Page 42 of Just Say Christmas
Taku toi kahurangi.His precious jewel.
He could also marry her. That would help. Well, it would help him, because Zora seemed content with the way things were. He wasn’t. He wanted to be able to say, “My wife.” He wanted another ring on her finger, a circle with no beginning and no end, and he wanted one on his own. It was a symbol, and symbols mattered.
She’d told him, on a winter night when they’d been lying in the dark, her head on his chest and his hand stroking over her shoulder in the quiet aftermath of love, “One thing that being unhappy, and then being happy, has taught me? That the moment is good. The moment is enough. You have to hold it cupped in your two hands like the precious thing it is, because moments are like water. They slide away through your fingers no matter how hard you try to keep hold of them. If you’re lucky, though, you can get a whole string of moments, and turn them into memories, like the string of pearls you gave me. This moment, for example . . .” She’d sighed, turned her head, her hair brushing over his skin, and kissed his chest. “This is a pearl. It’s beautiful, and it’s enough. This moment when I love you.”
It wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to marry her, and he wanted to get her pregnant. It didn’t have anything to do with his brother. It had to do with him.
He wanted stability. He wanted to have it, and he wanted to give it. That was the truth. From his earliest memory, the day his Nan had taken him to see his newborn brother in hospital, until the age of forty, his only stability had been himself, the certainty he carried within. His life, though? His life had been about moving on. To a new code, and a new team, first as a player, then as a coach. A new country, so many times now. A marriage, and a divorce. So many goodbyes. Change, and sometimes—too often—death. Now, he had a chance to build something around himself, and he wanted it. Zora, and Isaiah, and Casey, and somebody else. Somebody new. He wanted to catch his baby as it emerged from his wife’s body, to hold the brand-new person they’d made together in his two hands, and to make another promise. That he’d built a family with no cracks in it, and it was going to stay that way. He wanted to stand at the base of his family’s life and hold up that solid foundation with his arms, his strong back, and know that he could keep doing it. A place where Zora could know she was safe, where their kids could grow.
Pa whakaruru ha.A shelter from the wind.
There was his team, too. He wanted to stay here a while. The Blues had gone well this year, his first one coaching them. They had some pretty significant departures coming up in the backs, of course, with Koti James and Nic Wilkinson heading north, and his starting forwards weren’t getting any younger. His captain, Hugh Latimer, wasn’t likely to give the team more than one more season. It would be England, probably, after that. Jocelyn Pae Ata was a very hot property, acting-wise, as funny and oddly appealing as she was beautiful, and surely the UK would be calling her name. Besides, you couldn’t blame a player for finishing his career where the money was. Rhys had coached in France himself, after all.
Which left a new skipper to develop, and maybe . . . a chance to shift things up in the backline? He thought about that, moved on from the serious business of looking at his life, and started considering players and possibilities. Isaiah was right. The balletwasa good chance to let your mind range, almost as good as the golf course. It was dark, the music wasn’t too intrusive, and he wasn’t especially interested in dancing snowflakes, or whatever this was now, although the athleticism, the control and flexibility of the dancers, was more than impressive. Which made him think about core strength, and about injury and preventing it. Something to talk about with Finn Douglas, his conditioning coach, maybe. Finn was here, in some row ahead of him, with his wife and their four kids. Going on five now, although five was fairly extreme. Jenna liked babies, though, and Finn liked being a dad, so why not? Finn knew about being the shelter himself, Rhys suspected, although he was probably thinking about the same thing Rhys was at this moment. He watched the rows of dancers on the stage stretching their arms and legs in opposite directions, appreciating the degree to which they could turn out their feet. Flexibility, definitely.
There was Kevin McNicholl, also, who happened to be sitting two seats over from Rhys, just beyond Casey and Kevin’s son Zavy. Kevin’s wife, Chloe Donaldson, was theprima ballerina,and apparently about to make her first appearance. The audience, in fact, was starting to shift in anticipation. That part wasn’t much different from a rugby crowd when the team clicked into gear and started stringing together some phases, using the width of the field, letting you know something big was about to happen. The snowflakes had left some time ago, and there was some kind of introductory stuff going on now. A bit boring to the audience, like a scrum, restarting play. They were shifting more out here. If it had been a rugby game, they’d have been doing the Mexican Wave.
Kevin. An idea there, a niggle that had grown as Rhys had watched the All Blacks play at the Rugby World Cup. Wingers were usually at their best on the younger side. Kevvie had kept himself in good shape, and he had mana and rugby nous, that near-instinctive feel for the game, to burn, but he wasn’t the fastest man on the team anymore. How about shifting him to the midfield, where he could use his talent for reading the opposition and for making the switch from defense to offense at pace, opening the space for the younger, faster players outside him? That could up their tempo. It was radical, changing him from the backline, but . . .
There was definitely a rustle around him now. The stage went dark, then lit up again, the lights bathing it in pink and purple. The music started up again, two dancers appeared on the stage, and everything changed completely.
He sat up.
Whoa.
* * *
KEVIN
When Chloe had told him about this, Kevin had felt . . . cautious. That was the word. Cautious.
“It’stwoparts?” he’d asked. “Isn’t that a lot?”
“Less dancing than I’d do inSwan Lake,”she’d said. “Less than inA Million Kisses.Less than inLa Sonnambula,for that matter.Less than in . . .”
“Right,” he said. “Less than normal, then. But they’re still two totally different parts. Sounds grueling.” He still struggled to understand the intricacies of ballet, a discipline so rigorous, it could make international rugby look like a diversion for dilettantes, although with fewer stitches and concussions. “Like Odette and Odile, inSwan Lake,”he managed to pull out of the hat, somehow. “And you said that just about killed you.”
“You’re always going tosaythat, at the time.” She looked up from her spot on the floor, where her entire upper body was folded over her legs, stretching out after hours of rehearsal, preparing for tonight’s performance. “You don’t mean it. It’s just pain. It’s ballet.”
“Right,” he said dubiously.
Zavy, who was officially Kevin’s own now, since the adoption had come through, looked up from his furious coloring and said, “I drew a building, Kevin. Superman is flying over it, except he’s a dog. He’s Superdog.”
“Ah,” Kevin said. “The dog idea.”
“Yes,” Zavy said. “Because a dog can be your friend. And Holly says she wants a dog, and Noelle says she wants a dog, so I think we should have a dog for everybody, and her name will be Fred.”
“Fred?” Kevin asked.
“Yes.” Zavy’s ability to focus on the task at hand had only increased since he’d blown out the fourth candle on his birthday cake. Some kids were lighthearted. Zavy took life more seriously. “Fred Astaire, because that’s Mummy’s favorite dancer, and Fred will be a dancing dog.”
“Ah,” Kevin said. “Fred’s a poodle, maybe.”
“She’s a very good dog,” Zavy said. “And she needs to have a home, and we can be her home.”
Holly looked up from the table, where she was studying, and said, “What?” She shouted it, actually, because she was wearing headphones.
Some men came home from rugby games to a silent apartment and were lonely. Kevin didn’t have that problem. He came home to twin sisters down the hall, a brother, sister-in-law, and nephew in the flat upstairs, a wife, and a son. Fortunately, he was used to it. He tapped his ear, and Holly took off her headphones and asked, “What?”
