Oh yeah, that smile. He was looking forward to seeing a whole lot more of that while she was here.
‘Mate … maybe you could check the roof is sound.’ That should get Pete out of the lust haze he’d fallen into. ‘We don’t want it falling in on Kirsty.’ Or the relic she was inspecting. That possibly valuable relic.
Her eyes widened. ‘That’s so thoughtful.’
Yeah. And motivated by self-interest if he was honest.
Pete still hadn’t clued in, so Joey gave him a light punch to the kidney. ‘The shed? Posts, joists, rafters …. remember them?’
Pete turned and winked at him. ‘Keep your shirt on, mate. I’m getting to it.’
Joey grabbed him by the arm and hauled him off to do a perimeter walk.
‘Did you see those eyes?’ said Pete. ‘Like the Pacific Ocean, only darker.’
‘They’rebrown, Pete.’
‘And wow, if I’d known chicks tinkering with airplanes could be such a turn-on I’d have gone to the airport more. She’s single, right? Tell me she’s single.’
Well, crap. He didn’t know. ‘She’s not here for romance.’ That he knew of. But if she was?
‘How long have you known her?’
‘Like, a few days?’
‘Then you can’t know what she wants, can you?’
Well, no. But he could tell when someone was hiding a few secrets—he looked in the mirror at himself every morning, didn’t he? ‘I guess not.’
Pete shook his head and kept moving along the eastern wall. He picked up a crowbar at one point and whacked it against a few passing posts and shone his torch app into dark crevices. He kept moving right up to the back of the shed then dropped his voice. ‘You know, just because she’s only here for a little while doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to get to know her, man.’
Joey frowned. ‘I’ll do my own choosing, thanks, Pete. In private, when I’m good and ready.’
Pete bent down to haul a pile of old hessian sacking away from a lined section of wall. ‘That might be asbestos sheeting. Get the experts out here before you disturb it.’
‘Gotcha.’
‘You’re in a blue funk because your ex-girlfriend ditched you …’
It took Joey a second to switch gears from asbestos back to the life advice Pete seemed determined to give him.
‘… and you sabotaged your own career.’
‘What do you know about my career?’
‘Mate, I may spend my days on the tools but that doesn’t mean I can’t read theAustralian Financial Review. Unlike the rest of Clarence, I know all about your fall from grace.’
Well … crap.
Pete clapped his back. ‘Like I care. So now you’re back, but you’re notback, Joey.’
Being dragged to the pub for beer and darts would have been preferable to this. ‘What is this, some sort of tough-love intervention?’
‘You’re hiding out here on your farm instead of getting involved back with the community—’
‘It’s called hard work, O’Connor. It’s called busting a gut to get a few dollars in the bank.’
‘Is it, though?’ his friend said. ‘Or is it too hard to go into town and spend time in all those places you’d been with Natalie? We all lost a friend when she left us, but the rest of us didn’t bugger off to Sydney and pretend like Year Twelve never happened, Joey. We were sad. We learned how to laugh and have fun again. We moved on.’