Page 31 of Kiwi Gold
“And,” she said, “because despite the nightdress, I don’t think I can have sex outside of marriage. Or come, you know … close. Obviously, that’s the third reason, the one you won’t say.” She colored up again when she said it, and she wasn’t looking at me. Until, suddenly, she was. Huge golden eyes that were doing their best to knock me breathless. Triangular face. A curving mouth with the kind of etched bow to the top lip you’d want to kiss, and the kind of bottom lip you’d want to bite.
Except … what? I said, “Oh.” Stupidly. And, yes, that was the third thing. That remote thing she had. That pulling back she did.
“Yeh. Well.” She took a stab at her salad, then set her fork down. “Anyway, I think I need to learn to date, because I’m … well, eventually I’m going to want to, even if I don’t now. Perfect time to practice, both of us with our eyes wide open. So if I paid the bill and you weren’t doing anything else, what d’you reckon? Would you be willing to go out with me and show me how it’s done?”
* * *
Laila
Had I actually said that? Yes, I had.
He wasn’t exactly leaping out of his seat with excitement. In fact, he looked so gobsmacked, I was afraid he was going to have another choking fit. Instead, he swallowed his bite of salad and said, “You’ll have to explain a bit more, I think.”
“I’m trying to be systematic,” I said. “Practical.”
“In charge,” he said. “Because you have to be.”
“Yes. Right. I do. And I’d want your honest feedback, of course, on the dating. On my … behavior. On your expectations. That would be the point.” I wasn’t wearing the nightdress anymore, and yet it felt like I was. My clothes were much too form-fitting through the torso for modesty, and my arms were bare. This was, in fact, the sexiest outfit I owned, my flash-dinner-out clothes. I hadn’t worn them for two years, probably, and now I’d worn them to abarbecue.Whereashewas wearing a T-shirt and shorts again, khaki this time. The shirt matched his eyes, which were pure navy blue, and the sleeves of that shirt were short, showing the muscle again. Which wasn’t anything unusual, for a T-shirt. At a barbecue.
I should have worn shorts myself, or a pretty sundress. Yellow, possibly, with a longer skirt and some sleeves and a modest neckline. Sending no message at all but “barbecue-appropriate.” If I’d had a sundress like that, that is.
Oh. Wait. I said, “Obviously, if you, ah, met somebody you wanted to date—actuallydate—I’d expect the deal to stop. Clearly.”
“Hmm,” he said. “You mean if I’m sleeping with them.”
Oh, bloodyhell.What was Idoing?
I didn’t swear, either, and here I was doing it. Also sweating. “Yes. I mean, I assume that once you … ah, get serious, you don’t … she wouldn’t want …” I stopped. “Actually, I have no idea. You said last night that if you asked me to go home with you, I’d run, and I don’t think you were looking for a lifetime of loving, so maybe it’s … completely normal to go out with heaps of people. While being, uh, intimate as well. With some of them. Or all of them.”
He was laughing. Oh, yes, this was going wonderfully. I said, “I’m not even in the rightclothes,though. I also don’t know when, during the dating process, you’re meant to explain the thing about sex. Aboutnosex. Up front, at the coffee date or whatever? I know that, anyway. You start with a coffee date. But then who’d want to go out with you again, especially if he’s paying? Orishe paying? Maybe you wait instead, like waiting until you get the job offer to state your disability, because by that point, they like you and are invested. Or maybe that’s dishonest. I don’t know. And could you stopgrinning?”
He couldn’t, apparently. “That’s a fair number of questions. Seems to me that we should answer them as we go.”
“So you’ll do it? Be my dating coach?”
“On one condition,” he said. “You’re not paying.”
“Yes,” I said. “I am. Because of the ineptitude and the not getting anything out of it and so forth.”
“It’s not a barter arrangement,” he said, not laughing anymore, “much less payment for services. It’s about my ego, which requires feeding, apparently. And you’ll have to pay a babysitter as well. So, yeh, I’ll help you with the dating practice, but I won’t let you pay.”
“That makes no sense,” I said. “All right, how’s this? I’ll pay my half. We split the check down the middle.”
He paused for so long, I didn’t think he was going to answer. Then he said, “Subject to renegotiation.”
I wasn’t a babe in the woods anymore, however much I felt that way at this moment, so I said, “Only after a certain number of dates. Once you’ve had a chance to reassess and to back out if you want to. Say … three. If we get that far.”
“Right,” he said. “Three. Once a week minimum.”
I looked at him with suspicion. “Why?”
“I require frequency to do my best work, dating-coach-wise,” he said. “Otherwise, you could forget all my lessons. And I usually have a pretty good idea of how much I like a woman by the third date. Or the first date, sometimes. Like last night.”
“Right,” I said. “In my nightdress, running away.”
“Just like that.” Those navy-blue eyes were right there, looking into mine, and he wasn’t smiling anymore. “I liked everything about last night except that it ended.”
I had to stop and breathe. I said, when I could go on, “It’s going to end, though. Every time. That’s the point.”
