Derek was bolted to a stone. His fists were sunk in a sheet of solid rock. He shook and pulled as hard as he could but nothing moved. He looked up and saw his arms were embedded in a boulder five times the size of his house. He froze, knowing it could roll forward and kill him.
“How’s it going, Hardiman?”
Troy Baker knelt on a bed in front of him and he wasn’t alone. He had his hands all over Mara’s half-naked body.
Instantly forgetting about the boulder, Derek pulled so hard his arms almost snapped off. “The fuck are you doing?”
Troy cupped Mara’s tits, squeezing them like dough. “Good, aren’t they?”
“Get off her!”
Troy laughed. He looked the way he had in school, with stupid scruffy hair and baby blue eyes. “Why? What are you gonna do about it?”
Mara looked at him, placid as a deer. She was wearing her cheerleader skirt and her shiny white sneakers. She didn’t remember him. Had no idea who he was. Troy licked along her shoulder. “You want me to rail you in front of him, Mara?”
“Shut the fuck up.” Derek pulled hard against the wall. “Mara, come here. Let me out.”
She blinked at him, her blue eyes full of confusion.
Troy clasped her chin and kissed her. “Don’t worry about him, baby. He’s happy where he is.”
“Mara, don’t. Mara, come and help me.”
But she didn’t even glance at him. Her gaze was locked on Troy. “Kiss me, Daddy.”
Troy smiled paternally. “Anytime, Little Miss.”
“NO!”
Their mouths closed together and Derek pulled as hard as he could, shouted until his lungs burned, but the volume kept going down, down, down and he could do nothing as Troy pushed Mara onto all fours. He smirked at him. “You wanna watch, man? She loves it. Can’t get enough.”
Mara made a soft, eager sound. Her eyes were closed.
He struggled harder, screaming in silence.
“Derek?”
“Hardiman?” Troy spat in his hand. “You wanna watch?”
“Derek!”
A bird was drilling his arm. Pecking him. He shoved it away and found his arms had loosened. His forearms burst from the stone, loose gravel and dust scattering around them. Troy was on the bed, gaping in surprise. Derek strode forward, grabbed his shoulder, and crushed his skull to a pulp. It shattered like watermelon in his hand, splashing scarlet over his wrists and thighs.
With a snarl, Derek pulled Mara down and pressed his mouth to hers, forcing his tongue between her lips. His prize. His girl. He climbed onto her confused, aroused body. She needed fucking, and he was going to give it to her. Then she’d remember. He sank inside her, sliding as deep as he could go. She was wet and warm and when her arms closed around him, he knew she remembered.
Mine. Mine. Mine.
He fucked her hard, pumping away his filthy enemy until she was pure and perfect. She whimpered, clawing his back. She was creaming around him, his to use, his to be used by. His hands were covered in Troy’s blood as he clenched Mara’s ass, pulling her onto his cock. “Oh my god!”
He seized her face, licking her as Troy had done. “Say my name.”
“Derek!”
He drove deep, his flesh slapping into hers. “Louder. More.”
“Derek. Daddy! Daddy!”
She was spasming around him, crying out his name. This was victory. This was everything. Come climbed his cock. He was so close he wanted to tear himself apart. He bared his teeth, barreling onto her. Into her.
“Come inside me,” she whispered. “Fill me up, Daddy.”
He jerked tight, his body releasing in hot, white pulses. He shoved inside Mara to the hilt, shuddering. “Mine. You’re fucking mine.”
He’d have to wash off the blood. Find somewhere to put Troy’s body. He was going to jail. He’d killed someone like his old man—
“Derek, what was that?”
His eyes flicked open. Everything was dark. He flexed his fingers and found them clean and dry. “Mara?”
“You went berserk,” she gasped. “You tore my shorts off.”
He rubbed his sweaty forehead. “We just fucked? Properly?”
“Yes.” Mara pressed a cool finger to his lips. “Were you dreaming?”
“I… yeah. What happened?”
