Jax could protect Debbie from the dog. He was supposed to be good at protecting. At least for people he cared about. I couldn’t do this, though. I couldn’t be here. Not possible.
Jax said, “Hang on. Karen.” He set the little girl down and came to put his arm around me, now, which meant I couldn’t escape. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh,” I said wildly, “nothing much. I need to go.” I needed to find Hemi. I needed somewhere I could actually cry, and there wasn’t anywhere. I couldn’t do it around Hope, or around my nieces and nephew, either. I needed to go home and lie on the bathroom floor again. Someplace I could be alone. I needed to crawl under a porch like a sick dog and wait to feel better. Sometime, I’d feel better. Why couldn’t I ever be alone?
Jax was peering down into my face, and now, Hope was coming around the house with Maia running ahead of her. When she saw me, Maia shouted, “Auntie Karen! It’s time for cake! And you get to blow out all the candles, and there are lots of candles, because thirty is so old. And Koro has to come and help.”
Hope said, “Wait, sweetie. We have new company. Hi. I’m Hope, Karen’s sister, and this is Maia. Welcome.”
“My sister, Poppy,” Jax said. “And her kids. They’ve come to surprise me. Karen. What?”
“What kind of cake is it?” Hamish asked. “I hope it’s chocolate. That’s my favorite.”
“Hamish,” his mother said. “We don’t say that. We say, ‘Thank you.’”
Jax said, “Karen. Sit down.” He had both arms around me now, and to my horror, was sitting down with me in his lap, and I had a hand over my face and had started to cry. Not just cry. Sob. Shoulders shaking, nose running, ragged, ugly noise-making. The works.
I didn’t cry. I. Did. Not. Cry. I couldn’t help it, though. Both hands were over my face now, and I was losing it big-time. Jax was rocking me back and forth, stroking a hand over my hair, saying, “Baby. No. What’s wrong? Tell me.”
“Your sister,” I managed to say. I shook my head and didn’t move my hands. “She’s your . . . sister.”
“What? I told you she was my sister.”
“No.”
I heard Koro’s voice, then, saying, “Come on. We’ll go put off the cake for a few minutes, eh, give these two time to get themselves sorted. Could be you’re hungry for lunch anyway, big kids like you. Got heaps of food back there. We’ll get that down you. Could be the dog needs a bite to eat as well. He looks like a hungry little fella.”
“Mummy always wants to eat,” Hamish said. “But then she spews, so I don’t know why she wants to eat. When I’m sick, I only have apple juice and things. She’s having a baby, and ladies who are having a baby get very sick.”
“My mummy gets very sick too,” Maia piped up. “Because she’s having a baby too. Ladies always have babies.”
Which could have made me cry some more.
Jax
I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Why would Karen be crying now? Had Hemi said something to her? She’d looked fine, though, when she’d first come up to me. She’d looked like she wanted to be there.
Everybody else left, finally, which was better. She was embarrassed, I could tell. She hadn’t liked being ill. She was going to like that she’d cried even less. I rocked her and kissed her hair, and after a couple minutes, the sobs eased. She said, “I’m . . . heavy.”
This tenderness. It hurt my heart. “No,” I said. “You’re just exactly not. What’s wrong?”
“I’m also disgusting,” she said. “Oh, yuck. Kleenex.”
This time, I laughed, and she kept her hand over the lower part of her face and tried to glare at me out of reddened eyes. “Let’s go inside,” I suggested. “You can clean up, and then you can tell me. You may also want to remember that I cried, too, much as I’d like to forget it. You could think that we’re even.”
“The car. It’s still . . .” She sniffed. “Running.” Practical and logical even in extremis.
“Right,” I said. “Go inside and clean up, then, and I’ll come join you in a second, once I’ve moved it.”
The little house was empty, fortunately, when I got inside. Nothing at all flash about this place, which I was guessing was because Hemi’s grandfather hadn’t allowed him to fix it up, because Hemi seemed like the type to offer. I sat on the couch, thought that my leg was still pretty sore, tried to make sense of all this, and failed.
