Page 92 of Catch a Kiwi
“Stop buttering me up and finish it,” he said, but there was a smile lurking there somewhere. “You’re possibly the most tactful woman I’ve ever known. Can’t quite sort out how that can be, when you’re usually telling me what I’m doing wrong, but go on and tell me again.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Well, that’s helpful,” he said, and I laughed and said, “I know. Just—be aware, maybe? Check in with her a little more? There’s this … pattern that happens when one person clings too hard, and the other person pulls away. Like—action, reaction. It’s normal, but if you can shift it a little, if you take a step toward her instead of a step back, and she starts to relax, she won’t have to try to hold on so hard, and you won’t feel as exasperated. It might change the dynamic. So maybe—call her at a regular time. Every Sunday evening, or whatever works for you. Encourage her to—I don’t know. Volunteer, maybe? Even get a job.”
“You think I haven’t encouraged her to get a job,” he said. “I’ve tried. I’ve given up.”
I could have argued, but arguing didn’t work. You planted the seed, and then you walked away. I said, “I know you have. You’re a good son. I see that. I got frustrated with my mom plenty. Now that she’s gone, I say only nice things about her, but did I wonder why she didn’t try harder to get ahead, especially when I could have sentherback to school, or whatever? Of course I did. I felt responsible for her and guilty about her and frustrated by her, and all of those things made me want to pull away.”
“But you didn’t,” he said.
“Not entirely, but it was easier than it is for you, because she reallydidtry hard. She reallydidhave major obstacles, and her heart was in the right place. Your mum seems vain to you. Selfish. Even lazy. It’s hard to respect that, but maybe you can understand it, at least a little, when you think about how little her life resembles what she thought it would be. And maybe that’s enough for now. Maybe that helps with the … the contempt. That’s the relationship killer. Contempt.”
His eyes had been steady on me all along, but now, they got even sharper. “You say that like you know.”
“I do. I was married.” Since I didn’t want to discuss that—it’s so much easier to tell somebody else what to do than to talk about your own failings—I stood up, took my purse off the chair and set it over my shoulder, and said, “I’m sure Delilah’s ready to get this day over with. Ready to go?”
He didn’t do what I’d expected, but when had he ever? He put his hand in his pocket and handed over the key fob. “Yeh. Ready for you to drive, too. Delilah drove us down the hill. I’m probably not over the limit, but I’m not risking it.”
I balanced the fob on my palm. “You are a surprising man.”
“I try to be. Let’s go. Give Delilah some beach time. Did you bring that bikini?”
Some more of the intensity behind the casual words. There was something in him—maybe his posture, maybe the set of his jaw—that told you how deeply he felt things. Or was that just my stupid heart, too trusting even now? I could have wondered. Instead, I gave him the tiniest smile, the most deliberate sidelong look, nothing like the straightforward woman I was working on being and everything like the teasing, tempting siren I definitely wasn’t trying to be anymore, and said, “I did. Because you asked me so nicely, on my card. And because I know you’ll keep me safe.”
“I’ll keep you safe,” he said. “Always.”
It didn’t even sound like a line.
Roman
Summer had looked good in that dress. That was nothing, though, to how she looked in her bikini. I’d have said the image was imprinted on my brain from the first time, but she still knocked me sideways.
She came upstairs in the very modern, extremely flash, fully stocked luxury home on Marine Parade—Esther had come through in spades—to join Delilah and me, and there it all was, appearing one glorious centimeter at a time. The face. The … shape. The legs. The skin, smooth, pale, and creamy against the deep purple fabric of the bikini. The thighs. Pretty much all of Summer was my favorite, but her thighs? Those had star quality, that perfect firm roundness that made your hands want to explore every bit of them, then keep on going.
“I just realized I don’t have a coverup,” she said when shereached me, possibly sounding a little breathless. “I know the beach is right across the street, but it seems a little exhibitionistic to walk out there like this. Can I borrow a T-shirt from you? Or even better—do you have one of those dress shirts in your luggage? I’ll wash and iron it afterwards.” She was doing her best to be matter-of-fact, but there was some pink in her cheeks. This was like the other time we’d gone swimming, and it wasn’t. Maybe the effort she’d gone to in order to look that spectacular for the party had made her more conscious of how she looked, or maybe it was pretending to be my girlfriend.
Or maybe it was how I was looking at her.
“Yeh,” I said, unsticking my tongue from the roof of my mouth. “Let me get it for you.” I finally remembered Delilah. “Do you need one?”
“Gee, you remembered I’m here,” she said. “Nope. I’ve got this fabulous men’s extra-large navy T-shirt with the stretched-out neck, see? A dollar at the Op Shop six months ago, and I’ve worn it, oh, about fifty times since then. I think my glamour quotient is met.”
Summer flushed a little more at that, and I caught her biting her lower lip, which made me wonder if she reallyhadleft her coverup at home. She’d never played any games. I should resent her playing them now, but sad to say, I was chuffed about it. About the shirt, and about what asking for the shirt might mean.
I brought out a white one, because she’d said before that the white shirt showed too much, and God help me, but I wanted to see too much. It was folded from the cleaner’s, and just the sight of Summer unfolding it, then pulling it around her and buttoning a few buttons in the middle, the flash of thigh beneath, had some more of that dark excitement trying to flood my veins. Like I was eighteen, but worse, becausethese days, I knew what to do with a woman. And then she pulled her plait of blonde hair from under the collar of the shirt, shook it into place, and said, brisk again, “Let’s go. So you can start keeping me safe again.”
39
KEEPING YOU SAFE
Summer
It was all sensation. Crossing the busy street to the beach, and Roman reaching for my hand and starting to run, heedless of Delilah beside me. The warm sun heating my skin as it had been doing all day, so different from the damp chill of Seattle or Manchester. The deep sound that was the waves coming in, a low rumble all the way inside your body, the touch of the breeze that lifted the edge of the white shirt, the faint scent of salt and seaweed and beach, the pleasant grittiness of the pale sand under my bare feet when I kicked off my sandals and set down my bag.
The look on Roman’s face when I started to unbutton my shirt—his shirt—and the hitch in my breath when I started doing it more slowly, just because he was looking. The sight of him pulling his own T-shirt up over his chest and arms, not making any kind of performance of it, but when a man has shoulders like that, when his brown nipples are flat and his skin gleams bronze, when his biceps are flexed as that shirt goes over his head and you’re staring at the ridges of his abs and the strength of his thighs and trying not to look at what’sbetween those two places? I was dimly aware that Delilah was heading down to the water, but I couldn’t watch. I had to look at Roman.
He dropped the shirt carelessly onto the sand on top of his crumpled towel and looked at me again. Or looked at me still. You know how they say, “His eyes were like hot coals?” I’d never understood that—wouldn’t the eyes be red, then?—but that was how they looked to me. Dark, but … burning, somehow, and there was a tightness to his jaw that looked like holding back. He said, “You haven’t taken it off.”
