16. Inner Peace
Summer
When Roman had finished his meal, I picked up his plate and said, “We’re closing.”
“I’ll wait for you,” he said.
“I told you, I don’t need you to. Also, you’re going to get me fired. If you think that’s some kind of sexy move, you don’t know me very well.”
He stood up, and I thought, Good. And also, from somewhere, Really? You’re giving up that easily? Instead of heading to the front door, though, he stuck his head through the swinging doors to the kitchen and said, “Oi.”
“We’re closing, mate,” Alfie said. The head cook and owner, wiping his hands on a kitchen towel.
“Got that,” Roman said. “Mind if I hang about and wait for Summer?”
Alfie stepped out and asked me, “This your fella?”
“Not really,” I said. “My, uh, friend. Maybe.”
“If you don’t want him here,” Alfie said, “say the word.” And folded his arms. Alfie was probably in his late fifties and had that tough-guy bulk that’s partly fat and partly muscle, the kind that says this isn’t his first rodeo.
Roman didn’t say, “You and what army?” or whatever you might have expected. He said, “Up to you and Summer, of course. Your place?” At Alfie’s nod, he put out a hand. “Don’t think we’ve met, but I’ve got a house just down the road. Roman D’Angelo.”
“Oh.” Alfie looked, if anything, more suspicious. He shook Roman’s hand, but said, “I don’t care who you are, nobody bothers my girls. Got that?”
“Got it,” Roman said. “She says you’ve been walking her to her car. Good of you. And if you’re the one who made that salmon curry, I owe you for that, too.”
Alfie looked at me, and I said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Fine, Roman. Stay.”
Alfie said, “Have a beer, then,” and pulled down a glass, and I all but rolled my eyes. Did everybody on Earth exist to do Roman d’Angelo’s bidding? No wonder he was so used to getting his own way.
“Now,” Roman told me when I sat down beside him with my own plate of salmon curry, because what was I going to do, sit at another table out of spite? “Explain.”
Roman
She didn’t answer straight away, but took a bite of curry first. I’d swear she was thinner than she’d been last week. How hard had she been working? After she’d swallowed her bite, she said, “Funny. That’s what I was about to say to you. Or more like—where do you get off?”
“Really,” I said. “You don’t think you need to tell me why you decided to take another job when you’re meant to be spending a full day cleaning my house?”
“What?” She blinked at me. “You’re kidding.”
“No,” I said. “Not. I employed you to clean my place, not to?—”
She set her fork down, put her palms on the bar top, and said, “Let’s get this straight. I agreed to clean out your house and your garden, and to get any damage repaired that I couldn’t manage myself. You have every right to tell me how to do that. You have no right to tell me whether I can work for somebody else when I’m not doing that. Did I miss the exclusivity clause in my nonexistent contract? I worked eight hours at your house today and eight hours yesterday before I came here. Delilah will have made dinner for you, too. If you want me to send you a time accounting, I will.”
I said, “I’m not?—”
Did she rush in to take back any of that, like you’d expect from a cheerful, caring sort of person? She did not. She said, “At least wait to see how far we’ve progressed on the house before you decide that I’m, what? Shirking? I’ll tell you how far. As far as it’s possible to progress, that’s how far. And I was planning on working on it tomorrow and Sunday, too, because you don’t get weekends off on paying for your accommodation, but you may just have discouraged me. If you want forty hours, I’ll give you forty hours and stop. So if what you wanted was to get it done slower, congratulations.”
I sighed. “Eat your curry.”
“I will when I want to.” I stared at her, and she said, “All right, I want to,” and did.
“I didn’t mean that,” I said. She looked at me, clearly disbelieving. “Right,” I went on. “I’ll explain. I don’t think you should be working this hard when you’ve been injured, and it drives me mad to think about it. I said three weeks. Why the hell can’t you take three weeks and heal?”
“You’re yelling,” she said.
“I’m not yelling. I never yell. I’m forceful.”
“Loudly forceful,” she muttered, and kept working on her salmon.
“Look,” I said, in a … less forceful tone, “if you need me to pay you a wage so you can afford to stay at the house and still pay me for the ute, tell me. In fact, I should be doing that anyway. D’you know what I’d be paying anybody else? Do I need to mention again that I’m a pretty well-off fella?”
“I will kill Delilah,” she said. “Tell me all this isn’t coming from her. This wasn’t just chance, was it, your stopping in here? You felt you needed to come in yourself and … and stake your claim, or something bizarre like that. Wow. You’re obviously not unhealthily possessive at all. For the record—not OK with me. Absolutely not.” She forked up another bite of salmon and looked much too composed for my liking. The woman had been around the block. She might look delicate, but there was steel under the skin. Unfortunately, I was a fan of steel.
