Page 4 of Just Say (Hell) No
“Yeh,” Marko said, and mustered up a smile. “How ya goin’.”
“Pity about last night,” the man said. “I was hoping for a better outcome straight up to the end. The tackling was pretty average. But then, the season’s young, and that’s why you actually have to play the game, eh. New blindside flanker for the Blues,” he explained to his wife. “Drew Callahan’s position. A real replacement at last, one hopes. Just moved to Auckland from the Highlanders.”
“I know who Marko Sendoa is,” she said. “For heaven’s sake, Walter. I do look at a newspaper occasionally. Never mind,” she told Marko. “I’m sure you players—and the coaches—know what you’re doing better than the punters.” Her husband opened his mouth like he wanted to say something else, but she was talking again, telling the young woman, “You could give him your keys, surely. He’s an All Black, isn’t he? If he steals your car, we all know where he works.”
“I know who he is,” the girl said without looking at Marko. “And thanks, but I’ve got it.” And off she went, back toward her car. The world’s slowest runner.
White skin, black bra straps. Zebra striped skirt. A Coke-bottle shape to her, and the kind of waist you wanted to put your hands around just to see how close they’d come to touching. Lifting her down from something, maybe. That’d be nice.
Yeh, right.
The bloke looked at Marko pityingly and said, “That’s twice you’ve been shot down, I reckon. Some days are like that.”
He clearly hadn’t read about the knitting bag yet.
On the bright side, Snow White hadn’t actually Maced him. There was that.
He hadn’t recognized her. He certainly hadn’t wanted her. The man was so not her fated mate.
And, yes, she’d been in her teens most of the times they’d been around each other. Slightly chubby and all the way awkward, not to mention felled by the most massive of crushes. It still wasn’t much of an ego boost that he didn’t remember.
Never mind. Heaps of men found her attractive. Some men, anyway. All right, a few men. Normal men, not men who went through blonde sport stars and TV presenters like chocolates in a box. And rugby players weren’t special. They were just blokes, and blokier than most. Entitled blokes, too.
Her stepbrother Kane had told her once, “Half dog, and the other half not much better. If you’re tempted—ask me about him first. Or say ‘no’ up front and save yourself the trouble.”
By the time he’d said that—because sex ed always came too late—she’d already been well aware that there were players out there who were quite happy to have an excuse to score against her stepfather and stepbrothers, to tick the “winner” box in the most elemental way there was. She’d also discovered that a photo gallery of rugby WAGs tended to look like you’d stumbled into a blonde convention, and that she wasn’t long-term material.
So it wasn’t like it was any surprise. Still. He might at least haverememberedher.
It was hard forhernot to remember how a nineteen-year-old Marko had looked through the eyes of an almost-fifteen-year-old girl trying to fit in with a new stepfamily and desperately ill-at-ease in her new posh school, new city, newislandwhere it was always too cold and nobody seemed to be Maori.
Come to think of it, it was just as well hedidn’tremember her. Not necessarily her finest moments.
The first time she’d seen him up close, it had been at a barbecue at her stepfather’s house, a preseason get-together to welcome the new forwards to the Highlanders. Her stepfather Grant had just been appointed forwards coach, so it was an icebreaker for him, too. You’d never have known it, though, from his manner, as in-charge as it was possible for a man to look without saying more than ten words at a stretch.
Her mum Miriama, already pregnant with Nyree’s sister Kiri, had moved around the hillside terrace that day as serene as if she’d been born to it, as if the shabby little flat outside Whangarei had already faded far into the distance and Dunedin was where she’d always been meant to be. The hulking mass of muscle that made up the forward pack of a rugby squad had eaten, talked, and joked, on their best behavior in front of the coach. And Nyree, the only other female in the place, had sat taking nibbles at her hamburger from her spot on the concrete wall at the edge of the semicircular terrace, imagining that she was looking thoughtful and mysterious.
She was rewarded for her efforts when a lanky young giant sat down beside her.
“Hi,” he said. “It’s a nice view, eh.” His dark hair had been too long, his nose too big, his body all arms and legs. He’d seemed like a prince out of a Disney movie all the same, recognizing her as his princess and coming to her rescue like it was meant to be. She’d had that kind of imagination at the time.
Almost-fifteen wasn’t the easiest age, especially when you were short, still carrying too much baby fat, and could fit your entire fist into your enormous mouth like a trout. If a trout had a fist. She’d sat, frozen, and wondered how she could eat her burger without showing him the new braces on her teeth. Wishing she’d left her spectacles off, too, although her mother would have noticed and made her put them on. “Yeh,” she said. “Nice.” And then wondered what to say next.
“I’m Marko,” he said. “I guess you’re Grant’s daughter.”
“Stepdaughter. My mum just married him a few months ago. I don’t really know him.”
His black brows rose, and he said, “Sounds like a change. Have you always lived in Dunedin?”
“No. Northland. I mean, we were in Northland. Before.”
“Different.”
“Yeh.”
Again, she was stuck, but he wasn’t. He said, “New school as well, then. I remember when I came down at first for boarding school. Dunedin seemed like LA to a kid from a sheep farm in the Southern Alps, from all the way out in the wop-wops. Nowhere to run away to when you needed to be alone, no place to take a breath deep enough.” He grinned at her. “I even missed my sisters. That’s desperation.”
“You have sisters?”Ask about him.She’d read that in a magazine. Oh, no. What if she had bits of hamburger stuck in her braces? He was close enough that she could see the dark shadow on his cheek where he’d shaved, and she got a shudder she’d never felt before, and a thrilling twist of something low and hot in her belly. She thought she could even smell him, and his scent, a little bit spicy, was making her dizzy. He was so… so manly, and he was talking toher.Out of everybody here.
