Title: Where We
Belong
Author: Eve Connell
Release Date: February 19, 2015
Synopsis
One
man diving into the
past.
One woman emerging
from the depths.
At the age of seventeen,
Amelia Baide won silver at the Olympic Games and was
the second-fastest woman in
the pool. Then one tragic night she crashed into a
lake and was dragged out
without a pulse. Now twenty-four, she is still haunted
by it and hasn’t swum again.
Until this year’s anniversary of the accident. It
is a day unlike any other and
a strange turn of events finds Amelia back at a
swimming pool.
Harry Jamieson had eyes for
one girl, while women and the media had eyes for
him. As a trainer of Olympic
athletes, he was an in-demand man. Until one boozy
morning after … But from bad
luck to pure chance he runs into his old flame,
Amelia, at a swimming pool no
less. She doesn’t remember a thing from the night
of the crash.
And Harry knows every single
secret.
The pair joins forces—a
comeback for Amelia and Harry’s ultimate coaching
opportunity. But dodging waves
is hard to do; and even the strongest swimmer
may sink.
Where We Belong is a
second-chance love story for young and
old, for swimming enthusiasts
and romantics at heart.
Chapter
1
Amelia
We had the fight
moments after I slipped the
robe off my shoulders into a pool around my feet. I had one foot on the shower
base, one on the
plush rectangular
mat.
At that moment, my
fiancé, Kristopher, knocked
from the other side of the bathroom door, which I’d
already locked for
privacy.
He had this
tendency often. The first word
he would speak to me all day? As I stepped into
the shower. Was it okay if he
went out with his friends instead of the dinner
reservation? As I stepped into
the shower. His
solution to cancer? As I stepped
into the shower.
Clenching my jaw, I
awaited the
question.
“Aftershave,
Amelia?” he
asked.
I sighed. “You
should have gotten it when I
told you I needed to shower. Or while I collected
my creams and lotions and make-up.
Or while I sniffed around for a clean towel
in your stash in the
corner.”
The soap—as we both
knew—was irrelevant in this
argument. For a fleeting moment, I wondered if we
stayed together out of
laziness. And maybe we did. Because I hated many
characteristics about my
fiancé. Especially his ignorance of this
anniversary.
It was September
twenty-ninth.
This year I called
my boss’s mobile at the crack
of dawn to fake a sick day, playing up my groggy
tone as a terrible sore throat
in addition to a nauseous tummy. She told me to
get well, and I swallowed the
news with a lump in my throat, guilty for lying. I was an assistant for a
medium-sized advertising
business and handled paperwork, invoicing and calls
all day long—it wasn’t like my
absence would be of consequence to day-to-day
activities. I’d pick it up
tomorrow.
Last year
Kristopher
and I made dates apart with our
respective best friends, and I’d spent it
eating all the ice cream along
a strip of shops down the coast. I’d thrown up
once and then kept on going.
Jaffa flavour, I remember.
I’d licked and
slurped the drips down the
paper cup, and only thought twice of the
anniversary. Once on the drive
down to the beach, and then once as I’d clutched
the sides of a rusty public
bin and spewed my guts up to the backdrop of
disgusted gasps from
passers-by.
I don’t know what
Kristopher did that day, but
he came back when the night sky was a deep
sapphire blue, whisky on his
breath as he climbed in bed behind me.
The year before I
took a day off from work and
spent $600 buying cocktail dresses I would never
have occasion to wear. The next
day I
donated them to
charity.
Six years ago
today, I died. Hence, it was
the one time
of the year we didn’t forget
the date. Unlike some years when we had to shop
for Christmas gifts at two
am on
the
twenty-fourth.
I stared down the
white door of the bathroom,
one foot tingling with the sharp cold of the shower
base, hand clutching the knob.
I stepped back onto the tiles, accepting
defeat.
“Come on, Amelia,”
he said in a low tone. “Just
one Goddamn bottle of aftershave. That’s all I
need.”
“No. Just wait till
I’m
done.”
“Babe.”
“Amelia,” I
said.
“Amelia,
please,” he said, voice breaking. “I
haven’t showered and I stink.
I just need a few fucking sprays, and I’ll be out
of your way all
day.”
I gritted my teeth
and hobbled from toe to toe,
the cold seeping up my legs. If we kept going on
like this staying out of each
other’s way was pointless. We knew how to nip at
each other’s sensitive spots
in a way learned from several years of being
together. I saw the
forthcoming crash, clenched my eyes shut against the pain.
My shoulders heaved, bracing
for impact.
Was this what
happened to me just before my
crash?
Was
there a moment of wide-eyed
fear as my corded, muscled arms grabbed the wheel
at the proper ten and two
positions, and I flew through the air, reduced to a
thin, crushed and crumpled
body at the bottom of the lake?
Hot tears grew
heavy behind my eyelids as
something inside me snapped. I shut the gate to the
horrific visions.
It was too late to
shower.
Kristopher banged
his fist on the door, the
boom
echoing. I
bent and hurried on my new
clothes folded on the
counter.
