8. The One That You Are
Roman
I didn’t get to sleep for a while that night.
I’d tried to get Summer to stay with me. I wasn’t sure why. Some combination of pity and sex, probably, which wasn’t particularly noble, but then, I’d never claimed to be. She climbed off the bed, though, so I walked her back to her bedroom and left her there. And then lay awake, troubled and aroused in equal measure, trying to force my brain to let it go.
It wasn’t that I didn’t know what to do. Feed them breakfast, collect their belongings, arrange to get the van towed, loan them a bit of money that I wouldn’t expect to see again, drive them wherever they wanted to go, and forget them. I’d been helpful. I’d been hospitable. I wasn’t responsible.
Unfortunately, my brain didn’t want to see it that way.
“Have good trust in yourself,” I reminded myself aloud in the warmth of the dying fire. “Not in the One that you think you should be, but in the One that you are.” Maezumi Roshi had been right. I knew who I was, and it wasn’t some noble fella, it was the kind of man who wanted a woman’s legs in his lap and everything that would come after it, when she had stitches in four places and her cousin had concussion and they both seemed pretty desperate.
No. A loan, a lift, and goodbye.
I woke to a strong smell of damp wood and wet wool, and slivers of light around the edges of the blinds. When I stepped onto the squashy carpet and looked outside, I was greeted by incongruously bright sunshine and calling birds. If it hadn’t been for a welter of broken tree limbs, a slick of mud over every surface, an impressive litter of scattered debris, and the squelching feeling of the wet carpet under my feet, I wouldn’t have known the storm had happened. I opened the windows to start to air things out, and it was late summer again: fresh and cool, with the promise of warmth to come and only a few clouds in the sky.
I looked at my watch. Nearly seven. I’d overslept by over an hour. That would be the bourbon, or the thoughts. More importantly, the power was back.
I didn’t do my aikido self-practice, even though I always did my practice. I didn’t do my meditation, either. I told myself it was because of the sodden floors, but it probably wasn’t. I headed into the kitchen instead.
Nobody here. No sound in the house, either.
I envisioned the girls grabbing my car keys from the hook by the door, searching the house for pawnable items, and heading off up the road. That hadn’t even occurred to me last night.
I resisted going to the door to look. Either I trusted my judgment or I didn’t, and it was a little late for second thoughts. If the car was gone, I’d find out in half an hour, when I did look, and I wouldn’t be worse off than if I found out now. I let it go, made a coffee, and got out the eggs and bread. If the girls—women—were still here, I wasn’t going to worry about their breakfast. The food was here for them to cook, and I wasn’t responsible for them.
I. Was. Not. Responsible. I was also not worried. Problems would come, would break over me, but they didn’t have to drag me under.
I was slipping an egg into the pot of boiling water when I saw her. My hand hovered, then hit the edge of the pot, and I jumped and exclaimed as the egg fell into the water with a splash.
“You’ve burned yourself,” she said. “Here.” She rushed forward, grabbed my wrist and pulled, and stuck my hand under the tap as she turned on the cold water. “Hold it in there so it doesn’t blister.”
“I know how to treat a burn.” I knew I was scowling and couldn’t help it. I wasn’t the one who needed help here. On the other hand, my judgment hadn’t steered me wrong. Here she was, back to being the caretaker, and no thief. “Grab that toast when it’s done,” I told her, “and butter it. You take the eggs out with a slotted spoon and?—”
“I’m a British citizen, remember? I know how to make poached eggs on toast.” She was, in fact, taking care of that now, even setting the eggs on a paper towel to dry. “Commanding me to make your breakfast, though? I’d say it was presumptuous of you, but we just slept in your house, so I guess I’ll do it.”
I said, “I didn’t mean—I meant that you could eat that and I’d make more.”
She looked over her shoulder at me, then slid the eggs onto the buttered toast. “No, I’ll put the oven on warm for these and do two more plates. Keep that hand in the water, and I’ll go get my brand-new medical supplies and treat that burn. Convenient that that’s the one thing I still possess.” She tapped unerringly at the electronic controls of the smaller of the two ovens in the big cooker and slid the plate inside, then left the room.
I felt stupid, standing there with my hand under the water, but I had burned it, so there you were. When she came back, though, I dried my hand on a tea towel and said, “It’s fine.”
