Stone Cold Kiwi (New Zealand Ever After Book 2)

by Rosalind James

  I pulled the jumper over my head, and the T-shirt, too, because it was exactly as wet, and scrubbed at my chest with the towel. I said, “I’ll bung these things into the dryer for a couple minutes. Not exactly the way I imagined getting naked with you.”

  She said, “Yeh, right.” But she was laughing, and so was I. The tears hadn’t been as awful as I’d always feared. I was drained, but I was lighter. Wasn’t I? The rain had stopped, too. The sky was lightening outside the windows, and I was right. It was the harbor I saw out there, and the city across from it, a tinge of pink announcing the imminent dawn. The clouds were breaking up, and it was a new day.

  Poppy asked, “What time is it?”

  “Dawn,” I said. “Maybe six-forty-five.”

  “How do you know that? If you work until midnight?”

  “I don’t always, and you don’t go to sleep straight away. Just like you wouldn’t if you worked until five in the evening. You’re too keyed up.”

  That was when the voice came from the stairwell.

  “What the hell?”

  It was a man. A man whose black eye was gone, and whose arm wasn’t in a sling anymore. He was holding a baby carrier in one hand, and had two little figures trailing along behind him, the smaller one stumbling, her hair not in its neat pigtails, but messy around her face instead, and her brother taking her hand.

  Poppy was up in a flash and darting forward, reaching for the carrier, from which, now, came a rusty-hinge wail I recognized.

  The family, coming home.

  14

  The Homewrecker

  Matiu

  Poppy grabbed the carrier and brought it back to the couch, and I was standing up, too.

  Max was still talking. “Why is he here?” he asked Poppy.

  She paid absolutely no attention. She had the baby at her breast even before she sat down, and was saying to the other kids, “Have you been having a good time at Daddy’s?”

  “Yes,” Olivia said, coming over at a run, the way she seemed to do most things, scrambling determinedly up onto the couch beside her mother and leaning into her body. “But Daddy has not very many toys at his house, and he doesn’t make the nice noodles, and I wanted to come home and sleep in my bed, and Daddy said I couldn’t come home, and I was very sad. And I wet the bed, but I didn’t mean to. Except it was Hamish’s bed.”

  Poppy smoothed a hand over her daughter’s mussed-up hair. “You’re all dry now, though. And you’re going back to Daddy’s, remember, until tomorrow? He’s probably got something fun planned for you and Hamish today. Something special.”

  “We’re going to go to Inflatable World, Livvy,” Hamish said. “We’re going to jump and run and play.” He’d come to sit on the other side of Olivia, and Poppy reached a hand out and touched his hair, too, even though it was too short to be messy. Like she was checking that he was still there, and letting him know that she was.

  “Yes,” Olivia said, “but I want Mummy to come, too. Mummy can’t jump, because she is preggant, but she watches the best.”

  “She’s not pregnant now,” Hamish said. “That was when the baby was inside. Now the baby is outside, and that means she’s not pregnant.”

  “Then Mummy can jump,” Olivia said, sticking her jaw out in a pugnacious way I recognized, like she was three, and not a woman to be trifled with. “I want her to jump with me and hold my hand and draw a picture about jumping and pretend we’re monkeys and tell a story about being monkeys.”

  “Hang on,” Poppy said. “We need to have another explaining talk. And did you eat breakfast?” Her eyes were nearly closing with the physical relief of feeding that baby, and the baby herself was hanging on to the front of the pink PJs as if she were never letting go. As for me, my shirt was still off, thrown onto the coffee table along with two white towels, and there was a rumpled blanket on the couch as well. This was an interesting look, and I suspected I now knew the meaning of “fifth wheel,” too. Did that mean I was leaving, though? No, it did not, apparently. Also interesting.

  It was the look Max was giving me, and the way he asked, “Why are you here before seven in the morning? Not to mention half-naked?”

  “Because I leaked all over him,” Poppy said.

  “What?” Max said.

  “You know,” she said. “Leaked. It happens. Why are you here before seven in the morning? What happened?”

