Pier pressure, p.1
Pier Pressure, page 1
Pier Pressure
A Love Bach Story
Anyta Sunday
Contents
Newsletter
Pier Pressure
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Epilogue
Leo Loves Aries - Chapter 1
About the author
Other books by Anyta Sunday
First published in 2022 by Anyta Sunday
4D Palm Grove, Berhampore, Wellington 6023, New Zealand
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An Anyta Sunday publication
www.anytasunday.com
Copyright 2022 Anyta Sunday
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Cover Design by Natasha Snow
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Content Edit, Line Edit & Proofread by Lynda Lamb @ Refinery
www.refineryedits.com
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All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced without prior permission of the copyright owner of this book.
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All the characters in this book are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
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This book contains explicit sexual content.
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“Signs of Love: Winter”.
Pier Pressure
Plenty of fish in the sea.
But what if there is no “plenty”? What if Leon Finn is a lone fish? A lone fish in a glass bowl swimming in hopeful but ultimately lonely circles forever?
Dumped and forced to retreat to his tiny-town seaside bach, it’s time for Leon to cast some lines, and quick! Prove to everyone—(*cough*) ex, mother, other ex who he’s now accidentally living with—that he’s a catch.
Only no one is biting.
It sucks, but it’s solvable.
With his trusty sewing machine and endless stash of fabric he’ll make himself into the ultimate suitor. Stitch this right up.
But as a certain someone keeps whispering in his ear, is this the right way?
For CC Belle for being an awesome PA and fabulous inspiration.
The original ‘bach’ (pronounced batch), aka the ‘haphazard holiday home’:
Small place of abode traditionally thrown together with corrugated iron and recycled timber, painted for personality. Found in the most beautiful nooks of New Zealand.
Chapter One
I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s an Italian leather loafer, teetering on the top shelf of my walk-in closet right above the ruins of a collapsed step stool. Over which I’m currently sprawled.
I pluck up the left shoe, which had tumbled down with me. Great start to the evening, Leon.
The door from my sewing room rumbles on its sliders, and Karl strides into the closet with his usual self-assurance. He spots me on the floor and blinks, like he’s not surprised to find me sitting on a pile of wooden . . . stakes. In fact, I don’t think he’d be surprised if I were stabbing said stakes into my sewing mannequins. Or if the mannequins came to life and started stabbing me.
I pick myself up and dust off my suit pants, tailored to fit—something I worked on that afternoon. Something I hope he notices. Something I hope he rips off me to break our six-month dry spell.
His gaze sweeps down my neat navy suit. “You do wear clothes other than pyjamas.”
“La Grande won’t let me in otherwise.” I glance up rows of slippers to the shoe playing see-saw. Just. Out. Of. Reach. I smile hopefully at Karl. He is, after all, the size of a steroid-addicted librarian.
He doesn’t move. “I cancelled our reservation.”
My stomach lurches as I jump for the shoe and miss. “Better plans for our third year anniversary?”
“Actually it’s been three years and six days.”
We have the same silly disagreement every year. He likes to count from when we unpacked our boxes. I like to count from the day we first had sex, which was a week after he moved in, a month after he sold me the three-million-dollar villa, and a year after I won the lottery.
I ignore the weird jumps in my belly and smile.
“You’re adorably sentimental about when we moved in together.” Always has been. He took about a trillion pictures of us in this house on moving day, and about a trillion more since.
Karl moves to one of my naked mannequins and rests an arm on its shoulder. “We should break up.”
My stomach is meant to fall. Whoosh, out my feet and all that. I kinda hate that it doesn’t. That I’m not surprised. But there have been signs.
Like our stagnant sex life.
Karl rubs his mouth like this is difficult for him. I can practically guess what he’s going to say. It’s not you, it’s me.
“It’s not me, it’s you.”
Wait, what?
“I debated whether to be honest with you, and decided it’s only fair. Awareness is the first step towards change.”
I blink and blink some more. “What are you talking about? The first step to change what?”
“The second step will be much harder work, of course. But I have every faith you’ll try.” He grimaces sympathetically.
There goes my stomach. “What do I need to change?”
Karl steps into the wreckage and pats my shoulder. “Good on you for being so eager.”
Eager? This is not eager, it’s horrified. Can’t he tell the difference?
I ball shaky hands in his five-hundred dollar shirt. A shirt I could’ve made in an evening for forty bucks, but I’m not a brand, so he told me not to bother.
“I really don’t want to be the guy who says mean things while breaking up with you . . .”
Why not pluck up one of these stakes and drive it into my heart? “But?”