“I woke up because you were making noises. I tried to wake you up and you…” She took his hand and brought it to her thighs. He touched ragged cloth; the sleep shorts he’d torn away from her pussy.
“Fuck! I really did that…?”
She laughed. “Yeah. It was amazing. What were you dreaming about?”
He saw Troy kneeling behind her, spitting in his hand. He recalled Mara’s pretty, vacant face. He’d killed a man in cold blood and fucked his girlfriend on the body. He shot out of bed.
Mara sat up. “Derek? Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, just trying to figure everything out.” He felt the floor with his feet, trying to locate his underwear. “Are you okay? You’re not hurt or mad?”
“Of course not! Come back to bed?”
He wanted to more than anything, but first, he needed to wash his hands. His right foot found his briefs and he bent down and grabbed them. “I’ll be back soon, baby. I’m gonna sit up for a bit and clear my head.”
She smothered a yawn. “Want me to come?”
“No. You stay here. Give me something to look forward to.”
He pulled on his briefs, grabbed his phone, and headed for the main bathroom. He washed his hands twice with soap, avoiding his gaze in the mirror. He could still feel Troy’s skull collapsing in his hand like eggshells, the thick fatty rage of watching him touch Mara.
Jesus.
He’d known he was jealous, and he’d sleepwalked and had night terrors when he was a kid, but he’d never thought he’d be capable of dream-murder. Or sleep-fucking. He was huge and Mara was tiny. What if she hadn’t wanted him to take her? What if he’d hurt her?
He wandered into the lounge he and Mara had vacated hours ago. The remains of the cheese and fruit pastes still clung to the wooden board on the rug and the fire was glowing coal. He chucked a log on the embers and poked until everything smoldered. As flames licked up the grate, he settled on the couch and unlocked his phone. He had a Google alert. He opened the attached link and was re-directed to The Weekly Sun where the headline sucker-punched him.
Derek Hardiman’s controversial new love.
“Fuck!” He glanced wildly at the hallway, half-expecting Mara to be standing there. He felt like he was holding a loaded gun. At the top of the page were the pictures of him and Mara kissing and an icon saying the article would take ten minutes to read.
Ten minutes? What the fuck have they written? A timeline of everyone I’ve ever put my dick in?
He headed for the bar, poured himself a double Grey Goose, and returned to the couch. There was no way he was reading this bullshit without a drink.
“Derek Hardiman’s controversial new love,” he muttered. “Let’s fucking go, then.”
The AFL’s most eligible bachelor, Derek Hardiman, may have a new girlfriend. The football superstar was spotted kissing Melbourne executive Mara Kennedy on the street yesterday.
“Fuck.” They’d printed her full name. That was bad. That was really bad.
At first glance, Ms Kennedy, who works for not-for-profit ‘Housing For All,’ appears to be your average working girl made good. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Why the fuck did journo’s have to write like this? All flowery, with a bunch of fake suspense? Why couldn’t they just say shit?
“Strap in, because this is one hell of a Cinderella story,” writes journalist Hannah English, a former schoolmate of both Derek and his mysterious new girlfriend.
Derek groaned. Fucking Hannah. But he could process her betrayal later, right now he needed to read. There was a squiggle followed by a second paragraph—this time from Hannah’s perspective.
I know Mara Kennedy and Derek Hardiman personally. We all graduated from Albury Secondary School in 2012. Derek was drafted to The Hammerheads and moved to Melbourne, while Mara undertook a certificate of Aged Care at Wodonga technical college. I decided to stay in our hometown and complete my Bachelor of Journalism online while I did a cadetship with the North Central Tribune newspaper.
“Whoop-di-fuckin’ do,” Derek muttered. “Where are you going with this, Han?”
In those days, Mara’s last name was Temple. She was Derek’s high school girlfriend.
“Fuck!”
He said it so loud, he was sure Mara would come barreling into the room. The house hummed in the aftermath, but as the seconds vibrated past, Derek knew she wasn’t coming. And that part of him hoped she would. How was he going to explain how fucked this was? Sick to his stomach, he made himself keep reading.