Did she listen to that? She did not. She took my hand, inspected it, and said, “Blister. Here.” And started up with the hand-holding and doctoring thing, standing so close to me, I could smell the scent of her again. Which was much more “mud and earth” this morning than “soft and sweet,” but that was the wet clothes.
When she’d wrapped the plaster around the side of my hand, she looked up at me with a teasing light in her eyes and asked, “No comments on my technique? What happened to Mr. Suave? Mr. I’m-in-Charge-Here-So-Shut-Up?”
“I—” I cleared my throat and wished she’d step back. Wait. I could step back. I did it. “You surprised me.”
That was putting it mildly. I hadn’t really seen, last night, what she looked like. It had been all strings of long wet hair and liberal lashings of mud, other than a glimpse of her shape in the firelight. Now, though … I said, “Your hair’s different.” Lamely.
She touched a pale strand. “You have power again, so I took another sort-of shower—it’s interesting to try to wash your hair without getting your hands or knees wet. I had to bend all the way over and aim the sprayer very carefully”—an image I did not need—“so I could soak it and then dry it slightly more respectably. Thanks for having a hairdryer in your guest room. I’m impressed. I don’t have a comb, though, so it’s better than last night, but still a wreck. I guess ‘different’ sounds better than ‘disaster,’ but I assume that’s what you mean.”
Well, no. It wasn’t. Her hair was blonde. Also shiny, pale platinum mixed with a few streaks of gold in a way that was either a very expensive coloring job or a lucky accident of nature. Had to be the latter, because she’d sounded skint, with the angst over the loss of the van and the hospital bills and all. A very lucky accident of nature. An embarrassment of riches, in fact, hanging halfway down her back and, yes, looking just-out-of-bed tousled in a fairly delicious way. Her eyes, which still held that teasing light, were a soft gray with a dark-gray rim, and the rest of her face …
She had the whole package: a heart-shaped face, with a wide forehead and cheekbones and a pointed chin, and those eyes, which seemed to take up half her face. As for the rest of her … She was wearing the same clothes she’d had on yesterday, the T-shirt and shorts and white strips of bandage. She’d obviously washed her clothes in the shower last night, because they weren’t entirely clean and were still damp, which meant they clung to her, and bloody hell, but the woman had a body. Too short for a model, I guessed, but proportioned in the way a man most appreciated.
That innocent kitten face and petite size said “cute.” Vulnerable, maybe. Sweet. The rest of her, though, said “holy fuck.” The combination was disorienting. How had I missed all that? Was I blind?
“You were muddier yesterday,” I said, hearing how lame it sounded. “And wearing a raincoat. And so forth. Oh—chuck those clothes in the washing machine. Can’t be comfortable, wearing them still wet.”
“Well, no,” she said, holding the T-shirt out from her breasts and fanning it, “but I don’t think it would be a good idea to be naked, do you?”
Yes, I did not say. “I can loan you a shirt while you wash your things,” I said. “One with tails. It should be long enough to cover your … the most important areas. Wait here.” I headed back to my bedroom, thinking, Get it together, boy. Harden up. Unfortunately, though, hardness wasn’t my problem.
I was a reasonably worldly bloke. You might even call me sophisticated, for a Kiwi. I aimed for that frame of mind, came back into the kitchen, and handed her a white dress shirt on a hanger. “That should do you.”
She held it up. “Ah … Do you have one that isn’t white?”
“What, you’re going to be fashion-conscious?”
“Roman.” Her mouth did interesting things, saying my name. “You’ll be able to see through this. It’s white. You’ve told me you’re not interested, of course, but …” There was that teasing light again. Her lashes might be dyed, I thought stupidly, because she had no makeup to put on, and unlike the hair, they were brown, framing the gray eyes. Or maybe that was another happy accident of nature, that and the winged eyebrows. That was one disarming face, innocent and sensual at once.
“Oh.” I took the shirt and headed out to exchange it, coming back with a blue one. “Better?”
“Better,” she said, and smiled. “Hang on while I go get almost naked.”
Bloody hell.
I had to get these women out of here.
No, I didn’t. What was I thinking?