  Max was opening his mouth like a goldfish, and my body had turned towards him despite myself, as if I were about to ... what? Fight him? It was the stupidest thing you could imagine, and I couldn’t help it.

  This was novel. I didn’t get myself into situations like this. I was a good time, I hoped, a charming companion and a pretty bloody attentive lover, but that was where it ended. I didn’t see married women, I didn’t do drama, and I didn’t do “serious.”

  Well, bugger.

  Max said, “I want him to leave.”

  Poppy’s chin shot up. She looked exactly like her daughter, and there weren’t any tears when she said, “You don’t get to decide that. Besides, you’re the one who’s leaving, remember? Speaking of that—you should give me your keys. You need to ring the doorbell.”

  “I’m still your husband.” His cheekbones had a dark flush now. “And it’s still my house.”

  “Daddy doesn’t have to ring the doorbell,” Hamish said. “Daddy lives here. He’s going to come back and live with us again. He said so.” He got off the couch and went to his father, throwing his arms around his waist, then back to his mother again, as if he could, somehow, join their hands and bring them together. It was one of the saddest things I’d ever seen.

  “No, darling,” Poppy said gently, pulling herself together with an obvious effort. “Daddy’s got his own apartment now.”

  My being here wasn’t contributing anything, especially to the kids. On the other hand, Poppy could need some backup. I told her, “I can go downstairs and get a cup of tea, dry my clothes, or I can go on home.”

  Max said, “What a hard choice. Wait, I’ve got it. You should go home.”

  Poppy said, “You probably need to sleep, Matiu.”

  “I do,” I said. “But I’ll stay if you’d rather. Or I can get your grandparents over here to help, if you like.”

  Poppy said, “I’m fine. Thank you for ... everything.”

  “You didn’t sleep,” Max said. His voice was flat. “And thank you for what everything?”

  I didn’t answer. The woman was barely four weeks postpartum, and last time I’d looked, her vulva had been a mess. What was I meant to have been doing? The mind boggled. I told Poppy, “You have my number. Text me anytime. Day or night.”

  Max clearly had something else to say. Like, for instance, “Next time she wants a hookup?” I didn’t wait to hear it.

  Poppy

  It was better that Matiu had left. What had I got him into? What must he be thinking?

  I knew what I’d thought when he’d pulled off his jumper and T-shirt. It was pretty much “Wow,” and not just because of the moment we’d shared. The moment when he’d opened up to me, had let me help, instead of the other way around. Even if I didn’t trust my judgment, didn’t I have to trust that much reality, coming from a man who hadn’t wanted to show it?

  And then there was what I’d actually, you know, seen. The answer to that, if there’d been a question, had been “Yes.”

  Yes to triangles, chevrons, and diamonds of Maori tattoo, the design wrapped around his upper arm and shoulder like intricately plaited ribbons of flax, showing blue-black against golden-brown skin, outlining the muscle of his shoulder, the carved lines and swells of biceps and triceps all the way to the elbow, and making you wish that it continued onto his perfectly sculpted forearm. Yes to the kind of chest that made you want to put your head on it, preferably while he had his arm around you. And yes to muscles. Oh, bloody hell, yes, muscles. His jeans were the type that sat low on the hips, and I’d also happened to notice, now that I was, apparently, staring, that
he was packing some heat there. I could judge that, because I’d done my share of Life Drawing. It hadn’t always been blue hippos. Also hands. I’d noticed the hands before, when they’d been on me. Medically, at least. They were big, strong, sensitive, and gentle. For all his looks, his hands were, somehow, the most devastating part of him.

  I didn’t have room for sexual thoughts just now, except that, whoops, I seemed to have room after all. I could call them “aesthetic thoughts,” and my fingers could itch to sketch the shifting planes of lean muscle and sinew in his back, the slabs of deltoids in his shoulder giving way to the ridges of washboard abs, and that diagonal of abdominal muscle that said a man’s body fat was low enough and his muscle development high enough that you got to oh-yes-boy see all of it, but the truth was that I didn’t just want to sketch him. I wanted to touch him, and more than that—I wanted him to touch me again with those hands. I wanted to know if the gentleness and competence extended beyond medicine. Even if his hand was just cradling your head as he kissed you. Which would be just bloody fine.

