30. Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Nonna died on Tuesday morning. The sun was beaming through her bedroom window onto the hospital bed they’d hired, Portia curled up at her feet purring like she had for a thousand mornings before, the whole family surrounding her, holding her hands, stroking her hair, telling stories. They all sat for a long time after her last breath, talking to her like there was still so much more they had left to say.

Afterwards Ollie found herself on the porch steps with just her siblings, like everyone’s grief was equally real but theirs was specific to them. They hadn’t lost their last parent like their dad just had, nor a very elderly great-grandmother like the youngest Gabrielli kids. Nonna had moved in with them to help when Matty had been only three years old. There was no family memory they held that didn’t include her in the mix.

“Do you remember that possum she used to feed? I swear to god he got so fat the delivery guy thought we had a rottweiler. ”

“Do you remember that time she caught Nico googling pictures of boobs? I’m not sure his balls ever descended again after that.”

“Remember Nonna and those bloody ducks she was so obsessed with?”

“Remember that time-”

At some point in the afternoon Matty wordlessly started pouring them all wine and the three of them - minus Pia who grimaced as she couldn’t partake - got quietly very drunk, laughing and crying and telling more stories. Ollie found herself calling Lara, holding herself strictly, carefully contained, so nothing she didn’t want spilling out of her mouth could escape in vino veritas . She didn’t remember the exact words Lara said back, just the incredible sweetness that lingered after she hung up the phone.

“You’ve got it bad,” Pia informed her when she drifted back to join them.

“Mate,” Nico said, “you’re in real trouble, just look at you.”

Ollie just shook her head at them all and threw back a solid swig of wine.

Neighbours started to arrive, bringing casseroles and lasagnes, hugs and kind words. Eventually their dad came to join them, Matty slinging an arm around him, their mother doing what she always did and staying busy through her grief. When Ollie went to check on her she found her doing an intense amount of meal prep as if ready to cater the whole funeral party herself. Ollie hugged her and slowly sobered up as she tried to make herself helpful, absolutely in the way but at least sure her mother wasn’t alone.

Time moved weirdly after that. The first night seemed horribly long, then the next days skipped, until all of a sudden she was making it through Nonna’s funeral, her father somehow delivering the full eulogy, Ollie and Pia gripping hands in the front row as they wept. As they filed out behind the coffin she spied Lara sitting next to Sadie somewhere near the back, her eyes filled with sadness as she sought out Ollie’s as she passed.

The wake was both private and overwhelming; just Gabriellis but oh god there were a lot of them. Up from Brisbane, from Toowoomba, from Adelaide. The next week slid by with extended family, food, stories, wine, more food, more family. It was dizzying and it never seemed to end. Aunts and uncles she saw twice a decade, cousins she’d run around causing havoc with as kids, tiny second cousins she’d never yet met. Kids shrieking and running underfoot, wine bottles open everywhere, endless meals, laughter and tears, hot-blooded opinions and everyone wanting to hug her and hear every minute of her last ten years in detail. Chaos, exactly the way Gabriellis did it best.

A week after the funeral, Ollie cracked .

I miss you she typed and then quickly deleted. I miss your pretty face she sent before she could rethink it. It was some version of the truth after all.

Come over

When?

Tonight?

When Ollie pulled up at Lara’s house that evening it was Lara waiting on the porch steps for her for a change. Ollie couldn’t fight her smile if she tried. Outside of the funeral glimpse it had been almost two weeks since she’d gotten to see her.

“Holy shit, you’re a sight for sore eyes,” Ollie greeted her. Lara’s hair was held back in what Ollie understood to be an artfully arranged messy ponytail, wisps of gold escaping around her face, short denim skirt, t-shirt that hit all the right spots. “How are you this beautiful?” she sank down on the step next to her and pulled her immediately over into her lap to kiss her thoroughly. Lara spluttered out a small gasp of a laugh and kissed her back.

“How are you?” she asked, her voice low.

“So much better now,” Ollie kissed her again. “It’s such a relief to see someone I’m not related to.”

“I mean I hope you don’t greet your relatives like this.” Lara glanced down at her bare thighs wrapped around Ollie’s hips.

