Chapter 4

“Come on, you two, it’s time for food,” Barb yelled.

“Coming,” Ally hollered back. She gave Tom a quick kiss and bounded off the bed. Grabbing her clothes, she hurried through the door to the shower.

Tom was amused that she hadn’t shut the door. The fact that Victoria got flashed as he stood didn’t bother him at all. He stretched and then calmly walked around the bed to retrieve his jocks and slid them back on.

He caught sight of himself in the full-length mirror on the back of the partly open door and stood up straight to check himself out. He had no idea why his body now looked as if he was in peak condition, but he wasn’t going to complain.

Tom headed to the loo and then the bathroom for a quick shower. Ally even gave him a toothbrush and a disposable razor so he could shave. Barb came in while he was soaping up his face and placed a towel on the sink for him.

Tom had to chuckle as she checked him out through the clear glass of the shower door.

Dinner was well received.

With so many busses and tourists, they had set up a help-yourself salads bar for a small fee or a food donation. Barbequed beef in the styles of steaks, snags (sausages) and mince patties were also on offer. Other tables held desserts, and many of the tourists had eskies full of beer and soft drinks that they shared. It ended up one big party.

Someone stuffed a beer in Tom’s free hand, and he soon found a place to sit that was next to Victoria. She gave him a couple of odd looks as he happily filled his empty stomach from the plate of food he held. It was good tucker.

In Tom’s case, he was just enjoying the cooling desert air with its hint of wood smoke, and the ambience of being with people who loved the great outdoors as much as he did. The stress of the last few months of work leached out of his body.

Sated from eating his fill, he cleaned up his dinner mess, grabbed a coke from one of the open eskies and rejoined the girls at the low fire they were sitting near with ten other people. He noted that Barb and Ally were giggling and sending some odd looks his way.

To his surprise, Victoria said snarkily, “Happy now?”

“Yes,” he replied as he cracked the seal on the tin of coke and took a sip. “I love being here. I miss seeing the stars so bright in the sky without light pollution from the city. It is a fantastic place, and I’m so glad I get to see Uluru in all her glory. I can’t wait to see her in the morning at dawn. Have you girls walked the base yet?”

“No, we’re planning on doing it in the morning,” Victoria answered with a new frown.

“Great, we have to make sure we take plenty of water with us. We should go north-east from here, so we do the northern side first. Then come back via the direction we came this afternoon to reduce heat stress,” Tom informed the ladies.

“That makes sense to me,” Ally answered.

Barb then leered at Tom, “Are you sure you’re going to have the energy for such a long walk tomorrow?”

“Sure, as long as you let me get a couple of hours sleep,” he replied with a grin.

“We will all need to get some sleep,” Victoria said primly.

“Yes, Miss Vicky,” Ally and Barbara chanted together. They then giggled like little girls and rocked together and hugged each other, while managing not to spill the drinks they held.

Tom guessed that the girls were already half-plastered, so he wasn’t so worried about getting some sleep. If they kept going, they would pass out first. Not that it bothered him that much as he took sex when he could get it.

He didn’t spend a lot of time worrying over what he might have missed out on, as it used up too much energy and was totally pointless as far as he was concerned. You can’t change the past.

He leant back and looked up at the stars with a sigh of pleasure and wonder.

Victoria noted what Tom was drinking.

She also determined that he didn’t seem to be in any hurry to replace it with an alcoholic beverage. She wasn’t sure if it was, so he wasn’t too inebriated to still use the other girls later or not. He just didn’t seem to care one way or another.

She studied his face as he lifted it to the heavens to look at the stars. He was an enigma to her. He didn’t behave like a lot of other men she knew. He had made no move to harass any of them. She knew that it was Ally and Barb who were doing the chasing, and Tom seemed to be just going with the flow.

His clothes and shoes, while casual, seemed to be more on the expensive side, as were his backpack and the strange, large, rectangular watch that lit up with an odd glow, when he checked the time.

Victoria suspected that he wasn’t just a hitch-hiker as she had first thought, since he had made no move to join the people from the afternoon buses. The man obviously had money, and he had said that he had a job in Brisbane. She couldn’t feel any ulterior motive from him, but still, she wondered what his game was.

Going by the way that Abby had been moaning and the bouncing coming from the main room for the half an hour they had been at it, he had no trouble performing. The body she had gotten an eyeful of when he got off the bed said a lot of why Ally had been more than happy to drag Tom to the bedroom.