Kiwi Strong (New Zealand Ever After Book 3)

by Rosalind James

  I needed to go to work.

  24

  Never Say Never

  Daisy

  I stood in the doorway of my first-ever yurt and felt bad.

  Fruitful said, “Do you really not have to be nice to men, Outside? Even if they’re nice to you, and help you when you’ve lost your car and give you a place to live and everything?”

  I said, “Yes. No. You should be nicer than that, if they’re being kind. I’ll go tell him so, in a minute.”

  Ungrateful much? I asked myself.

  Ungrateful heaps.

  “Do you just take off your clothes all the time Outside, too, even around men?” Obedience asked. “I thought—the Prophet says wearing trousers and makeup makes you a whore, but you took off your trousers, and back there, you took off your shirt, too, and your bra isn’t even white, and you weren’t wearing underwear before, so you were, you know … showing. Do men just not look? Or do they not care? I thought you couldn’t show your body because of lust. Don’t they have lust, then?”

  “Don’t sound so disappointed,” I said. “No, you don’t normally take off your clothes this much. That’s just … circumstances. And the lust depends on whether he’s attracted to you. And none of that makes you a whore. Erase that word. That’s a word men use to shame women who enjoy sex. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying sex.”

  I’d know more about that if I were actually having sex. Or enjoying it. I subscribed to the philosophy, though.

  Fruitful and Obedience looked at each other, and Fruitful said, “So Gray isn’t …”

  I sighed and said, “Sexually attracted, I mean. If he were sexually attracted to me, it would be a big deal to take off my clothes, but he isn’t, so it isn’t. Anyway, it wasn’t about sex, taking off my shirt, it was about him getting into the window. And before that, when I had to take off my trousers, we were escaping, and I couldn’t run. Men Outside can separate the two things. They can see you in a bikini and not think that means they get to be sexual with you, even if they are attracted. They know that your body is yours, not theirs. At least the good ones do.”

  “So, wait,” Fruitful said slowly. “If they’re attracted to you, you don’t take off your clothes around them? That doesn’t make sense. I thought men wanted to see women’s bodies because they are attracted. But if they’re not … then you can be naked? I don’t get it.”

  “I’ll explain later,” I said, knowing I wouldn’t. Not until I had a better idea of what I was explaining. “I need to unpack. Help Obedience put the groceries away, please.”

  “It’s nice here,” Obedience said. “Houses Outside are even better than I thought.”

  “Except Daisy’s,” Fruitful said. “Hers didn’t look like this. Maybe Dorian’s does, though.”

  “No,” I said. “Gray’s houses are … unusually beautiful.”

  In fact, the yurt wasn’t anything like I’d imagined Gray’s “extra space” would be. He had made it sound like a sleepout in back, when he’d proposed it.

  Well, no.

  To begin with, it was set on piers amongst the pines, half-surrounded by a wooden deck with a table and chairs and that spa tub. It was round, of course, but the main view from the lounge and kitchen area looked out down a sloping valley, over willows and poplars, their leaves still springtime-pale-green and vibrant. Farther down, a paddock was laid out with neat rows of humped earth, planted with green things. A neatly arranged orchard had been meticulously pruned into shape down there, too, the trees clothed in pink and white blossoms. And beside the orchard, next to a low hedge, four sets of multicolored boxes were stacked three high.

  I recognized those straight away.

  Beehives.

  It would be lovely down there. Drifts of pale pink and white blossoms in the fruit trees, and the lazy buzz of bees. You could grow lavender here, and flowers, too: hollyhocks and hydrangeas, peonies and hyssop and butterfly bush that the bees would love. There was heaps of room.

  And beyond all of that, far down there, was the sea. No beach, not here, but there’d be beach to the north and south of us. And surf. And salt.

  You saw all that from the yurt, because there were so many windows. Windows, and light, and space. The light and space came from a domed ceiling supported by beams radiating out from the center to the outer edge like close-set ribs in an umbrella. The dome rose for meters above us, and culminated in an open octagonal hole like a huge skylight where an enormous ceiling fan hung and stirred the air lazily. Through the skylight, you could see the tops of trees and the deep blue of the springtime sky.

