I said, “I should take my bath, and so should you, except that I’m not supposed to say that, so I’ll say that if you want to go chew on sticks or something to keep yourself from noticing that your leg hurts, now’s the time. It feels late, I’m sore, and we have to be in Thames at eight-thirty in the morning.”
Another pause, and he dropped his tea towel and said, “I’ll put Debbie in his box for you and put him in your tent. I’ll be back at six-thirty or so, and we can cook breakfast and have time to get a coffee before we start this thing. We won’t sleep past six anyway. Birds, eh.”
“Fine,” I said. “Thanks. See you tomorrow.”
Jax
When I called out, “Coming through,” and headed around the corner into the campsite the next morning, with the pink of dawn already replaced by golden sunlight, and the clamor of avian voices that was the birds’ dawn chorus having died down to chirps, trills, and calls from one treetop to another, Karen was already up. Debbie was in his pen, and Karen was dressed in flowered purple running shorts that were sadly longer than her black ones, a blue T-shirt over a red sports bra, and turquoise trainers, every bit of her looking like an advert for energy-enhancing vitamins. Living in color, you could call it. She’d also boiled water for tea, and was standing at the kitchen tent pouring it over the bag when I turned up.
“Morning,” she said, handing me the mug.
“Morning,” I said, and didn’t kiss her, even though she smelled like everything I wanted, and the nape of her neck was right there. That scent was soap, maybe, but it was also something that was purely her. She said I pulled her? That couldn’t be anything to how she pulled me, or she’d have been in my arms last night.
I didn’t say anything about that, obviously. Instead, I went over to Debbie’s pen and gave him a stroke. He peeped at me happily, resumed pecking at his feed dish, then waddled over and did an undignified scramble into his washtub. I told Karen, who was somewhere back there, if I could’ve managed to look at her, “I’d have come back last night and apologized, but I could hear your bath going.”
I’d imagined her in it, too. Candlelight, glass of wine, long legs draped over the edge, sleepy eyes. A chance absolutely missed, or a woman who didn’t want you, but if that was it, why didn’t she ever feel that way to my body? Why did I keep getting the urge to pull her in close, to send my hand lightly down to the base of her spine so I could feel those two sweet dimples for myself, to kiss my way across her cheek to that spot under her ear, and to hear her sigh, if it wasn’t coming from her, too? She’d said she felt it, so there you were.
She clearly had issues of her own, though, and the last thing I needed was to hurt somebody else. She wasn’t a casual person. Whoever my first-time-this-way was going to be with, and whenever it was going to be, it wasn’t going to be with her, and it wasn’t going to be now. And maybe that was for the best, because if something horrible happened, if I worried about the leg, about what she was thinking, about how I was going to move into that next position, I could lose the ability to do anything at all.
Impotence. We’d move on from that horrible thought. If that happened, I didn’t want it to be with her. I couldn’t stand for it to matter that much.
I didn’t say any of that, either. I said, “I’ll say I was a wanker, and we’ll move on, how’s that?”
“That’s good,” she said. “I heard you in the bath, too. It’s weird to be separated by just a few trees, and able to hear each other like that. It was kind of comforting.”
Huh. Had she been lonely? Lain awake despite her fatigue the same way I had, one person taking up too little space in a king-sized bed? Or had I just made her feel bad? She said, “Hopefully, the bath helped. And that’s OK. I’m not always great at the vulnerability thing myself, and neither of us was at our best last night, let’s face it.” Her hair wasn’t sticking up in spikes today, though it wasn’t quite tamed, either, and there were some wisps around her forehead and ears that made her look like an elf. One of the strong kind, with a bow and arrow. She wasn’t wearing makeup, which only made sense, and she was battered all to hell. Her shin had long red scratches all down it from her climb up the rocks to help Dougie, and the knee she’d fallen on yesterday looked swollen and red.
I stepped closer, took her hand, and checked out her forearm. Those scrapes were harsh and red, too, and I said, “Could be we should bandage this and your knee before you put on a wetsuit over them today, because this looks painful, and the knee looks worse.”
