Page 37 of Kiwi Gold
Something had come UP? Yeh, right.I might not know much about dating, but I knew enough for this.
Never mind,I told myself.No harm done, and in two minutes, I’ll be out of here. Two minutes of I’m-very-sorry, of you-deserve-more and there’ll-be-a-great-bloke-out-there-for-you, and then I can go see Dad and come home and send the sitter away and check on the girls and finally stop smiling.That wasn’t a very attractive prospect, but it beat dissolving in tears in front of Lachlan that I wasn’t exciting enough, or fun enough, even to make it to the first date.
He looked startled, but said, “Oh. That’s good, then.” Like hehadexpected the dissolving-in-tears bit.
I thought,Says you, mate. This isn’t going to devastate me. This doesn’t come close. All it means is that I need to find a better man,tried not to make that sound in my head like,In my next school, I’ll have heaps of friends,and said, “Fine, then. See ya.” And turned to go.
“Wait, what? Laila.” He reached out and took hold of my arm, and I teetered again.
I wanted to say,I wore heels for you! Heels I can barely walk in!But, of course, I absolutelydidn’twant to say that, so instead, I said, more or less over my shoulder, “You’re not on the hook for this. We have no real agreement. We also don’t have to have a talk about it. It’s fine. Besides, I need to go see my dad before he leaves to go overseas. That was what I came over to tell you, not that I was … what? Desperately excited for our date, so I came over early to throw myself at you? Ha. No. I came over to tell you that I’d belatefor it. And now I don’t have to worry about that, so cheers.”
“Would youlisten?” For once, he didn’t sound cool. He still had hold of my arm, too.
I said, “If you’ll take your hand off my arm, I might.” Trying to be cool myself instead of humiliated. Maybe a bit angry, too, that he’d carried my rubbish bags and asked about my life like he cared, and then had decided that he couldn’t cope with all my complication after all. The other half of me, though, somehow wanted to laugh again. I’d dated one man in my life.One.And I hadn’t learned much, obviously, because this had been a disaster from the start. No wonder Lachlan was backing out.
When I write my tell-all book,I thought,this can be a chapter. The View From Base Camp,I’d call it. Except that most people didn’t much care about the view from base camp, so unless I slagged off Kegan, that’d be a book with no audience.
Lachlan took his hand off my arm, ran a hand through his perfectly imperfect, slightly shaggy hair, rumpling it up some, blew out a breath, and said, “I wasn’t begging off. I was saying that I need a few minutes.” I turned around to face him again, felt the skin of my chest prickling and my face heating with relief, and tried not to show it, and he looked at his watch and swore under his breath. “I’ll call the restaurant and ask them to hold our booking, if you’re still good with it. If they can’t, we’ll … come up with something else. Kebab. Burger. Pizza. Yeh, I’m doing excellently so far on this datemeister thing. Never mind. I’ll do better. How long do you need for your dad? Two cars, you reckon?” He looked me over. “Ready to go now? Need a … cardigan, or whatever? Some sort of … cover?”
It was all pretty devastatingly take-charge and competent, served up to a woman who’d spent the past fifteen years managing every daily detail of domestic life all by herself, but … wait. Was he saying,Surely you want to cover that up?
Really? That was his reaction to getting a good look at me? This was so not what I’d expected.
I was, in fact, wearing the prettiest dress I’d ever owned, which I’d made a special trip to shop for in the after-Christmas sales, and I’m not evenmentioningthe heels. I’d had to take the girls along with me, which hadn’t been much good for the ego. They’d pointed out every hideous sack dress, every prairie-style horror show, and every ruffled throwback on the clearance racks, most of them either pink with huge flowers splashed on, like your great-aunt’s housedress from the 1950s, or some sludgy greenish-brown thing that buttoned to the neck, fell to the calves, exposed not a centimeter of wrist, and sported a wide ruffled hem that Oriana and her sisters could have worn at Mount Zion. They’d said things like, “This one looks like your blue dress, only nicer,” and, “This one’s very pretty, Mum! See, it has flowers! You don’t have any dresses with flowers.” Proving, possibly, that I had a limited and perhaps terrible wardrobe. Or that lack of style was hereditary, and they’d inherited it.
To put the icing on top, when I came out of the dressing room in the prettiest one, if only I had the nerve to wear it, Amira said, “I can see your legs,” in the flattest, most accusing tone imaginable.
