It was still dark outside when I woke up on the third of February. On any other morning I would have rolled over and gone straight back to sleep, but this was no ordinary day. Today was the first day of classes for the new year, and even though Ruby and I didn’t have to go to class until Tuesday at the earliest we still needed to drop by campus – we both had to pick up our class timetables and renew our parking permits, among other things. I also had designs on taking Ruby out to lunch once we were done at TAFE, just as we’d done a year ago.

Somehow, I managed to keep from waking Ruby up as I slipped out of bed and padded barefoot out of our bedroom, grabbing my phone from my nightstand as I went. I didn’t bother switching any lights on as I headed across the hall to the laundry, waiting until the door was firmly closed behind me to hit the light switch on the wall. Bright, white light filled the room as the fluorescent light flickered on overhead, and I let my eyes adjust for a moment before getting changed. My pyjama pants and T-shirt went into the hamper that sat in the far corner of the room, and I quickly pulled on the boardshorts and long-sleeved rashie I had left to dry on the clothes airer next to the hamper after I’d gone for a surf on the weekend. The beach towel hanging next to my boardshorts and rashie went over my right shoulder, and I grabbed a clean T-shirt from the dryer before turning the light off and leaving the laundry.

The last thing I did before grabbing my surfboard and leaving the house was write a note for Ruby, just in case she woke up before I got back from the beach.

Went to Towradgi Beach for a surf – I’ll be back soon. Love you :)

I stuck the Post-It note I’d written the note on to the back of Ruby’s phone so that she was sure to see it if she did wake up before I got home. That done, I crept quietly back out of the room and headed outside to the garage, snagging my surfboard from its spot next to the back door on my way.

The sun was rising as I pulled up to the traffic lights at the intersection of Towradgi Road and Pioneer Road, the first rays of light painting the sky right above the eastern horizon orange. Hardly anyone was on the road this early in the morning, with the red arrow ahead of me turning green again almost as soon as I’d hit the brakes. I hummed along with the Paul Kelly song playing on the radio as I turned left into Towradgi Road, the sky steadily lightening as the sun continued to rise.

As soon as I’d parked my car in the carpark between the bowling club and the playground, about a hundred metres from the shoreline, I took my phone out of its spot in the centre console, unlocked it and pulled up the surf and tide reports for Towradgi Beach. I normally checked before leaving the house, but it had somehow slipped my mind that morning. I couldn’t see much of the beach from my vantage point, but what I could see looked less than impressive – something that the surf and tide reports seemed to bear out. High tide was still more than four hours away, and the waves were peaking at less than a metre all along the coast – far from my ideal surfing conditions.

So instead of going for a surf like I’d planned to, I left my surfboard lashed to the roof racks of my car and took my beach towel, my wallet and the T-shirt I’d brought with me from the backseat. After I’d locked up, and once I’d rolled my shirt, keys and wallet up in my towel, I headed over to the nearby rock pool and dropped my things off on the highest level of the seating area. I tucked my phone inside my towel and tied my hair back with the elastic band I had around my left wrist, taking a few moments to centre myself before heading down to the pool’s edge and diving into the water. Almost as soon as I’d resurfaced I swam down to the pool’s southern end, set a timer on my watch for one hour, and started swimming laps.

The sun had well and truly risen by the time I was done swimming, with the glare of the sunlight off the water almost making me shield my eyes as I climbed out of the pool. It was still reasonably early, not even half-past seven, but I could already see people on the nearby beach and out in the surf. Others were dotted around the swimming pool’s seating, and still others were walking, running or cycling along the bike path. It was turning out to be a spectacular day, and I almost wished I could stay out in the sun until that evening. If I didn’t have things that needed to be done that day, I wasn’t entirely sure I could have resisted. I ruthlessly shoved all of that into some deep, dark place way down inside myself, figuring I could easily revisit it later on when I wasn’t going to be quite so busy.

When I got home roughly twenty minutes later, it was to music playing in the kitchen and Ruby singing along – sounds that, before she’d moved in, I hadn’t heard of a morning since I’d moved away from Newcastle. I paused just inside the back door, closed my eyes and let it all wash over me for a moment or two.

“What are you smiling at?”

My eyes snapped open, and I started a little when I saw Ruby standing in front of me, hands on her hips and an eyebrow raised. I hadn’t even heard her leaving the kitchen.

“You,” I replied. “Just…this place has felt so much more alive since you moved in. I haven’t heard other people singing in the mornings for years, and I forgot how much I missed it.”

Her stern expression melted right away into a bright smile. She took a couple of steps closer to me, put her hands on my shoulders and raised herself up on tiptoes so that we were almost eye-to-eye, and leaned in for a kiss. “You taste like saltwater,” she said a few moments later, sounding thoughtful. “Good surf?”