My friend Theresa “Tess” Briggs showed me the recent photos of Derek kissing someone and asked if I thought it was Mara. There was no mistaking it. She looks a little different now, but she’s still recognisable as the shy girl who haunted the hallways of Albury Secondary. At least until Derek Hardiman took a shine to her.
“Mara and Derek were such a cute couple,” Tess said. “Derek was really popular, so it was kinda surprising, but everyone thought they were so sweet together. It was so sad they had to break up when Derek moved to Melbourne.”
Derek’s head was about to burst. Tess Briggs. Why the fuck would Hannah have quoted Tess Briggs? Tess Briggs gave him a wristy his first week at Albury Secondary. She sent him so many messages, he’d blocked her on Facebook. How was she the go-to contact for this bullshit story?
There was a break in the text for a photo, right out of the yearbook. Him and Mara in uniform, holding hands outside school. She looked adorable. He looked like an idiot, glaring into the camera like he was on Sons of Anarchy or something. “Fuck!”
It’s clear to onlookers that Derek and Mara have resumed their teenage romance, but Mara Kennedy is much more interesting than she appears. She spent her twenties travelling Europe and used to go by the name ‘Marie Kennedy,’ a well-known face on the London and Croatian social scene. She mostly flew under the celebrity radar, although she did date Italian model, Carlos Follachio. Former friend Karlie Morena informed me that Marie ran the hybrid lifestyle and fashion Instagram account @BlissAndGlow.
Derek stared at the screen, waiting for the words to make sense. Mara was a lot of things, but she wasn’t an influencer. She hadn’t dated an Italian model. She was from Albury. She lived in Fitzroy.
She told you she went overseas.
But she’d made it sound like she was bumming around, collaging, and looking at trees. The same stuff she’d done when they were kids. Not dating models and doing whatever the fuck a ‘BlissAndGlow’ was. Hannah threw him an assist.
@BlissAndGlow was extremely popular, one of the first accounts on Instagram to gain over four million followers. It showcased the lives of some of the wealthiest twenty-somethings in the world; their parties, clothes, and famously, their shoes. As I recall, Mara had an artistic flair at school, decorating her pencil cases and bags with sequins and glitter. Her aesthetic was obvious when I studied the images on @BlissAndGlow. Mara was an enigma even on her own Instagram account, rarely posting photos of her face. But from the images available online, it is clear to me that Mara is Marie Kennedy and Marie Kennedy is Mara.
There were photos. Mara in a sheer red dress, fabric leaves covering her tits and ass. Mara in a gold miniskirt and a tiny white bra. Mara with Lily Allen and one of the guys from Game of Thrones. Mara wild-eyed and laughing, leaving a nightclub with a Chris Evans’ looking-pretty boy on her arm. The guy wore a tux and had his arm around her neck. Derek knew without checking that this was the Italian model.
He slammed his phone on the coffee table. “Fucking hell!”
He wanted her to wake up now. He was hoping she’d hear him and run into the room. But the door stayed closed and soon Derek was going back for more, staring at the photo of her and the model. His Mara wrapped around Captain America. He thought of that famous photo of him—leaving the Bellagio in Vegas with Katerina Blanch on his arm and a cigarette in his mouth. This image had the same vibe. Fuck you. I’m rich, I’m famous. I’m fucking this hot person. Deal with it.
So, while he’d been running riot around Australia and the US, she’d been doing the same thing in Europe. Doing it better than him, it seemed like. Pressure rose in his chest like a corkscrew, but he kept going, kept scrolling. The photos ended and the text resumed.
@BlissAndGlow was deleted in early 2018 and Marie Kennedy has not been publicly profiled since. Karlie Morena informed me that Mara had said she was ‘going home’, although she was under the impression that Mara was from South Africa. Which raises the question—how did a girl raised in government-assisted housing make it to the upper echelons of European society? For weeks, I’ve looked into Mara’s past—
Derek’s stomach plummeted. Of course, she had. At his request. This was his fault. This whole thing was on him.
