The Waitress

Full circle

SHE needed to write.

It was like a sickness, an ache. She hadn't written – really written – for weeks and it was gnawing at her soul. Eating her away from the inside.

But the floodgates were opening now.

She felt it.

It was three am in the morning, well before the dawn before the heat of a late spring morning and finally, something had shifted, shifted in her mind and soul.

She knew what had done it, knew exactly what it was.

Or in this case who.

He was still there, still sleeping beside her. He looked at peace now after the turmoil of before, he looked rather like an overgrown child long soft lashes hiding those Aegean blue eyes, the smattering of freckles illuminated by the subtle light in the after-midnight ambience of her coastal bedroom. His hair had been tousled by their recent activities. But in other ways he looked tired and older than his years, his hair wearing out a little in places and yet still somehow angelic and impossibly young. A contradiction. The ultimate in contradictions.

He looked switched off from the world now, after the heartbreak and self-realization of before, but she knew something would still be going on in that great big brain of his. He had as much chance of switching it off as she did. Even last night, even when they had been drinking and then fucking because it was fucking, hard and frantic filling a need, a need to feel needed, a need to feel...........something.

To connect.

For those moments they had been lost in the connection. But both had minds that were still whirring. Only orgasm and now sleep brought release, relief, but only for a short time. She knew that was the case for her and more than suspected it was the same for him.

But the pleasures of the flesh had helped. The primal need to feel him inside her, to throw her legs around him to encourage, harder faster, deeper until they both broke apart until they both started to feel again. Like an orgasmic jumper lead to their nerve-endings.

In her case it had unlocked her writers block and maybe it had helped him somehow. She hoped it had. He needed something, relief, connection, something.

Yes, she hoped it had helped.

This pity fuck.

She laughed at that.

At the absurdity of this situation.

One of the best- known actors in the world and a waitress at the café near where he was staying, where he had been staying on and off all year.

And she had given her body over to him to make him feel better, feel something.

He looked so amazing, so confident on screen.

But that was onscreen.

At the moment, he was a lost little boy.

Putting on a brave face for the world.

The ultimate, consummate performer in a role he didn't always look or feel comfortable in.

Even after what they'd done to each other, for each other she wasn't really sure if anything had changed for him. She looked over at Tom then, in the light of the laptop and the moon still peering through the white shutters of her bedroom. A tall man, he was curled in on himself. Not stretched out confidently as she'd have expected a man of his talent and height, but pushed inward by life.

He'd needed a friend last night, this whole weekend really, and she'd been that for him, been what he needed when he needed it.

Truth be told she'd been that most of the year.

Two stints living on the Gold Coast and he'd become a regular The Wave and not just for the food. A regular at the place where she studied people, where she had been trying to reconnect to life after years, a lifetime maybe, locked away in her own head, her own world.

He wasn't the only one who was an emotional mess, an emotional cripple, she knew that. She'd studied law, become a clone of the two people closest to her in her life. But Melody Taylor had an artist's soul. A soul crushed by the relentlessness, the sameness of the law and so when her father and grandfather had been lost to her, the little bit of that life that had made sense suddenly didn't. She had been the artistic cuckoo left in the nest of the analytical birds by a mother who had found her own escape. And now history was repeating but not exactly, not at all. She'd returned to university – English literature.

She should be earning thousands of dollars but instead, she was waitressing to make ends meet, though in reality – thanks to her investments, her fathers, her grandfathers, she really didn't need to. But for her soul, yes for her soul it was imperative.

And she was happy, well happier now.

She needed a simpler life, she needed words, craved them – reading them, ingesting, bringing them into her mind and then regurgitating and repurposing them. The writing course was probably not even the best idea – she had a natural talent. But waitressing – waitressing had been the real education. People watching with the added bonus that people paid her – both in money and leftovers. With a bonus that it had brought her what she had never had, not really. Not like this. It brought people to her life. People on her wavelength, people who understood her.

It had brought her Tom.

And even though he was a fucked-up mess. Even though she probably should have slapped him rather than slept with him. She got him. Understood his logic. Understood him in a scary cellular level that she really wasn't going to acknowledge or analyse too closely.

So on the surface, it had brought her Tom, her Blue Wave family and so many ideas for stories. Yes, so many stories crossed the threshold of that trendy restaurant in the new sector of Broadbeach. Tourists, holidaymakers escaping, real lives, real problems. Relaxing and chatting. So many stories, so much better than a stuffy lecture about other long-dead writers. The restaurant was alive with stories. She just needed to write them. To step off the edge and believe in herself. In that great big brain of hers.

She smiled to herself at that.

She'd said the same to him only a few hours ago.

He was broken.

Broken by something the world thought was a sham, by something that other people thought was still going. That he himself had probably thought was a summer fling. A nothing in a long line of nothing. But he had been more invested than he realized or maybe it had just been the catalyst to him really seeing himself, seeing what he had become and was becoming.

Yes, he'd called it off, let it reach its limit – his limit and yet now he was lost. Only work to keep him sane, to keep him grounded. And yet his work had caused it and fueled it. But he still loved it. Loved the purity of it, he'd had a wake-up call about the fame of it but he still loved it. Loved the work, needed the work.

Work and friends.

Friends like her.

The waitress.