Page 49 of Just Say Christmas
She was the one at a loss for words now. “Oh,” she finally said, then laughed and shoved her hair back with one hand. “Guess we’re both trying to lose the secrets. It can be hard to roll that boulder off you, can’t it? You keep shoving it off, and it just keeps rolling back on. You get pretty tired of how heavy it is.”
He smiled. “Yeh. That’s about it.”
Movement on the stairs behind him, and Rhys was there. The usual thumps on the back and shakes of the hand, and Zora said, “Luke and I have been exchanging stories. He didn’t know about you and me. And here I thought everybody would have heard that.”
Luke said, getting it in fast so he could move on, “And I was telling Zora that I’m gay. I thought everybody would have heardthat.”
“Oh,” Rhys said. “Well, that’s a surprise. Never heard that one, no.”
“I didn’t say before,” Luke said, being his usual self, the only one he knew how to be. “That’s why I’m saying now.”
“Well, mate,” Rhys said, “if you’re here to paint, you’re welcome. We seem to have a bit of a crisis. Always a good man in the tough spots, as I recall. See what you can do, will you?”
So that was all right, but when Zora took him into the bedroom, he blinked. The wall was girly. It wasverygirly. Nyree was there, looking exactly like herself, dressed in paint-smeared short denim overalls with a bandanna wound around her head to hold back her curly hair, and painting like fury on some sort of little thing—a fairy, it was, riding on the back of an iridescent-green beetle—while Kane painted clouds onto the edge of the ceiling, and the tall kid named Tom something, whom he’d briefly met back at the Waiheke house, painted a horse. Which was in the sky, for some reason. The horse was upside down, which would give you vertigo.
Somebody else was sitting on the floor, his legs crossed, painting blades of grass in the foreground that were probably suitable for tiny mice to peek out from, by the look of things here. A man of around thirty, with the kind of profile that made you stand up straighter, his glossy chocolate-brown hair cut high and tight, almost fading over the ears, but more conservative than that. He turned from his spot on the floor to look at Luke, and Luke stopped breathing for a second.
His eyes were brown.Brightbrown, if that was a thing. Amber, maybe. Full of life. The sleeves of his blue-checked shirt were turned up two careful turns from his wrists, revealing some muscle, and he was slim, but he didn’t look precious. He just looked . . . like the kind of fella who made Luke’s tongue feel too big for his mouth and the rest of his body feel equally outsized, and made him completely aware that he wasn’t good-looking and never would be.
“Ah,” Nyree said. “The skill position’s here. Hi. I’d hug you, but I’m covered with paint. I’m on a deadline here, too, so . . . You know Tom. Lock, with the Blues, dating Marko’s cousin Ella. This is Hayden, who’s Zora’s brother, and is here helping too, because he took the afternoon off.Nota rugby player, for once. A lawyer. Hayden—this is Luke. My brother. Yes, a rugby player, though you can probably tell. Paris Racing. Skipper for England. Et cetera. Tighthead prop.”
Tom stood still, holding his paintbrush in midair, like he’d forgotten about it. “Hi,” he said.
The problem with this thing was that Luke couldn’t tell what wasI-don’t-know-how-to-deal-with-your-unexpected-gayness,and what wasI’m-shy-around-senior-players.Also, he needed to breathe. He said, “Hi.”
Kane said, “Hey, bro. I rang you back yesterday about that lunch, but you didn’t answer. Sorry I didn’t answer your message sooner. It’s been a bit . . .” He stopped, probably because,That new-love thing where you can’t get out of bed or take your eyes off the other personwasn’t really something you shared, even with your brother.
“No worries,” Luke said. “I get it. I was moving. To a hotel. And then I was . . .” He couldn’t think how to put the kind of black hole he’d been in yesterday. He didn’t want to put it any way.
Nyree stopped painting. “I thought you were staying with a mate this week. In Ponsonby. If I hadn’t thought that, I’d have asked you to stay with us. Surely you know I’d have asked you.”
Kane looked surprised by her intensity, at least Luke thought that was what it was. She hadn’t told him, then. Wonderful.
“I was,” Luke said. “I left. What do you want me to do here?”
“The forest, over here,” Nyree said. “Where it spills over onto the other wall, or where I want it to. You’re the best at this, so paint the trees in like I’ve drawn them, please. Trunks, branches, leaves. They’re the leaf kind, not the needle kind, because that’s prettier, and you can climb them, and I’m going to paint creatures in them, and maybe somebody else. Use this green and this brown. Brushes here. I’ll do the overpainting, with the details. Why did you leave? What are you not saying?”
He picked up his brush, studied the drawing, selected a starting point, and began work on the largest trunks. Knotholes in here, that Nyree had marked to paint with a darker brown, and getting the lines in the trunk, for the pattern of the bark. He could do that. “I’m saying I had to leave.”
“Right,” Nyree said. “NowI’msaying, because I can’t handle all these undercurrents. They block my painting chi. If you don’t want me to say, tell me now. Three, two, one . . . Luke’s gay, Kane. Oh, and Tom and Hayden, in case Tom didn’t hear. You cameout,”she told Luke when he turned to look at her. “Everybody’s going to know. Surely it’s easier if you don’t have to tell every single person yourself, especially since you never tell people anything, normally. Now that I think of it, that’s probablywhyyou never tell people anything, isn’t it?”
“One of the reasons.” He could feel his ears getting red. When your ears were as damaged as his were, they reacted, unfortunately. He could control his face. He couldn’t control his ears. “What do you want me to say? That I told my oldest mate, because I’m trying to tell everybody, tired of keeping secrets and remembering to change the pronouns, and he got odd, like I’d made a move on him? Because that happened. That it made me want to . . . go to ground for a bit? That happened, too. Not everybody’s going to be accepting. I knew that.”
He didn’t tell her how it had felt when Matt had looked at him that way. With alarm, like he had something catching. Or, more likely, like he was trying to catchhim.He’d played with Matt all the way back at school, then for Canterbury and at the Crusaders. Back when Matt had first been dating his girlfriend, to whom he was now married. Before he had kids. He’d known him for more than fifteen years. Sunday night, though, when they’d been sitting on the couch, when Matt had had a couple beers and Luke had had a couple cups of tea, and he’d told him? Matt hadn’t asked anything, had changed the subject as fast as he could, and had stood up, a few minutes later, and said, “Well, best get off to bed. Fiona’s waiting, eh. Says I stay up too late. Work tomorrow.”
Luke had stood, too, and said, “If it’s a problem, me staying . . .”
“No,” Matt had said. “Of course not.”
“I’m not interested in you,” Luke had said. “If that’s what’s worrying you.”
Matt had laughed. Too loudly. “That’d be a surprise, eh. After all those showers.”
“It doesn’t have to be a surprise,” Luke had said, “because it didn’t happen, and it won’t happen now. That’s not the way it works.”
All the same, after hearing the murmur of voices for an hour that night, picking up the concern in them like vibrations from a faraway earthquake, he’d said to Matt and Fiona, “Thanks for your hospitality. I’ve got a booking from today, so I’m off. Took the sheets off the bed for you.” He’d seen the relief on Matt’s face, gone a bit more hollow inside, and crossed that friendship off the list.
He’d known it would happen. It was going to be worse with the team. Too much nudity in the changing sheds, and too much grabbing of bodies in the scrum. Sex was the last thing he thought about when he was playing, but not everybody would believe that. Yeh, it was going to be worse. It would hurt, but heaps of things hurt. You were never going to avoid them, so you might as well face them.
