Page 98 of Kiwi Gold
Wednesday ended and Thursday came, as Thursdays always did. But tomorrow night, I had a date. Also, yes, I was focusing on posing a naked baby this afternoon, as that was my job. At the moment, I had him on a poufy nest of fake fur inside an upside-down leather stockman’s hat (Dad was an Aussie), and was getting him arranged just right while I attempted not to think about two things. Or possibly three. First, that I only had one more day of regular work, and then those two weeks off, and the mortgage was due. And second, about the item sitting on the tallboy in my bedroom.
There was a third thing, too, but I was trying hard not to think about the third thing.
I adjusted the tiny koala in the baby’s hand, told Oriana, “Hold him like that,” waited until she had careful hands on him, then got behind my tripod and started shooting. I focused on what was in front of me, and I saw last night anyway.
Lachlan’s bedroom. And Lachlan.
He’d taken me straight in there last night and said, “Close your eyes and put out your hands.” And when I had, he’d put the thing into my palms. I felt the weight of it, and the hardness. Not something to wear, then, unless it was in a box.
“Open your eyes,” he told me, and I did.
I’d been right. It was a box. Made of some dark wood, covered with an intricate inlaid mother-of-pearl design, and fastened with a brass clasp. The pattern of the inlay was complicated and so pleasing in its geometry, the way so much Islamic art was, the strictures on representing humans and animals forcing the artist to find another way to express his creativity.
I said, “It’s beautiful. Thank you.” And meant it.
He said, “I bought it before my presentation. Restless, I reckon, because I went last, and I had six hours to kill. It’s meant to be an antique. No idea if it’s true. If you open it, the inside’s lined. Jewelry box, eh.”
“I don’t really have jewelry, though,” I confessed. “Just a pair of diamond studs that I don’t wear much, because, well … no occasion, and a gold chain. So it’s beautiful, but …”
“Open it,” he said again, and the intensity on his face made me catch my breath.
I opened it. It was divided into two square compartments lined in deep purple, like my dressing gown. The velvet was thick, rich, and a little worn, as if it reallywasold. And there was something coiled into the right-hand one. Something bright.
Lachlan didn’t say anything. He just looked at me.
I pulled the thing out and held it in my palm. It was so light, it was like I was holding nothing, but the yellow gold gleamed like the sun.
“It’s Saudi gold,” I said, because there was no mistaking that richness, or that yellow.
“Yeh,” Lachlan said. “Twenty-two carat, probably from Mahd Al-Dhahab. Which is a mine.”
“Is it a necklace?” I asked. I couldn’t quite tell, because there were loops, but …
“No,” he said. “It’s a bracelet. Can I put it on you?”
It should have been a casual question, but it wasn’t, and I was holding my breath by the time he set the box on the bed, took the impossibly delicate chain from me, and started fastening it onto my right hand. The circle that was a ring around my middle finger, the twin strands that extended down from it in an elongated V-shape over the back of my hand and met at my wrist, and finally, the three fine strands around my wrist. He fastened the clasp at the inside of my wrist, then lifted my hand to his mouth and kissed me there, on that tender flesh, and I trembled, then put my palm against his face, looked at the gold against my skin, and said, “Thank you.”
My heart was too full to say more, and maybe he knew it, because he turned me around to face the mirror on the back of the bedroom door, stood behind me, held my hand against my breast, and said, “Your mum was a princess, you told me, or she should have been. Look at yourself. That’s what you are, too.”
I wanted to say,I’m no princess,but how could I, when I was wearing all that gold around my hand? When he was pulling my hair aside and kissing the nape of my neck, and my hand had gone back over my head to hold him there?
By the time he lifted his head again, his eyes meeting mine in the mirror, I had no air left to breathe. My breast was rising and falling, trying to get that breath, and his hand wasn’t going there. Instead, his arm was around my waist, and he was saying, “Reckon I was always going to tell you that I love you.”
I couldn’t say anything. It wasn’t possible. He smiled, a nearly painful thing that was a twist of his mouth, and said, “Yeh. I know you’re not really there. You hit me like that, that’s all.”
I’d always wondered how my mum felt when she’d picked up that note. How she could have been so sure it was worth risking discovery, risking her reputation, risking everything. Now, I thought I knew. I said, because I had no choice but to tell him, “So do you.”
I didn’t know what else to say, and maybe he didn’t, either, because he just looked at me in the mirror. In a dressing gown from the Arabian Nights, my hair falling to my hips, and my hand over my head, touching his face. He straightened and said, “If I take you out on Saturday night, will you wear this for me? The bracelet, not the dressing gown.” That twist of a smile again. “Though I love the dressing gown.”
“I only have the one dress,” I said. “And you know I can’t walk in my shoes. I have diamond earrings, though, little studs. If I wore those, and this, too, maybe it would make up for you having seen the dress before.”
He said, “You don’t have to make up for that. I can see that dress again.”
I tried to tease. “You just want to take it off this time.”
He didn’t smile. “I do. But I’ll want to go out with you anyway, whether that happens or not.”
“Third date after all, then,” I said.
