Page 39 of Catch a Kiwi
He raised his eyebrows, and I said, “All right, maybe I’m argumentative, but only when somebody’swrong.”And did my best to ignore his … appeal. Unless he was turning around and driving home tomorrow, I had a whole weekend with him, and I needed to get my footing here. “I have to believe you learned all this power deal of yours at home. Nobody gets that good at it all by himself. Let me guess. Your dad’s a lawyer. Your mum’s a … an estate agent, one of those terrifyingly efficient and hard-nosed ones who only sells multi-million-dollar homes. Your family invented the bungee. That’s how you started a business at eleven years old or whatever.”
“Not even close,” he said. I waited, but that was all. I got the hard expression again. The forbidding one.
I said, “I told you my story. How can it be worse than that?’
“It’s not a contest,” he said. “Not a slumber party, either.”
“Oh, nice. So sharing is unmanly?”
He kept looking fierce, then suddenly grinned, totally unexpectedly, and again, it changed his whole face, those parentheses around his eyes and all, and I smiled back and said, “Sounds like somebody had agreatday. What, did you accidentally set a pile of money on fire? Somebody steal the corporate jet?”
“I’m not that well off,” he said.
“I’m a luxury-house expert, remember? You’re that welloff. How many homes do you own, that this is the throwaway one? Tell the truth. If I can confess the crappy trailer of my youth, you can confess the yacht.”
“There’s the fact that you won’t like me if I tell you,” he said. “That could be it.”
“I will if you tell me the sad story first, and follow it up with the inspirational tale of how you rose from your pitiful beginnings and triumphed on your brains and courage and hard work alone with no help from anybody. Every self-made success I’ve ever known has had that same story. Tech mogul? Football star? All of them. If anybody grew up as a happy suburban kid with two loving parents, understanding teachers, a salt-of-the-earth grandma who always believed in him, and a dog named Spot, it doesn’t make it into their origin myth.”
He didn’t answer, just drank his beer, and I said, “Wait. It reallyispainful.”
“Nah,” he said, “just boring.” And, again, shut up.
I stood up with my somehow-empty plate. “I need to help close. Feel free to leave.”
“I said I’d walk you out,” he said without a smile. “I keep my promises.”
Way to look dark, brooding, and mysterious, dude.
17
THE LIFE WE PLANNED
Roman
On Saturday morning, I was using a nail gun to attach a baseboard in a guest room while Summer held the board. She’d fought me about it, of course, saying, “At least let me do the nail gun.”
“If my hand gets tired,” I’d said, “we can switch off.”
“Ha,” she’d answered, because the woman had never heard of “discreetly going along with your white lie in order to preserve your male ego” in her life. Also, when I’d got home last night, she hadn’t decided to sit up with me and have a chat and possibly a glass of wine. She’d said, “I need a shower, and then bed. Goodnight,” and vanished.
It felt to me like the sparks all but leaped between us every time I was in her vicinity. Either I was delusional, she was scared of those sparks, or she didn’t want to get warm. Which was it? I had the feeling it was the “scared” option, but maybe because that was the one I wanted. Fire could burn. It could also melt you down, and I wanted to melt Summer down.
On the other hand, there was that ex of hers. Baggage, eh.
Now, Delilah said from across the room, where she was applying caulk to the baseboards we’d already nailed into place, “You realize that this job would be a whole lot easier and go a whole lot quicker if you had a normal-sized house, right? You have four bedrooms, an office, a gym, a wine cellar, two kitchens—who needs two kitchens? That’s just weird—andfivebathrooms. For one person. Who doesn’t even live here during the week! When the proletariat finally rises up, you’re going to be swinging from a lamppost. Just saying.”
“No,” I said. “I’m a man of the people.”
In answer, she hummed the part of theMarseillaisewhere they sing about watering the fields with the blood of the oppressors, and I smiled, then asked Summer, “You have an opinion?”
“No,” she said. “Your house is your business.”
Because she hadn’t asked, I told her. “It’s a good investment, and we do executive retreats here sometimes.”
“And that’s totally cost-effective,” Delilah said. “Like you couldn’t just rent some rooms in, let’s see, aresort.”
“I could,” I said, “but it may not have a pizza oven and outdoor fireplace. Cozy. If Summer weren’t running off to work, I could make pizza tonight. Pity.”
