Shady Places

And I miss you, like the deserts miss the rain

– Everything but the Girl

Alison couldn’t stop thinking about Christian since they had last said goodbye only days earlier. She truly believed that she had found her perfect man. He was everything she had ever wanted. He kept surprising her with wonderful things in everything he said and did.

Whenever she thought of him, Alison went all gooey inside. She became aroused each time she thought about all the foreplay, sex, and after play, he seemed to dish out by the shovelful. And it didn’t help, of course, that for half a day after each visit, she could still feel Christian moving inside her.

But distance wasn’t the only thing that caused Alison to miss Christian so much. Her flatmates didn’t provide the same stimulating conversation, and neither could they send her into another world like he did when they made love.

She lay in bed one night re-reading Christian’s latest three letters. They were so beautiful. She loved everything he wrote in them so much that she became wet just remembering and imagining him doing what he said he would in each one. He made her feel something that she’d never felt before  — adored.

Christian’s latest letter was especially amazing, not just in how he described how it felt to be inside of her, which Alison loved, but also in his description of his values and character. They were a perfect match. Although she didn’t think that he was “boring” — maybe because she thought she was on the same level of boring.

All Alison wanted in life was to be happy and comfortable with her perfect man, which he was. She would rather be successful in her marriage and in bringing up children-which were a long way off-than have had an amazing career. She rarely went out on the town and saw no reason she would ever need to when she could spend the evenings in bed with her gorgeous guy.

Alison was lying in bed rereading another letter when there was a knock at her door.

“Just a minute,” she said. Refolding the letter, she put it down on her bedside table and went to the door. Opening it, she saw her flatmate Fiona standing there.

“You have a call,” she said. “It’s your mum.”

Alison hadn’t spoken to her mother in a few weeks. Most of the time, the conversation was pedestrian; her mother asking about university and work. But this time Alison bounced out of her room, excited that she had news to tell. After the usual greetings and updates, Alison was set to tell her mother all about Christian when her mother stole Alison’s thunder.

“Who is Christian?”

It only took a moment for Alison to work out that Jane’s mother must have told Alison’s mum about Christian.

“Yes, I’ve met somebody, and his name is Christian! He’s …” Alison was about to say, ‘an officer in the army,’ but her mother cut her off.

“Is he a classmate?”

Alison’s mother did not know about her previous lovers. As far as she knew, Christian was her first. She likely assumed that they were sleeping together, but she didn’t say it out loud.

“No, he’s from Canberra.”

“From Canberra?” Alison could almost detect a sigh of relief all the way down the phone line from Bathurst. That Alison could maintain a relationship with someone 300km away must have seemed impossible. But then the wheels turned in her mother’s head and the questions got more pointed.

“How are you able to see this boy from Canberra?”

It was a double barb. The question clearly intended to undermine Christian’s status, and Alison saw straight through the ‘boy’ reference. However, the second part about the distance to Canberra was right on the money.

“He has a car, and he drives up here on weekends,” Alison said defensively.

“But you work on weekends! And what about your army training? Oh, I wish you would take your education more seriously, Alison.”

Alison had never heard her mother defend her army training before. She was usually against it. Another barb at Christian, no doubt. The rest of the conversation was polite, but every moment it lasted, Alison clenched her jaw and ground her teeth.

For Christian’s part, it was difficult not to compare Alison favourably to his previous girlfriend, Beth. Easier still since Beth had been making life difficult for him. Until then, their breakup had at least been civil. Beth never gave him a reason she had left him, so Christian was confused about why she now seemed to act hurt over the whole saga. Hadn’t she planned the whole thing?

Christian seemed to have gotten over their breakup, and it pissed Beth off, but she didn’t know why he had. He didn’t know if her original plan of moving out whilst he was in Queensland had been to make him suffer because he was powerless to have prevented it. But it had clearly backfired.

But things got bad once Beth discovered the existence of Alison. It had taken a while, but word had eventually filtered through to her from either a mutual office colleague or an army contact from the camp. If it had been from work, then she would have also followed through her army network, some of whom may have known Alison from Brigade HQ in Sydney. Or she could have found out directly by asking questions of her army friends in the hope of digging up some dirt.

When Beth learnt Christian had met someone else, she hit the roof. And when she discovered it was during the same camp that she had dumped him, she lost her mind. In a bizarre leap of logic. She now believed that he had set out to cheat on her while he had been away at that camp, which of course legitimised her dumping and her rage.

But what Christian failed to remember until much later was that in one of Beth’s rounds of relationship point scoring, she had taught him the tactic of tagging an opposing player in touch football when you had the ball. If she hadn’t taught him that, he never would have reached out that day in Queensland and touched Alison the way he did. Alison already had him in her sights before he did, but it certainly didn’t hurt his chances.

So as far as Beth was concerned, suddenly Christian was the guilty party in the breakup and responsible for her moving out. He dared to still work in the same building, march in the same army, live in the same city, and breathe the same air as her. It was all his fault. He was an officer consorting with a private soldier. Actually, that one was true. Beth even referred to Alison as a “floozy”.

Christian never needed Alison more than he needed her then. After her call from her mother, Alison missed him so much that her heart hurt. That was the moment they knew they were in love.