—and uncovered more secrets, twists, and turns than I believed possible.
“You better be hyping this up, Hannah,” Derek warned. “This better be bullshit.”
It is common knowledge that Mara left Albury in 2013, abandoning the rental house where she’d lived for most of her life, and her role as an aged care worker at the Morning Stars Nursing Home.
“She took off,” said Troy Baker, Mara’s boyfriend at the time. “She didn’t even quit her job. She just walked out without saying goodbye.”
It was a sign of how fucked up Derek felt that Baker’s quote barely registered. Had Hannah really found out why Mara left Albury?
Some speculated that Mara left because of her grandmother’s death two months prior. Some, like Troy, believed she’d come into money as she’d paid off her debts to the local hospital and mechanic before leaving. For weeks I spoke to former staff at Morning Stars Nursing Home and anyone who’d known Mara and her grandmother, Winnie. No one seemed to have any idea where she’d gone, and though several had heard of BlissAndGlow, nobody was aware that Mara had once run that account. Yet as I prepared to admit defeat, I received a call from Elenore Partridge, an eighty-nine-year-old Albury resident and former friend of Winnie’s. She had an interesting story to tell…
Derek downed his vodka. This was it. The moment. He could put down his phone and go back to the woman sleeping in his bed. He could stay in ignorance and wait for her to tell him what he wanted to know. And then his eyes were back on the screen. He was a kid once again, shoveling down chocolate.
Elenore attended Winifred Temple’s funeral in early 2013, bringing a bouquet of yellow roses and a card for Winnie’s granddaughter, Mara.
“I knew she was all alone, and I felt sorry for the little lamb. She was a lovely girl; very quiet, and I knew she wasn’t seeing that football boy anymore, which I’m sure was very sad for her.”
Derek’s mouth filled with spit. He raised the empty vodka glass to his lips then swore. He went back to the bar and poured more, making more noise than necessary. No sound came from the bedroom. He wished he had cigarettes.
Elenore didn’t hear from Mara Temple for a week following the funeral, then one night she received a call on her landline from the then twenty-year-old Mara.
“She told me to sit because she had incredible news, then she waited until I actually did it!”
Elenore’s voice shook as she told me this, still excited almost a decade later.
Derek’s own heart was thumping. He felt as jacked up as old Elenore Partridge.
And Mara did indeed have some incredible news. She’d just won a hundred-and-thirty-million-dollar jackpot—and Elenore had helped her do it.
Derek pressed a fist into his eye socket. That couldn’t be right. That didn’t even make sense. A hundred and thirty million dollars? What did that mean?
Elenore had slipped a system seven into the card she gave Mara at the funeral. A nine-dollar lotto ticket that won the second-highest jackpot in Australian Tattslotto history.
“Fuck. My. Asshole.”
“It turned out Mara had called to say she’d won the Tattslotto and she was leaving town,” Elenore said. “She was offering money—as much as I wanted. Well, I could hardly believe it! I told her, ‘Oh, a hundred thousand dollars would pay off my house and take care of me,’ and Mara took my bank details and we said goodbye. Afterward, I wasn’t sure if she was joking or if it was even a real call. Then three days later I had a million dollars in my bank account!”
Elenore pauses to dab at her eyes and tells me the difference the money made in her life and the lives of her grandchildren. “I just wish I could have thanked her! She didn’t have to do that, but she did.”
I informed Elenore that Mara is living in Melbourne and has recently become re-involved with Derek Hardiman again.
“Oh, how wonderful!” Elenore said. “I’m so glad. I hope they’re very happy together.”
Derek tried to keep his breathing steady. Tried to let time tick by without yelling or throwing something. The adrenaline dump was similar to winning a final—the surreal sense that something had happened, and you needed to wait for it to feel real.
One hundred and thirty million dollars certainly explains Mara Temple’s acceptance into the European glitterati.
