Stone Cold Kiwi (New Zealand Ever After Book 2)

by Rosalind James

  Matiu

  I was setting myself up for complication in exactly the way I never did. And I was exactly where I wanted to be.

  When I’d seen her on the doorstep, when I’d wanted to hold her, and she’d stepped into my arms like she needed to be there? That minute had had power, at least to me. I didn’t know what it had been to her. Maybe nothing but a cuddle, but it didn’t feel that way.

  I was confused because—well, because of that, and also because she wasn’t dressed like any woman in history who wanted to appeal to a man, and yet she appealed to me so much anyway. She was wearing flowered pink PJs with a button front. Maternity PJs, nursing PJs, something like that. She also had on fuzzy socks, and her red hair was down, curling around her shoulders, and more than a little messy. The skin of her face was whiter than ever, showing her freckles and the blue veins at her temples, and her jade-green eyes had smudges underneath them like bruises, even when she smiled.

  I didn’t want to have sex with her, not exactly. Eventually? Absolutely. Tonight? Absolutely not. I did want to hold her on the couch, and maybe to kiss her. Definitely to kiss her. Softly, on that soft mouth.

  I didn’t do it, of course. Instead, I went down a showpiece staircase with acrylic railings and into about the largest great-room space I’d ever encountered.

  This was a house. It would overlook the harbor in spectacular fashion in the daylight, since it was perched on a hillside, its entire considerable frontage made of glass on three stories. Outside, the night was black, the storm beginning to howl, but inside, you’d be cozy in the stormiest South Island night. The whole thing, posh as it was, still managed to be family-style, with a soft, cushiony carpet in muted colors covering the area where another sectional leather couch sat, inviting kids to plop down and play, and its alcove off the designer kitchen kitted out with a kids’ table and chairs, cubbies holding toys and books, and a double-sided easel.

  There’d been another, smaller deck upstairs, running the length of the place, including outside the master suite, where Poppy had led me. Because she wanted to relax, and maybe because she didn’t want to look at those books and toys, and she didn’t want to be close to the kids’ bedrooms, wherever they were, with their empty beds.

  And the empty cot or Moses basket in a nursery somewhere, where Isobel should be sleeping. On her back, the right way, the safe way, wrapped up tight. Poppy would be wondering whether Max remembered the rules, wanting to tell him and not able to. I was wondering it, I was wanting to tell him, and I was nobody.

  I made tea. It was easy, because the kitchen was sleek and perfectly organized, with every appliance and every convenience possible included. There was a very flash coffee machine built into a cabinet by the main sink, for example. I’d never been in a private home with one of those. I was sure they didn’t come cheap.

  Somebody was doing very well indeed to have bought this house and kitted it out like this. Poppy, or Max? Poppy had sold a business—her business—to my cousin, Hemi. I didn’t know much about that transaction, but I knew that Hemi didn’t think small. I also wondered if Poppy would be able to keep the house, because surely it was marital property and somebody would have to pay off somebody else. I wondered whether that was another thought that had kept her awake at night.

  I wondered, too, as I carried white porcelain mugs upstairs again, how much the loss of the statement house, the statement wife from the rich-lister family, casual as Poppy made all that look, was going to matter to the bloke I’d met only in a hospital room. He’d been very well dressed that day, in a cashmere jumper and fine wool trousers, and his haircut had been absolutely up-to-the-minute. I was willing to bet the smashed car had been, too. He had his own firm, supposedly. How well did it do? Well enough for this? Or was he one of those blokes who wanted to have his cake and eat it, too? Did the man-who-has-everything lifestyle to which he felt he should be accustomed include a well-connected, warm, loving wife and a showstopping mistress?

  I was willing to bet the answer was “yes.” Possibly, I was prejudiced. I’d been accused of being a pretty boy myself from time to time, of having too many smooth edges that real life could slide off of. I’d never cared much what anybody said about that. I was good at my job, and it wasn’t one that most people could do. That was good enough for me. I didn’t have much respect, though, for men who didn’t put in that kind of effort. And for a man who coasted on his wife’s efforts, I had no respect at all.