“I probably would if they looked like you,” Ollie told her.

“That’s fucked up,” Lara observed, her smile slipping out sideways.

“Mmhmm.” Ollie kissed her again. She tugged at Lara’s t-shirt and pulled it up over her head. Lara looked at her in disbelief.Ollie noticed she was wearing that bra again, the one she’d worn the first night they’d spent together. “What?” she said, trailing her fingers along soft skin, “it’s not like you have any neighbours.”

They made out heatedly, Ollie feeling desperate and slightly shaky, like the time apart had made it new all over again.

“Missed me huh?” Lara observed, slightly wide-eyed at the greeting.

“You have no idea.”

“I thought I was inviting you over for a cup of tea and gentle conversation,” she told her, eyebrows raised, her smile almost a smirk. God she liked Lara’s mouth.

“Can we do that part after I take you to bed? Holy shit-” She attempted to cover Lara’s breasts with her hands. “I didn’t even ask if Tilly was here.”

Lara burst out laughing.

“You’re safe,” she told her. Ollie grabbed her hand and tugged her into the house.

Everything got so hazy after that that she felt drunk. Hot skin, blue eyes, arched back, nipples hard and slick from Ollie’s mouth. The taste of her, Lara’s breath getting shaky, the sound of her cry as her whole body contracted around Ollie’s fingers. Lara’s hands on her skin, her gaze growing intensely focussed as she stroked Ollie with her fingers, pleasure wracking her as Lara watched her come completely apart with rapt attention as if there’d be an exam on the subject later.

Ollie was raw, cracked open, everything heightened, all of life suddenly in its clear and rightful context.

“Lara, ” she murmured into her skin as they both lay gasping.“We only have three weeks. Can we… can we just fuck whatever the rules are supposed to be in this situation and just… have everything? Just for now? ”

Lara clung tight to her.

“I don’t know what that means,” she told her. “But I think I’m in.”

Ollie pulled her back down into her arms and kissed her, nothing but heartache and deep wistful want filling her veins.

Lara closed the shop for three days - Tilly having a best friends mini-break with Frankie - and Ollie took her camping. They didn’t have to go far from Ribbonwood for a perfect spot: a semi-wild campground out the back of someone’s bush block, no tourists sharing it mid-week, nothing but trees and the riverbank, stars for days and a campfire every night.

The first half of the trip was all lazy day hikes, making love in the afternoons, squealing and splashing in the icy cold stream in lieu of a shower, Lara laughing at Ollie’s attempts to cook literally anything in the campfire embers, coming to the rescue with pre-made snacks and endlessly decadent store treats that Ollie now understood were entirely Lara’s secret champagne tastes.

“I don’t understand how a wide-eyed country girl got to be such a hipster foodie jerk,” Ollie teased her.

Lara rolled her eyes.

“You understand we have the internet here too, right? ”

By day two they were barely even wearing clothes anymore, the weather so balmy, the location so private, their desire only heightened it seemed, by the impending end of it all.

“God,” Lara groaned from inside their tent as she collapsed into a sweaty, sex-drenched, incredibly hot mess at four in the afternoon. “I don’t think I can even walk anymore.”

Ollie gathered her in close, smirking at her handiwork.

“Luckily, you don’t need to,” she placed a kiss on her lower abdomen, making Lara twitch and grab for her just in case that kiss wandered. She tugged Ollie up and pulled her down against her body.

“What am I going to do without this?” Lara whispered into her ear. “What the fuck, Ollie, what have you done to me?”

Ollie kissed her, then kissed her again, her heart clenching. Lara hadn’t once said anything like this, not one single thing that would suggest she was going to miss Ollie when she was gone. Now that she had, her tone full of longing and confusion, Ollie felt like she was in pieces. She had nothing. All she could do was to kiss her again.

“Lara,” was all she could whisper back. “Lara Bennett. How could I have known you would destroy me like this? ”

They clung to each other for so long, without words, that they eventually fell asleep in each other’s arms, only to wake up in the pitch black night, hungry, disorientated, and a little sad. That night they stayed up by the campfire, telling each other all kinds of mixed up stories about their lives.

