Page 20 of Catch a Kiwi
So I headed down the curving hallway—yes, the enormous housewasbuilt in a semicircle, mostly on a single level, with many bedroom-type rooms and who knows how many baths, plus windows and skylights and natural materials galore and an embarrassment of planted beds and walkways around the enormous lap pool with its infinity edge that spilled over into a spa—found the laundry room, dumped the clothes and soap into the washer—Miele, of course, and looking brand-new—chose the fastest cycle, and started the machine. Then I went back to the kitchen, and Roman.
He'd been surprised by me. Well, I’d been surprised by him, too. Not that he was good-looking, because I’d noticed that yesterday. Maybe that he seemed as tough in the morning light, clean and dry and cooking in a spectacularly modern, deceptively rustic kitchen that opened onto equally spectacular landscaping, as he had all wet, dirty, and frustrated, hauling Delilah up the hillside or yelling at me in the ER. Black scruff of morning beard on his face, which looked hewn from some sort of very hard rock and was something better than handsome, skin that looked a little rough, a little weatherbeaten, biceps and triceps and chest and thigh muscles that were more than obvious in the T-shirt and shorts, and the dark hair on his legs that had felt rough under my skin the night before.
When he’d been kind. When he’d asked about Delilah, about my mom, and listened. Before he’d seen me for real and everything had changed.
He was Maori, wasn’t he? The skin and the hair and the build and all? I wondered if he had a tattoo under the shirt, with its complicated swirls and spirals wrapped all the way around his muscular arm. In New Zealand, only Pacific people had tattoos, the Maori and Samoans and so forth, and the markings always meant something, too.
Mostly, they meant, “Well, that’s attractive,” at least to me.I didn’t have sexual feelings, but there you were. The look was objectively attractive, that was all, and yes, it made a man look even tougher. If Roman had one, though, it didn’t come far down his arm.
Fortunately, I didn’t like big, tough men who thought they could tell you what to do because they outweighed you, and I liked handsome men less than that. Tattoo or not, rich men and entitled men came even further down my list, and he was all those things.
A man was not a place to land.
I didn’t tug at the tails of the dress shirt. I knew they only came halfway down my thighs, that he knew I was naked underneath, and that he’d focus on it. Breezy and confident, that was how you handled men like this, so I didn’t wait for whatever he’d say. I just said, “Coffee. That’s what I need. Also food. And then I’m going to go out there and search for my stuff, because I need my toothbrush.”
9
SOME DEAD MONK
Roman
Did I get legs in my lap? Or even just to watch her walk around the house in my shirt, which turned out to be, according to my body, the garment a man most wanted to take off a woman?
No. She made breakfast for herself and Delilah and disappeared with it, and when I saw her again, she was wearing her now-clean T-shirt and shorts and holding my shirt, buttoned up primly and on its hanger.
In my bedroom. Every window and the accordion-style doors were open to the air, and I was hauling the sodden carpet out from under the bed when she came in. She tossed the shirt onto the bed and rushed to help even as I said, “I’ve got it.”
“It’s heavy,” she said. “So is this bed. What is this mattressmadeof?” As she, yes, attempted to lift the whole thing. With a stitched hand.
“Stop,” I said through my teeth. “I’ve got it.”
Did she listen? Of course not. She said, “I’ll tell you what.You lift the top corner of the bed, and I’ll slide the rug out from underneath. Once we do both top corners, you can hold up the end, and I can?—”
I stood up and glared at her. “It’s heavy,” I said, enunciating carefully so she’d know I meant it, “which means I’ll do it.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “I helped you get Delilah up the hill yesterday, remember? What’s different?”
“That I was helpingyou,not the other way round.”I could hear how stupid it sounded, but out it came anyway.
She gave a faint snort. “That you discovered I’m good-looking, you mean, once I wasn’t covered in mud, so now you have to impress me.”
“No,” I lied, “it’s?—”
I didn’t know what I was going to say, because she was pretty much bang on, but fortunately, she didn’t give me a chance to say it. She talked right over me. “You’re too intelligent a man to have that much stupid ego. Figure you’ve already impressed me, stop fighting me, and let me help. I letyouhelp. I let you rescue my cousin and drive us about two hours to the hospital and buy us dinner and?—”
I sighed. “All right. I’ll hold up the top corner and you pull out the carpet. Still trying to work out how you complimented me and insulted me in the same sentence, though.”
She smiled. Her smile was something to see. She’d done her hair in a thick plait—to get it out of the way, I guessed—but as she had no fastener and no comb, it was a very soft plait with little pieces coming out around her face. Every bit of her was what you wantedonthe bed, not pulling a filthy, sodden carpet out from under it. And then she crouched, stuck the leg with its stitched knee out beside her like a rugby halfback at the back of the breakdown, and said, “Lift,” in the commanding tone of, yes, a rugby halfback.
She didn’t stop there, either. She told me to help her rollthe carpet, hefted her end to stagger outside with it, then informed me that I should probably collect all the carpets out here and hire a specialty firm to collect and clean them, “because I’m guessing they’re all wool, like this one, and you don’t want to ruin them with amateur equipment and the wrong chemicals. You can find a cleaner online. There’s bound to be one in Dunedin, or maybe Queenstown. That’s rich, right? We couldn’t even camp in Queenstown, it was so expensive. Look for one that specializes in Persian rugs. They’ll be the best.”
I said, “How do you know it’s wool? Maybe it cost me eighty-nine dollars and is made of plastic.”
“Yeah, right. I’d help you haul out the rest of them, but it’s going to take me a while to find all our possessions and clean them off, and you want us gone today.”
“Yeh,” I said, “about that?—”
“And I want to be gone today, too,” she said. “I’m going to look around your kitchen for some rubbish bags, if that’s all right.”
