LITMIR.BIZ

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her perfectly well. But the tumour also meant she couldn’t think in images or conceptualise something she felt. She really was completely blind.’

      ‘And that’s not you?’

      ‘My blindness is in my retinas, so my brain creates things that might be like images. I just don’t rely on them.’ She wondered if his pause was accommodating a frown. ‘Think of it like this... Mum said you’re quite handsome. But I can’t imagine what that means without further information because I have no visual frame of reference. I don’t conceive of people in terms of the differences in their features, although I obviously understand they have different features.’

      ‘How do you differentiate?’

      ‘Pretty much as you’d imagine. Smell, the sound of someone’s walk, tangible physical features like the feel of someone’s hand. And I have a bit of a thing for voices.’

      ‘How do you perceive me?’

      Awkwardness swilled around her at his rumbled question, but she’d given him permission to ask and so she owed him her honesty. ‘Your strides are longer than most when you’re walking alone.’ Though, with her, he took pains to shorten them. ‘And you smell—’ amazing ‘—distinctive.’

      That laugh was like honey squeezing out of a comb.

      ‘Good distinctive or bad distinctive?’

      She pulled up as he slowed and reached out to brush the side of her hand on the rough clay wall of the chalet for orientation. ‘Good distinctive. Whatever you wear is...nice.’

      In the way that her favourite Merlot was just ‘nice’.

      ‘You don’t do the whole hands-on-face thing? To distinguish between physical features?’

      ‘Do you feel up someone you’ve just met? It’s quite personal. Eventually I might do that if I’m close to someone, just to know, but ultimately all that does for me is create a mind shape, address a little curiosity. I don’t rely on it.’

      ‘And people you care about?’

      Did he think you couldn’t love someone without seeing them?

      She pressed her fingers to her chest. ‘I feel them in here. And I get a surge of...it’s not vision, exactly, but it’s a kind of intensity, and I experience it in the void where my vision would be when I think about my parents or Owen or Wilbur. And the bees. Their happy hum causes it.’

      And the sun, when she stared into it. Which was often, since her retinas couldn’t be any more damaged.

      ‘That sometimes happens spontaneously when I’m with someone, so I guess I could tell people apart by the intensity of that surge. But mostly I tell people apart by their actions, their intentions. That’s what matters to me.’

      ‘You looked me right in the eye after we shook hands.’

      ‘Only after you spoke. I used the position of your hand and your voice to estimate where your eyes would be. And the moment either one of us moved it wouldn’t have worked until I recalibrated. I don’t have super powers, Elliott.’

      His next silence had a whole different tone to it. He was absorbing.

      ‘You’ve been very generous with your information, considering what an intrusion my questions are. But it felt important for me to understand. Thank you, Laney.’

      ‘It’s no more an intrusion than me asking you what it’s like being tall.’

      ‘How do you—? The angle of my voice?’

      ‘And the size of your hand when I shook it. Unless you have freakishly large hands for the rest of your body?’

      ‘No. My hands are pretty much in proportion to the rest of me.’

      Cough.

      Not awkward at all...

      Wilbur snuffling in the distance and the chirpy evening cicadas were the only sounds around them. The only ones Elliott would hear, anyway.

      ‘I’m tall because my father was a basketball player,’ he volunteered suddenly. ‘It means I spend my days looking at the bald spots of smaller men and trying very hard not to look down the cleavages of well-built women. My growth spurt at thirteen meant I made the school basketball team, and that was exclusively responsible for turning my high school years from horror to hero. It taught me discipline and focus, sharpened my competitiveness and gave me a physical outlet.’ He took a breath. ‘Without that I’m not sure what kind of a man I might have grown into.’

      His words carried the slightest echo of discomfort, as if they were not things he was particularly accustomed to sharing. And she got the sense that he’d just given her a pretty fair trade.

      She palmed the packed earth wall of the chalet and opened her mouth to say Well, this is you, but as she did so she stepped onto a fallen gum nut loosed by the wildlife foraging in the towering eucalypts above and her ankle began to roll. Her left fingernails bit into the chalet’s rammed earth and her right clenched the fabric of Elliott’s light jacket, but neither did much to stop her leg buckling.

      The strong arm that slid around her waist and pulled her upright against his body was infinitely more effective at stopping her descent.

      ‘Are you okay?’ he breathed against her hair.

      Other than humiliated? And way too comfortable in his strong hold. ‘Occupational hazard’ she said, when she really should have been thanking him. ‘Happens all the time.’

      He released her back onto two feet and waited a heartbeat longer as she tested her ankle for compliance. It held.

      ‘I’m sorry, Laney. Guess I don’t have Wilbur’s years of training as a guide.’

      Guilt saturated the voice that had been so warm just moments before. And that seemed an ungrateful sort of thanks for his catching her before she sprawled onto the ground at his feet.

      ‘It wasn’t you. My bottom and hip are peppered with bruises where I hit the dirt. Regularly.’

      Talking about body parts suddenly felt like the most personal conversation she’d ever had, and it planted an image firmly between them that seemed uncomfortably provocative.

      She released his jacket from between her clenched fingers. ‘Thank you for those basketball-player reflexes.’

      ‘You’re welcome,’ he breathed, and his smile seemed richer in the silence of evening. ‘Are you okay to get yourself back?’

      She whistled for Wilbur, who bounded to her side from out of the night, and then forked two fingers to touch his furry rump in lieu of a harness. ‘Yep. I’m good. I walk these paths every day.’

      Not that you’d know it by the wobble in her gait.

      Then she set off, turning for the house, and Wilbur kept careful pace next to her, making it easy to keep up her finger contact with his coat. But she wasn’t entirely ready to say goodnight yet, although staying was out of the question. Something in her burned to leave him with a better impression of her than her being sprawled, inelegant and grasping, in his arms.

      So she turned and smiled and threw him what she hoped was a witty quip back over her shoulder.

      ‘Night. Sorry about the possums!’

      CHAPTER FOUR

      IT WASN’T THE possums that had kept him up half the night, though they’d certainly been having a ball, springing across his chalet’s roof in a full-on game of midnight marsupial chasey. Kiss chasey, judging by some of the sounds he’d heard immediately afterwards.

      Because if it had been the possums he would have been able to fall asleep when they’d finally moved on to foraging in the trees surrounding the chalets for the evening, instead of lying there thinking about the gentle brush of Laney’s fingers on his arm, the press of her

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