Free Our Kind of Love by Victoria Purman Page A

to one of those good times he could look back on when he was old and grey, when his best friend was a walking frame and he might be lucky to have all his own teeth. Remember that time at the wedding down at the beach , he’d ask himself? When you were still moderately handsome and you met that Italian woman? What was her name?
    Anna.
    Joe knew he’d never forget her. He’d growled her name when he was inside her, whispered it in her ear after he’d come.
    ‘C’mon, Anna.’
    ‘I meant what I said, Joe. What happens in Middle Point has to stay in Middle Point. Got it?’
    He lifted a clenched fist to knock again but hesitated. He got it. She’s trying to give you the kiss off. She’s married, you dumb schmuck . Joe turned to leave but his mind whirred with questions. He’d made a career out of reading between the lines of what people said and he couldn’t help but wonder why, if Anna was married, she kept turning up to Middle Point all alone?
    As he walked out the front door into the bright sunshine and the sea breeze, Joe realised there was another question he couldn’t answer.
    Why did he care so much?

CHAPTER
11
    In the half hour since he’d left Anna barricaded behind the bedroom door at Dan’s place, Joe had thrown down a hasty coffee at The Market and then headed out into the water with his surfboard. He needed to get her out of his head and he knew that the ocean was the best place to do it.
    Looking back on Middle Point from one hundred metres out, past the swell of the water in front of him and the white foam caps, the sand and the cliffs, Joe had a light-bulb moment. He’d been too long out of the ocean. He’d lived a lot of life since the last time he’d been a regular out on the water in his hometown. And to him, home didn’t necessarily mean the place he’d grown up in. Or his family, most of them gone. It didn’t mean schoolmates or the first time he’d driven a car or got laid. He hadn’t felt settled anywhere since he’d left, almost two decades ago.
    Except for one place. This ocean. Where the water was all around him for what felt like a million miles and the rhythmic swells from the south carried him, propelled him along and gave him a feeling he’d never been able to find anywhere else. This place had been his playground. He’d practically grown up out here, past the rocks of Middle Point and the swell of the Southern Ocean. Out here, with breaks left and right, and the southern swell sweeping in to the long wide beach. And even when the waves didn’t come, you could just sit on your board and look to your left along the coastline to Victor Harbor and to your left, to the east, was the sand as far as it disappeared into the sea mist and the horizon.
    This had been home, before ambition had overwhelmed him and he’d caught a bus to Sydney to escape his small town for a career in the biggest and most competitive news market in the country. He’d surfed when he first moved to the east coast, but he’d soon replaced his passion with his ambition. It wasn’t long before journalism had replaced the waves for the sheer buzz of an adrenaline rush. Soon he was on the Sydney fast track, where weekends were spent schmoozing not surfing, but life was good. It was even better when he met Jasmine. Three months later, in a lust-filled, sex-fuelled rush, they were married and he was in heaven with a beautiful woman on his arm and his face in the newspaper every day. There was no longer anything small-town Middle Point about him – he’d made it. He’d willingly paid the price for his career and for being married to a woman like Jasmine, which had made him feel like an even bigger fool now that it was all over. The headline of their relationship may as well have been ‘North Shore Beauty Meets Small-town Hack’. If he was honest, and he could do that now because it was over and he’d spent more than enough time wallowing in his misery, he’d never believed he was good enough for her.