Today
ZAC
My palm grips Josie’s thigh as our car inches along Victoria Road, my pulse nicely settled now that we’re basically going ten kilometres per hour. She had to ply me with whisky, impersonate me until I nearly fucking died laughing, then undress me to get me to agree to let her drive on this road trip to Sydney. I hate saying no to her and always have, but this was a massive, heart-pounding step for me. It took six months of us being together for me to work up the courage to drive four hours to Bellingen for our half-year anniversary and another nine months for me to come around to being in the passenger seat on this Sydney trip.
It’s another first that Josie’s given me without really realising it. Just like I’m pretty sure she’s still clueless that she was my first crush, my first heartbreak, my first love. My first everything.
Those ocean-blue eyes that I don’t have a hope of resisting glance at me for half a second. ‘Come on, admit you miss this traffic,’ she says. ‘You have wet dreams about it.’ Then she throws her hands up at the windscreen. ‘Honestly, it’s not even two pm on a Thursday. What the hell, Sydney!’
One side of my mouth pulls up. ‘Feeling a little stressed there, sunbeam? Want me to drive?’
‘Hell no. We had a deal. You do what you do best—sit and look pretty.’
I let out half a laugh. ‘She only wants me for my body,’ I pretend-grumble. My gaze then veers to the strip of tanned thigh that I’ve been reaching over the console and grasping for most of the way here, but I force my eyes off it. No time for that right now.
‘Finally,’ Josie moans as the GPS leads us off the main road and onto a side street, the gridlocked traffic slowly disappearing in the rear-view mirror. ‘Oh my god, there it is.’ She snorts a laugh.
I peer through the windscreen at the approaching slab of burgundy brick wall and share her grin. We must be the only humans on earth this excited over a decaying high school that holds as many bad memories as good, but it’s a key stop in our little nostalgia tour around Sydney. Since leaving Christina’s baby shower this morning, we’ve already driven around the sleepy suburban streets that we used to race bikes down as kids, gawked at our humble, tan-brick childhood homes from the footpath, and are now pulling up outside this shitty old school that I love because it gave me Josie.
We park across the road and step out of the car, gazing up at the silent, weathered building coated in street art that’s been left alone for the school holidays.
‘It’s so small,’ I say, my eyes trailing over the main complex, which used to feel like an entire planet.
‘I know, right?’ Josie leans so close to me that our thighs rub, and I fold an arm around her back. I turn my head and brush my nose over the wild waves of blonde hair that will be the death of me, inhaling deeply because I need a little hit. That’s all it takes for her to twist and lift her mouth to mine, and my stomach dips hard when our lips connect. I cradle her face and do a thorough job of kissing her until she’s gorgeously delirious, her eyes blinking dizzily into my own.
‘I love you,’ she says, and I fucking kiss her like crazy again.
‘I love you,’ I eventually get out, wrapping my arms around her lower back and just holding her for a while.
‘Do you want to go inside and walk around?’ she suggests into my shoulder. ‘That could be a head-trip.’
Nerves grab my stomach and I shake my head. ‘We don’t have much time.’
We’ve still got a couple of stops left on this little trip down memory lane, and it all has to be done today because Josie’s now reading the news four days a week and is back on air tomorrow. With my critical care shifts all over the place, it hasn’t been easy for us to find a window to make it down to Sydney at the same time. Christina even picked her baby shower date around us, and with her second little guy due in four weeks, we were cutting it fine.
Josie gazes up at me with her you’re-my-favourite-thing-in-the-world face that always makes my heart pick up its pace. ‘Should we head off then?’ she asks.
I jerk my head at the train station beside the school. ‘I just want to have a quick look and see if my graffiti’s still there.’
‘Graffiti?’ Her eyes expand. ‘You bad bitch!’
I chuckle and link my fingers with hers. Hand in hand, we head up the stairs to the station overpass and down the other side until we’re standing on the dusty platform that was once our favourite hang-out place. I almost snicker at that memory—this noisy pile of concrete sucks, but back then, it felt like our little sanctuary. It was the place where I first fell in love with this beautiful creature holding my hand. So how can I turn my nose up at it?
‘I just need to remember which bench it was,’ I say, twisting around. It’s been over a decade, so it takes me a few seconds, but I step towards what I’m pretty sure is the right one. I’d thought for sure it would’ve been replaced with a newer one by now, but there it is, the sun-bleached strips of wood marred by globs of blackened chewing gum, sparking a rush of memories.
‘Looks like they scrubbed your vandalism away,’ Jose says with a snort, nodding at the otherwise clean bench.
‘Hold on.’ I crouch down and crawl beneath the seat before shifting onto my back to gaze up at the underside.
‘What are you doing?’ Josie says above me.
Holy shit, it’s still here. My eyes roam over the strip of faded black letters scrawled into a spot where I knew no one would find it. I pull my phone out of my pocket and snap a couple of pics because I’m sure this bench’s days are numbered.
‘Come and see this,’ I say to Josie’s legs, and a second later, her head pops into view. She’s got an unsure look painted on her face, but I grab her wrist and whip her towards me, loving the little squeal she makes. Come to me, beautiful.
‘Check this out,’ I say with a smirk as she crawls beside me and looks up at where I’m pointing. Her lips fall open at the words: ‘ZAC LOVES JOSIE FOREVER’.
‘Oh my god, what?’ she practically screeches.
‘Told you I had it bad for you.’ Our eyes catch in the shadows, and a little bolt of electricity flashes between us. Just as I peel my gaze off her to look at the graffiti again, she rolls to face me, grabs my T-shirt, and pulls me against her, my shoulder knocking the underside of the bench.