“I know,” I said. “Aren’t they pretty?” Like a teenager talking to her mum, but surely there was an acceptable line along the continuum between “Mount-Zion repressed” and “in danger of a summons for inadvertent genital reveal.” Call it “body-positive.” Sounded better than what my mum would have called it, and I didn’t want to raise my girls to be ashamed. How Ididwant to raise them, I wasn’t sure yet, but not like me, without my mum’s serene convictions but also without a Western woman’s breeziness. I was stuck in the awkward in-between, and I needed to get unstuck and find my own continuum, so I could model it for them.
Amira hadn’t got the memo, unfortunately, because she said, “Except I can never see your legs that much, except when you’re going to bed. Are you going to be in bed in your dress?”
I chose this moment to flash on Poppy, when I’d asked her,Do people really do those things?answering,Only if they’re lucky,with a sort of … secret smile.I was a bit jealous of that smile, but I held on to my composure and said, “No. But I can wear this to go out. It’s pretty, and it’s modest. I’m covered up. You can see through the lower part a bit, that’s all.”
Doing my best to convince myself, as Amira and Yasmin exchanged dubious looks. It clearlywasmodest, though, since Lachlan hadn’t even registered it.Orthe shoes.
Because they werenormal.Nothing special. That was the point!
Also, I wasn’t wearing my ring. I’d looked at myself in the mirror after my dad had called, had put up a hand to smooth my hair, and seen the flash of gold on my finger. I’d stood there for ten seconds. Fifteen. Unable to move. And then, as if in slow motion, I’d pulled it off my finger and dropped it into the tiny trinket box my dad had given me for my eighteenth birthday A box that held nothing more than it had then, when I’d opened the box to find diamond studs for my ears to replace the tiny gold balls I’d worn for years, the ones I still wore. Kegan had thought jewelry was a waste of money, especially engagement rings with their ridiculous “rules” about how much you were meant to go into debt for them, and I’d agreed. I’d wanted to save for a house instead. I’d truly be an adult, I’d thought, if I had a house of my own, but it had never happened.
When I tossed it in, the ring bounced against the diamond studs with a fainttingand then settled there, like the One Ring in the fire, and I stared down at it for a minute, then closed the box.
Now, I did my best to haul my mind back to the matter at hand and said, “I have to go to Speight’s. To meet my dad, I mean. Only for ten minutes, but we need to leave now, because he said he onlyhasten minutes. And—no, on the cardigan, or whatever else you’re thinking I should do to finish this off. I’m finished. It’s done.”
Why? Because if I put on a cardigan, I’d never take it off. If this was me moving into a new normal, it was time to start. Besides, we’d be inside.
Lachlan looked startled and said, “I need to go to Speight’s, too, oddly. For more or less the same reason. For my sisters, and my mum. Ten minutes works. After that, we’ll go on to Moiety. I hope. Or to get that kebab.” He glanced down at my shoes, seeming to register the ankle-strapped nude sandals for the first time. And the height of their heels. “And no worries. We’ll drive. And valet.”
I said, “I can walk.” Reflexively, before I realized that I probably couldn’t. I was used to dressing practically. Even if I’d wanted to be less modest, Kegan, as mentioned, wasn’t a fan of too much female ornamentation, especially of the type that made it impossible to run. “Foot-binding,” he’d called shoes like this in disgust.
Kegan is dead. Choose for yourself.
Lachlan smiled at me. Slow and … and hot, in his white shirt that stretched across his chest, and his black jacket that showed the breadth of his shoulders. Not to mention the snug jeans. I wasn’t looking at those, but I had that faint inner tremble again, the one that had had me putting both hands on the bathroom benchtop and taking deep breaths a few minutes back, because I’d just sprayed my scent deep into my non-cleavage as if I expected somebody to smell it.
If he so much as tried to kiss me, I knew I’d freeze again. Even though I’d thought about him doing it ever since that kiss on the cheek in the driveway last week. The warm brush of his lips, the alien feeling of scruff against my skin, the way he’d held my face …
“You sure, on the walking?” he said. “I was hoping you fell against me because you weren’t used to the heels. Because you’d bought them to go out with me. A man likes to think a woman dressed to please him, on a date. That she thought about getting pretty for him. Since we’re meant to be communicating about these things.”
There was something so warm in his navy-blue eyes, and I may have been a bit breathless when I said, “I did fall because I’m not used to wearing them, so you may be right. And I did buy them to go out with you, too. Well, to go out. I reckoned—neutral color, eh. Neutral style. It’s best to stick with versatile props. For the future, I mean.”
