Page 39 of Just Come Over
“Yeh. Casey.” Rhys didn’t feel like talking, and not just because he didn’t feel like explaining. He didn’t feel liketalking.It must be all the pizza. It felt like every slice had settled in his abs and was burning to get out.
“Didn’t realize you’d been to Chicago seven years ago,” Finn said, not even sounding out of breath, “other than with the ABs.”
“I wasn’t. That was when.”
“What was when? What happened?”
Rhys curled back down, breathed a moment, and said, “With the ABs. What d’you think happened? It wasn’t a bloody romance. I was with Victoria. It was a night.”
“Before or after the game? And you’re three reps behind. Keep up.”
Rhys laced his hands behind his neck again and grimly pressed on. “What does it matter? She’s here. She’s six. She’s mine.”
“Maybe you forget,” Finn said, “that I was your roomie in Chicago. I remember a hockey game, a couple nights before ours, maybe, because we were pretty relaxed. I remember a curfew the night before, and having a few beers after the game in some bar. And I remember walking back to the hotel with you. It was bloody cold. Windy, too. It may have been snowing. I even remember you ringing Victoria, because I went and took a shower I didn’t need and wished she wouldn’t talk so long. I wanted to go to bed. So unless you hooked up in the toilets somewhere in there, or became a different man from the bloke I’d known for ten years...” He swung his feet out from under the bar and stood up. “I don’t think so.”
Rhys said, “You don’t need to know the details.” He did his three more reps and got to his feet, possibly not as smoothly as he ever had in his life. Tonight, he and Casey were keeping to the schedule. Home, dinner, bath, bed. He needed sleep, and so did she.
Finn tossed him a towel. “Does Zora know the truth?”
Rhys buried his face in white cotton, then scrubbed the rough fabric over his head. “No. Hasn’t she had enough to cope with?”
“The whanau? Victoria?”
“No. My name’s on there. I’m the dad. And as for the rest—I’m still waiting for all the dominoes to fall. It’ll happen, no worries.”
“But you didn’t know before.”
“If I’d known before,” Rhys said, the anger rising on the words as he tossed the towel into the barrel, “I’d have made sure Dylan did better. He never even saw her. Didn’t make arrangements for her. It’s two and a half years now.”
He was furious. He wasfilthy.And he had nobody to take it out on. Why hadn’t Dylan told him? He could have handled it, then. He could have taken care of all of it. Casey’s mum would never have been hit in that crossing, wouldn’t have been running from one job to the next, trying to keep the two of them afloat.
“He’d have had to tell you, though, to make arrangements,” Finn said. And, yes, that was probably why Dylan hadn’t. “Or Zora, but more likely you. Always one for skating away from the tough ones, Dylan.”
“I’m in the showers,” Rhys said, and walked away.
When they were changing, though, his body settling down into the shaky-gelatin aftermath of a hard workout, calming his mind, he asked Finn the important question, at least for now. “If you know, who else will?”
“Nobody,” Finn said. “They’ll be surprised, maybe. Think less of you, probably.”
“Cheers,” Rhys said, pulling a clean T-shirt over his head and tugging it down. “I think I knew that.”
“I think you did, too,” Finn said. “And that you did it anyway. Nobody’s going to suss out the truth, though. It won’t occur to them that there’s another explanation, because nobody but you would do this. Character is destiny. That’s what they say. Could be true.”
This conversation was making Rhys itchy. Besides, he needed to go get Casey. First day of Year Two, where you had to read big words, and she wouldn’t know any of the kids. Maybe he wanted to see Zora as well, or maybe he just needed to get out of here. “Not true,” he said, tossed another towel, and laced up his shoes. “You’d have done it.”
“Nah, mate,” Finn said. “I don’t think so. In fact, I know so. I’ve come up short on tests heaps easier than this one. I think this is all you.”
Feeding Rhys and Casey on Wednesday night had been fine, Zora thought on Friday. It had been the right thing to do, and it was good for her to get used to being around Rhys anyway. Maybe then her heart wouldn’t start pounding just at the sight of him coming up her walk, his long legs eating up the ground like he’d rather be running, or like he was eager to get here. To collect Casey, of course. Or at the way he’d looked last night walking out to the car again, holding Casey’s hand while she skipped along beside him. What was it about a dad and his little girl that made you go all goopy inside?
However much of a reluctant, uninvolved dad and lying, cheating bastard he’d been? Yeh, there was that.
At the moment, she was studying her appearance in the bedroom mirror, touching up her eye makeup, slicking on ruby lipstick she’d bought specially for the occasion, wondering if it was too obvious a shade, rumpling her hair a bit more, and trying not to feel either (A) cross, (B) jumpy, or (C) stupid, with approximately (0) success.
She wasn’t used to trying to look sexy. Was this the right amount of it? For that matter, was the idea of her looking sexy ridiculous under any conditions? She had no idea anymore. She wished she could ask somebody.
Elegance, she’d reckoned, and not much skin showing. Especially not if that skin might be striped by a few silvery stretch marks.
Including on her breasts. And Alistair was a plastic surgeon.