  Alas, sketching wasn’t on the menu, and too many other things were.

  Like that my sort-of husband was watching me watch Matiu pull his T-shirt over his head and down his pectorals, his abs, covering the trail of black hair that started above his navel and vanished into the waistband of the low-slung jeans, and then watching him head down the stairs and listening to the front door slamming behind him before he turned his gaze to me again and the look turned to an accusing one.

  I didn’t have a temper anymore. What was this, then? The hot flush that rose from my chest, where Isobel was still drinking like she’d been deprived of me for days instead of a few hours, and into my cheeks? I said, controlling my voice with a major effort, “Hamish, take Olivia downstairs and get some cereal, if you didn’t have breakfast with Daddy.”

  “I want juice,” Olivia said. “Daddy doesn’t have the good kind of juice at his new house. He has a yucky kind. I want the special juice that makes the noise.”

  “Daddy or I will come make you a special juice in a minute,” I said, when Daddy made no move to speak up. “Right now, I need to change the baby.”

  “I think the baby should go in the potty,” said Olivia, which was rich, considering her track record. “And then you could make special juice now.”

  I looked at Max and asked, “Would you go fix them breakfast, please?” Why was I asking? This was meant to be his weekend. I hadn’t wanted him to take the kids at all, but if he did? Fixing breakfast was part of the deal.

  Except that wasn’t important. What was important was that the kids ate, and that they weren’t in the middle of our troubles, and whatever I had to do to make that happen, I would do. I also needed to have another calm talk with Hamish about how We Were Never Ever Getting Back Together, and how that was a Good Thing.

  Sometimes I hated being an adult.

  Max didn’t answer. He just said, “Come on, kids,” and I let him go, changed Isobel, swaddled her again, put her down to sleep in the Moses basket beside my bed, noticed in an exhausted, distracted sort of way how much happier my body was to have her with me, pulled off my frankly terrible PJ top and pulled on an oversized green flannel shirt instead that wouldn’t win me any Yummy Mummy awards, and headed downstairs.

  The kids were sitting at the breakfast bar, and as I came down the stairs, Max was pouring OJ into a plastic cup for Olivia.

  She said, “This isn’t the good juice. This is the yucky juice. I want the Daddy juice.”

  “You said you wanted Mummy’s juice.” Max looked harassed. Also fairly messy. Jeans, T-shirt, no shave, and ungroomed hair. Max hated being imperfectly groomed. I found I enjoyed watching him hate it. I was turning out to be pretty imperfect myself in the character department, because I could have said something, and I didn’t. It wasn’t point-scoring to let him get his kids’ breakfast for himself, right? Call it on-the-job training, and if it made him sweat—I was permitted to enjoy that, or if I wasn’t, I was going to enjoy it anyway.

  “Livvy likes slushy juice,” Hamish informed his father.

  I probably did have to step in now, however reluctantly. “Smoothie,” I said. “Remember? She likes it because it’s what you like.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Why didn’t you say so? Maybe you should make it, and I can watch.”

  “Or maybe,” I said, “you can make it and I can watch, as you’re presumably making your own breakfast smoothies now. I’ll critique, how’s that?”

  Hamish said, somewhat mournfully, “Daddy doesn’t know how to make very many things to eat, I don’t think.”

  “What did you eat last night?” I asked. That either fell into the “critiquing the ex” category or the “helping your child through the transition” category. I was going to pretend it was the latter.

  “We had McDonalds!” Olivia announced triumphantly, with her eagle eye on her dad’s progress as he found spinach, blueberries, the ice container, and a banana, searched for and finally pulled out the blender as if he hadn’t had a smoothie every single morning for the past three years, most of which I’d fixed, and began the impossibly slow process of transferring his ingredients into the blender.

