Page 116 of Kiwi Gold
I wanted to ask, “Will you ring us back and tell us what they say?” But, of course, I couldn’t. That wasn’t how it worked.
At last, the call was over, and Peter rang off, then mopped at the sweat on his face with a tissue and took another huge swallow of “coffee” before saying, “Satisfied?” It was belligerent, but it rang hollow, because hewashollow, now. Hollowed out.
I said, “Yeh. Thanks for doing that.”
He nodded and took another gulp. “I didn’t mean for anything to happen to you.”
“I know,” I said. I wanted to say more, maybe,Thanks for teaching me everything you did.Or even,Thanks for adopting me. I know you didn’t have to.What else did he have? I couldn’t quite get there, though. Maybe another day. I stood up and said, “I’ll be going, then.”
This time, I didn’t wait for my sisters. I just left. I aimed my car toward home and let it take me.
It was ten minutes, and it was the difference between two lifetimes. Away from the troubles and the failures of the past, of weekends in that little flat with the bunk beds, wishing I was grown and a man already. Toward a place where I controlled my own destiny, a place where I could be, not the man my father had been, or my stepfather, either. My own man.
Maybe a husband. Maybe even a father.
Possibly, a man not unlike Torsten Drake.
I went to Laila like that, like a man who needed everything.
Date number three.
50
BEATING LIKE WINGS
Laila
I hadn’t heard from Lachlan, other than a single text.OK. Sometime after six-thirty.
I thought about what he was doing over there, and told myself,This isn’t the night. It was a hard day for you? It was a harder one for him.Disappointment. Disillusion. His sisters’ feelings. Almost as bad as the day I’d found out about Kegan, probably.
I ached to be there with him, to hold his hand, to help. I couldn’t do that, but I could help now. When he came. If he came.
I took a shower in my pink-and-white bath, and did all those things in there that you do. Body cultivation, shaving and plucking and exfoliating and moisturizing, just in case. I thought about how little I knew about sex, and how much he did, and somehow, I couldn’t worry about it. It would be tonight, or it would be another night, and it would be all right. You couldn’t love a man’s scent, his mouth and his hands and his heart, and not have it be all right. This was my new life, and my new life was messy, but it was good.
I belong to my love, and my love belongs to me.That shouldn’t have been how it felt, you think? That was how it felt anyway.
I thought about lighting a scented candle, but I didn’t have any scented candles. I did turn on a sexy playlist, although I had to hunt around to find one, did my makeup as well as I possibly could, combed out my hair and put it up again, sprayed on my favorite scent, dressed in my best undies and the see-through dress, put the diamonds in my ears, then possibly lowered the romantic mood by taking out the rubbish and hoovering the lounge before I turned down the lights. It was never going to look seductive in here, not with my yellow kitchen and my scruffy couch and found-by-the-side-of-the-road coffee table, but lower lights would help. Possibly.
The last thing I did? I put on Lachlan’s bracelet, one step at a time. The music was playing, something tortured and slow, a man singing about how touching her body was his drug and his oblivion, and I was sliding the ring over my finger, draping the two lengths of gold over the back of my hand, settling the three strands circling my wrist into place, and hooking the clasp. Feeling the feather weight of the thing fastened to me, turning my hand in the low light and watching it gleam, and remembering Lachlan’s eyes in the mirror, how hungry they’d been, how he’d kissed the inside of that wrist.
That was when the doorbell rang.
* * *
Lachlan
When she opened the door, all my thoughts just … vanished. They were gone. I stared at her, she put out her arms, and I stepped into them like coming home. And then I kissed her, and I lost it.
Somehow, she was against the door, and I had a hand around her waist, the other hand under her bum, and I was lifting her.
She wrapped her legs around my waist like she knew it was what I needed, and it was almost too much right there. I had a hand in her hair, was pulling out pins, trying to be gentle but probably not quite managing it, and she got her hand up there and helped me. Thetingof those pins hitting the floor, and then the two larger ones, and her hair was falling around her, I was wrapping one hand in the silken length of it, and then I was kissing her again, my mouth desperate, unable to take in enough, to get everything I needed.
Lips, and hands, and breath. Her hands pulling at my shirt, getting it up my chest until she couldn’t go any farther, and I was yanking it up and off me with one hand, then kicking off my jandals. Wanting to lower her to the floor, and thinking the same thing I had before.Not on the floor. No.Through the flat and not into her bedroom, because I couldn’t. This needed to be better. It needed to be more.
Out the back door, still carrying her, still kissing her. Dressed only in a pair of shorts, letting the door slam behind us and digging my keys out of my pocket. Her hands around my head as I felt for the keyhole and finally found it, and then we were inside, into the bedroom where I’d lain awake at night and listened to her soft movements, where I’d wondered if she was thinking about me.
When she went down on my bed and onto her back, my hand was still behind her head. When I was unfastening the transparent dress and spreading it wide, her mouth was opening under mine, her breath was coming hard, and her hands were running down my arms, down my back. She rose on one elbow, got her arm out of one sleeve, and I pulled her up and helped her with the other one.