“Actually, how about asking our friends? Any one of them.”
They all think something’s wrong with me? “Our friends—”
“Technically I suppose they’re my friends.”
I loosen my hold on him, laughing over the sting of a thousand needles to the chest. “What’s their consensus?”
“You know.”
I make a nebulous gesture for him to please, continue this plundering of my self-esteem.
“You change into pyjamas the second you come home. You never go out. You don’t even watch telly. Or listen to music! You’re only ever bowed over your ridiculously pink sewing machine. Or reading books in the bathroom.” Karl moves to the corner cupboard and pulls out two suitcases.
Boring. That’s what he means.
“I-I go to parties.”
“When I drag you there. You don’t say much. Just sit in the corner drooling over your kindle app.”
“I don’t like talking to people I don’t know.”
“You don’t like talking to people you do know.”
I grab a suitcase, dump it atop the carnage that was once my step stool, and start unzipping. “Let me help you pack.”
Karl grabs a stack of my neatly folded pyjamas.
I frown. He has a screw loose if he’s mistaken my collection of one-of-a-kind flannel pyjamas for his own. “What are you doing?”
He sets them inside the suitcase, gazing at me like I’m an idiot. “We’ve been together three years.”
“And one week,” I grind out.
“Exactly! In the eyes of New Zealand law, that makes this place half mine.”
I clutch a shelf behind me. He’s right. The house—everything—will be considered relationship property now. I should have signed an agreement with him that my property would remain mine. What was I thinking?
That he loved you. That you trusted one another.
Adorably sentimental my sex-deprived arse.
I laugh. At this point it’s that or cry, so. “Should I get some chalk for dividing rooms or are you already carrying?”
“I spoke to my lawyer last week. We have two options.”
Last week? He slept beside me every night since, and . . . what? Dreamed of this moment?
He initially wanted to discuss this at La Grande?
I spent all day designing a break-up suit?
“The first option,” he says, ticking off his fingers, “we sell all our combined assets, pool our property, and split the money—”
“Combined?”
“I came into the relationship with a new car.”
“And I, millions, and a villa.”
“Don’t forget the bach. It might be dilapidated, but the land is worth just as much as this place.”
I hiss in a breath. That bach belongs to family. Family and friends. And friends of friends. It’s for anyone to use over summers, weekend holidays. A place to gather for births, deaths, and marriages. It’s my childhood. My adolescence.
I haven’t been back there in years.
Thoughts of why that is try to sneak to the forefront of my mind but I cast him aside and focus on the problem: just la st year, I bought the bach off my great aunt so she could age with sufficient funds. That bach has papers in my name. Bought while Karl and I were officially together, from our combined account. With Karl’s enthusiastic consent.
That bach is relationship property. He has a right to half the value.
But . . .
It’s also a place I need to protect.
“What’s the second option?” I croak.
Karl whips open the other suitcase, jostling the shelves, and a hard leather loafer falls onto my head, smacks my nose, and drops onto my cat-themed pyjamas.
The other shoe has dropped.
Karl agrees not to go after everything he’s legally entitled to, as long as he gets the villa. That leaves me the bach, and whatever I have left in the bank. Lawyers will soon make our agreement official.
I take my sewing machine, suitcases, and mannequins, and hit the road. I’m eager to put space between Karl and me, and my foot is pedal happy. At least it is until I draw close to my destination and start encouraging grannies to overtake me.
It’s just . . . it’s been three years.
More specifically, it’s been three years since I last ran into local pride Damon Conroy.
God damn beautiful Damon Conroy. There are just some men who go about their lives unaware they’re ruining romance for an entire generation. No normal bloke can live up to that level of divinity—and sexual prowess.
Every year Damon and I splashed about in the same waters under the same blazing sun. Every year we waited in the same line for the ice-cream truck. Every year we attended the same Christmas church services, but we never looked twice at one another as kids. We looked twice later. After I stopped coming with family and started coming up alone. After he stopped coming with family and decided to move there. Kōpuha Bay.
Population three hundred, swelling to five in summer; one small Four Square supermarket; one old tea rooms & bakery; a library, quirkily clad in corrugated iron; and a petrol station. Weatherboard houses nestle around the main streets and disperse into grand holiday homes—and ramshackle baches—along curving stretches of beach. Friendly people. Glorious views.
Including Damon.
I was nineteen when I looked twice. He was twenty-two. I recall it vividly: a mighty wave pushing me under, the swirling pull of a vicious current, the sudden certainty I was going to drown. And then, a firm arm locking around my chest and heaving me back to the living.