When Karen came out, she was still wiping her face with a wad of toilet paper, and her nose was red. She said, “If I were one of those women who always had an extra makeup kit in her purse, I’d look better right now. I’m not, and I don’t even have a purse, because I was supposed to be camping, so too bad.”
“Sounding more like yourself, anyway,” I said. “What happened out there? That can’t be because I got a bit narky earlier, unless you’re actually barking mad, and I don’t think so. Not quite.”
She sighed, sat down beside me, and stuck her bare feet up on the edge of the coffee table like she’d done it a hundred times. “I thought you were married.”
“What?” I laughed. “Me? No. To who?”
“To Poppy. Obviously.” She was glaring again. “What do you expect me to think, when you kiss her and hold the little girl and act like they’re all your family? You said they were your family.”
“But . . .” I tried to think it out. “Poppy’s my sister. You know she is. She’s who you were meant to meet in the Coffee Club, remember? What, my wife and my sister are both named Poppy? That’d be unusual. Off-putting, too.”
“See,” she said, “and now I feel stupid, because I realize you did say her name. I just . . . you looked . . .” Her arm was going again. “Like you loved her. And I was kind of . . . off balance anyway.”
“Geez, I’d be casual. That’d be cool, introducing you like that.” I’d started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. She smiled, reluctantly, and then she started to laugh, too.
The hilarity rose in me like a bubble. The duck. The dog. The old man. All the times I’d held women’s heads these past few days while they vomited. The hospital. The absolutely ridiculous amounts of emotion. I had my arms around Karen, she had hers around me, and as the laughter died down, I pressed my forehead to hers, smiled into her eyes, and said, “So. Wanna fuck?” And we were off again, laughing like fools.
It was the oddest romantic interlude you could possibly come up with. The whole thing. And it had also been the best, and the worst, I’d felt in about . . .
Well, in forever.
Karen
I couldn’t stop smiling. The daylight was fading, the air smelled like roast pork and citrus, a very relaxed Maori version of a Bob Marley song was playing over the speakers, half of the whanau had gone home, and I was dancing with Jax. Swaying to the sweet rhythm, the voices around us picking up the chorus, the stone of the patio warm under my bare feet, my lips against Jax’s neck and his big hand splayed over my lower back.
He said, “OK?” His voice was very nearly a hum. A lovely low hum, vibrating through his chest and into mine.
I sighed, said, “Oh, yeah,” and could practically hear his smile. Beside us, Tane and June were dancing, too, and Hemi and Hope were behind me somewhere. All that love, and I had some, too. At least that was how it felt.
“I used to be better at this,” Jax said. “Had some moves. I’ll have to ask my physio for help, I reckon. I wonder if that counts as operational fitness. Depends what you’re trying to get operational in, maybe.”
“Mm,” I said. “Or you could figure that I’m liking it fine.” I pulled back a little and smiled up at him. “Happy birthday.”
He bent his head and kissed me like he didn’t care who was watching. “Happy birthday, baby. You’re beautiful.”
When the song ended, we sat on the curved concrete wall again, my hand in his, and I realized how wonderful it was for a man to want—really want—to hold your hand, because he needed that connection as much as you did. His thumb was brushing over my knuckles, and
I was listening to his sister, who was sitting on his other side. Her daughter, Olivia, was sleeping on Koro’s bed along with Maia and a couple other little ones, arranged beside each other like bundled loaves of bread, or a demonstration of fertility, and for once, that didn’t even hurt my heart.
Poppy said, “Sternengeschwister. That’s what you two could be. Star siblings, destined for each other. That’s romantic, eh. Wheeling round the heavens together like Ranginui and Papatuanuku.”
“Mixing up your myths,” Jax said. “The Sky Father and the Earth Mother.” He sounded amused, though, and relaxed, too, not like he was running screaming at the mention of destiny with a woman he’d only just met. Somehow, I wasn’t running, either.