‘What are you doing?’ I laugh against her lips, knowing how this must look—two sets of tangled legs sticking out horizontally from beneath a bench. The sun beats down on my calves through my jeans, and our groins knock together as Josie reaches around my hip to cup my ass. She gives me that hungry, needy look that instantly wakes up my dick.
‘Fuck, don’t look at me like that,’ I say, wrenching myself off her. I wouldn’t put public sex past Josie, but I’m not about to get us both arrested for indecency. Plus, there’s a bigger reason than graffiti that I wanted to bring her to this spot, and if she keeps rubbing her body against mine, she’s going to feel two things sticking out of my jeans.
Still, I make out with her under there for way longer than I should, then shift to get up, whacking my head on the edge of the bench. ‘Ouch.’ I wince and rub my forehead while Josie crawls out beside me.
‘Oh no,’ she says, nearly laughing because she’s always been ten per cent sadist. ‘Are you OK? Aww.’ She clutches my head and kisses the sore spot on my brow.
‘Probably concussed, but don’t worry, I still mean everything I’m about to say.’
She tilts her head. ‘What?’
I blow out a jittery breath, trying to expel some of these out-of-control butterflies. But at least the train station’s pretty dead, so we don’t have an audience. Hurry the fuck up, Zac, before an army of office workers descends. This isn’t Newcastle.
I steady myself in the comfort of my girlfriend’s eyes and reach for her hands, my fingers wrapping around hers.
‘Josie,’ I begin in that tone that says something big is coming, and her eyes flash wide. ‘I know this is literally the most unromantic place in the world to do this, but as my exceptional graffiti masterpiece has just shown you, this spot has sentimental value to me. I don’t know if you remember, but this is the exact bench you were sitting at when I asked you out when we were fourteen.’
Her eyes soften as they sweep over my face. ‘Of course I remember. You were perfect, and I was an idiot.’
I chuckle through my thick throat. ‘No, you were perfect then, and you are perfect now, and you will be perfect tomorrow. But even so, the fourteen-year-old guy in me got pretty badly burned that day, and he’s never really gotten over it, to tell you the truth. So, I wanted to bring him back here and give him a second shot at becoming the happiest man in the world.’
My fingers shake with nerves as I stick them inside my pocket, and Josie gasps. I know she must be expecting me to produce a velvet box, but what I place into her palm is much smaller and made entirely of silver. It’s not a diamond ring, but it looks exactly like one.
A sound of shock flees her lips as she lifts her hand to her eyes, the tiny charm of an engagement ring glimmering in the afternoon sun.
‘Josie Larsen,’ I say, my voice cracking and my heart racing. ‘I knew it then, and I know it now. And I tried to ignore it for so long. I didn’t think you’d ever want me like that, and I didn’t want you to feel uncomfortable or scared, so I never talked about it. I kept it buried deep inside my heart, and I tried so hard to love someone else. And you know I got close.’ Tara’s serene face slides into my vision, but I push it back out. ‘But close wasn’t good enough,’ I say into Josie’s eyes as they gleam with a film of tears. ‘Close wasn’t you.’ Her face scrunches like she’s fighting not to cry, and the sight makes me bite away my own tears. ‘All my happiest memories are with you, beautiful. You’re not my “close”; you’re not even my enough—you’re my everything.’ I inhale a deep breath and sink to one knee, even though I didn’t really think through the concrete. Thank god I’m wearing jeans. But the second I look up and meet Josie’s watery gaze, everything else melts away, and my own eyes fill up. ‘You are the brightest thing in my world, Josie Larsen. I can’t imagine a life without your light. So, I’m asking you, sunbeam, please. Will you marry me?’
A sharp cry bursts from her lips, and she flings her arms around my neck, clutching the back of my shirt and dragging me to my feet.
‘God yes, hell yes—yes!’ she says into my hair, and I don’t know if I’m laughing or crying more as I squeeze her so hard that I’m worried I’ll hurt her. And she’s holding me just as tightly, every part of her gorgeous body trembling.
When we let go, I wipe my eyes and dig inside the other pocket of my jeans. ‘I was hoping you’d say yes, so there is this one other little thing I got.’ When I produce the black velvet box, Josie shrieks and tackles me so hard again that I nearly trip.
‘Zac,’ she says achingly as I slide the sparkling solitaire diamond ring down her fourth finger. She gasps and holds it up to the sunlight, and it’s so blindingly beautiful that we both stare at it for a little bit. Josie’s mum and I looked at a whole bunch of rings in secret during her parents’ last visit to Newcastle before deciding on this one. It’s perfect.
‘Oh my god, I love it,’ Josie says, her beaming smile making my heart run a marathon. Tears slip past the corners of her eyes. ‘I don’t know what I did to deserve you,’ she says. ‘I’m such an idiot for not just saying yes back then.’ She drops into a crouch and her head disappears beneath the graffiti bench. ‘Do you hear me, childhood-Josie-Larsen?’ she scolds in her angry-school-principal voice. ‘You are an idiot!’
That cracks me up, then her face reappears, her eyes doing that soft thing they do whenever I laugh too hard. She gets back up and curls her fingers around my wrists, gazing up at me with the heart-eyed look that always reassures me that she feels the same way I do. Like all the fears and anxieties that we’re going to keep battling in our lives will be OK. Because when we’re together, we’re always OK.
I comb my fingers through her wild waves of honey-blonde hair. ‘I kind of like that you said no to me back then,’ I admit. ‘You made me work hard for it, you little shit.’ She blurts a laugh, looking utterly delighted at that comment. ‘And you were an awesome best friend,’ I add for the record, resting my forehead against hers.
‘You’re still my best friend,’ she replies immediately.
‘With benefits?’ I lift a brow and bite down on my bottom lip.
Her eyes darken as though she likes that, but then they reset to something heartfelt, a world of emotion shining through. ‘With everything, favourite. I can’t wait to marry you.’