  How did men get anything done, I wondered, if the activities of daily life took them this long? Or did Max just pretend to be incompetent about things like the washing machine and the dishwasher—and even the bloody blender—because it meant I would take over? Huh. That was a new thought.

  Olivia went on, “Hamish and I got a Happy Meal, but the baby didn’t get a Happy Meal, because she can only drink milk. Babies are very boring.”

  “We had chicken nuggets,” Hamish said, and I looked at Max and raised my brows. Max had always had words to say about mystery foods, concocted of who-knows-what type of fillers.

  “Succumbed to the lure of the drive-thru, did you,” I asked him, and he had the grace to look a little embarrassed. He finally had his four ingredients in the blender, about ten minutes after he’d started putting them there, and had now gone back over to the freezer and was starting a brand-new search.

  Olivia said, “I’m very, very thirsty. I’m as thirsty as a camel.”

  Max was looking hunted now. Also cross. He was opening drawers in the freezer, asking, “Where’s the acai puree?”

  I said, “I don’t think I have any.” Because, oddly enough, I hadn’t felt I needed acai puree in my life anymore. Or ground flaxseed. Or hemp protein. I’d thrown them in the bin, in fact, the evening before, at the beginning of my fit of mania. I ate eggs for breakfast. Call me radical. “Use some OJ and a bit of ice cream instead,” I suggested.

  Max looked as scandalized as if I’d suggested he mainline heroin and said, “Never mind. I found it.”

  I opened my mouth. I started forward. He paid no attention, just looked at me triumphantly, opened the carton with a yank and a flourish, stuck the spoon in, dumped some of the contents into the blender, bunged the lid on, frowned for a moment with his finger on the button, then started the machine up, stopped it, peered inside, and asked, “Has this puree gone off?”

  I wanted to let him do it. So badly. I longed to let him do it, in fact, with the burning passion of a thousand fiery suns. Unfortunately, there was that “adult” thing.

  “No,” I said. “It’s been frozen all along. Chokka with protein and vitamins, too, I’ll bet. But you may have a problem with drinking Isobel’s placenta. I’m just saying.”

  15

  Hazel’s Powerful Placenta

  Poppy

  Max jumped and shrieked like a little girl. It was immensely satisfying. After that, he said, “Come put it down the sink.”

  Olivia said, “I want the special juice. I want juice now.” She was crying some, and banging her spoon against the benchtop for good measure. It was loud.

  Max shouted over the noise, “Mummy’s going to put it down the sink so I can make you a new one.”

  I wasn’t all the way gone. I considered smoothing the
moment over for the sake of the kids. Somehow, though, I didn’t do it. I was sleep deprived. That was going to be my excuse. I crossed my arms instead and said, “That’s a Dad job now, I guess.” Max stared at me as if his world had shifted, which it probably had, and I shrugged one shoulder at him and felt a tiny bit better. After that, I told Olivia, “Stop making that noise, please. Daddy’s going to make you your drink in just a minute.”

  “With ice cream,” she said, the tears magically stopping. The ice cream would either happen or it wouldn’t. Not my decision.

  Hamish asked, “What’s a placenta?”

  “Disgusting, is what it is,” Max said. He lifted the blender out of its base with the care you’d take in transporting the Ebola virus, held it at arm’s length, tipped it down the sink, then turned on the disposal and shuddered as the purple mess went down. His face worked, and I thought he might be trying not to be sick.

  He was a baby. I’d been married to a baby. I’d thought it was cute, once. He could call it “fastidious,” but that wasn’t what I’d call it. I probably shouldn’t tell him that the glistening, purple-and-blue umbilical cord was at the bottom of the container. I said, “It’s the whenua, in Maori. It’s the special part of herself a mummy grows in her uterus in order to feed the baby. When you come back from Daddy’s, I’ll draw you a picture. After the mummy has the baby, she doesn’t need the placenta anymore, and it comes out.”

  “Or somebody pulls it out,” Max muttered. “In pieces. With the even more horrible cord. I can’t even think of a word to describe it. If you’re thinking Dr. Shirtless can blot that image out—forget it. Not possible.”