“Holding each other tight in the dark,” Poppy said. “But maybe with some space between them, so they don’t have to worry about being separated.” Something sad in her voice, but then, the Maori creation myth was sad. The Sky Father and the Earth Mother, together through all the pitch-dark ages at the beginning of the world, until they were separated forever by their children. The Sky Father’s tears falling onto the earth for all the years and all the centuries that followed, blessing his wife again, longing to touch her one more time. And her longing just as much, only able to reach him via the morning mist, the vapor left behind by her sighs as she ached for her husband through the long nights.
It was sad, kind of like life. I was a realist, or I tried to be, but I liked the Star Siblings idea much better. Well, maybe not so much the “siblings” idea.
Hamish was playing with pocket-sized trucks on the patio at his mother’s feet with Tama, who was enjoying being the big kid as they built a ramp out of blocks. Now, he sighed and said, “Mum. Boys don’t like romantic.”
“Hush,” she said. “It’s not for a story. It’s for Uncle Jax.”
“Uncle Jax doesn’t like romantic either,” he said. “He’s a soldier.”
“Actually,” Jax said, “Uncle Jax likes romantic fine.” He lifted my hand to his lips, kissed my knuckles, smiled into my eyes, and said, “So tell us, Poppy,” as I tried not to fall even harder and absolutely failed.
“It’s German,” she said. “I read it in a book. A romantic book. Research, you could say. Imagination work. In the story, they were both Gemini, which is even more romantic. Star twins.”
“Jax is a year older, though,” I said. “Also—incest.” I’d got a shiver down my back all the same, though. Star twins.
“Doesn’t matter which year,” she said. “It’s the same, astrologically. Want to know?”
“I’m an Aquarius,” I said. “Which I don’t believe in. It makes zero logical sense that eight-point-three percent of everybody on earth would share the same characteristics. Also, Jax and I don’t have the same personality.”
“You’re exactly on the cusp with Capricorn, though,” Poppy said. “Which means you have both. He’s got more Capricorn, even though he’s left-handed, and you’re more Aquarius, at least I think so, although the ‘eight-point-three-percent’ thing sounds like Jax. Science, eh. Or math. Whatever.”
“Karen is a scientist, as it happens,” Jax said. “So maybe not so Aquarian. She’s left-handed as well, which is interesting, maybe. Also excellent in the water, though. First day I met her, she reminded me of a mermaid.”
I had one of those moments where your world tilts, and you aren’t sure if you’re looking at things upside down, or whether you just now realized how you ought to have been looking at them all along. I said, “The first time I saw you, coming out of the sea? I thought you were a merman. The way you swam, and how lean and strong you were. And how beautiful. You were walking on your knees, and that seemed so right. I thought I just had jet lag.”
Hope, who was sitting on the ground with Hemi, raised her head like she was hearing extra-low-frequency noise, in that way she did. Hope didn’t have extra-sensory perception, she had ultra-sensory perception, and right now, so did I. I felt a prickle along my arms, and looked down to see goosebumps.
Beside me, Jax had gone still. Or “more still,” because Jax was good at stillness. Boy, I was hanging out here. Talking about how beautiful he was in front of everybody, letting him know how I felt. Now, the goosebumps weren’t just about the connection. They might be about the fear, too.
He didn’t let go of my hand, though, as Poppy went on, “There you are, then. Aquarius is all about the inner world, your waking dreams, where what’s going on inside your head, what you’re reading or thinking, is more real than what’s actually happening. Born to create, eh, like being left-handed, but the Capricorn side means all that’s based in logic and reason. You want security and balance, but you want freedom, too. Your need for grounding will always be fighting with your need to fly. I looked it up,” she said at a probably-sardonic look from Jax. “A long time ago, when I was looking up birthdays. I didn’t say I believed it. I said it was interesting.”
“That’s you, Karen,” Hope said. She was sitting against Hemi’s chest, his arms around her, and just for tonight, I didn’t have to be one bit jealous of that.
“What do you do for work?” Poppy asked me.
Oh, boy. Not my favorite subject. “I’m separated from work right now,” I said.
She laughed. “Sounds like a divorce.”
“Exactly like that,” I said, and Jax squeezed my hand. I was tired, worn out by the day despite my long nap, and probably ready to leave, but I went on and said this anyway. I was tired of running away from the doubt and the disappointment. Tired of running from the fear most of all. That I wasn’t enough.
