Just Breathe (24 page)

Outside Ethan’s apartment, Dee couldn’t help taking a cautious scan around before she got out of the car. The thought that someone might be watching made her want to run to the apartment block. Then she thought how stupid that would look if someone was taking photos.

Ethan was in the lift when it opened on the ground floor. ‘Just wanted to make sure you were alone.’

‘Wow, you must have had it bad some other time. I’m sure they couldn’t possibly be that
interested in me.’

Up in his apartment, he pulled her into his arms and kissed her. ‘I just want you to know it doesn’t matter what gets written in the paper. I want to be with you, with or without shoes.’

His words should have been reassuring but they were too much like a declaration. She didn’t want that. She just wanted to be with him – today, whenever. No promises. No future.

While Ethan slid food into the oven, Dee sat on the marble counter and sorted through the latest batch of phone messages. Ian the Bastard Reporter again, Val and Amanda again, Leon and Arianne again. At least the list of callers was reducing, even if the quantity wasn’t. As she deleted the last one, the phone rang in her hand.

Dee pulled a face. ‘It’s Mum.’

‘Will she be upset about the paper saying you’ve moved in?’

‘No, she’ll be ecstatic. Hey, Mum.’

‘I’ve been ringing all day. You’re in the paper. It’s very exciting. Everyone’s called.’

Famous by association. ‘Where are you?’ Dee could hear voices in the background.

‘It’s our tennis night. Are you really sleeping with Ethan Roxburgh?’

‘That’s a bit personal.’

‘I thought that’s how everyone talked these days. Are you seeing him then?’

Dee was tempted to lie but it was her mother. If the story went on, it was only fair to let her know. ‘Yes, we’ve been seeing each other for a couple of weeks.’

‘Oh, that’s lovely, Dee. He’s such a nice man.’ Then she yelled, ‘Yes, she’s sleeping with him!’ which was followed by a chorus of whistles.

‘Mum! I was about to ask you not to tell anyone.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Dee. You should be proud you’ve got someone at last, especially
someone like Ethan Roxburgh. And I know you’re busy but you really should try to make time to update your wardrobe. That outfit you were wearing in the paper looked like it came from a market-stall.’

‘It did.’

‘We could go shopping after we inspect that new apartment down the road. They’re finished now and there are some very stylish stores nearby. We could buy you some make-up, too. How about Tuesday?’

Talk about seizing the moment. ‘Not this Tuesday.’ Not any Tuesday, if she had her way. ‘I’m shooting the DVD.’

‘I wouldn’t leave it too long if you want to hang on to him, Dee. Men like that want a woman they can take anywhere.’

A spark of anger flared and words snapped out. ‘It’s stressful enough being picked apart in the newspaper without
you
joining the fashion police.’

‘I’m just trying to help. Have you still got my hairdresser’s phone number? I’m sure she could fit you in on Monday if I explained the situation.’

‘Don’t try to help, Mum. I’ll call you later.’

She switched off the mobile, tossing it on the counter, where it landed on the newspaper like an underscore for the headline on page five – ‘New Look Roxburgh Girl’. She slammed the paper shut. Damn. Even the front page seemed to insult her by default – ‘Health Life Hits Up Members: Big Fee Hike’.

‘My mother just used a loud hailer to tell her tennis club about my sex life.’ Ethan slid his arms around her. ‘I’m sorry. I know you wanted to keep all this quiet.’

‘It’s too late for that now. We may as well make it official.’

Dee stiffened in his arms. ‘But they made all that stuff up. It’s just speculation.’

‘If you try to hide, it gives them reason to keep speculating. If we fess up, there’s no story and they’ll leave us alone.’

Fear knotted in her stomach. ‘Fess up to what? We haven’t even talked about … us.’ Didn’t want to.

‘I think it’s pretty obvious what’s happening.’

Her heart thumped. ‘I, um …’

He ran a thumb down her cheek and across her lip. ‘If you want to talk about it, we can.’ He bent his head, kissed her. ‘Or we could just let it happen.’ He nuzzled her neck, her throat.

She slipped hands under his shirt. ‘We don’t need to talk. Not when your mouth can be put to much better use.’

