Page 82 of Kiwi Sin
“Yeh,” I said. “I know. Porn. I saw it by accident at first, but then I watched. I promise I won’t watch anymore, but I did. I saw. You haven’t, though, I guess. Girls don’t, it seems. Or maybe they do, but they don’t say.”
She shook her head, though her hands were still pressed against her face as if she were holding herself together. I thought,Why did you tell her?And answered,Because she has the right to know, and because it feels so wrong not to.I wondered, though, how I’d feel if this was how I lost her.
Like a fool, that was how. Or a sinner.
She said, finally, “I haven’t … watched. I wouldn’t know where to watch. I have thoughts, though, and they’re always …” She heaved a breath all the way from the bottom of her lungs, and the next words came on that exhale. “About you. They’re always about you.”
I’d touched her hair, because I’d wanted to kiss her lips, and then I’d wanted to kiss her more places. I ran my hand along that soft, shiny hair, put up so neatly, wished with everything I had that I could take down her hair and take off her clothes and feel her trembling hands undoing my buttons, too, her hands on my body, that we could learn about it all together. I said, “I want to do all those things, but I want to do them with you.” She caught her breath, and I went on. “I know we need to wait until we’re married. I don’t want to do the wrong thing. I don’t want to hurt you. But … I hope it can be soon. I’m saving for my own flat, and I’ll work as hard as it takes to make this happen.”
“I want it to be soon,” she said. “And I’m saving, too. It won’t just be you.”
“You’re still seventeen, though,” I said. “Daisy will say it’s wrong, and I think Gray will, too.”
“I know. And I should probably care.” Then she started, grabbed her knitting, jumped to her feet along with the dog, and said, “That was Lachlan’s car. I need to go inside.”
* * *
Now,I thought,We need to sit down with Daisy and Gray and tell them, and make a plan.That was what mattered, not my out-of-control imagination. I pressed the buttons for the code on Gray’s gate and wondered if he’d invite me to dinner again. Was it wrong to eat at a man’s table when you were planning to take a seventeen-year-old girl away from her family?
Well, yeh, almost certainly. I might not know much, but some things didn’t come from experience. Some things came from inside you. I heard the gate closing behind me, headed down the hill with more of that shingle-spatter, and tried to refocus on this. On today, and what each man needed to do in order to finish the job. If I let Gray down and didn’t finish on time, he wasn’t going to think much of me.
Last week, he’d told me that he was giving me that rise in pay. “But don’t be thinking your check will be the same after this week,” he’d said. “Some of that’s for the time you’ve already been foreman.” All the same, the number I’d seen on my check yesterday had made me sweat a bit. It put me that much closer to changing my life. If we finished on time, and if I showed Gray and Daisy my account balance? Wouldn’t it help?
I stopped thinking about it, because somebody’s little car was already here, parked in the spot I usually took. Only two of us with the gate code: my dad, and me. He’d already be at the house, then. I checked my watch. Six-fifty. I was five minutes late. I parked beside his car, checked my phone to make sure nobody else needed to be let in, jumped down, and went inside to find him.
He was standing in the middle of the kitchen, in which the cabinets were half installed, but he swiveled to meet me when I stepped through the door.
“Getting closer,” he said. “Paint job’s not bad. Who did it?”
“Raphael,” I said. “As he’s the most meticulous. And if you’d take over installing the cabinetry today, working with Uriel, that’d help. We’re behind on the third bath, and I want to do it myself, so the stone’s perfect.” It was for the ensuite in the master bedroom, it was marble and was going to be more beautiful than I’d ever imagined a bath could be, and I needed to lay it myself. Gray would know if it wasn’t right, and what was worse—I would.
Adingfrom my phone, and I checked it and buzzed my brothers through the gate. Dad said, “I’d like you to come home after work.”
“OK,” I said. I knew he meant, “to his house,” not to mine, even though I’d never lived in the flat. Had he heard, somehow? Or guessed? Had Raphael or Uriel told him, maybe?
The sound of the door opening, anotherdingthat was another member of the crew arriving, and I was going out to meet them. And seeing Oriana out the window, walking up the track and headed toward the yurt with a basket on her arm. Eggs and fruit, maybe, for Daisy and Gray’s breakfast. She turned her head to look at the house, or, probably, to look at the arriving workers, but it felt like she was looking at me. I went to the doorway and raised my hand, and she raised hers and smiled. Shyly, and so sweetly, and I got another rush of emotion. Five flames again.
That was all, except for a text in early afternoon, when I was holding up an oversized slab of marble with my cousin Diligence, slotting it into place with absolute precision. I heard the chime, remembered how Oriana and I had finally exchanged phone numbers last night, just before she’d dashed into the house with Long John, and told myself it would be one of the flatmates. Rowan, texting,Out of loo paper,or something like that, as if it were easier to tell me than to go buy some.
Somehow, I’d become the wife in my flat, or possibly the mum. There was a thought for you.Don’t do that, when it’s the two of you,I reminded myself, and got a kick of excitement in my gut at the thought.
When the stone was secure, I told Diligence, “Lay the cement for the next one,” then pulled my phone out of my pocket and glanced at it, even though it was a terrible example to set.
It wasn’t Rowan. It was Oriana, saying,Come for dinner? I didn’t ask yet, but I’m cooking it. Daisy’s on day shift, so she’ll be there. Maybe come by at five-thirty, so we can talk first. Meet me?
My heart gave an almighty leap that was either excitement or dread, and I textedOK,tried to breathe, and picked up the next slab of marble.
My parents, then Daisy and Gray. What could go wrong, other than everything?
34
BURNING IT DOWN
Gabriel
I found out.
I left work after my dad, of course. After everybody. I’d learnt my lesson. And when I got to my parents’ flat, Harmony opened the door to me, looking … something. Excited, or something else.
