Page 34 of Kiwi Gold
“You told me what you wanted,” I said. “You left when you needed to. That works for me.” I said all that, and then, yeh, I did it. I bent and touched my lips to her cheek. My hand, somehow, was holding the side of her face now, my fingers touching the silk of her hair, and the softness and the scent of her nearly knocked me back.
She didn’t run this time. She trembled a little more, and I felt it. I stepped back with the effort of a lifetime, tried to smile, and said, “This would be a good time to do that sharing. Was that OK? Or too much?”
A breath, hauled in. The rise of her slight breasts. The color in her cheeks. “It was OK,” she said.
“Good. Friday, then. Seven-thirty. Wear something pretty, because I’m going to do my best to wow you. Fair warning.”
“I don’t … wear revealing things.”
“It can still be pretty, though. Because that’s what you are.”
“Mum.”The voice came from inside the flat.
Laila turned, turned back, and said, “I need to go.”
“Right,” I said. “Seven-thirty. I’ll drive this time. And Laila?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll have a good time. And no pressure. I promise.”
15
WITH THE WHEELIE BINS
Lachlan
I saw Laila twice during the week. Once walking the dog with the girls at seven-thirty in the morning, and once taking her rubbish bags to the curb.
The first time, I was off to work again after working late into the night on a proposal to an Aussie mining company that was after copper, nickel, and precious metals in the freezing, far-northern region of Quebec. Giving it my all, because you struck while the iron was hot, and just now, mine was. Also, I’d heard that Torsten Drake would be going after it, too, and I wanted to win again. He’d be steaming when he heard about Papua New Guinea, and I was glad.
I waved out the window of the car and smiled in the rearview mirror at the girls waving back. Especially Yasmin, who had a huge smile on her face and was actually jumping up and down to wave. It was cricket, I reckoned. Cricket was bonding.
Leaping out of the car myself and joining them on their walk, though, would be … odd. More than odd.
All my adult life, I’d avoided women with kids. Now, being interested in Laila was making me look like a pervert. You couldn’t win.
The second time I saw her, it was late Thursday evening, I was coming home from the gym this time, and she was dragging her black rubbish bags to the curb. Walking backward, because they were heavy.
Obviously, I did stop then. I jogged the few meters over to her, in fact, and said, “I’ll get those.” One right move here, and I knew what it was.
She looked up, startled and wary as the bird she always reminded me of. A toutouwai, maybe, small and soft, clad in gray and white. Because, yeh, she was dressed in lightweight gray trousers and a gauzy white shirt. Her hair was in the knot again, she wasn’t wearing any makeup, the planes of her face were cut like glass, and there were shadows under her eyes and faint lines around them. Tired, or worried.
I put a hand on a rubbish bag, and after a second, she relinquished it, and then the other bag. It shouldn’t have felt like a triumph, and it did. I hefted them—they were heavy, and they had a pong even through the plastic—dumped them at the curb, and said, “That’s a fair bit of rubbish for a week. Smells awful, too. Have you been cutting up bodies in there?”
“Ha,” she said. “I started back to work this week, is why.” She was smoothing her hand over the side of her head as if she were checking for misbehaving strands. Of which there were none. Her hair shone, dark brown and deep copper and restrained fire, and I was looking down at the part in it. It went straight down the middle. A careful woman.
“That’s early,” I said. “Just after New Year’s, eh. I did as well, but that’s because I own the firm.”
Her chin came up. “So do I.”
“Oh.” I stopped a minute to consider what to say next and decided on, “Got recycling?”
She smiled, and I noticed again what I’d noticed before. That she had a little gap between her front teeth, and it made her curvy mouth even more …well, anyway. That was one hell of a kissable mouth. She said, “It’s in a wheelie bin, Lachlan.”
“Yeh, and seems I want to wheel it. I need to take mine out anyway.”
Now, she wasn’t smiling. She was laughing. “So you can show me that you can wheel two bins at once?”