Sundays were never so good, Dee thought, listening to Ethan’s heart drumming under her cheek, smiling as he wound a strand of her hair through his fingers. Her first lesson was three hours away. They had time to get tangled in the sheets again.

‘Let’s have coffee in bed with the papers,’ Ethan said.

‘Naked?’

‘Of course.’

As Ethan moved about the apartment, Dee stretched luxuriously under the covers. She’d stowed a basket of clean knickers in his walk-in robe the other day and an extra toothbrush had appeared in the en suite last week. It didn’t mean anything, she told herself. It was just being practical.

Ethan appeared with coffee and she sipped while he tore the wrapping off the Sunday papers. When he spoke, it was more breath than voice.

‘Fuck.’

Ethan threw the paper on the bed. The headline was huge.

Pay Up And Relax: Health Life Fee Increase Spent On Yoga.

‘Ohmigod.’ Dee snatched it up, reading a smaller headline:

Roxburgh’s Girl Given Job.

‘Oh. My. God.’

Ethan sat and they read the article together. It was awful. Ian the Bastard Reporter, under a large byline, suggested Health Life Insurance’s fee increase was to pay for the production and distribution of Dee’s yoga DVD. He quoted her saying that even she couldn’t afford to pay their fees and that the DVD was a big budget production. Worst of all, it implied Dee had been given the job because of her relationship with Ethan and his position on the board of the insurance company.

While Mr Roxburgh’s involvement with the model only became public yesterday, they were seen embracing as early as February this year, shortly after Ms Nichols appeared in the Health Life commercial. The decision by Health Life to use Ms Nichols in the promotional video was made in late March.

‘Shit. Shit,’ Ethan said.

Accompanying the article was a series of photos, including one of Dee and Ethan pressed to each other on the dance floor at the advertising dinner, when she was drunk and he rescued her boobs from exposure.
Unable to keep their hands off each other in February
, the caption read.

Dee felt sick. ‘I can’t believe he’d write this stuff. He asked me about the fees and how much the DVD was costing and I told him I didn’t have a clue. I didn’t say any of that.’

‘Shit. Shit,’ Ethan said again, raking a hand through his hair. ‘Okay, tell me exactly what you told him.’

Dee went through it, hoping she wasn’t incriminating herself. Ethan’s eyes went all flinty and his mouth became a hard line. When she’d finished, he didn’t speak for a long time.

‘It’s not true, is it? I didn’t get the job because of you, did I?’

‘I wouldn’t do that,’ he answered curtly, then, standing abruptly, made for the door. ‘I’ve got to make some calls.’

This was bad. Very bad. It wasn’t a lightweight guess at a relationship. It was casting aspersions on Ethan’s business ethics. Dee wanted to strangle Ian the Bastard Reporter, shout her innocence from the rooftop, punch something really hard. Instead, she stood for a long time in the shower, hot water pouring over her head – breathing steam in, breathing steam out.

As she stepped from the en suite, she heard voices from the other end of the apartment. Someone else was here. She went to the door and stuck her head into the hallway. Lucy. And she was arguing with Ethan.

‘… a shit fight.’ Her tone was sharp.

‘Don’t you think I know that?’ Ethan snapped.

‘What the fuck were you doing letting her loose on the media?’

‘You were the one who put her in front of the media.’

‘For pictures. That’s it. She wasn’t meant to
say
anything.’ Dee heard a papery slap, as though one of them had thrown the newspaper down.

‘It’s not her fault,’ Ethan said. ‘You know that arsehole. He’s made a career out of creative quotes.’

There was a pause and Dee heard high-heeled footsteps move about on the timber floors.
Lucy was talking again but too far away for Dee to hear. Did she want to hear? Her mouth was dry and her face was flushed but she took a few steps into the hallway anyway.

‘… reflects badly on all of us,’ Lucy said and Dee imagined her pissed off stance – hands jammed on her hips. ‘I was the one who suggested the damn DVD.’

‘Don’t go into panic mode, Luce. It’s bullshit.’

‘I don’t know how you can be so calm. You’re the one who’s had shit shovelled all over you. What the fuck were you thinking anyway, escorting her around town like she was some kind of Roxburgh Girl?’