“I would have,” she said, “at least put a couple Band-Aids on, but I couldn’t, uh . . . quite manage well enough on the arm. I’m left-handed.”
“So am I,” I said, for something to say. “Though I’ve trained myself to use both.”
“Because you’re perfect.”
“No.” I had to smile, just a bit. “Because that was my job. I can’t do whatever it is you do. Food . . . science. Biochemistry. Agriculture. Consumer goods.”
“You looked me up.”
“I did.” I was still holding her wrist, still feeling that pull from her body, like what she’d said. Tentacles, reaching out and wrapping around me. Or something less sinister than tentacles. Shining threads, twining around my body like a vine around a tree.
This time, she was the one who stepped back.
“Right,” I said. “First aid. Breakfast.”
She said, “I’ll start the bacon.” Not exactly, “Come on, boy,” and we had an adventure to take. So I went and got the first-aid kit instead.
She had me completely confused. She turned my head around and got my body worked up, and then she acted like it was nothing. Maybe the problem was that we were both hurting, and we were trying to sort out how to be with somebody now. Or maybe it was something else. Revulsion at the idea of touching the barely healed stump of a man’s leg, for example. I’d seen that look before from visitors to the trauma center. Looking, then looking away fast, like you would at a smash on the highway. It shouldn’t sting, but it had. Sometimes, it still did. This would be one of those times.
Whatever the problem was, I wasn’t going to find out this morning. I’d take her on an adventure instead. I hoped she was as fearless as she seemed. Otherwise, this could get difficult.
I wasn’t worried about not being able to get her out of trouble. No matter what happened, I could do that. The question was whether she’d let me.
Karen
The canyoning adventure—my first—didn’t start out the way I’d expected.
Being fitted for wetsuits back in Thames was nothing out of the ordinary, and neither was the Kiwi-casual way the lead guide, Nathan, assessed Jax’s fitness.
“How d’you reckon you’ll go with that leg, mate?” he asked. “OK to hike up three hundred pretty tough meters, and can the machinery get wet after that? Dunno how you’d get over the rocks to start rappelling without it, but you’ll be in a fair bit of water all day.”
“No worries,” Jax said. “She’ll be right.” He’d brought his own wetsuit, which was cut off above the knee on the left side, because, he’d told me, his leg would rip a normal one to pieces. “I’ve got a waterproofing boot to put on it once we’re at the top, and I can do the walk. I’ve done some rope work as well. Good as gold.”
“You were in the Defence Force, weren’t you, Jax? Special forces, or something heroic,” a redhead named Megan said in an extremely perky sort of way. She was a Kiwi, and here with a friend, a blonde German backpacker. They both had long hair pulled back into cute high ponytails, and the German one had about three times my amount of breastage. I kind of hated both of them already. “I read about your leg,” Megan went on. “It looks like you’re fit again, though.” She glanced at her friend, then down Jax’s body in a way that wasn’t nearly subtle enough. He was wearing a white T-shirt, which looked, if possible, even better than the black one, because it showed off his chest and shoulders so much more, and board shorts of the shorter, trimmer-fitting, Down Under type. Not that trim
-fitting, though, so I didn’t know what Megan and her pal Hilda, or whatever her name was, were staring at.
“Well known, are you, mate?” another guy, an Australian named Rog, asked Jax. “War hero, is that it? Good on ya.” He was fortyish and here with his teenaged son, Andrew, who’d trailed up to the storefront behind his dad like he was doing Male Bonding Under Duress. Andrew had perked way, way up, though, when the Sexy Girls had walked in.
Jax looked like he wanted to be anywhere else, and also like he didn’t much want to answer. Megan did it for him, saying, “I had his poster on the wall when I was seventeen. The jeans one,” she told Jax. “I had an undies one as well, ripped out of a catalog, but my mum made me take it down. I cried. It was a dramatic time in my life, to be fair. Wrote you a letter as well, and imagined how you’d look reading it, realizing that I was your lifelong love. I told my mum that the undies ad was no different from my brother having the swimsuit calendar, and she said it was in his desk drawer, not on the wall, and if I wanted to keep you in my drawer as well, go ahead. So I did. And now I can tell her I’ve met you in the flesh. I’ll get a selfie with you and text it to her. Revenge, eh.”