  It was a very large yurt, partitioned off by walls of more of the same honey-colored wood, the horizontal planks sanded and varnished to a sheen but still sporting irregular dark knots, for a look that was both casually masculine and absolutely beautiful. The kitchen was up-to-the minute, with darker wood cabinets, stainless-steel appliances, and benchtops in some kind of amber, speckled stone, and the bathroom, when I peeked in there, was just as nice. No tub this time, and the shower was smaller, but it was warm and bright and spare and clean. A stacked washer and dryer stood in an alcove, and the two bedrooms had the same varnished-plank walls, but no ceilings. Instead, the walls stopped partway up, which meant that you would lie in bed and look up at that soaring space, that pleasing arrangement of pale umbrella-spike beams, and a little bit of the night sky, maybe even a star or two. There was a friendly dark-green wood-burner in the tidy living area, a wooden table and chairs for four, and a little loft over the kitchen, and you could stand in one place and see it all.

  I headed up an almost-ladder made of stripped varnished-pine poles to check it out as Obedience opened kitchen cabinets below me, tried out the icemaker with some shrieking, and turned on stove burners. Both she and Fruitful, who was perched on a stool at the island, exclaimed over all of it as if they’d never seen anything like it, as excited as if they’d been transported to a foreign country, which they more or less had.

  The loft was floored with Japanese mats. Tatami, they were called, made of pale woven stuff. Bamboo, I thought. There was a big window with an extra-large sill stretching around the outer arc of the loft. A flat cushion sat below the central open part of that sill, while a single shelf ran just above the floor on either side. A desk and shelves. A desk you had to sit on the floor to use, where you’d be looking out over the orchard and the gardens and the sea, all of it even more visible from up here. Sliding doors made of strips of dark blue with rice-paper inserts ran along the back wall of the loft. I guessed they hid storage space. The rest of the room, I imagined, would be for stretching, and maybe something more strenuous. Those long, low shelves could hold books, and they could also hold weights.

  I wanted to stay in that tiny, wood-railed loft-room room forever, bathed in light and space and serenity.

  Right now, though, I had to do something else.

  Gray

  It wasn’t fifteen minutes before I heard a knock on the door. It was barely ten. I stopped filling food and water dishes for the dog and went to open it.

  Daisy.

  “Gray, I—” she started to say, then stopped.

  “Yeh, well,” I said, “I told you it was a terrible house.”

  She started to laugh, and I had to smile myself. “I know,” I said. “That’s why it wasn’t nearly as dear as it ought to have been. The whole house was like this, and the section as well. Pretty shocking, all of it. Also, the house wasn’t insulated, and it had bad pipes and scary electrical. Oh, and a hole in the roof and a leaky sewer line that we won’t go into, because nobody needs to imagine that. The whole place stank like a mother—” I stopped myself. “Like a pigsty. They’d left the furniture, too. As you see.”

  “But you haven’t changed it,” she said.

  “I just told you I did,” I said, trying to be offended.

  “Most people,” she told me, “would have painted.”

  “Yeh, well, I’m a builder. Builders always have rubbish houses, because t
he last thing we want to do when we come home is build some more. Anyway, you don’t paint until after you remodel, and as you can see, that’s not done.”

  “Why aren’t you living in the yurt, then?” she asked.

  “I have to live here to see what I want to do, what feels right. But I got busy, so … it hasn’t happened. And then there was Iris. She needed a place to stay, so … Never mind, I’m hardly ever here, and I have room for a gym. It’s insulated, also. Did I mention the insulation?”

  “I can’t see the insulation or the plumbing or the roof,” she said, “through the green.”

  The lounge was indeed green. Deep-green walls, but pale-blue carpet, for interesting contrast. Also a tufted blue couch and a huge monster of a coffee table with round, bulbous legs. If this had been a Disney movie, that table would have come to life as a draft horse. The fireplace had a very nice carved-wood mantel, though, original to the house, which meant 1870. That could stay.