Ethan lowered his voice to a growl. ‘She’s not a Roxburgh Girl.’

‘No, she’s not. Nice to know you’re smart enough to realise that, at least. So what are you going to do about it?’

Dee retreated to the bedroom, leaning hard against the door. God, oh God. Dee didn’t want to be a Roxburgh Girl but their words made her feel like a peasant trying to steal food from the royal table. Her heart was a lump in her throat, her face burned with shame and embarrassment. She didn’t want to know what Ethan planned to do. She wasn’t going to give him a chance to do anything. She threw her stuff into her basket and stepped back into the hallway.

‘Keep your voice down,’ Ethan was saying as Dee walked into the lounge.

They turned to look at her.

Lucy’s mouth dropped open. ‘Oh my God.’

Ethan was wide eyed. ‘Dee, how much did you …?’

‘Goodbye,’ was all Dee could manage through clenched teeth. She pressed the button for the lift, relieved when it opened straight away.

‘Wait,’ Ethan said.

Great big chunks of her wanted to do what he asked, to stay and hear him out. No, she warned herself. Be a warrior and get the hell away from him. She stepped in.

Ethan made a move to join her. She put a hand to his chest and pushed him back over the threshold into the apartment. ‘No!’

Dee knew that walking away would hurt – and it did – but it was better than waiting for someone else to do it.

She didn’t walk, though. She ran – out of the building to her car. Then she drove and drove, passing through suburbs she didn’t know, steering around traffic so she wouldn’t have to sit still. She felt like she’d been injected with a vial of negative emotions. Her feet were sweating and her palms tingled and her head throbbed. And every way of looking at the events of the morning produced another flood of horrible sensation.

She felt assaulted by newsprint, couldn’t believe that Ian the Bastard Reporter had pretended to be nice so he could make a fool of her.

The tone of Lucy’s voice kept ringing in her head – thick with scorn, running with disdain.
Escorting her around like some kind of Roxburgh Girl.
Dee was aware that in Lucy’s powerful world she was just her yoga teacher, but she’d thought Lucy actually liked her. Perhaps only if Dee knew her place.

And Ethan – she was one big, painful melting pot where he was concerned. She was angry and embarrassed, felt stupid and naive and deceived. She was never a contender for Roxburgh Girl but hearing him say it, just half an hour after she’d sat astride him, made her feel like every other woman desperate for a shot at the title.

It was more than that, though. She liked him. A lot. Much more than she should have allowed herself. He’d got under her shell, let her talk about the hard stuff, had wrapped her in his
arms, taken her to his bed. She’d clung to him without realising and, as much as her head was telling her to go, her arms hadn’t found the quick-release button – and they were aching with the effort to hold on.

At least she hadn’t given in to the temptation to picture him in her future. She didn’t have to tear pages out of that book, take a match to them and watch them go up in smoke. She’d almost died of smoke inhalation once. She wasn’t going to let that happen again. No, she had to keep moving forward, down the path she’d started on.

‘Shit!’ She pulled up suddenly, forcing the car behind her to screech to a halt. She had a class today, which meant facing a bunch of students who’d read the weekend papers. She had to face Arianne and Howard too. Saturday’s newspaper called the yoga school a ‘private Eastern Suburbs ashram’, which was inaccurate but not really insulting. Sunday’s story named it in connection with a Roxburgh Girl who used her lover to get overpaid by an insensitive health insurance company.

Dee turned the car around, guilt squirming in her gut at the thought of the school suffering because of her naivety. She parked out front twenty minutes before class and knocked on the door to the upstairs flat. It was not a lot of time to make amends but enough for some apologies.

Howard answered the door, surprise in his smile. ‘I thought you mustn’t have got my message.’

‘I didn’t. I turned my phone off last night. I’m so sorry.’

He seemed hesitant as he motioned her inside. ‘Arianne told me not to say anything without her. She’s in the sitting room.’

Following him down the hall, she tried to gather some words to help the situation. Arianne was cocooned in a bed of cushions on the sofa. Dee threw herself down in the chair opposite.
‘I’m so sorry about the paper. I had no idea that guy was going to write that stuff.’

Arianne and Howard frowned in unison.

