She grabbed her backpack and headed out into the frosty darkness.
That next evening Rosie arrived at the mid-city address Cameron had invited her to, only to find there was nothing there. Just a cold sidewalk with a handful of newly planted trees looking drab and leafless in the winter darkness, and grey plasterboard two storeys high lining the entire block.
She banged the soles of her knee-high boots on the ground to warm them, and wished she'd brought a cardigan to wear over her floaty paisley-purple dress. But obviously she'd lost her mind the second she'd agreed to come.
She looked up and down the block. A group of bright young things in even less clothing than she wore skipped merrily across the road, arms intertwined. Their voices faded, then it was just her once more.
Her and her chatty subconscious.
What if he was stuck at work? What if he was alone somewhere, trapped under something heavy? Or, better yet, what if he was about to prove how beautifully unavailable he was, how ideal a choice for a first date, by standing her up on the second?
Just as she was about to give herself a pat on the back for being immensely gifted at picking the right wrong men after all, a concealed doorway opened up within the wall of grey, revealing a figure silhouetted within the gap. A figure with sexily ruffled hair, broad shoulders and shirt sleeves rolled up over the kind of sculpted forearms that made her think this was a guy who knew how to fix a leaky tap.
Cameron. Even cloaked in darkness there was no doubting it was him.
'I'm late. Again,' she said, her voice gravelly.
He pushed the hole in the wall open wider. 'You're right on time.'
She shook her head and hastened across the path. When she was close enough to see his eyes so blue, like the wild forget-me-nots scattered throughout her wayward back yard, he said, 'You look beautiful.'
'So do you,' she admitted before she even thought to censor herself.
'Why, thank you.'
She tucked her hair behind her ear and looked anywhere but at him. 'Where are we?'
'We're not there yet.'
Cameron shut the hole in the wall and locked it with a huge padlock, then passed her a great, hulking, orange workman's helmet.
'You have to be kidding,' she said.
'Put it on or we go no further.'
'I'll get hat hair.'
He glanced briefly at the waves that for once had been good to her and curled in all the right directions. 'While inside these walls, you're not taking the thing off.'
'Jeez, you're demanding. You could try a little charm.'
'Fine,' he said, putting his own helmet on and only ending up looking sexier still in a strong, manly, muscly, blue-collar kind of way. 'Please, Rosalind, wear the helmet lest something drop on your head and kill you and I have no choice but to hide your body.'
She grimaced out a smile. But all she said as she lugged the thing atop her head and strapped herself in was, 'You're lucky orange is my colour.'
He stepped in and reached up to twist it into a more comfortable position, then looked back into her eyes. He said, 'That I am.'
He smiled down at her. She felt herself smiling back, hoping to seem the kind of woman who could get those smiles on demand. It seemed eighteen hours away from him hadn't made her any more mindful. She wondered if it was too late to feign strep-throat or the plague.
She hoisted her handbag higher on her shoulder and gripped tight on the strap. 'Is this going to be some kind of extreme-sport type of dinner? Should I have brought knee pads and insurance?'
'Stick close to me and you'll be fine.'
Said the scorpion to the turtle.
He tucked her hand into his elbow so that their hips knocked and their thighs brushed, and Rosie felt nothing as straightforward as fine as they tramped over tarpaulins, beneath scaffolding and past piles of bricks and steel girders, until they reached a lift concealed behind heavy, silver plastic sheeting.
Rosie said, 'I feel like a heroine in a bad movie with people in the audience yelling "don't go in there!"'
He waved her forward. 'Go in there. Trust me.'
She glanced at him, at the come-hither smile, the dark-blue eyes, the tempting everything-else. Trust him? Right now she was having a hard time trusting herself.
She hopped in the lift, and for the next one and a half minutes did her best not to breathe too deeply the delicious scent of another freshly laundered shirt. Or maybe it was just him. Just clean, yummy Cameron.
She hoped this date would go quickly. Then at least she could say she'd given it a good old try. And know she could still rely completely on her judgement.
As the lift binged, Rosie flinched so hard she pulled a muscle in her side. Cameron moved to her, resting a hand against her back, and she flinched again. Then closed her eyes in the hope he hadn't noticed.
She felt the whisper of his breath against her neck a moment before he murmured by her ear. 'Now we're here.'
'Where, exactly?'
'CK Square.'
The lift doors swished open, and what she saw had her feet glued to the lift floor. 'Holy majoly,' Rosie breathed out.
They had reached the top floor of the building, or what would be the top floor. The structure was in place, but apart from steel beams crisscrossing the air like a gigantic spider-web there was nothing between them and the heavens but velvet-black sky.
Cameron gave her a small shove to the left, and that was when she saw the charming wrought-iron table set for two around which candles burned on every given surface, their flames protected by shimmering glass jars. A cart held a number of plates covered in silver domes, and a bottle of wine chilled in an ice bucket to one side.
It was all so unexpected she felt as though the lift floor had dropped out from under her.
'Cameron,' she said, her voice puny. 'What have you gone and done?'
'I needed to make up for the farce at the Red Fox.'
And, it seemed, for every mediocre date she'd ever endured in her lifelong pursuit of cardboard-cutout companions.
Cameron guided her round neat piles of plasterboard and buckets of paint to the table. Only when his hand slid from her back to pull out her chair did she realise how chilly it was.
She let her handbag slump to the floor and sat, knees glued together, heels madly tapping the concrete floor.
The second he'd finished pouring her a glass of wine, she grabbed it and took a swig. For warmth. He caught her eye and smiled. She downed the rest of the glass.
'So, how was your day?' he asked, and she laughed so suddenly her hand flew to her mouth lest she spit wine all over the beautiful table. 'Did I say something funny?'
She put down the glass, and with her finger pushed it well out of reach. 'Well, yeah. We're currently sitting atop the world, surrounded by what looks to be every candle in Brisbane. And you're actually expecting me to remember how my day was?'
She looked down, picked up a silver spoon and polished it with her thumb. 'Of course, you've probably had dinner here a hundred times, so none of this is in the slightest bit unusual for you.'
She put down the spoon and sat on her hands. He poured himself a glass of wine slowly, then refilled hers just as slowly. Maybe he didn't feel the tension building in the cold air. Maybe she was the only one second guessing why they were here.
As he pushed her glass back towards her, he said, 'I have eaten Chinese takeaway atop a nearly finished building many, many times when the deadline came down to the wire and every second of construction counted. But my only company has been men in work boots. I'm not sure candles would have been appropriate.'
She slid her eyebrows north in her best impression of nonchalance. 'Did you just compare me with sweaty men? I may just swoon.'
Cameron's eyes narrowed, but she caught a glimpse of neat white teeth as a smile slipped through. 'Eat first, then swoon. I'm afraid this will be a shorter meal than last night. The fact we are here at all at this time of night without supervision means that we are breaking enough laws and union rules to get me shut me down.'
Rosie tried to do a happy dance at the "shorter meal" remark, but alas she found mischief even sexier than smooth talk. She clasped her hands together, leaned forward and whispered, 'Seriously?'
He put the bottle down and leaned close enough that she could see candlelight dancing in his eyes. 'Bruce, my project manager, just about quit when I told him what I had in mind.'
'Just about?'
The eyecrinkles deepened and all breath seeped quietly from her lungs.