Page 5 of Just Say (Hell) No
“Three,” he said. “All younger. One of them your age, I’m guessing. Thirteen?”
She could tell she was turning red. “Nearly fifteen,” she mumbled, and looked down at her plate.
“Oh. Sorry. And no sisters?”
“No. Just, uh… I guess, stepbrothers. You know. Not really brothers.”
“Luke and Kane,” he said. “They seem like good blokes. What? They’re not nice to you?”
“Yeh. I mean, no. Kane gave me his room. He didn’twantto, though. He had to move in with Lukas so I could have a room.”
“Well, why shouldn’t he?” Marko answered. “Luke’s up with the Crusaders now, eh. What does he need a room in Dunedin for? When you leave the house, your parents get the room back. It’s the rule.” He grinned again. “Ask me how I know. When I went home for Christmas this year, I slept on the couch. Course, that suited me. The beds are too small. I’m a bit of an oversized fella, like your stepbrothers.”
“No,” she answered, knowing she must be beetroot-red. “I mean, I know. It’s fine. Everybody’s nice to me. They’re all…”
She trailed off, because Marko wasn’t looking at her anymore. A shadow fell over her untouched plate, and she looked up to see Kane standing over them. Six foot eight and still growing, not quite eighteen, and even more gangly than Marko. The expression on his face wasn’t friendly.
Nyree scrambled to her feet, and her hamburger slipped from her plate. She watched as if in slow motion as the whole mess fell to the stones of the terrace in a mini-explosion of tomato sauce and salad. Onto Marko’sshoes.
Oh, bugger.
She crouched down to pick it all up as best she could and shove it back onto her plate as best she could. She couldn’t do anything about the tomato sauce, a splash of red on Marko’s enormous white trainers, and she wished she could sink straight through the stones.
Marko hadn’t noticed. At least, when she stood up again, he was facing Kane, ignoring her.
Kane said, after a long moment, “My dad would like a word. Now.”
Marko’s face hardened to match Kane’s. He looked at Nyree, then back at her stepbrother. “You’re joking. Mate. She’s a little girl.”
“I know,” Kane said. “That’s the point, isn’t it.”
“Fine,” Marko said. “Whatever.”
So much for her fated mate.
Today, once again, he’d shaved, the aggressive jaw free of black stubble, allowing his deep-set dark eyes and strong nose, with its hump that said, “Broken! The hard way!” to send their ferocious message all by themselves. She happened to have noticed over the years that he normally played with a week’s worth of scruff, possibly to look more intimidating, as if that were necessary. She guessed he shaved after the match. But there were still the two hundred forty pounds of muscle, another thing that had changed between nineteen and thirty-two. In a singlet, so you got the full benefit of all that shoulder and arm. Almost indecent, a raw display of power completely unsuited to this genteel beach suburb.
She was rattled, and she shouldn’t be. She was used to tall men. Tough men.Rugbymen. A supersized man wasn’t any kind of sexy treat. She knew better. They ate all the eggs and left you with the empty carton, drank milk straight from the bottle and put it back in the fridge, left their size sixteen shoes out for you to trip over, watched too much sport, and talked too much about cricket and not enough about anything interesting. No treat.
She’d known all that for years, and yet she hadn’t been able to shake her unfortunate crush until her final year of school, after which she’d left home for Christchurch and university. Maybe because Marko always gave her a smile when he saw her, as if he felt something special for her, too. A dream shemayhave held too close to her heart for too long a time. And maybe because he’d stopped being gangly, eventually.
Until she’d found out that he wasn’t any different, and he certainly wasn’t special.
And now? She couldn’t escape seeing his photo from time to time, especially when she was in Dunedin. If he wasn’t on a rugby field, though, he had his arm around a blonde every time. Adifferentblonde.
As for her? She’d moved back to the North Island, to Auckland, after uni. She had her own life, and it didn’t include rugby. Not anymore. She didn’t watch unless she was in a pub and couldn’t avoid it, or was watching her stepbrothers, sometime when it really mattered. Marko could move to the Blues if he wanted. It might make a difference to her stepfather, but it made no difference to her. She was over it.
When she got to the car, her headlightswereon. She muttered something that would have shocked her mother, turned them off again, and set out once more. It was all exercise, even if she did some of it a couple times over. And running was good for her. She hated it, but she was doing it, see? For clarity, for inspiration, and hopefully for a tighter, smaller bum.
She knew it was two kilometers to Achilles Point. She didn’t look at her watch to see how long it was taking. The point was, she made it. She puffed her way up the final incline, which felt more like a mountain, tried to tell herself,Gorgeous sea view,and failed. Maybe it was the black spots that were swimming in her vision. She bent over from the waist to haul in a few precious breaths and focused on not being sick.
When she stood up again, she saw him. He’d just run the stairs from the beach. She didn’t even want towalkthe stairs from the beach. And he wasn’t breathing hard.
Bastard.
He dropped to the boardwalk, began doing press-ups in a leisurely manner, and said, “I’ll take your apology now.”
“P-p-pardon?” It came out wrong. She still couldn’tbreathe.