Lara told Ollie about her only clear memory of her mother, kissing her goodnight before bed, maybe somewhere around the age of four. She smelled good. I remember that.

Ollie told her about the PTSD-lite she was experiencing from her job, how she still struggled to sleep at night without tiny faces popping into her memory. It’s the faces I’ve probably forgotten that are the worst part, she told her. No one should forget a child’s death, but I know I have.

Lara told her what it was like when Tilly was a newborn, Lara completely overwhelmed and sideswiped by terrified love. I barely knew who I was but I knew that for her, I would find out.

Ollie just about died laughing, swearing blue that Lara was entirely inventing her claim to remember a twelve-year-old Ollie making a self-righteous, twenty-minute speech about the dangers of smoking marijuana during school debates, though honestly it did sound kind of familiar .

She retaliated with her newfound conviction that Lara’s hostility toward her in their teens was purely down to desperate, latent desire for her sweaty, ponytailed, gangly self. Or was it because you were an insufferable arsehole? Lara wondered aloud, though with the way her eyes danced, Ollie was adamantly convinced her own theory was for sure the truth.

That night when they went to bed, the sex was furious, like it was their last chance, like they had to somehow get their fill, as if they could each brand themself onto the other’s heart through her skin until walking away wouldn’t even matter.

Ollie nearly got whiplash when Tilly got dropped off after school on Friday and their camping trip became one big silly sleepover, toasting marshmallows, Lara and Ollie both trying to remember the dumb ghost stories they’d all told each other as kids, fresh sheets on the air bed, Tilly happily snuggled between them talking a mile a minute until almost midnight.

In the morning Lara huffed at them in fake-exasperation as Ollie and Tilly spent forty minutes chasing each other around the campsite with a discarded snake skin, each trying to hide it in creepier and creepier places to make someone jump, mostly Lara as she took the lid off a pot to try to cook breakfast and shrieked so loudly the two of them nearly wet themselves.

“So funny,” she said drily as she opened the door of the car to drive them home and found the snake skin curled around the centre of the steering wheel like it was napping .

“Are you coming home with us, Ollie?” Tilly said on the way back. “You said ages ago you would come and cuddle Moonbright. I promise you’re going to be obsessed with her.”

Ollie and Lara exchanged a sideways look and that was how Ollie found herself sitting on her arse in the world’s most stylish chicken coop, a large fluffy golden hen in her arms and Tilly trying to make her memorise the names of what had to be forty different chooks of every colour and stripe and fluff level.

Ollie would have thought it could be weird, spending an extended amount of time with both Lara and her daughter - god, where to put her hands all the time, just for a start - but when she’d said everything she’d meant everything and so she and Lara cooked dinner together again, bickering easily and teasing warmly, Lara even stealing a quick kiss while Tilly was absorbed painting scenes of their camping trip at the dining table. They all ate around the table together, played boardgames and cackled with laughter, Tilly high on all the extra attention before she was sent, complaining, to bed, hugging Ollie goodnight on the way.

That night they went to bed, chastely, both wearing underwear and t-shirts, Lara wrapped tightly in her arms, thighs entwined, kissing and gazing at each in some kind of hazy desperate wonder until Ollie felt like she might die. It was possible that she didn’t let go of Lara all night; she’d never know, because she slept like a goddamned baby.

Even though it was Sunday morning, Tilly was up bright and early and Ollie looked over wide-eyed to Lara .

“Shit, should I be sneaking out or something?” she whispered, alarmed.

“It’s fine,” Lara told her, calmly. “I mean, she knows.”

“Knows what?” Ollie was flabbergasted.

Lara rolled her eyes.

“That I like you,” she told her, making Ollie feel oddly flustered and hot. Had Lara ever been that direct? “That adults who like each other sometimes like to spend nights together. That you’re leaving soon. That it’s all happy and all sad and all okay.” She kissed Ollie and got out of bed.

Ollie got dressed and joined them in the kitchen, making the coffee while Lara fed the chooks and Tilly danced between them both and all Ollie could think about were Lara’s words.

Was it okay?

Was any of this?

She had no goddamned idea anymore.