Gravity

After Yallingup, I told myself I was done.

I meant it for three whole weeks.

Then the text came.

"Hey, when suits to grab the Ducati?"

Two words from me:

"What time?"

And just like that, the orbit restarted.

I was so tired. Exhausted in a way that even breathing felt like a mortgage I couldn't refinance. The kind of tired where your own good judgment starts to sound like someone else's voice — sensible, distant, irrelevant.

So when he wrote "Don't catch the train alone, I'll meet you after your work thing" — I said yes before I could think better of it.

He arrived in the car, not the train — classic Dion logic — and somehow one drink became Fremantle at midnight. The sea air. Amber streetlights. Playing darts in bare feet. We laughed like the past was a joke we were finally in on.

Rain soaked through the thin fabric of my satin dress. His hand found my waist like muscle memory. And then he kissed me under late night fairy lights that forgave everything.

For one evening I wasn't the woman with the black eye. I wasn't the daughter bracing for another hospital call. I wasn't the mother counting bills on the kitchen bench.

I was just alive.

The night unfurled the way Fremantle does — cobbled streets, stolen wine glasses, a hotel hallway mapped like a labyrinth. Somehow we ended up in a room where he lay on the bed, grabbed the complimentary notepad and said:

"Don't move."

He sketched me standing by the window, city lights haloing my silhouette. His lines were fast but careful, like he was trying to capture me before I disappeared.

Later I coloured it in. It became one of my favourite pieces — a relic from a night where two damaged people made something beautiful out of each other's fault-lines.

That evening, just before bed, he said it casually, like a fact he was simply reporting:

"If it happened again — Yallingup — I'd still kick you and the boys out. Most certainly."

It didn't sound like a threat.

But it landed like thunder.

I lay there in the dark, his breathing slowing beside me, and held that sentence up against the sketch on the notepad, the fairy lights, the way his hand had found my waist like it already knew the way.

I couldn't make them fit together.

I still can't.

In the morning we stumbled out barefoot, holding 7-Eleven pies, wondering how we'd ever find the car after walking so far the night before.

Then we looked up.

The car was ten metres away. Exactly where we'd started.

A perfect loop. Our signature shape.

We had wandered all night only to end up back where we began.

Maybe that was the point.

Gravity doesn't ask permission. It just pulls.

And God, I was so tired of being alone.