Derek drank the rest of his vodka in one. It burned in his stomach, swinging a lamp over the things he’d been ignoring. Mara’s clothes, her quietly confident way of talking. What had he thought she’d been doing in the years since he’d left? Why hadn’t he asked her about any of it?
I tried! She wouldn’t let me.
Yeah, but you dropped it pretty fucking fast. You didn’t want to know. You just wanted to wrap everything up in a nice little bow and say, ‘it all starts here.’
The article still had two minutes to go. Wondering what else Hannah could have possibly found except for Mara being a lizard person, he scrolled down.
It’s unknown how Derek Hardiman and Mara Kennedy were reunited, though sources say they haven’t been in contact for years.
“Me,” Derek muttered. “I was the source. Nice of you not to quote me.”
Even before his reunion with his glamorous ex-girlfriend, life has often been complicated for the tough-as-nails forward. Derek and his siblings grew up in several different homes and foster families as his parents alternated between legitimate work and criminal activity. They are both currently incarcerated— something Derek refuses to discuss in interviews.
He heard a sound like a bear attack and realised it was coming from his mouth. They’d done it. The Weekly had used Hannah—not only to print Mara’s full name and personal history—but to do a write-up on him as well.
Something Derek refuses to discuss in interviews.
“Why the fuck would I discuss it in interviews?” he asked the empty room. “What’s my dad being in jail got to do with footy?”
Mara Temple-turned-Kennedy also suffered a difficult childhood.
Fear flooded his brain. “No. Fucking no.”
Never in a million years did he think Hannah would have the balls to go there. Not after everything Mara had been through.
The name ‘Temple’ is synonymous in Albury with the grisly double homicide that took place in 1998. Thea and Barry Temple were found murdered in their living room on Christmas Day, their bodies discovered by the then five-year-old Mara. Residents feared a serial killer, but police soon uncovered that Barry Temple had killed his wife before taking his own life.
The words ‘killed his wife’ were in blue. A link to another article, probably going into even more detail. Derek’s chest tore open, but he forced himself to keep going, scooping up words like a cold, greasy meal.
Shared tragedy may have been what pulled these lovers together and perhaps reunited them again. Either way, the pair must have a lot to talk about! Hannah English and the entire team at The Weekly Sun wish Mara Kennedy and Derek Hardiman well.
Wished them well. Wished them well?
Derek slammed his phone on the table so hard, he heard it splinter. His breathing was fast, his pulse faster. It was so bad he didn’t know where to begin analysing how bad it was. How was he going to break this to Mara? He couldn’t. He’d have to run into the bedroom and throw her phone out the window. Then they could move to… Kenya. Except that wouldn’t solve anything. The story would just become ‘Murderer’s son and different murderer’s daughter fuck near lions.’
Shared tragedy may have been what pulled these lovers together
Derek bared his teeth. It had been years since someone told him he and Mara were a thing because their dads both killed people. He was as pissed to hear it now as he’d been back then. Mara was gorgeous and fun and perfect for him. He’d met plenty of people with fucked up dads and she was the only one he wanted to marry. How fucking dare Hannah. Hadn’t she seen the pictures of Mara? Any man in his right mind would want her.
And they did. Baker and that model and fuck knows who else.
And that was Hannah’s fault too. She’d made him think about Mara fucking Captain America. He picked up his now-cracked phone and managed to open the messenger app. He wrote ‘you fucking Judas’ then caught himself. Hadn’t Hannah proved she’d print any old shit? He couldn’t send her more quotes. He’d call her as soon as the sun was up. But even as he planned his opening line, he knew it was pointless. All the ugliness was in the open now, shining like a serial killer’s knives. Mara’s anonymity was blown. Everyone knew everything.
“Derek?”
He looked up. Mara stood in front of him, pale and beautiful.
“Hey, baby,” he said, a vodka slur in his voice. “I… how come you’re up?”
She ignored him, staring at his phone. “What’s happened?”