Lost & Found

Reeeeally love this part of the book:

He descended the plane steps, forward to seeing Gina. Trying not to look exhausted. Trying to look as if he was eager for this visit to begin.

Gina wasn’t in the small bunch of waiting people. Instead... His heart sank. Georgie. Georgie Turner.

He’d hoped she’d left town by now. What Gina saw in this...tramp, he didn’t know.

‘Hey, Alistair.’ She waved and yelled as he crossed the tarmac.

She was chewing gum. She was wearing tight leather pants and bright red stilettos. She had on a really tight top – so tight it was almost indecent. She was all in black. The only colour about her was the slash of crimson on her lips, her outrageous shoes and two spots of colour on her cheeks.

‘How’s it going, Al?’ she said, and chewed a bit more gum.

‘Fine,’ he said, trying to be polite and not quite succeeding. ‘Where’s Gina?’

‘See, she was expecting you yesterday. So today she and Cal are running a clinic out on Wallaby Island. The weather’s getting up so they thought they ought to go when they could.’

‘You couldn’t have taken her place?’

‘Hey, I deliver babies. Gina’s the heart lady. There’s not a lot of crossover. You got bags?’

‘One. Yes.’

She sniffed, in a way that said real men didn’t need baggage. She turned and headed for the baggage hall, her very cute butt wiggling as he walked behind her.

It was some butt.

Ok, that’s what he couldn’t allow himself to think. That was what had landed him into trouble in the first place. She was a tart. Somehow she’d gained a medical degree but, not matter, she was still a tart.

But even so, he shouldn’t have tried to pick her up.

Now they stood side by side at the luggage carousel, waiting for his bag. It took for ever. There were other doctors there from the plane.

‘There’s some other wedding happening here,’ he ventured for something to say, and Georgie nodded, looking at the baggage carousel as if it was she who’d recognise his bag.

‘Yep. One this Saturday, one next. Planned so those going to both needn’t make two trips. We were starting to think they’d be no guests for the first one.’

‘It’s some storm down south,’ he said reflectively. ‘That’s how I met these guys. The trip from New Zealand should have been cancelled. We hit an air pocket and dropped what felt like a thousand feet.’ Anyone who wasn’t belted in was injured.’

‘You got called on as a doctor?’

‘A bit. I was asleep at first.’

‘Off duty,’ she said blankly, and he winced. There was no criticism in her voice. It was a simple statement of fact, but she knew how to hurt. When he’d woken to discover the chaos he’d felt dreadful. He’d helped, but other doctors had been more proactive than him.

‘Look, I-’

‘It this your bag? It must be. Everyone else has theirs.’

‘It’s mine,’ he said, and she strode forward and lugged it off the conveyor belt before he could stop her. She set it up on its wheels and tugged the handle, then set it before him. Making him feel even more wimpish.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘My wheels are in the carpark.’

‘Your car?’

‘My wheels.’ She was striding through the terminal, talking to him over her shoulder. He was struggling to keep up.

He was feeling about six years old.

‘Hey, Georg.’ People were acknowledging her, waving to her, but she wasn’t stopping. She was wearing really high stilettos but still walking at a pace that made him hurry. She looked like something out of a biker magazine. A biker’s moll?

Not quite, for her hair was closely cropped and cute - almost classy. The gold hooped earrings actually looked great. She was just...different.

- 'THEIR LOST AND FOUND FAMILY' BY MARION LENNOX