  I came upstairs wanting to ask about it, wanting to put Max into a category I could despise, but when I saw Poppy, the intention flew out of my head. She was sitting back in one corner of the sectional, her arms wrapped around her knees. Making herself into a ball, holding herself tight, like she was afraid parts of her would come flying off. Something inside me, some inner place that hadn’t been touched in years, softened and opened up like a flower blooming, improbably and unexpectedly, from a crack in the pavement.

  A poppy, possibly. Bright. Fragile. Real.

  “Hey,” I said, sitting down beside her and setting the mugs on the coffee table. “Hard, eh.”

  She swallowed. I could see it happen, all the way down her white throat. She didn’t say anything, just nodded, then reached for her mug and said, “Thanks. I want to watch Titanic. What do you think? I tried to think of another film, and I just couldn’t. I should want something silly. Something funny. My whole life is being silly and funny. It’s all I am, but tonight, I can’t. I need to let it be sad for once. For now. Can you stand for it to be sad?”

  Not a movie I’d ever wanted to watch. A movie I’d have paid money not to watch. It seemed we were going to confront my demons after all.

  Oh, well.

  13

  The Demons Arrive

  Poppy

  I was self-conscious at first, despite the familiar film, the warmth of the fire, my comfy PJs. I was getting tension from Matiu. Why? I wasn’t sure. He hadn’t been that way before, had he? Did he not want to be here after all? It wasn’t sexual tension, not that I’d ever realistically thought it could be. The idea was pretty laughable. It was some kind of tension, though.

  I stole a quick glance at him. He wasn’t quite looking at the TV screen. He was looking out the window instead, his profile seeming chiseled from marble, or some other stone that came in a bronze that was nearly gold. Limestone, maybe. His nearly black hair was cut with razor precision and shaved sharply around the edges, looking like it wanted to wave, but it wasn’t being allowed to, because he was too disciplined for that. My fingers itched to sketch him this way, and my hand dropped to the table beside the couch, to the sketchpad and tin of willow charcoal sticks I hadn’t picked up for weeks.

  How would I draw him? As the hardworking, serious doctor I’d seen, or the player Karen had described? She knew him so much better than I did. He seemed to feel my attention shifting, because he turned his gaze to me, and there was something troubled in the golden-brown eyes.

  I’d draw him neither way. I’d draw what I saw. That was what I always drew, because my fingers didn’t listen to my head.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Warm enough? Want a blanket?” He looked like he wanted to ask more. About my bleeding again, probably. I’d bet he was restraining himself. If he saw you as vulnerable, as wounded, he’d try to fix you. And no question, that was how he saw me.

  “I’m OK.” I was actually pretty disappointed, if you want to know the truth. I said, “Put your feet up on the table, if you like. I’m all about comfort, in case you couldn’t tell.”

  He fell silent, and we watched the movie some more, at least I did. I fell asleep somewhere in there despite my anxiety, or because of it. Anxiety was exhausting. Eventually, though, I was lulled by the music, the voices, the slap of rain against the windows, the staccato drumming of water on the metal roof, and the man by my side.

  Matiu was warm, just like I’d imagined, even though he wasn’t touching me. Maybe that was why I fell asleep. W
hich unfortunately meant that I missed watching the sketching scene, when I’d know how it felt to be seen for the very first time, to be wanted that much by a man who was holding himself back. I missed the car scene, too, when I’d know how it felt when you had no fear. When all you wanted was to fall, and to fly.

  I missed all of that, and trust me, I was sorry. You could say those moments of breath-holding romance had been missing in my life for quite some time. You could definitely say that. In fact, you could say I wasn’t sure I’d ever had them.

  When I woke, sitting up with a lurch of fear, Rose was floating on the door in the cold water, to the sound of a plaintive tune that was nearly a Maori bone flute. The bodies around her in the water were frozen, stiffening, and Jack was slipping down. Slipping away, his face white under the dark water, then vanishing. I heard something beside me, and I turned.

  Matiu was looking at the screen now, and he was also looking like he was seeing a ghost. His face had paled, the lines of strain standing out around his mouth. I asked, barely able to breathe, “What? What’s wrong?”