I’d shown myself, front and center, all through the past eight years. At work. With Josh. With everything. I’d given all of myself, and everything I was had been rejected. And the fear was—maybe I always would be.
I was tired of the fear, though, too. I had a feeling I’d come too close to dying a few days ago. I’d looked up sepsis today, when I’d been resting after Hope and Hemi had left, and had realized how close I’d come. I’d almost died fifteen years ago, too. How many do-overs could a woman expect to get? I was taking this one. I was moving on.
“Before,” I said, “I was an . . . an entrepreneur. In food technology, developing new products. My degrees are in biochemistry and business.” That was another of those stones, the ones that had been weighing me down. Loss, or call it what it was. Grief. That was the only word, surely, to describe what it felt like to lose what had defined you for your entire adult life, to lose your purpose and your home and your community.
Well, I’d lost it. It was over. It was done, and it was time to put those stones down and walk on without them. Or at least to take the first few steps, if I wanted to leave them behind.
“So interesting,” Poppy said. “Jax is the same, but different. Got the drive and the curiosity, anyway.”
“And the calm and logic. And by the way—being left-handed doesn’t actually make you more creative. That idea’s based on one misinterpreted study, sadly. Means you’re more likely to have certain mental illnesses, though. Which he clearly doesn’t.” I leaned my head against his shoulder, he put his arm around me, and that was even better. “I kind of like you,” I told him, “you know?”
He kissed my temple. “I kind of like you, too. Want to go home?”
“Yeah.” I asked Koro, who was sitting in his chair, which Hemi had brought around back, “You sure you’re OK with the dog for now, if we come back tomorrow? I’d take him, but we probably shouldn’t. I don’t want to get Jax kicked out of his apartment.” We’d given the little thing a bath after cake time. Its fur wasn’t matted anymore, but it was now extremely fuzzy. It was adorable, just like Debbie, with big, round brown eyes that looked at you worshipfully and brown eyebrows on its black-and-white face, but it desperately needed grooming. Also dog food, and a few other things. If it was a breed, I couldn’t imagine what. “I’m not worried about Debbie, at least,” I said. That was because Debbie was already the boss of the dog. In fact, right now,
they were both asleep at the edge of the terrace, Debbie’s bill resting on the dog’s back like he was making sure the dog would wake up still knowing what was what. Debbie didn’t mess around.
Koro waved a hand. “No worries. Nikau will get it sorted tomorrow. The dog’s good with the babies, and that’s enough for me.”
“I feel bad,” Poppy said. “Dumping a dog on you. I meant to dump it on Jax.”
Jax laughed, got up, gave his sister a kiss, and said, “Breakfast tomorrow, then. We’ll meet you at eight-thirty, along with Hemi and Hope. Family time, eh. If you’re too sick, ring me, and Karen and I will come get the kids and feed them.”
They were staying over, Poppy had told me brightly, because her husband, Max, was “traveling. Again.” I thought she might have come up to see Jax as much because she didn’t want to be alone as because she’d wanted to be with him, but there was no better antidote to loneliness than being with Hemi’s whanau. Or, it seemed, than being with Jax.
Jax
I thought Karen was asleep. The long summer daylight was fading at last, streaks of pink and orange lighting up the electric-blue twilight as we headed south, the muscular growl of the car a bass note to the soft music playing over the speakers, the wheels hugging the curves in the winding road. It occurred to me how different this drive was from the last time I’d done it, with Karen hot and listless beside me and the anxiety winding up tight in my body.
As I was thinking it, she said, “I didn’t hear you yell at your sister. Did you do it?”
“Nah.” I downshifted as I slowed for the Tauranga limits. “Hard to do, when she’s being sick.”
“Mm. I’ve noticed you have a weakness when it comes to sick women. Could be alarming. A pretty terrible tendency toward gentleness with women in general. What happened to my tough guy? You’ve barely yelled at me since I got sick. What’s up with that?”
Kiwi Rules (New Zealand Ever After Book 1) Page 26