  I said, “Come see the kitchen and dining room, get the full experience.”

  “Oh, my,” she said faintly, when she was standing in the kitchen. “It’s not worse than mine, because nothing could be worse than mine. It’s just …”

  “Ugly,” I suggested.

  “There you go. That’s the word I was looking for.”

  It was a big room, with the appliances arranged around the walls for maximum inefficiency. Refrigerator on one wall, sink at the far end, stove on the other wall, but not opposite the refrigerator.

  “Not so much a work triangle,” I said, “as a work marathon. Room’s too narrow for an island, too wide to be convenient. The perfect storm.”

  “I thought the storm was the color scheme,” she said.

  “What? That the cabinets are green and the walls are orange? And the benchtops are almost that same orange, but actually red instead, so you want to run away screaming? Also note the orange color scheme in the dining room. You see? We match. Green to green-and-orange to orange. A whole progression of color-blindness testing. You see why the place was cheap.”

  “Nice big wood-burner in here, though,” she said. “And a slate hearth that’s much too tasteful to match anything.”

  “Stop trying to be encouraging,” I said. “It doesn’t suit you. Yeh, you’re right, I did the wood-burner. And you haven’t even seen the bedrooms. I have a pink-and-blue one. That is, I don’t, because I don’t sleep in there. Nightmares, eh. Also one bath. Lime green.”

  “Oh, dear.” She was still laughing, and had dropped to her knees on the carpet in the orange dining room—the carpet was green, and shaggy—to pat the dog, who rolled obligingly onto her back to allow Daisy access to her belly. “It’s not a terrible house, though. It’s a lovely house. Or it could be.”

  I eyed her skeptically. “You’ve never been tactful before. Don’t start now.”

  “You did the yurt, though,” she said. “Didn’t you?” She wasn’t laughing anymore. She was sitting with her hands in the dog’s fur, looking up at me.

  I crouched down opposite her and did some of my own dog-patting, because I couldn’t exactly stand there and loom over her. “Yeh,” I said. “That’s how I started, in fact. I worked for a builder when I was young, so I knew how to do some things already, and I didn’t want to live in a caravan while I worked on the house. Too small, for one thing, for a fella like me, and anyway, I don’t like them. They don’t feel right. I bought the yurt instead, twelve or thirteen years ago, while I was still living in my apartment, and taught myself how to do most things to put it up and outfit it. YouTube, eh. I got mates to help me. It was fun.”

  It had been more than that. It had been meditative, and exciting, and so satisfying when I’d got it right.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. “It’s more than beautiful. It’s … it’s thoughtful. I can stand in it and feel what you wanted, what spoke to you. The sky, the wood. The roof. The same peace I felt in your house in Wanaka, even though it’s totally different. The connection to the outdoors, and the simplicity. My favorite is the loft, though. I love the loft.”

  “Japan,” I said. Stupidly, because she’d know that. “Shoji screens. Tatami.”

  “The Wanaka house,” she said. “You built that, too.”

  “Once I knew what I was doing. I did some yurts for other people first. More as a hobby than anything, in the offseason, the summer, and then I did the Wanaka house once I knew more, and could put together a crew. Once I knew what I wanted, and how to make it happen.”

  “And I made you feel like it didn’t matter,” she said. “Like I was criticizing it. Like I didn’t care. It’s just … I can tend to … try to … to stay above it. Apart from it.” She looked down at the dog. “I don’t know how to explain. And I want to make a joke here, but I can’t think of one.”

  “It’s hard,” I said gently, because she needed gentleness, and because this had been tough for her to say, tough to do. To come over, and to apologize. “When you need to stay strong, not to have anyone think you need anything, that you want anything. Not to have anyone think you’re small, and they’re big.”

  “Yes.” She was looking at me at last, so much honesty in her face. “But that isn’t what I wanted to say. I didn’t come here to talk about me. I came to talk about you. To say that I’m sorry. You’ve been kind, and I’ve been …”

  “Bitchy?” I suggested.

  She laughed out loud. “Well, yeh. In fact, I think that’s the exact word. Bitchy.”