Summer
It wasn’t like men never stared at me. Men had been staring at me since I was twelve. I might be disappointed that Roman was staring at me, though. Or pleased, what with that “naked” comment, because why on earth had I said that?
I couldn’t tell how I felt, to tell you the truth. Yesterday, he’d been totally oblivious to how I looked, because I’d looked terrible. He’d shown me his real self, which was weirdly nice, even though his real self hadn’t always been that nice.
Too confusing, and my life was too complicated to care about this. And I didn’t have sexual feelings anymore. Which was good, because I didn’t need that. I stripped off the disgusting, damp, not-clean-enough clothes as Delilah slept on—I didn’t want to admit how many times I’d woken and checked that she was still breathing, or that it was the reason I’d wanted to sleep with her—gathered up her wet clothes, and went to find the washing machine.
It had to be near the kitchen. I focused on that and not on the house, because I didn’t care about fancy houses. All right, this was a very fancy house, and, with all its natural stone and wood, more tasteful than any of the many, many fancy houses I’d seen thus far in my life, but still. I didn’t care, other than taking tastefulness notes for the much more modest house I would eventually buy with the salary I was going to earn on my own.
Once, you know, I got over being desperately poor again.
I’d never understood why Mom couldn’t get out of the hole. I’d seen the six-pack of beer and the liters of store-brand soda in the grocery bags every week, the carton of cigarettes she picked up at the Indian reservation every month, and said, “If you didn’t buy any of this stuff, at the end of a year, you’d have at least six hundred dollars.”
She’d said, “I know, honey. You’re right. I’m cutting back. I’m going to quit smoking, too.” She hadn’t quit or cut back, and now that I wasn’t fourteen anymore, I understood that in a life with so little pleasure, how could you deny yourself the temporary reprieve of that cigarette, that beer at the end of the day? You could cut back to the bone, and you still wouldn’t be getting out of your crappy trailer or your crappy life. I got it now, but it was a little late.
So I headed down the curving hallway—yes, the enormous house was built in a semicircle, mostly on a single level, with many bedroom-type rooms and who knows how many baths, plus windows and skylights and natural materials galore and an embarrassment of planted beds and walkways around the enormous lap pool with its infinity edge that spilled over into a spa—found the laundry room, dumped the clothes and soap into the washer—Miele, of course, and looking brand-new—chose the fastest cycle, and started the machine. Then I went back to the kitchen, and Roman.
He”d been surprised by me. Well, I’d been surprised by him, too. Not that he was good-looking, because I’d noticed that yesterday. Maybe that he seemed as tough in the morning light, clean and dry and cooking in a spectacularly modern, deceptively rustic kitchen that opened onto equally spectacular landscaping, as he had all wet, dirty, and frustrated, hauling Delilah up the hillside or yelling at me in the ER. Black scruff of morning beard on his face, which looked hewn from some sort of very hard rock and was something better than handsome, skin that looked a little rough, a little weatherbeaten, biceps and triceps and chest and thigh muscles that were more than obvious in the T-shirt and shorts, and the dark hair on his legs that had felt rough under my skin the night before.
When he’d been kind. When he’d asked about Delilah, about my mom, and listened. Before he’d seen me for real and everything had changed.
He was Maori, wasn’t he? The skin and the hair and the build and all? I wondered if he had a tattoo under the shirt, with its complicated swirls and spirals wrapped all the way around his muscular arm. In New Zealand, only Pacific people had tattoos, the Maori and Samoans and so forth, and the markings always meant something, too.
Mostly, they meant, “Well, that’s attractive,” at least to me. I didn’t have sexual feelings, but there you were. The look was objectively attractive, that was all, and yes, it made a man look even tougher. If Roman had one, though, it didn’t come far down his arm.
Fortunately, I didn’t like big, tough men who thought they could tell you what to do because they outweighed you, and I liked handsome men less than that. Tattoo or not, rich men and entitled men came even further down my list, and he was all those things.
A man was not a place to land.
I didn’t tug at the tails of the dress shirt. I knew they only came halfway down my thighs, that he knew I was naked underneath, and that he’d focus on it. Breezy and confident, that was how you handled men like this, so I didn’t wait for whatever he’d say. I just said, “Coffee. That’s what I need. Also food. And then I’m going to go out there and search for my stuff, because I need my toothbrush.”