34. Walk On
Roman
I didn’t know exactly what to say to Summer after that. She blew so hot and cold, it was driving me mad. Did I go with what I was getting from her today, or what she’d said before? I was on the back foot and no mistake.
She kept me confused by moving off as soon as the meal was over and circulating among the guests, introduced first to one group, then another, either letting me know that I didn’t need to worry about her or … or something else. I saw her shining blonde head through gaps in the crowd, and every time I caught a glimpse of her face, she was smiling as if this party met all her dreams for a social occasion. She’d been the one with the composure today, with the ease. So far from the withdrawn, brittle woman who’d dragged herself up and down my hillside with her rake until she was practically dropping where she stood. When had that changed? And why? I needed to know.
Just now, though, I was sitting on the wall with Jax MacGregor, drinking a beer and neither of us saying much, possibly because he was a soldier and I felt like I’d been walking through a minefield all day myself, and because I wasn’t Summer. I didn’t have her ease with people, or whatever that was. Compassion, I guessed. Empathy. Maybe I’d always worked so much because it was the one thing I knew how to do. Huh. That was a thought.
Jax had the sort of watchful, calm stillness you saw in military blokes who lived on the sharp end, and he wasn’t quite part of this family either. Or Maori, for that matter, which made it easier. We talked about bomb disposal, about wind power, about Dunedin. “I grew up there,” Jax was saying. “Thought I’d stay closer, but Karen’s whanau is here. Her heart, too. No choice.”
The party was quieter now, most of the teenagers and younger people having gone next door to Matiu’s brother Tane’s house to play basketball and ping-pong, Delilah among them. The babies and littlies were mostly taking naps in the house, the slightly bigger kids playing cricket on the grass by the fruit trees. Music played softly in the background, mingling with the hum of insects, the voices around us, the occasional call of a bird. A warm, sleepy day. Hard to stay wound up on a day like that. I said, “No Army base in Tauranga. And, yeh, I recognized your name.”
Jax said, “Can’t escape it, especially not in shorts. I’m conspicuous. We’re in Auckland during the week, but here most weekends. Got a house on the sea not far from here. Poppy and Matiu and the kids are there with us this weekend. Bursting at the seams, but never mind, I like my sister, and it makes Karen happy. Keeps her laughing, and I like her laughing. She’s a bit like wee Olivia. Always an original thought, and she always expresses it. Lives to the hilt. Force of nature. She does consulting for work, except that it’s more like inventing. Food science. New products.”
“Accomplished,” I said.
“She is that,” Jax said. “Brilliant, too. Out-earns me by heaps.” He grinned, crinkling the surface of the wide blue scars. “Pretty funny, hey. But then, power struggles can be fun. And I can hear you thinking about the MacGregor money. I have some of that, yeh. Some money I earned myself, too, back in the day.”
“The underwear modeling,” I said. “I have a few pairs of that Wallaby stuff, with the pouch. Pretty sure that was your body on the package.”
“Not so much now,” he said, “on the money or anything else. I’m not as pretty as I was. Not as stupid, either, fortunately.” He looked at me for a second, then took a pull at his beer and said, “Not always easy, being given too much. Look at you. Look at Hemi. Didn’t have anything handed to you, did it all yourselves, the hard way. That’s something to be proud of. Something to count on. I only became a man worth anybody’s time when I stripped it down and lost the easy stuff.”
“When you quit the modeling,” I said, “and joined the services.”
“Talk about a shock to the system,” he said. “And then, of course, I lost the leg. And the face. People used to stare at me, walking down the street. They still do. Different reason, of course. I hated both things, but I hate it less now. Oddly.”
“Not earning your living with your face anymore, that’s probably why,” I said. “Or with your body, at least not in the same way. It felt like cheating before, I’m thinking. Too easy.”
Jax said, “Oddly sensitive of you. Who knew?”
I hesitated, but then I said it. The threads of the idea had been there all day, swimming around at random in my brain. “Summer,” I said. “Summer knows.”
“Ah.” It was nothing but a sigh. “That’s a beautiful face. Beautiful everything. Was she a model, then?”
“No,” I said. “WAG. Trophy wife.” I explained in a few sentences. “Embarrassed as hell by the whole thing, and tired of it. Know what she did for work before she came here, though? Software engineer.”
“Reckon everybody needs to feel like they’ve got something to offer the world,” Jax said. “It’s not very satisfying to be told that your beautiful self is enough. Even if you’ve stood about under lights all day until you’re stiff and sweating and you’d say you’ve earned it. That doesn’t look like much when seen from, say, Afghanistan.”
“Dunno,” I said. “I’ve never been a beautiful person.”
“Not exactly an ugly one, mate,” Jax said with a crooked grin.
“I’m thinking it’s different, though,” I said.
“It is. Not that I cared much as a young fella. More than happy to take all the sex and money and substances that came my way, if we’re being frank here. Could be different for a girl, though. I don’t know. You could ask her, I guess. That could be a thought.”
I picked at the label on the beer bottle. “It’s that obvious?”
“That you’ve barely started? That you don’t know where you stand with each other? It is to me. One way to find out.”
“What’s that?”
“Tell,” he said. “And then ask. And …” He hesitated.
“Yeh?” I asked. “I’m open to suggestion here. Embarrassing to say, but …”
“Mate,” Jax said, “we’ve all been there. Maybe do some courting.”
It was such an incongruous word coming from him, I laughed. “Courting?”
Jax waved his beer bottle. “Love and affection and sex and romance. All that. Courting. Let her know—make her know—that you see her, and you know her, and you like what you see. Inside, not just outside. Romance her. Sweep her off her feet.” He grinned, took a final swallow of beer, and hopped off the wall, landing on both feet, the real one and the substitute. Jax may have been put down, but he was walking on. “If you get the chance?” he told me. “Give her the best sex she’s ever had. If you want her, show her why and show her how, and do it with everything you’ve got. There you go. My advice.”
I wasready to leave and get started on that. More than ready. The old man had wanted me to meet people? I’d done it, and if that made him feel better, I was glad of it. It was a fine family. A fine whanau. It just wasn’t my whanau, and no accident of DNA was going to change that. If I didn’t want to be that kid with his nose pressed against the glass, I needed to leave before anybody thought of me that way. Correction. Before I thought of myself that way. Before I started wanting a family.
And then there was Summer. I had exactly one day to spend with her before I had to be off again, and I needed to sort out how to work that.
I can’t be casual about sex. She’d said that just this morning.
I didn’t know the answer, so I told myself, Act without expectation, and went to find her. She wasn’t on the patio, though, or in the grass, or with the kids playing cricket. That left the house, or possibly the house next door.
Right. The house first. Not my house, but that was OK. I was just looking for Summer.