  “Yeh, nah,” I said, and smiled. “A willful woman’s just a woman who knows what she wants.” I touched her cheek. Soft skin. Fine bones. “No worries, Daisy. You said it. I get it.”

  I could see her swallow, and I could see what it had cost her to make herself this vulnerable. I told her, “You take care of everyone. It’s who you are, and it’s a beautiful thing to be that brave and that strong. It’s harder, though, to let somebody take care of you.”

  “It’s never,” she said.

  “Takes trust,” I said. “Takes faith. You know what they say, though.”

  “What do they say?” Her eyes were big and dark and clear in her delicate face, and they were holding mine right here.

  I smiled again, and I touched her face again, too, just because I liked her face so much. “Never say never.”

  25

  Like a Brother

  Daisy

  An hour later, Fruitful was still saying, “I feel naked.”

  “You’re not naked,” I said. “You’re wearing a T-shirt, and my jeans are baggy on you.” Since Fruitful did have thin thighs.

  Unfortunately, my feet were smaller than either of my sisters’, making my shoes unworkable, so she was barefoot. But then, the huge white trainers would have looked awful with the too-short, non-skinny skinny jeans, so just as well.

  Obedience was wearing a dress, and the shoes looked even worse than they would have with jeans. Jeans hadn’t worked for her, though, because she wasn’t as skinny as me. Both girls could wear my shirts and undies, but bras, shoes, trousers, and skirts were out. We needed to go shopping. “And don’t talk to me,” I said. “I’m focusing on the road.”

  “This is such a cold car,” Obedience said.

  It took me a second. “Cool,” I said. “It’s a cool car.” On the one hand, I wanted to drive it fast and see what it could do. On the other hand, I could just see myself having another smash. Wouldn’t that go over well.

  So, obviously, the car wasn’t an old sedan with rust spots. The car, in fact, was a ten-year-old Ford Mustang, its cherry-red paint still gleaming bright, and it had an engine that growled all the way down into your bones like a tiger that was ready to run. No matter what Gray said, he’d care if this one didn’t remain in one piece.

  It was only a fifteen-minute drive to the hospital, fortunately, so I didn’t have to focus for long. It was nice, to feel like you were out in the country but only be ten minutes from downtown, but now I was downtown, and expecting something terrible to happen at
any moment. An abandoned shopping trolley to come careening down the hill and crash into the extra-shiny hood. An old lady to misjudge her turn and scrape the entire side. Some clueless idiot to rear-end me.

  Oh, wait. That had already happened. I felt marginally better.

  This car, though. And he didn’t drive it? If I’d owned this car, I’d have driven it even when I didn’t have to go anywhere. I’d have sat in the driveway in it. I didn’t understand Gray. I’d say he’d been born rich and took it for granted, but I could tell, after meeting Honor, that it wasn’t true. Honor was a working woman, and I’d swear she always had been.

  I parked on the top level of the hospital carpark, because I could keep extra spaces around us that way and avoid car doors being opened bang into the gleaming paintwork. Obedience said, “I think Gray must like you, if he’s letting you drive his car.”

  I helped Fruitful out and told Obedience, “Get on her other side. Fruitful, put your arms over our shoulders,” headed to the lifts, and didn’t answer. That was because I was confused.

  I’d expected Gray to be narky back there, in his house. He’d sounded that way when he’d left us at the yurt, and I’d understood why. But when he’d touched my face, he’d been … sweet. And the look in his eyes …

  A willful woman is just a woman who knows what she wants.

  He’d said he was a builder. Not a panelbeater, and not a landscaper. Well, obviously, a builder made sense. I should have guessed a builder. You didn’t own a house like that—in Wanaka—unless you were doing very well indeed. A second house. How had he done all that, though, and got that car ten years ago—new, too, which nobody did in New Zealand that I knew—if he’d only built the yurt a couple years before? He’d said he’d worked for a builder. You didn’t get rich working for a builder, and anyway, he didn’t act rich. He acted like somebody who was work boots and jeans all the way down to his bones. Like the men I’d grown up with.