“Come on. This is
beyond a joke. It will take
you a few seconds to pass it.” The door rattled,
the handle jerking, but I’d
locked the door already.
“Amelia.”
I slipped my arms
into the cardigan and threw
open the
door, despite the bags under
my eyes and the chill settling over my chest
because of the unbuttoned
front.
I said, “Have it
all,” pushing the aftershave
bottle into his chest, then rushed past
him.
And I didn’t look
back.
Chapter
2
Harry
I woke to star-
and heart-shaped
glow-in-the-dark
stickers radiating in neon
green from the
ceiling. A ceiling I’d never
seen before in my life—typically, I wasn’t the
sort of man to befriend the
fancy sticker type of person.
It was pre-dawn,
barely so, the sun a tiny orb
just under the horizon through the crack in the
curtains.
My world swayed as
I tilted my head. I held my
ears in my palms, and my fingers weaved through the
messy state of my bed hair.
Under the purple sheets, my stomach churned, and
farther down, morning glory
unstuck from the
aforementioned undelightful
purple
sheets. I crawled out of the
bed.
What the
fuck was this? I thought. And where the fuck was I?
I remembered
flashes from the previous
night. A club, a slime party, and breathy kisses with
the girl who lay splayed under
these purple sheets beneath her stars and hearts
glow-in-the-dark
ceiling.
Viol … Vick … no,
it was Vivienne. No, wait, Vivienna.
I smiled, proud of
my achievement. But that
dropped into a wobbly set of lips. My stomach churned
again. I lurched into the
attached bathroom and retched, wiping myself clean
with
water.
Even
though I was
ninety-nine-point-nine per cent certain I fucked Vicky (or
Vivienna), I shivered at the
thought of sharing her toothbrush, so I used the
handy finger-stick in lieu and
then the mouthwash beside the basin.
Feeling somewhat
refreshed, I let out a deep
breath and looked around the bathroom, not much of
a better sight than the
bedroom. The towels were white and pale purple, the
soap purple, and more stickers
dotted along the corners of the mirror above the
basin.
I stared at my
reflection,
disgusted.
My hair Mohawked,
askew
to one side, a chunk plastered
across my forehead in a teenage boy-crush style.
I fussed it around with my
hands. It looked as if I just had sex, which was
better than it had moments
prior.
I stepped back into
her bedroom, peering amongst
the sheets and all her hair. I sighed upon seeing
her, confirming one thing. She
had the youthful expression of someone I hoped
was legal. I was twenty-eight,
she perhaps twenty or twenty-one. I hoped.
Since she was still
asleep, I returned to the
bathroom and looked around for supplies to make
myself appear more human. But
I caught my reflection in the mirror and stalled.
My tan skin and dark hair
vividly contrasted against my steel-blue eyes. Most
noticeably, a bloodshot glare,
lined with
purple bags, rolled lazily at
the reflection.
I didn’t suspect my
pick-up techniques from last
night would have worked if I’d looked like
this.
Just twelve or so
hours
ago, one look at Vivienna and
she was
under my arm, my lips near her
ear telling her things she wanted to
hear.
I
wished I’d had the foresight
to stop drinking and pick up her nuisances: the
squeals I thought made her
sound cute, the frilly neckline of her dress more
girly than sweet, and the
bright purple shoes. The poor woman had a young girl trapped inside her
body.
I looked through
the doorway and whispered,
“You’re a little crazy, Purple Vivienna.”
I never should
have—
Stop, Harry. I told
myself. Find some deodorant, get some clothes on, and get out of
here.
So I did just that.
Then I walked out of her
bedroom without a note or text. I didn’t have her
number, plus she didn’t care
for me.
The others didn’t,
either. They
thought they cared.
But they wanted the
thrill of a night with
the Harry Jamieson.
A
night of passion and drinking
with the idea of
love.
One of us had to
have our heads screwed on.
With
mine teetering on the right
side of sanity, I dashed out and found my car
parked by the kerb outside her
house, hoping she’d been sober enough by the end
of the night to drive it. I
knew
with absolute certainty I
wouldn’t have gotten behind the wheel.
I didn’t drive
after drinking. Not
anymore.
I
travelled home, which took an
hour—a long way for pussy, even by my
standards—and did the whole
routine: shower, force down some hangover-cure
food, spend the rest of the
day watching TV like a zombie. Late afternoon, I got onto all my emails,
responding to meetings,
questions and other ad hoc business, then prepared some
training sessions for my
swimmers.
When I woke the
next morning, I stumbled
drowsily onto my front lawn in just a pair of sleeping
pants and retrieved the
delivered roll of newspaper. My neighbour, having
noticed my exit, darted her
eyes away and scurried inside her house.
I never claimed to
be a sight for sore eyes in
the morning. But what the hell was that
about?
Five minutes later, as I
tipped a steaming cup of coffee to my lips, I saw the headline and
cursed, spraying coffee all
over my granite countertop.
Author
Bio
Writer, kid-at-heart, awesome partner, graphic
design dabbler, book
lover.
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