care a lot, actually. I care when you’re sad, or hurting, or when you’re frustrated or when your hands are really bad. I care that I’ve upset you and made you cry and I feel like the world’s biggest bastard for that, you’ve no idea, but I’m going to keep doing it because I care. I care about you too much to stand by and watch you risk breaking your bones or your neck or your beautiful stubborn skull because you want to go to a stupid dressage competition. You might care about that more than you care about yourself, but I don’t. You are more important to me than anything.”
I sniffled, my hair falling in my face, hiding from him while I sat silently. About a thousand conflicting thoughts were galloping through my poor overheated brain. He’d called me stupid and stubborn but also beautiful. He said he cared about me. Annoyance and delight chased themselves around my brain until I felt almost dizzy and sick. But if he cared about me, really, shouldn’t he care about what was important to me? I tried again to explain why it was so important.
“I need to qualify Jinx for the squad. To do that I need to take him to Goulburn and do well in the Novice tests. To do that I need to get him doing better lateral work and collecting properly. And to do that I need to ride him. Can’t you understand this is my dream? Don’t you support that?”
“Of course. But I want you safe more.”
I don’t, I thought automatically, but managed not to say out loud. I wanted to get Jinx onto that squad more than anything else in the world.
“I’m going to take Jinx to Goulburn and I’m going to ride him myself to get him ready. There isn’t anyone else, unless you think you can help me?”
William shook his head. “I would if I could, but I’m no dressage rider. I could work him for you, but I can’t teach him any of that fancy lateral stuff.”
I’d meant it sarcastically and it gave me pause that William had answered so seriously. I was impressed, even though I didn’t want to be, that he at least knew shoulder-in was a lateral movement. It was more than what my brothers knew.
“So then I have to do it. And anyway, I want to do it. This is my dream, it’s been my dream for a long time and—and you can’t stop me.” I added that last bit in a cold sweat, terrified at how close I’d come to saying something else; to blurting out that unspeakable truth that hid deep within my heart.
William’s hands slid from my arms and he dug at his hair again.
“Actually, I can,” he sighed.