Page 10 of Catch a Kiwi
Roman
She was as cold as if she’d been in a deep freeze, and shaking. Still wearing her raincoat, but it wasn’t doing her any good, especially as her long hair was soaked and she was wearing short shorts and sandals. I started rubbing her icy, mud-covered thigh, and she pulled away and said, “S-stop. Don’t … touch me.”
I glared at her. “I’m getting you warm, not desperately aroused by drowned rats. Could you shut up and let me help?”
“Oh.” She did shut up, but she wasn’t what you’d call “relaxed.” I was glad when another nurse, a dark, slight woman with an air of competence, arrived with another wheelchair.
“You can come back with her,” the nurse told me when she’d got the girl into the wheelchair.
“No,” the girl said.
“Yes,” I said. “Somebody’s got to give them details, and get the cops in, too, and you’re in no shape to do it.”
“I can?—”
“Shut up,” I said again. “Let’s go,” I told the nurse.
“Are you two in a relationship?” Her gaze was steely despite her size. The scarier kind of nurse.Daisy Tamatoa,her name badge said. She didn’t look much like a Daisy, and she didn’t look Samoan, either. Much too small.
“No,” I said. “Don’t know the woman from Adam. Pulled the other girl out of a car, that’s all.”
“If you don’t want him to come,” the nurse told the girl, “tell me.”
The girl said, “He should … come. He’s right.”
“First sensible thing I’ve heard you say,” I said, which was, yes, ungenerous of me, but here I was, doing nothing but helping and getting stick for it. I should sit here in my chair, wait to make sure they were both going to survive, because that was the decent thing to do, give the girl my mobile number once she was able to comprehend I was doing it, then drive back to the Purakaunui Valley one more time, arrange for her van to be winched up my hillside and taken to the wrecker’s, collect what there was to salvage for her, and go on with my life. There you go. Clear, simple plan. It wasn’t like I didn’t have enough to do.
“White knight and thinking you’re a dark one, which is even worse,” I could almost hear Clarissa, my latest ex-wife, say. “Rushing in to save the day because you’re the only one who knows how, but you’re not. Just because you’re good at business, that doesn’t mean you’re good at relationships. There’s no boss in a relationship, and no, it doesn’t matter if he’s a good boss. It’s an inferiority complex, is what it is. Chip on your shoulder from growing up illegitimate and skint and not knowing who your dad is. You aren’t going to change that, so what’s the point?”
Right. I’d learned my lesson. I wasn’t rushing in. I wasn’tfixing it. I also wasn’t sharing my feelings with women anymore. You want to talk about mistakes?That’sa mistake.
And yet I came along anyway. I couldn’t just leave them there, not knowing how badly injured they were or if they had anyone to help them. I was a Kiwi, after all. It was practically my national duty.
Summer
I didn’t cry while the nurse started an IV and cleaned my cuts and grazes, picking the gravel out of my skin, or when the doctor stitched my palm and some more places on my legs that I hadn’t realized I’d cut that badly. Maybe that was because of the man sitting next to the bed, or maybe it was because I was cried out, or more likely, in the Numb Zone, everything in me that could still feel focused on Delilah.
Idid,unfortunately, cry when the doctor told me she’d be all right. I burst into tears, in fact, like a little girl. “Sorry,” I said. “Sorry. I just—I need to go see her.”
“Not as unsteady as you still are,” the nurse said, “and not with an IV in you, you don’t.” She was one of those take-charge nurses. I’ll bet she longed for the days when she’d have worn a starched white cap and white stockings and swept into rooms with her bosom swelling indignantly under her uniform dress, terrifying doctors and orderlies alike. It wasn’t that large a bosom, but I had faith in her.
“I’ll go see her if you like,” the man in the chair offered. Maybe he felt guilty about how many times he’d told me to shut up, but I doubted it. He didn’t seem like the type to feel guilty.
I kept mopping up tears and other assorted attractive secretions and said, “O-OK. But you should tell me your … name.”
“Roman.”
“Roman?”I forgot to cry and stared at him. “Was your mom a romance reader, by any chance?” He was that kind of guy. Dark hair with some wave to it—it might be black; you couldn’t really tell, since it was wet—dark skin, five o’clock shadow, and eyes of … weirdly, of jade green. Startling, against his olive skin. Those eyes could be described as “piercing,” if you were that kind of writer. Tough, was how he looked, because he was also big and broad.
Good. The last thing I wanted around me was any kind of big, tough, physical guy. If there ever was a next time, I was going for one of those thin, quiet, sensitive types.
Which was childish of me. He wasn’t asking me to like him. I’d torn up his trees! I should be nicer to him. Maybe he’d give me a discount. “What’s your last name?” I asked.
“My surname? D’Angelo.”
I laughed. I tried to pretend it was a cough, or a sob, putting the tissue to my face again, but I didn’t think he was convinced, because his jaw sort of twitched and he said, “Don’t blame me. I didn’t choose it.”
“Roman D’Angelo,” the nurse said flatly. “You may want to provide Summer here with some ID. Predators everywhere,” she told me. “Passing themselves off as something they’re not.”
