Afterlife of Alanna Miller

Part 10

TEN

"All passengers travelling on the Qantas flight to Perth, please proceed to Gate 21 for boarding."

The voice over the speakers jolted me out of my doze. The concert had been so brilliant I could barely sleep last night, and now I was paying for it, but I'm sure part of it was my excitement at finally going home.

Of course, I'd think of Nathan, given the phone call to his sister still preyed on my mind. s**t, hoe, whore...I should've told her that I'd never slept with her brother. Though I would have if we'd been together longer. I wondered if he'd changed much in the intervening time. It had been five years since I'd last seen him, after all. But if he was still pulling girls for one-night stands and his sister was fielding his calls, I suspected his body was still as chiselled as I remembered it. Who knew? Maybe more, given his tactical training and all. As for the mind within that buff body, I vacillated between the troubled, traumatised man I'd known and the well-adjusted, highly trained operative he'd probably become. Surely that training included how to deal with death, killing and witnessing all manner of horrible things. He could probably teach me a thing or two about coping with my fear of physical intimacy with anyone. Maybe he'd be willing to do that naked...

I shook my head in an attempt to dislodge the explicit thoughts and stared at the clouds massing in the skies over the tarmac. It was definitely autumn, with a storm brewing to remind us that winter wasn't far away. From Melbourne's mad weather to Sydney storms, I'd had enough of the east coast's weird weather. What would it be like not to have four seasons in the same day, like I'd had in Melbourne? Or storms that wreaked havoc on the whole city, like they did here in Sydney? Perth had always seemed to have the best weather.

How would Perth have changed in five years?

I tried not to think how much I'd changed in that time, but I knew I had. Would I want to be back home, despite the differences? Or would I be better off doing my internship on the east coast? I could have chosen somewhere on the Gold Coast, near the beach. Except they got cyclones and floods and...no.

I sat in my assigned window seat and buckled the seatbelt. It was time to go home.