  Had something happened? What? My phone was right there on the table, and he’d have woken me up if there’d been a message. Wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t just sit and watch the movie, if there was something bad. Would he?

  He tore his gaze away from the screen, and I could tell it was an effort. He’d said he didn’t want to watch horror. I’d swear he had. My heart was ice, now. I was the one who was frozen.

  I managed to say, barely able to mouth the words, “Matiu. What’s wrong? What ... what’s happened?”

  This time, I was the one who held out my hand. And he was the one who took it.

  Matiu

  I could wish she’d woken up at a different time. Say, five minutes from now.

  I said, “Nothing’s wrong.”

  She wasn’t listening. She’d picked up her phone, checking for something, and was looking at me again, confused, alarmed. “What?” she asked, shoving off the throw I’d put over her when she’d fallen asleep, which had been about fifteen minutes in. “Did Max call? My mum? Did something happen? What?”

  “No,” I said. “Nobody called. Everything’s fine.” On the screen, some more things were happening. We were away from the water, though, fortunately. I picked up the remote and turned the volume down. I didn’t need to see the rest. I’d seen enough.

  “Then what?” she asked. “Your face looked like death.” I must have made some involuntary motion, because she said, “I was right. Wait. What is it?” She picked up my hand again, the same way they’d done in the film. What was it, I wondered, taking a logic-break from the emotion washing over me like the frigid waters of the north Atlantic, about the simple act of taking another person’s hand? Especially somebody you wanted so much to touch?

  Then there was the first time you looked at them naked. That had been the better part of the film. When the girl—a gorgeous girl—had dropped her wrap, and the bloke had stared at her, mesmerized. Like he couldn’t believe he got to see all that. Red hair, white skin, and every glorious curve. And he had to pretend he didn’t care.

  I might have a fair idea of how he felt.

  I laced my fingers through hers and felt the pulse of rightness. I held tight to her hand, to her warmth, and said, “I’ve never seen it before. That’s all.”

  “That’s not all,” she said. “It hurt you. The movie. I’m so sorry, Matiu.”

  This time, I was the one who swallowed. To my horror, I felt tears behind my eyes. Nothing shameful about that, not if you were Maori. Not shameful to another fella, anyway. Shameful to me. Or maybe just dangerous. If your walls crumbled, how could you hold yourself together?

  I didn’t want to say anything. I said, “I have a ... problem about people drowning.”

  “Oh.” Her eyes filled with compassion, and she was facing me now. Rumpled red-gold hair, white skin showing in a vee at her throat. “But you must see it so much. And you must swim, too. Mustn’t you? Didn’t you live in Katikati? Tauranga? Somewhere like that?”

  “I swam tonight,” I said. “That’s why I swim. Because I need to know, if it happens, that I can swim well enough for anything. I need to know that I’ll be ... fast enough.”

  “Fast enough for what?” she asked.

  It hurt. Like always. Like a wound ripping open, or like when the stitches you’d placed to close that wound had become embedded in the skin, and you had to dig them out. “Something that happened to me,” I said. “When I was a teenager.”

  She’d sat all the way up now, had grabbed my other hand. She was paying no attention at all to the screen, but had both hands on mine instead, and her eyes on me, too. There was nowhere to hide, not anymore. “Tell me,” she said. “Please. This is the horror you were talking about. You need to share horrors so they don’t hurt so much. It’s not fair to expect yourself to carry them alone.”

  Oh, geez. I was so close to crying. I took a breath and said it. I’d done harder things, after all. Every single day. “My brother,” I said. “Tane. And June.”

  “I met them,” she said. “At Karen’s birthday hangi. And at the wedding.”

  “They have kids,” I said. Lamely, I knew.

  “Two sons,” she said.

  “They had a little girl, too.” Here it came, the embedded stitches being ripped out, one by one. “Kahakura. About the same age as Olivia.”

  Poppy knew what was coming. I saw her swallow again. “What happened?” It was nearly a whisper.

