A Quiet Place to Break

The car moved north along the Brooker Highway through the thin drizzle that was all that remained of the afternoon's rain. Karl Jenkins was at the wheel. Sarah Lahey was in the passenger seat. Neither of them had spoken since pulling out of the station carpark, and the silence between them was not uncomfortable but it was not empty either — it was the silence of two people sharing the same small enclosed space after the kiss that had happened in it, neither of them yet knowing how to begin speaking again.

Karl's hands were on the wheel and his foot was on the accelerator and the car was going in the right direction, and that was as much attention as his conscious mind was currently capable of mustering for the task of driving. The rest of him was occupied elsewhere. The silver-haired woman from the cubicle kept surfacing against his will. Gladys Cramer pouring shiraz at the Berriedale house the afternoon before. Sarah walking into the trees at Myrtle Forest without looking back to see whether he was following. Charlie Claiborne's pen moving across paper without stopping. The grab on his partner's arm that he could still feel in his fingers. None of these things were present in the car, and all of them were in the car, and after a while he stopped trying to make the distinction stick.

Sarah was watching the city lights slide past the passenger window. The kiss in the station carpark was still in her mouth — she could taste coffee and rain and the small startled warmth of a thing she had not expected and had not, in the end, refused. Her right palm throbbed inside the bandage. Her head throbbed in a slower, deeper rhythm from the concussion she had not reported. She was aware of both and had been aware of both for hours, and the awareness had taken its place in the background of the day like weather she could do nothing about. What she was aware of in the foreground was the man in the driver's seat beside her, who had been drifting slowly out of himself since the forest, and whose hands on the wheel were no longer entirely reliable.

She saw the drift before he felt it.

The car crossed the centre line of the Brooker Highway into the path of a pair of oncoming headlights that had no business being where they suddenly were. Her hand shot out to brace against the dashboard and her voice cut through whatever Karl had been occupying instead of his own head — his name, sharp, and a profanity. He yanked the wheel hard to the left without thought. The tyres screamed on wet asphalt before they caught, and the oncoming car passed within inches of his driver-side mirror with its horn howling into the wet air behind them.

Neither of them said anything for a long moment afterwards. Karl's hands on the wheel had started to shake in a fine persistent tremor he could not stop. Sarah's hand was still splayed against the dashboard. She did not take it down for several seconds, and when she did, she did not look at him.

He took an exit that he did not remember deciding to take.

The Derwent Entertainment Centre sat at the northern edge of Glenorchy in the way that buildings of its kind sit at the edges of cities — too large for the suburb that contained it, empty on most weeknights. No events were scheduled. Karl had known this without deciding to know it, the way a man who has walked a city for twenty years knows the small mechanical facts of which places will and will not have people in them. The carpark was vast and half-flooded and empty of every vehicle except his own. He drove into the far corner of it, as far from the security lamps and the loading docks as the geometry of the place permitted, and killed the engine. The mechanical silence that replaced it was absolute.

Sarah did not ask where they were going. She had watched him take the exit and had watched him navigate the empty lanes of the carpark and had not said a single word, because she had understood by then that the question was not one Karl could answer, and because somewhere in the last hundred metres she had stopped needing him to answer it.

The cabin began to fog with the heat of two bodies sitting still in a cold enclosed space. Karl's breathing was shallow and quick. Sarah's was steadier but not by much. The pressure that had been building in him since Myrtle Forest and the pressure that had been building in her since the break room that morning were, for the first time all day, occupying the same small cabin at the same time, and there was nowhere else for either of them to put it down.

He turned and leaned across the console to kiss her.

The seatbelt caught him. It jammed hard against his chest halfway through the motion, locking with mechanical finality against a small swift movement it had registered as a collision. He tried to pull against it. The more he pulled, the tighter it held. He felt the pressure across his ribs and the small absurd indignity of being stopped mid-lean by a piece of safety equipment that had decided, with more judgement than he currently possessed, that he needed to be held in place. He slumped back against the seat. His breath came out in a short hard sound that was not quite a laugh.

Then the tear came.

It rose without his permission and rolled down his cold cheek in a thin warm line. He could not wipe it away, because his hands were shaking and because he could not bear to take his eyes off Sarah's face for the second it would take to lift one.

Sarah saw it.

What she felt in that moment was not pity and not alarm and not the small controlled tenderness she had been rationing toward him all day. It was something older and more dangerous. She had seen Karl Jenkins composed and Karl Jenkins furious and Karl Jenkins violent, and she had not, until this moment, seen him break. The version of him currently trapped in his own seatbelt with a tear on his cheek was not a version she had been prepared for. It was also, she understood with the small dispassionate clarity she had been carrying since the morning's incident report, the first honest thing he had shown her in twenty-four hours.

She did not look away. She did not reach to wipe the tear for him. She unbuckled her own seatbelt instead, and she placed her hand flat against the centre of his chest, and she pushed him back harder against the seat than he had expected. The jammed belt responded by tightening further. He was held fast. He was not going anywhere. And the thing he had been carrying all day in his shoulders and his jaw and his driving hand had been set down, and the place he had set it down was the passenger side of his own car, under the hand of a woman who had not flinched when he cried.

She leaned across the console and kissed him.

The seatbelt released under her hand and Karl was free of it, and the console between them became an obstacle she climbed over rather than around, and his seat slid back under the combined weight of them with a hard mechanical thud that rocked the cabin on its suspension. The windows fogged. The handbrake dug into his ribs and he did not care. Her mouth was on his and then on his throat and then on his mouth again. Her hands were in his hair. His hands were at her waist and then under her shirt and then at the small of her back, and the small urgent sounds she made against his mouth were not words, and the sound he made when she sank down onto him was his own and not his own, and the cabin was too hot and too small and too dark and exactly the size it needed to be.

It did not last long. Neither of them had anything left for it to last. When it broke over him it broke over her a heartbeat later, and both of them went still against each other with their breath coming hard and their hands still where their hands had been, and the only sound in the cabin was the sound of two people who had just crossed a line neither of them had known was there until they were already on the other side of it.

Karl's face was pressed into the side of her neck. Sarah's cheek was against his temple. Neither of them moved.

Neither of them spoke.