Page 55 of Just Come Over
“If I wanted to golf,” Rhys said, “I’d have had you meet me in Titirangi. Ten minutes from my house.”
“Yeh,” Finn said. “Hang on a sec. I’ll get my clubs.”
Did Rhys feel more relaxed, a few hours and quite a few tree-shaded Remuera Golf Club kilometers later, headed up Finn’s steps again? Yes, he did, and also yes, they’d talked over most of what they needed to. Finn opened the door and said, “Let’s see what we can scare up for lunch. We’ll fuel up, and then we’ll finish this,” and Rhys threw up his mental hands, went in and made a sandwich, and took it into the lounge with Finn along with a cup of tea, his laptop, and his notebook. He did have to move a naked baby doll over on the couch in order to sit down, however.
“I want to try swapping the wings around,” he was saying twenty minutes later, his sandwich forgotten on the coffee table. “I think Kevvie could give us more on the right.”
“You sure?” Finn asked, frowning. “He’s gone well on the left so far.”
“I’d like to see him on the openside, find out what he can do there. He’s got more finesse than Matt, and Matt’s going to be better at bashing his way up the guts. He’s young and raw, but he’s got the power, and we need to give him his head to use it. If it doesn’t go, we’ll swap them back. Let’s talk about the lineout.”
He’d started to chart a set piece, sketching fast, explaining, when a little girl wandered into the room. Her curly ginger hair was in a high ponytail that looked neat, but not any neater than Rhys was managing himself now, and her top had a unicorn on it. Unicorns were a thing, it seemed, because ever since he’d found Casey, he’d seen them everywhere. The little girl headed straight for his couch, climbed up on it beside him, picked up the baby doll, and said, “Daddy, my baby has lost her bottle.”
Rhys paused in his sketching.
Finn said, “Say ‘Excuse me,’ Lily.”
“’Scuse me,” she said. “My baby has lost her bottle.” She turned big, accusing green eyes onto Rhys. He was doomed to be followed by accusing little-girl eyes, it seemed. “I think it’s under your bottom.”
Rhys stood up and turned around. Yes, there was a tiny, white-plastic bottle in the corner of the cushion. He handed it to Lily, and she said, “Thank you. She needs her milk, because it’s her lunchtime, and she’s a baby.” Which was logical.
“She needs clothes to eat lunch, surely,” Rhys said.
“No,” Lily said. “She’s ’posed to be naked, because she is going swimming very soon. She doesn’t have any togs, because they got losted, so she has to be naked. But first she has to drink milk. And then she can go swimming.”
“She’s a girl, eh,” Rhys said.
“Yes. Because she doesn’t have a penis. Boys have a penis, but dolls never have a penis. So dolls are all girls.”
Finn said, “There you are, mate. Can’t argue with that.”
Jenna came into the room fast and said, “Sorry. Lily got away from me. Come play in the kitchen, sweetie. Daddy’s busy working.”
“OK,” Lily said, “but I have to kiss him first.” Another scramble up onto the other couch, a smacking kiss and a rub of her hand down Finn’s hard cheek, and she took off, dragging the doll by one arm. The girl doll.
“Can I bring you boys another cup of tea?” Jenna asked.
“Nah,” Finn said. “I’ll make it, once we’ve finished. Pretty soon now.”
She took off after her daughter, and Finn said to Rhys, “Normally, this would be the moment when I ask you how it’s going with Casey, but I’m waiting until that cup of tea.”
Or,Rhys thought,this would be the moment when I ask you why it is that I used to feel lucky not to be married and have four kids, and now I realize that I’m not actually as lucky as I thought. Except that it’s not a question I can ask.
Zora turned the van eastward. Five o’clock had come early this morning. Extremely early. Exceptionally early. That was what you got when your brother had had other plans for his Sunday night, the way somebody with a social life tended to do, and instead of getting some reassurance from an actual live person, you’d lain on the couch, drunk half a bottle of wine, laughed, cried, steamed up, and let yourself believe that a man could be devoted to a woman, absolutely and forever.
All right, only inPride and Prejudice,which was set in the nineteenth century and involved fictional people, but it still counted, sort of. Jane Austen had believed it, and other people believed it enough to still buy the book and watch the movie two hundred years later, so there you were. Besides, seeing Mr. Darcy be so hopelessly attracted, so nobly determined to make things right, and so smolderingly hot was good for her. About the only company she had right now was her dirty fantasies and her apparently outmoded standards, so she might as well spend the night with the one person who shared them, even if that was Jane Austen and she was dead.
It had been a drunken thought, but her own.
She may have cried some at the end. She may also have crossed her legs when Elizabeth’s eyes had met Darcy’s over the piano, his hard face had softened at last, and both of them had known that there couldn’t ever be anybody else. Also that all Darcy wanted at that moment was to draw Elizabeth down on his bed, shove her bodice down with a slow hand, and show her everything her body could possibly feel for hours on end, and all Elizabeth wanted was something vaguely like that, too, which she wouldn’t even have been able to fantasize adequately about, because she’d never had sex. And allZorahad wanted was to believe that Mr. Darcy had been as attentive, intense, and careful a lover, and Elizabeth as gorgeously shocked and satisfied, on their fictional, completely nonexistent wedding night as she imagined them.
Also, at least the BBC, unlike her mum, her dad, Rhys, Dylan, and probably Hayden, was willing to tell her,Yes, cheating’s a dealbreaker.
She’d got up at five o’clock anyway. She might not be good at everything, but she was good at soldiering on. If ninety percent of life was showing up, she had ninety percent taped. And when Rhys had brought Casey over before school, she’d focused on the girl, not on him.
It had been fine. Itwouldbe fine. Rhys’s face had been back to “shut down,” anyway, like Mr. Darcy’s pre-revelation, so that told her what she needed to know. Tomorrow, she’d drive him to the airport, since he’d insisted that it was better if she have his car, “just in case,” and then she’d have twelve days to take care of bunnies and kids and get herself right again.
In his bed. In his bath, too, in front of the windows as the sun set over the mountains.