  “A birthday hangi. My birthday, when I was fifteen. She climbed out of her cot, out the front door that somebody had left unlatched. Nobody could remember, afterwards, who it was. Or nobody wanted to remember. Would you? You’d go back a hundred times in your mind. A thousand times. You’d go back, and you’d latch the door. I was the one who put her in her cot. Told her that when her nap was over, she could help me blow out the candles. I went out the back door, not the front one. But I didn’t check the front one, and I should have.”

  “She got out,” Poppy said. “Out the front, when everybody was in the back garden, probably. And nobody saw. Nobody knew.”

  “We looked.” My eyes wanted to close, but the images from that day were there behind my lids. After it had happened, they’d been there every time I’d closed my eyes, and they’d come to me in my dreams when I finally fell asleep. There was no shaking memories like that. I knew. I’d tried. “I looked. Kahakura ... she was a special one, or maybe I was just the right age. Old enough to hold her when she was born. Old enough to love somebody that helpless. But I think it was that she was special. So bright. So curious, always. So sure she knew what to do. A stubborn girl. A shining girl. The way Hamish is with Olivia—that was how it was, for me. So I looked. I should have gone to the pond first, though. I should have looked where the ducks were. She loved those ducks. In my mind, I go back again. I run to the pond first, and I see her running in. I see her toppling over, her pink shirt going under the water. I run down the hill, and I run through the water. And I pull her out. I get her out in time.”

  “Instead,” Poppy said, her face chalk-white, her freckles standing out against the skin, “you pulled her out too late.”

  My throat worked, and my face twisted. I wanted to put a hand over my eyes, but that wouldn’t help a thing. “Yeh,” I said. “I gave a shout, I guess. Ran up the hill like I couldn’t feel it, even though it was steep. And my brother took her from me. The look on his face ... I see that look every time I have to tell a dad that his son, his daughter is gone. Every single time, because it’s the same thing. The horror you can’t believe, that you’d give anything, even your life—especially your life—to make not be true. He dropped to the ground, started breathing into her, and he didn’t stop until the ambos came. When they did ... the others had to pull him away. They had to hold him back. And I knew that was too much for a man to take. There was no going on from that pain. You couldn’t.”

  Poppy said, “That’s too hard. That’s to
o much.”

  “It was,” I said. “It is.” That day, something in me had frozen, and it had stayed that way. That day, I’d learned to keep my distance, because I didn’t have the courage of my brother. The courage to go on living with my whole heart.

  My secret. My shame.

  “And you became a doctor,” she said. “An emergency doctor. So that next time, you wouldn’t be helpless.”

  “Except that I still am,” I said. “Too much. Too often. You can’t always cheat Death. Sometimes, Death comes anyway, and it comes where it shouldn’t. You can try to bar the door, but Death slips under.”

  “Tonight,” she said. “It slipped under.”

  “No chance. He was dead when he came in. Teenager. Stupid. It’s nearly always something stupid. That dad’s wondering tonight where he went wrong. What he should have said tonight, last night, a month ago, to make his son not crawl out that window. To make him make another choice. He’ll think it again and again. He’ll try to drown it in drink, maybe, but thoughts aren’t like kids. They don’t drown so easily.”

  Poppy made a pained noise, and then she was in my arms, pressing her face into my neck and her body to mine. I twisted my face again with the effort not to cry, not to let that pavement crack, but it cracked anyway, with the force of nearly thirty years of strain finally released. This time, it wasn’t a flower. It was the rain. Warm, wet, and unstoppable.

  It was minutes, surely, that we sat there like that, bodies pressed together, holding on. The music swelled on the TV, then changed. Credits rolling, probably, I thought dimly. And finally, Poppy pulled back, gasping, took hold of the front of her shirt, and said, “Bugger. I’m sorry. Oh, bloody hell.”

  “What?” I was trying to clean up unobtrusively, but there was no way. I was too far gone for that.

  “I’m leaking,” she said. “I’ve leaked. All over you. Emotion. Actually, probably just time. I’m a bloody dairy cow, and nothing says, ‘Casual movie date’ like pumping breast milk while you’re having it. Which is probably why I didn’t do it. Hang on.” She jumped up, headed into the bedroom beyond, and came back with two hand towels. She handed one to me and pressed the other one to the front of my jumper, which was, indeed, more than damp. Soaking wet, in fact.