“Nah, it was shit,” I replied. “Tide and the waves were too low. Went for a swim instead.” I gave her a smile of my own. “Let me have a shower, then I’ll make us breakfast. Okay?”

“Okay.” She gave me another smile and wandered back toward the kitchen. A moment or two later I followed her, pulling my T-shirt off over my head as I went.

One of the advantages of living just a few suburbs away from TAFE, along with orientation not being until eleven o’clock for either of us, was that we were able to take our time that morning. “So what do you want to do after orientation is done?” I asked just after we had finished breakfast. I’d made a batch of crêpes, half of them plain and the other half chocolate, with Ruby devouring most of the chocolate ones.

“We could go out to lunch,” she suggested with a small half-shrug. “Like we did last year.” She swiped a finger through a puddle of Nutella that had been left on her plate. “Can you believe it’s been a year since we met properly?”

“Time really does fly, doesn’t it?” I said, and Ruby nodded. “Did you ever think we’d find each other again?”

“Honestly? I thought I might somehow get a meet and greet one day, but literally running into you at TAFE was the absolute last thing I expected.” She gave me a shy smile. “I’m glad I did run into you, though, even if I did knock you over.”

“Yeah, me too.” I gave her a smile of my own. “So, lunch – anywhere in particular you want to go?”

She didn’t say anything for a little while, but I knew she was thinking so I didn’t push her to talk. Instead, I started clearing the table so that the dishes could be done before we left for orientation.

“How about you surprise me?” she said at last. “Besides, I picked where we had lunch last year.” Here she narrowed her eyes at me. “And if you decide the bloody TAFE canteen counts as a surprise, I won’t be pleased.”

“Nah. I have somewhere much better in mind.”

Orientation was quick and relatively painless – I recognised a few of my classmates from the previous year, but the rest were all new to me – and as soon as I’d collected my timetable for the year I headed off to meet up with Ruby outside the campus library, taking a shortcut across the grassed area between Q Block and A Block. The line outside the administration block looked a lot longer this year than it had last year, and I pulled a face at it – there was no way in hell I wanted to stand in line all afternoon, not when I had the rest of the week to get my parking permit and student union membership renewed, so I skirted around the end of the line and went to sit down on the bench just outside the library’s doors.

I wasn’t waiting long. Not even ten minutes later I heard the familiar sound of rubber tyres on terracotta paving, and I looked up from my phone to see Ruby rolling out of the nearby breezeway. She spotted me almost right away, and I waved her over.

“So what do your classes look like this year?” I asked once she had parked herself next to me.

“Wednesday, Thursday and Friday afternoons again,” she replied. “What about you?”

“Wednesday and Friday, all day. Looks like we’ll be able to have lunch together again this year.”

“And more than once a week, too.” She folded the sheet of paper that had her class timetable typed out on it into quarters and slipped it into her handbag. “So where to next?”

“I had a few ideas,” I said as we headed out to where I’d parked my car an hour earlier. “Depends on what you’re in the mood for, though, really. How do you feel about chicken parma?”

“That sounds bloody amazing.”

“I thought it might. Come on.”

We had soon left TAFE behind us, and after a short drive up the Northern Distributor and along the Princes Highway toward the centre of town I was turning into the car park behind the North Gong Hotel. “Haven’t been here in a while,” Ruby commented as I found a parking space near the pub’s driveway.

“You don’t mind?”

“Where else am I going to get a half-decent chicken parma?” She gave me a grin. “I seriously don’t mind. We could have gone to Macca’s and I wouldn’t have cared, because I get to spend time with you.”

“Just thought I’d make sure.”

“And that is why I love you.”

The pub was busy that lunch time, so it was a little while before our orders were ready. As soon as the beeper that the kitchen had given me went off, I collected the tray holding our lunches and a plate of garlic bread from the counter and carried it outside to the garden behind the pub. Ruby had picked one of the picnic tables in the middle of the garden for us to sit at, in the shade of a tall tree, and was studying the screen of her phone as I set the tray down next to her right elbow. “Lunch time,” I said.

“You are so good to me,” Ruby said with a bright smile. She passed my chicken burger to me before taking her plate of chicken parmigiana off the tray. “I haven’t had a chicken parma from here for years.”

“Maybe we should come here more often,” I suggested, right before I took a bite out of my burger.

“That is a fantastic idea.” She tried to steal a chip from my plate, and I batted her hand away. “Like once a month for dinner after class, maybe?”

“I like the sound of that.”

Neither of us said much after that, the two of us focused on eating. Ruby was the first to break our comfortable silence, around half a minute after she had finished her lunch.