“Or there could be nothing unhealthy about it,” I said. “Could be that I’m a decent bloke, and I wanted you and Delilah to have a chance to heal after you got hurt on my section. And not working God knows how long on top of what you’re putting in for me.”
“Four hours, five days a week,” she said. “Delivering plates of food to lovely people. Not exactly onerous. And you’re not fooling me at all with that ‘decent bloke’ thing. You keep saying that you owe me something because we rolled our van down your hill, as if I don’t know it’s exactly the opposite. You haven’t made that much money being stupid.”
“Right,” I said. “It can’t be kindness. What’s my motive, then?”
She sighed. “If I say it’s because you want to sleep with me, I sound full of myself. But I can’t think of any other reason. I keep forgetting I’m not that attractive now. All right. You’re weirdly kind, but the possessive thing is still a hard no. Which is why you’re not paying me, not when we’re staying there for free.”
“You’re not that attractive? You’re joking. And me? Kind? Here’s a thought for you. Women normally want to sleep with me.”
First time she hadn’t looked stroppy tonight. In fact, she laughed. “Well, here we are, then. Both immune.”
“Yeh,” I said. “Here we are.” Drop it, I told myself, knowing I probably wouldn’t, even though she was the wrong woman. Too prickly, too guarded, and all wrong for a fling, because despite all those walls, I knew I’d never get enough. Just too many … parts of her to discover. Too many facets, so you’d keep wanting to turn her to see all of them.
Which wasn’t sexual, except, yes, you’d want to keep turning her there, too. Touching her. Getting through that reserve and finding out what was beneath it, because I had a feeling there was heaps beneath it, and I wanted to see and know it all.
But if she was wrong for a fling, she was obviously wrong for more than that, because she didn’t want a relationship and neither did I. I took another swallow of beer and reminded myself of that.
Summer
Still way too intense here, and I couldn’t figure out why. Why my heart was beating like this. Why my cheeks were getting hotter. It wasn’t anything he’d said, not really. It was the way he looked at me, the power that came off him even when he was being casual. I was so off-balance.
“Do not let the behavior of others destroy your inner peace,” I told him, and possibly myself. “That’s the Dalai Lama. I figured Quote Wars were next, so I got my entry in early.”
“Got me there,” he said. “You realize you’re stroppy, right?”
“I am not stroppy. That means angry, and I’m not angry. I’m focusing on the positive these days, haven’t you noticed? It also means argumentative, and I’m not argumentative, either.”
He raised his eyebrows, and I said, “All right, maybe I’m argumentative, but only when somebody’s wrong.” And did my best to ignore his … appeal. Unless he was turning around and driving home tomorrow, I had a whole weekend with him, and I needed to get my footing here. “I have to believe you learned all this power deal of yours at home. Nobody gets that good at it all by himself. Let me guess. Your dad’s a lawyer. Your mum’s a … an estate agent, one of those terrifyingly efficient and hard-nosed ones who only sells multi-million-dollar homes. Your family invented the bungee. That’s how you started a business at eleven years old or whatever.”
“Not even close,” he said. I waited, but that was all. I got the hard expression again. The forbidding one.
I said, “I told you my story. How can it be worse than that?’
“It’s not a contest,” he said. “Not a slumber party, either.”
“Oh, nice. So sharing is unmanly?”
He kept looking fierce, then suddenly grinned, totally unexpectedly, and again, it changed his whole face, those parentheses around his eyes and all, and I smiled back and said, “Sounds like somebody had a great day. What, did you accidentally set a pile of money on fire? Somebody steal the corporate jet?”
“I’m not that well off,” he said.
“I’m a luxury-house expert, remember? You’re that well off. How many homes do you own, that this is the throwaway one? Tell the truth. If I can confess the crappy trailer of my youth, you can confess the yacht.”
“There’s the fact that you won’t like me if I tell you,” he said. “That could be it.”
“I will if you tell me the sad story first, and follow it up with the inspirational tale of how you rose from your pitiful beginnings and triumphed on your brains and courage and hard work alone with no help from anybody. Every self-made success I’ve ever known has had that same story. Tech mogul? Football star? All of them. If anybody grew up as a happy suburban kid with two loving parents, understanding teachers, a salt-of-the-earth grandma who always believed in him, and a dog named Spot, it doesn’t make it into their origin myth.”
He didn’t answer, just drank his beer, and I said, “Wait. It really is painful.”
“Nah,” he said, “just boring.” And, again, shut up.
I stood up with my somehow-empty plate. “I need to help close. Feel free to leave.”
“I said I’d walk you out,” he said without a smile. “I keep my promises.”
Way to look dark, brooding, and mysterious, dude.