‘What, you mean the newspaper?’ Howard asked. ‘We don’t read them on weekends. Too much negative energy.’

Dee noticed then the buzz of excitement about Arianne, the spark in her eyes, the happy smile. ‘So what’s going on?’

‘We’re going for a drive,’ Arianne cried, as though she’d booked tickets to Paris. ‘I’m so excited. I haven’t left the house in weeks. That’s why we wanted you to come up before class.’

Howard, who’d sat on the floor, glanced up at Arianne. She nodded to him, then turned to Dee with a serious expression. ‘Okay, first of all, you don’t have to say or do anything today. But you have to promise not to freak out.’

This obviously had nothing to do with the newspaper. It was something else that might make her freak out. Anxiety pooled in Dee’s belly. She was already overwrought. Freaked out was only a step away. ‘I can’t promise anything. Especially if you’re going to start the conversation telling me not to freak out.’

‘Sorry, but’ – Arianne took a breath – ‘I’ve decided not to go back to teaching. At least for the next six months. After all this sitting around, I’m going to be out of condition and I want to enjoy this baby when it finally comes, not spend my time trying to get back into shape. So we’re going down to Mum’s after the birth. She’s a post-natal guru these days and I can ease my way into it with her.’

Arianne’s mother was a yoga legend. Dee had been to her school on the South Coast. Almost every teacher she knew had. It would be the perfect place to recuperate from a difficult pregnancy. What was there to panic about? ‘That’s great. So Howard will go down on
weekends?’

‘That’s what we wanted to talk to you about,’ Arianne said.

Dee looked back and forth between them. Fear punched her hard in the ribs. They were closing the place down. Shit. Half her income came from classes here. If that went, she’d go broke faster than she could roll up her yoga mat and find a new place to stow it. A sweat broke out on her upper lip and a pulse thumped in her throat. Not now. She couldn’t deal with this and Ethan. ‘When are you closing the school?’

‘No, we’re not, and stop freaking out.’ Arianne paused, a small, excited smile curling her lips. ‘We want you to be a partner in the school.’

Dee’s brain went slack with shock. ‘What?’

‘An equal third partner with Arianne and me,’ Howard chipped in. ‘The last few weeks have shown us we can’t operate without you. And now that Arianne’s decided not to come straight back to work, I’ll need some help to keep the place going.’

‘You want me to run the school?’

‘We want you to keep doing what you’re doing but with a stake in the business. Arianne’s been checking our books and almost half the students go to your classes exclusively. That means, if you left and those students followed, the school would fold.’

‘But I don’t want to leave.’

‘And we want to make sure it stays that way.’ Howard crossed his legs and put his hands on his knees, palms up, making a case. ‘You’ve been looking at all these business ideas lately and we understand you want some security. We did too. That’s why we started the school. You create a lot of positive energy here and we think it’s time you shared in the results.’ He took a sheet of paper from the coffee table beside him. ‘It’ll mean an investment, of course, so I’ve
drawn up some numbers for you to think about.’

Dee took the page, saw the big number on the bottom and felt anxiety ripple through her muscles. ‘I don’t have that kind of money. I’ve only saved enough for a sofa.’

‘You’d have to get a business loan. There are some good rates around, especially if you take it out over, say, fifteen years,’ Howard said.

‘Fifteen years.’ Her heart thumped. Hard. ‘But it’s such a long time.’

Arianne touched a hand to Howard’s shoulder. ‘Go slow. She’s starting to lose it.’

He began counting off points on his fingers. ‘As a partner you’ll get an income even when you’re sick or take a holiday, you’ll earn more for what you’re already doing at the school and it’ll set you up for the future. Just think, in fifteen years you’ll own a third of the business, hopefully a third of this building if we can ever buy it, and you’ll have your career mapped out. It’s a real future, Dee. Something you can build your life on.’

It’d sounded pretty good right up to that moment. A whole future – not just a week or a month, but one she could build a whole
life
on. It made her suck in a breath and physically recoil. It’s just as well she hadn’t promised not to panic because she was on Freak Out Station and all the trains had been cancelled. Her friends were handing her an incredibly generous, practical and potentially prosperous offer and it scared the shit out of her.

‘I, um …’ Something thick and hard was lodged in her throat.