“I know it’s still nearly six weeks away,” she said, sounding tentative, “but I was wondering if you’d had any ideas for what you wanted to do for your birthday this year yet.”

“Honestly, I haven’t even thought about it yet,” I admitted. “It’s not as big a deal this year.”

“I beg to differ,” Ruby replied. “You have survived so much shit that every single birthday that you make it to is absolutely a huge deal.” She held up a hand, somehow knowing that I was about to say something. “It is, Taylor, and you’re not going to argue with me about it. So yes, as far as I’m concerned you turning thirty-one is a fucking massive deal.” She picked up one of the leftover pieces of garlic bread and tore it in half. “I know you don’t like thinking about it all. Believe me, I know. But look at it this way. If you hadn’t survived all that shit, then we would never have found each other. So I am very fucking thankful that you did, and I am fairly certain that you feel exactly the same way.”

“How the fuck do you always manage to put things into perspective?”

She grinned. “Lots and lots of practice. Mostly from trying to calm Lis down when she was panicking over exams.”

I reached for Ruby’s right hand with my left and started rubbing my thumb over her knuckles, my thoughts straying to the ring box I had hidden in one of my desk drawers. I had decided not long before Christmas that I was pretty sure I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Ruby, but I hadn’t quite found the right moment to tell her just yet. I knew it would happen eventually, I just wasn’t sure when.

I finally found the right moment six weeks later.

The sounds of the Brisbane CBD waking up greeted me as I stepped out onto the balcony of our hotel room with my phone, my medication and a mug of coffee, sliding the door closed behind me so that I didn’t inadvertently wake Ruby up. It wasn’t all that early, but I still didn’t want to wake her yet. Especially since we didn’t have to go anywhere until later that afternoon if we didn’t want to.

When I had told Ruby during lunch on the first day of classes for the year that I’d had no idea what I wanted to do for my birthday, I hadn’t been lying. I didn’t usually figure that out until two or three weeks before, and it was usually something along the lines of going to a concert if there was anyone I liked playing a show in Wollongong or Sydney – failing that, seeing a movie and then getting takeaway for dinner on the way home. Last year had been the first time since moving out on my own that I’d been around my entire immediate and most of my extended family for my birthday.

This year, though, Ruby had done something completely unexpected. As a surprise for both my birthday and our first anniversary, she had booked us a long weekend away in Brisbane. We had both skipped our Friday classes in favour of catching a midday flight out of Sydney, and even though we had spent nearly all of my birthday travelling I hadn’t cared a bit. Not when it meant getting to visit Brisbane not for work, as I usually did, but as a tourist for the very first time. Today was our last full day in the city before heading back home the next afternoon.

I set my coffee and my medication packets down on the glass-topped table that sat on the balcony and pulled out one of the chairs so that I could sit down and watch ferries traversing the river below. Our hotel room overlooked the Brisbane River and out toward the Story Bridge, with Queen Street Mall a ten-minute walk away and the markets we’d visited the day before just down the street. As I watched one of the ferries pass by the nearby wharf I drank some of my coffee and absently flipped one of my medication packets around in my other hand. It had been seven months since I’d started on my current medication, and so far things weren’t going too badly. I particularly hated having to be on Aropax again, but it was working – as far as I was concerned, that was the main thing.

Around half an hour after I’d gone outside I heard the door slide open, and I looked back over my shoulder to see Ruby stepping out onto the balcony. She had a mug of her own in one of her hands, though I knew hers would be filled with tea and not coffee, and her phone in her other. She gave me a tired smile as she sat down next to me. “Hey,” she said, just as she let out a yawn that she quickly hid behind a hand. “How long have you been up?”

“About forty-five minutes or so. Not much longer than you, really.” I picked my mug up and swirled the last few mouthfuls of coffee around inside it. “I know we need to pack and everything for tomorrow, but is there anything you really want to do today?”

Ruby seemed to be considering this for a little while. “We’re still going out to dinner tonight?”

“If you think you’ll be up for it, yeah. We can stay in if you don’t think you can manage it.”

“I think I should be okay. I’ll just use my wheelchair as much as I can today so that I save most of my energy for later.” She studied me for a little while. “Can we go bowling? There’s a bowling alley in Queen Street Mall, we could spend an hour or so there and go out to lunch after.”

“If that’s what you want to do, then we can totally do it.” I checked the time on my phone’s lockscreen. “It’s seven-thirty right now, do you want to go out to breakfast first?”

“Oh, hell yeah.” She unlocked her phone, opened Firefox and pulled up the website of Strike Bowling. I figured that was the bowling alley that she had been talking about. “We have to book a time to go bowling – anytime from ten o’clock onward.”

“I reckon ten-thirty – we can take our time with breakfast that way. I’m pretty sure there’s one of those Coffee Club places somewhere near here.”