Jax didn’t look thrilled to know any of that, so I picked it up and told Rog, “He was an underwear model before the military, for a company called Wallaby. Named for the pouch. Australian company, but you obviously didn’t pay keen attention to his commercials back in the day. It was five years ago, and it may not have been quite your thing. He’s moved on.”
“Wallaby? That’s you?” Rog asked, clearly delighted. He laughed and slapped Jax on the back. “I’ve got a couple pairs of those. The missus put them in my Christmas stocking last year. Not saying I look like you in them, mind. Always feel a bit of a prat, strutting around like that, but she seems to like them well enough. I’ll have to get a photo as well, though it’s likely to end up as the wallpaper on her computer. And she’ll crop me out of it.”
Jax’s cool, for once, seemed entirely missing. Now, he really didn’t know what to say. Andrew, for his part, looked mortified. “Dad,” he muttered in a despairing tone I understood completely.
“Righto,” guide-Nathan said. He wasn’t smiling, but I got the feeling it was taking an effort. The junior guide, a woman named Sheila, was smiling. “As we’re all here, let’s load up into the van. We’ve got a full day ahead.”
When the van started up and pulled out of the driveway, we were in the far back. Which hadn’t been easy for Jax to get into, but he’d gone there anyway, as if he were saying, “Save me.” He muttered, low enough that the hot girls wouldn’t hear it in the next row up, “I was not an underwear model. Not primarily. Cheers for that. I thought Nathan was about to tell us he wouldn’t know, because he goes commando. What a topic. I’m sweating.”
“You’d already been outed. And would you rather be a war hero?” I had to whisper it in his ear, because Megan and Hilda—I was going to have to ask her name again, even though I didn’t want to—looked like their ears were actually pricked up to listen. Fortunately, I could get close enough to Jax to be discreet, as there were only two seats back here, and he was so close to me, our arms were brushing. He also smelled great, somehow, even though he wasn’t wearing anything scented, except possibly deodorant, which also smelled good.
Responding to his scent wasn’t True Love, it was histocompatibility. My body was telling me that his immune system code was suitably different from mine, the way female mammals’ bodies had evolved to do in order to avoid interbreeding. If we’d been mice, I’d have picked him as my male mouse, assumed the lordosis posture, and let him know I was ready to start makin’ babies, but we weren’t mice. If I wanted to bury my nose in his white T-shirt, it was my vomeronasal organs talking, and I didn’t have to listen to them.
He wasn’t exactly a colorful guy. So far, we’d had khaki, black, and white T-shirts. And yet his very presence still talked louder than Josh’s had in his pumpkin sweater. All he had to do was stand there.
“Model’s better than war hero,” he murmured, his warm breath in my ear giving me goosebumps. “Just. The ‘pouch’ bit wasn’t necessary, though.”
“I was merely smoothing over an awkward moment. Besides, she also remembers the jeans. Which had the button undone. Very subtle message. Your chest was bare, so were your feet, and you were lounging back with a hand draped over your knee and smoldering again. That’s practically the same thing as the underwear.”
“It is not the same thing,” he said. “And there were all sorts of others besides. Hiking in the mountains, fully clothed in merino. A luxury-car advert wearing a dinner jacket. I did a beer commercial as well, laughing with my mates and smiling at a girl. Earned heaps from that one, almost as much as the undies. Why aren’t we talking about my suave glamour?”
“Because nobody cares about your dinner jacket. Why do you think they were checking out your package back there?”
“Anybody ever tell you that you’re a refined woman?”
“No.”
“Astonishing.” I had to laugh, and so did he. “You look very nice as well,” he decided to add.
“Ha.” I had a white bandage fastened to my kneecap with adhesive tape and another one taped all the way around my forearm, and I felt about as alluring as Debbie the duck. The blonde girls were wearing bikini tops and tiny shorts with their running shoes. I had versions of those things myself, but they were back in my fancy tent, because I’d dressed for a full day of serious adrenaline sports, starting with a thousand-foot hike up a steep, rocky track. You didn’t wear that kind of outfit to do that, unless you were interested in both acquiring a sunburn and allowing your male companions to pursue a careful evaluation of the lower curve of your butt cheeks. Besides, nobody’d ever accused me of being bootylicious, wedgies were uncomfortable, and I was here for the adventure.
