Page 46 of Just Say (Hell) No
“Bloody hell.” He ran his hand through his hair, and Cat let out a protesting squeak. He’d forgotten she was up there. He grabbed for her, then said, “Come sit outside with me a minute.” She was going for easy-breezy, but he was getting something else. He was getting that she cared. And that she didn’t want to. Was this about him, or about her?
“We need to talk about it,” she said. “I’m going to bring one of my mates back here, and you’re going to tackle him. And since any normal fella would be in the hospital after that, I think it’s fair to say that you’ll be going to jail.”
“We’ll talk about it. Meet me on the deck. Five minutes.” He tried an enforcer stare. Probably wouldn’t work, but at least he’d tried.
It wasn’t five minutes. More like ten. On the other hand, she’d taken a shower and was wearing her black silk dressing gown again. And something shorter under it, he saw when she put her feet on his deck railing. With lace.
“I like your red nail varnish,” he said, already feeling his mind settling as his fingers picked out the melody and his palm thumped out the rhythm. “On your toes. Pretty.”
“Thanks,” she said, stroking Cat’s head the way she liked, there where her fur was especially soft. “Although you’re just going for points now.”
He smiled. “Could be. What would you say if I told you I didn’t want to film blondes in my spa tub? Just how many of them were you imagining, anyway?”
“The imagination knows no limit,” she said cheerily. “You wouldn’t be the first man who bit off more than he could chew.”
He may have stopped playing for a moment. “I’m careful where I bite,” he said. “I can chew, too. No worries.”
“So those four women are all going home happy?”
She was still doing that easy-breezy, and he was playing something much less sweet than he had the night before, and thumping out the rhythm harder, too. His body was a mixture of frustration and arousal that would have been familiar to his sixteen-year-old self, but not so much since. He’d signed up for this? What had he been smoking? “You’re a bit curious, aren’t you,” he said, “for somebody who keeps telling me this is a business arrangement?”
“That could be, too. I’ve never been a not-quite-housekeeper before. Companion. Poor relation. It’s like an old English novel. No worries, though, on my end. I don’t go out with rugby players.”
“What, as a life rule?” He was still playing, but then, she was still sitting there. “Got a list of preferred and prohibited occupations, have you?”
“Maybe I do. Don’t you? I’d say you have a type.”
He decided it would be best not to answer that. “Bit elitist of you, maybe. We don’t all drag our knuckles. And we don’t all talk in the sheds about the women we’re seeing, either. What was that all about? You must’ve known some princes.”
She was silent for a long moment, as if this had got away from her, which it may have done. “I probably don’t need to say this,” she said, “but I don’t want to complicate your life.”
“No,” he said, “because that would be a bloody nightmare. You might paint my walls orange. Introduce unwanted livestock. Bring all sorts of random people around. Oh, wait.”
She laughed, and that was better. He smiled, started playing something softer, and said, “So. If this is about who I bring home? Let’s say I have no plans. D’you want to know how I’d feel about you doing it, though?”
Another pause, before she said, “Yes. I do.”
“I’d hate it,” he said, and saw her posture change. “And, yes, I’d be jealous. If I’m home, I’d rather you took him someplace else. Ella’s not the only one who doesn’t want to see the ropes come out.”
She sat there another few minutes, which was good, but she didn’t share any more. She certainly didn’t climb into his bed in the wee hours, wrap her arms around him, and kiss his mouth. Instead, she worked the next two nights, and he didn’t even see her. Which was fine, because she was right. This was about Ella. Who offered up something new every day.
On Wednesday, she showed him a tallboy of dubious construction that Nyree had spray-painted white. “On a tarp on the driveway,” Ella told him, “before you get all horrified about—what? White paint splatters on your white walls? And see how cool it is now?”
Contact paper on the front of each drawer, in five different swirly purple patterns. “Nice,” he said, and Ella sighed and said, “No.Awesome.You just don’t know how to appreciate it.”
He’d eyed the white net… what, draperies, he guessed, hung from two ceiling hooks near the foot of the bed and threaded through with fairy lights, and hadn’t said anything at all. There was no purpose, it was obvious. To the draperiesorhis comment. They’d hung window shades, too, which at least made sense.
On Thursday, Nyree had done some more spray painting, because he arrived home to the sight of a desk made up of two short purple stepladders, each holding a yellow basket across its lower rails, with purple board laid over the top. Also a purple shelf attached to the wall, and a wooden kitchen chair, painted yellow. “See?” Ella said.“Somuch better. Papers here, in the baskets, and school books on the shelf. It’s got actual personality, and besides—we made it ourselves. I covered a can with contact paper, see, for pens and all. Matches the tallboy.” And if Marko wondered why you couldn’t just buy a desk and chair and be done with it, he didn’t say it.
On Friday, everything changed again.
Marko was in the sheds after the Captain’s Run at Eden Park on Friday afternoon—changing,nottalking about the women he’d slept with—when he got the call.
It was Nyree. “What’s up?” he asked.
“I think you’d better come,” she said. “If you can.”
He was already pulling his T-shirt over his head. “Where?”