Ruby gave me a smile. “That sounds bloody fantastic.”

“I thought so.” I quickly took my medication before skolling the last of my coffee, and got back to my feet. “I’m going to go have a quick shower before we head out.”

That evening, after we’d had dinner at the restaurant in the Customs House over on the boardwalk, we took a long, leisurely walk down to the city’s botanic gardens. Ruby had one of her hands in mine as we walked along the path that ran alongside the river, her other hand carrying the long-stemmed red rose I’d given to her just before dinner. Every so often I brushed my fingers across the pocket of my pants that had the ring box tucked inside, as if I was making sure it was still there. It had been burning a hole in my pocket all evening, just waiting for the perfect moment to give it to Ruby. It needed to be just right.

We stopped walking near the gardens’ playground, sitting down on a park bench that overlooked the river. For a little while we were both quiet – Ruby was almost compulsively smoothing the skirt of her bright red dress over her lap, her rose sitting on her other side on top of her handbag, and I was watching a yacht sailing past.

“How has it been a year already?”

I looked over at Ruby. She was looking out across the water, her hands tucked under her knees and the heel of her right sandal scuffing across the concrete beneath the park bench.

“I know,” I said. “It’s practically flown by, hasn’t it?”

“Yeah…” She let out a quiet sigh. “I used to dream about this, you know? Meeting you, getting to be one of your friends, that kind of thing. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I would ever be lucky enough to be going out with you. And now I can’t imagine my life without you in it. I feel like I’ve known you forever.”

“In a good way, I hope.”

She let out a quiet laugh. “Definitely in a good way.” She slipped her hand into mine again, and I felt her start to run her thumb across the inside of my wrist. “I’m pretty sure I want to spend the rest of my life with you, Tay.”

“You are?”

She nodded. “Yep. I keep running through all these scenes in my head – they’re all different, but the one constant in them is us. That’s the one thing that never changes.”

Here she started rummaging one-handed through her handbag. “I got you something,” she said as she finally unearthed what she was looking for.

“So did I,” I said. “Do you want to go first?”

“You sure?”

I nodded. “Absolutely sure.”

“Okay.” She took in a deep breath, letting it out a little shakily, and she placed a neatly-wrapped parcel in my lap. I saw her cross her fingers for the briefest of moments as she set her hands in her own lap, and for a moment I swore she was biting her bottom lip out of what had to be nerves.

“Oh wow,” I whispered when I saw what was beneath the wrapping paper. Ruby had given me a dark brown leather journal, one that had a long leather strap wound around it to keep it closed. The outline of an origami crane, identical to the one on the guitar strap that she had given me for Christmas, was engraved into the cover. I unwound the strap and let the cover fall open, revealing a notebook that turned out to be full of music composition paper. “Ruby, this is amazing.”

“I thought you might like something you can use,” she said, sounding almost shy.

“I’ve been wanting something like this. It’s perfect.” I leaned over to plant a kiss on Ruby’s right temple. “I love it. Thank you.”

She blushed bright red. “You’re welcome.”

I took the ring box out of my pocket and turned it over in my hands a few times, trying to figure out what to say. “Close your eyes,” I said at last, deciding to just say the first thing that came to mind.

“Okay,” she said, her tone unsure.

I waited until her eyes were closed before opening the ring box and taking out the ring inside. Slowly, and carefully, I slid the silver claddagh ring I had bought her onto her right ring finger, making sure that the heart on the ring was pointing toward her wrist. Her eyes flew open right as I went to let go of her hand, and her mouth fell open.

“It’s not an engagement ring,” I said. “But it is a promise ring.”

“You mean…”

I nodded. “One day, when we’re both ready, I’ll add an engagement ring to your finger.” I ran the pad of my thumb over the heart on Ruby’s ring. “This is me committing to you, Ruby, with all of my heart.”

“Holy shit, Tay,” she whispered. “This…it’s beautiful.”

“There’s something else,” I added, and I carefully slipped the ring back off her finger to show her the engraving inside – the words The best is yet to be. “It’s from a John Lennon song,” I explained as I returned her ring to its new home. “I really do believe that for us, the best is still to come.”

We sat there quietly side by side for the longest time, the evening sounds of the city settling around us. Before long Ruby had put her head down on my shoulder, and I slipped an arm around her. The world could have ended right then and there, and I wouldn’t have cared because the two of us were together.

“How does that song go?” Ruby asked finally.

“What song?”

“The John Lennon song you mentioned.”

“Oh…” I closed my eyes, trying to recall the first couple of lines of the song. It came to me after about half a minute.

“Grow old along with me,” I recited, leaning down to press a kiss to the crown of Ruby’s head before finishing. “The best is yet to be.”

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