My back hit the sand, I hauled in air, and he—a dark-haired Adonis—frowned down at me. Yes. Yes, you can do CPR on me, I’d thought.
That is, I thought I’d thought it. But these moments of surging adrenalin cleaved through my sanity. I was cupping that square jaw, staring into dazzling hazel eyes, and coughing all over him. You’re literally taking my breath away.
Which of course meant that when I regained my sanity, I spent the next two summers avoiding him. A hard task. He was everywhere. He’d taken over management of the tea rooms, hosted bingo evenings for the elderly, and spent the weekends volunteering as a life guard. He was everywhere, and then the next year, he was everywhere.
He came to the summer book club I’d set up. The first week, he smiled. The second week, he asked how intimately I knew the town. The third week, after a discussion on how best to organise so many books, he asked to see my holiday reads collection.
Five titles into my shelf and he’d smirked his way into my boxers. And there, on the single bed I’d slept in every summer since I was six, with a view onto the sand-swamped veranda and the ocean beyond, I lost my virginity. And how thoroughly I lost it. He moved inside me like soft waves against a calm dawn beach. He moved with a roar like surf, breaking into sweat. He moved like the waves against the cliffs of Kapiti Island. A pounding that erupted into the most overwhelming orgasm of my life.
Two days later, I drummed up the courage to ask if he, you know, maybe, like, wanted to come to book club again? His yes was swift and I was humming tunes I didn’t know the lyrics to. Until I overheard him and his mates at the Four Square. I hovered in the bread aisle, clutching a box of condoms and peeking through the gaps between the shelves like the manly man I am.
“Damon, spill. Are you and that guy . . .?”
“Leon?”
“Are there other book club guys you’ve slept with?”
“He’s pretty cute. Those curls are, damn—”
Score! I pumped my fist, the one with the condoms, and they burst out of the box. It was raining latex over me and a bewildered teenage shop assistant.
“—but it’s a summer thing at most.”
“Distance too tough?”
“Discussions too tough. I said I love Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World”, and he said he once wanted to be an astronaut.”
They laughed.
I did a quick Google search.
They were still laughing.
I collected the condoms, put the box back on the shelf, and cancelled book club.
I was twenty-three the last time I saw him, about five short days before I bought a winning lotto ticket and drove away. I’d successfully avoided him most of the summer. And then there he was, in the beach showers, water cascading down corded muscle and the dick that had briefly sent me to the stars. He glanced over and had the audacity to beckon me with a devilish grin.
I grabbed his wet togs, his dry clothes, and his towel from the bench, and with a heel-clapping salute, marched out of there.
It’s good to know I’m capable of decent passive aggression.
A car honks and honks and honks at me to go faster. I pull onto the side of the road and wave apologetically as they roar past.
Kōpuha Bay off-season is different. Quiet, for one. Especially windy for another. Gusts tunnel through semi-deserted streets, and a bank of clumpy tussock looks like a thousand bad hairpieces about to go flying. It’s not quite nine, and the sky is an oppressive weight of black, but it’s not as dark as the ocean. At least it has some sparkles in it.
The Four Square is the only shop with the lights still on. I zip into a parking spot—bread, muesli, oat milk. Something to keep me going until I manage a proper food run. Six aisles of overpriced food are waiting for me inside. Fortunately, thanks to holidayers, there are plenty of dietary requirement alternatives. Unfortunately, no oat milk where it’s usually shelved.
No problem, they’ll have some out back.
I head to the counter. The cashier is a blond-haired dude bobbing his head to the beat coming out of his mega-blue headphones. He’s decorated his apron with price tags, and when I see him, I’m reminded of a rainstorm of condoms in the bread aisle.
Hopefully he doesn’t have such a keen recollection of me.
He glances my way and . . . nothing.
Wait—not memorable in the slightest?
To my dismay, he just keeps bobbing his head, ‘yessing’ my fretful internalised questions. Never mind. He was young, and my hair was curlier then. That probably, hopefully, explained it. I wave the awkward universal “hey there, can I please have your attention?” like I got taught in school.
Dazed blue eyes blink again.
“There’s no oat milk on the shelf.”
“What?”
I say it again.
He still doesn’t get it.
Instead of taking his headphones off, he cups his ear for me to speak louder. I raise my voice, aware I’m not the only person in the store.
“There’s no oat milk on the shelf.”
“Milk?”
“Oat milk.”
“What?”
“Oat. Milk made from oats. Oaty milk.”
He nods his head and raises a hand. Just a sec.