The hike, when we got to the end of the road at the bottom of a steep, forested, impossibly deep canyon, was as tough as I’d expected, complete with rocks and roots that you had to pull yourself up by. I was sweating within ten minutes, and within an hour, Hilda—all right, her name was actually Margarete, which was as beautiful as she was, unfortunately—had some reddening happening on her shoulders and back despite her tan.
Jax told her, during a water stop, “You may want to put some more sunblock on. I think you’re getting burned. D’you have some, or would you like mine?”
“Oh, no,” she said in her sexily accented English. “Could I have some of yours, please?” A gigantic surprise. Jax pulled the tube out and handed it over, and she began to rub it into her chest and shoulders, pulling away the edges of her bikini top to do it, which had every guy in the place watching except Jax, who was engaged in offering me a water bottle.
“Thanks,” I said, trying not to be grumpy. The scrapes on my forearm, for some reason, were burning like crazy. Probably sweat. I’d be all good once we got to the fun part. This was the effort that made the payoff even sweeter.
Jax took a long drink of water, and I watched him. So did Megan, the redhead, but that was probably because his scruff of beard was now a few days old and looking better than ever, the sweat was making the white T-shirt cling to him some, and he could definitely have modeled for a sports drink at this moment, scars and all. Scars even better. Which was probably why, when he’d finished, Margarete handed him the tube of sunblock and asked, “Could you put a little on my back, please?”
He didn’t say anything. He just did it, and she pulled her ponytail aside and smiled at him over her shoulder like a woman on the screaming verge of coming out and asking for it, or possibly like a female mouse discovering his histocompatibility. When Jax had finished rubbing the white stuff in, though, he stuck the tube back into his pack and looked at Nathan, who said, “Right. Let’s keep on, then,” with another suppressed grin.
“Nathan’s going to be talking about this one in the pub,” I muttered to Jax as we took off up the track. I grabbed a root, swung up onto a rock outcrop, and
ignored my elbow and knee, and also the view of Margarete’s considerable butt cheek action up ahead of Jax.
He waited until I got up the trickiest section, then said, “Here, go ahead,” and put his hand on my shoulder to help me pass him. “I could be slower on this part, and I know how much you enjoy winning.” He grinned at me, and I got another flutter of the heart and thought, Stand back, girls. The underwear model is mine.
He wasn’t, of course. But pretending was fun.
Jax
Soon enough, I reminded myself as we kept going up the steep track, I’d be done with this. How many years could women remember the face of the fella on the undies packet? Surely not many more, even if he came with a missing leg for easy identification. All I had to do was stay out of the papers, and I was golden.
Ahead of me, Karen looked good. Slim and strong, and so much less obvious than either of the other girls. She wasn’t here for me, or for her idea of me, she was here to have an adventure. We rounded a rare switchback, which made a change from climbing straight up, and I saw the Border Collie coming out in her again as she heard the sound of rushing water. She must have sensed that we were nearly at the top, because she picked up her pace.
Fifteen minutes more, and she wasn’t looking at me at all. She was standing with her arms out from her sides and a huge smile on her face, taking in the view. “Wow,” she said happily. “Wow.”
“Good, eh,” I said, which was inadequate. The steep walls of the slot canyon dropped beneath us like you’d be stepping off into space—which you would—and the plume of spray from a series of waterfalls hovered like mist against a background of blue sky dotted with puffy white clouds, long, squared-off columns of gray rock, and foliage in every shade of green, the low, forested mountains stretching as far as you could see. The promise of adrenaline to come was all but hanging in the air, and I wondered who the first bloke had been who’d thought, “Let’s try going over the edge of this thing!” Whoever he was, he’d probably been a Kiwi.
Kiwi Rules (New Zealand Ever After Book 1) Page 14
