The door thudded again in a manly, open-me-now way.
Hannah looked at Kylie.
Kylie looked at her.
Then they turned to stare at the spuds, the mess of plates, the wine bottle and tissues and donuts littering the floor and coffee table.
‘It must be Tom!’ Hannah said. ‘OMG!’
‘There’s wine left,’ said Kylie. ‘And potato. Let’s focus on the positives, Hannah. And don’t rush things! Listen to me on this, I am an expert on how to doom relationships from the get-go.’
Okay. She’d passed tipsy about half an hour ago, and dinner wasn’t salvageable, and she might have just spent the last hour and a half having an existential crisis, but okay. ‘I’ll get the door,’ she said. ‘What will I say?’
‘Um, crikey. I’m out of ideas, sorry.’
‘Gee, thanks. Be a pal and pretend the tissues are yours,’ she said, as she swung open the door.
Tom stood there, his jaw a mess of stubble, dark shadows under his eyes, a furrow down his brow deeper than a knife cut. If she’d been sober, he may have looked worse, but tipsy, he was giving off rugged broody man-vibes that had her blood pressure sliding up into the two hundreds.
‘Oh, hi,’ she said, trying for casual surprise. She leant up on the doorjamb and only slightly misjudged its location.
‘It’s late. I wanted to see you.’ There was nothing casual in his tone whatsoever and she got goosebumps hearing it.
Kylie was right. She was a hundred per cent out of her depth.
CHAPTER
23
Statistics from the 2021 study inform us that the semen quality of men with spinal cord injury (SCI) is poor. Further, the cohort in the age range 30–40 rank sexual dysfunction as a greater stressor than leg dysfunction.
‘We’ll be clear to go through in a few minutes, mate.’
Tom looked over the top of the medical journal he’d picked up from the Cooma Hospital and Health Services waiting room.
‘Sorry for the wait; it can get a bit crazy here on a Friday arvo.’ The nurse at the counter had that blokey, sun-creased look that made Tom wonder if he spent his weekends umpiring his kids’ footie games. Six kids, maybe. He and his wife drove a van with stickers of kids marching across the back window, they bought jumbo boxes of cereal daily, and his wife saved her frilly underwear for date night once a month when the teenager next door came over to babysit.
Sounded like heaven.
Sounded like the sort of outlandish scenario he’d been torturing himself with for weeks, ever since the love of his life suggested he’d like to be a sperm donor. With no frills at all. Certainly no umpiring and no date nights.
‘No rush.’ Tom waggled the journal in his hand. He could read about sexual dysfunction all day. Not.
He flipped his phone over to check the time and told himself not to read Hannah’s text message again.
Too late. Perhaps that steel shard had messed up the nerve endings that controlled his fingers as well as his legs.Dinner? Friday? My place at 7pm? #olivebranch
It’d be dark by the time he got out of the hospital. Find his car, hit the highway, punch out some Teskey Brothers on the stereo … he’d be cruising through Hanrahan right about dinner time. He could go and see for himself if Hannah had gotten over the fiasco at Lake George. Find out what exactly had led her to ghost him for the month since. He’d sure like another image of her to replace the one where she shuffled into her apartment all white-faced and puffy-eyed from crying and shut the door in his face.
‘Don’t be weak,’ he said to himself.
‘What’s that, mate?’ said the nurse.
‘Sorry. Talking to myself.’ He flipped the page and read on. As patient reading material went, it was singularly lacking in sugar-coating.
The study broke its focus into three parts: or the three E’s of SCI, as the cohort described them. Erectile dysfunction, ejaculatory failure, and “egg drive”, the latter a term coined by respondents to refer to motility. The issue of reduced fertility is causally linked to motility, as both curvilinear and straight line swimming speed are less than those recorded in non-SCI test subject—
‘Here we go.’ Dr Novak had appeared through two swing doors and was looking expectantly at Tom. ‘You ready? A forklift driver had a head injury and we lost our spot in the queue. Come on, let’s get in there before the Friday night dramas start walking in. The radiologist will be injecting contrast dye into the area around your spine, like last time, and it’ll be ten or fifteen minutes in the tube.’
