“Seriously, Josh,” Karen said, “you should leave.”
He stood up. Slowly. And told me, along the way, “But you see—I win.”
Or, rather, he didn’t quite say that. Halfway through, he was taking two careful steps. And on “win,” he was starting his kick. With his right leg, the first one he’d used when he’d stood up. The one I’d been expecting. I stepped outside his body as the leg came up, grabbed his ankle with one hand, and struck him hard in the chest with the other one. While he was still snapping back, I got a fistful of his shirt at the shoulder, dumped him onto his side on the ground, and put my knee on his chest.
He was saying something. I wasn’t listening. I hauled him to his feet again, grabbed him by the collar and the back of the belt, marched him around the house to his car, shoved him hard against it, and said, “Take out your keys.”
He said, “Fuck you.” Surprise.
I got hold of his wrist and pulled his arm up behind his back, making him twist to avoid the pain, then reached into his right-hand trouser pocket, found the car key, tossed it to Karen, and hauled him back with enough force that he’d feel it.
“Open the door,” I told Karen. “Put the key in the ignition.”
She did, then scrambled out again. I shoved Ranfeld into the driver’s seat and said, “Go. Or I will fucking kill you.” And slammed the door.
He left.
Karen
I was shaking, Jax wasn’t even sweating, and Josh’s car was disappearing around the curve.
When Jax looked at me, the easygoing mask was gone. I got a blast like a laser from his gray eyes. It nearly knocked me back.
I was expecting something like, “Are you leaving?” Instead, he asked, “Are you OK?” And I just . . . melted.
I nodded. This time, I thought he’d hug me. Instead, he kissed me. Or more like—he grabbed me, and then he kissed me. One hand under my butt, pulling me up, the other one around my head, pulling my hair back, and his mouth over mine like he meant it.
I was squeaking, maybe. Saying something. Making some noise, anyway. He took his mouth off mine and asked, “What? No?”
I tried to say something, and couldn’t, so I pulled his head down instead. I thought he’d smile. He didn’t. He picked me up like that day in the hospital parking lot, except not. He was hefting me under the thighs, all right, but after that?
He tossed me over his shoulder.
I had no words.
I had my palms against his back, bracing myself as he headed fast across the ground, his gait a little jerky, and yanked open the front door. I heard the slam as he kicked it shut behind him, and he had one hand right up under my skirt, on the curve of my butt. If I’d thought he might not have seen me inside, I’d obviously been wrong.
I thought he’d carry me into the bedroom. Instead, he set me on my feet right there. He got one hand on either side of my shirt—his shirt—and when he ripped it open, I heard the buttons hit the floor.
He said, “Take it off. The skirt, too,” and when I did it, my hands were shaking. He took off his shoes and socks, then his shorts, his movements jerky and impatient and completely unlike Jax. His chest was rising and falling, and I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t think what. I’m sorry, maybe, or Thank you, but he didn’t want to hear either one, because he said, “Turn around and put your hands against the wall.”
My safe word was “dolphin.” Don’t ask me why. Maybe because it was a word I couldn’t imagine saying during sex. I looked in his eyes and knew I could say it. I didn’t want to say it. He wanted me to do what he said, and so did I.
I turned around and put my hands against the wall.
When he got behind me, took my hands in his, and moved them farther down the wall, I started to shake. When he yanked my legs back, I started to burn. And when he was pinching a nipple with one hand and had the other one between my legs, I started to moan.
He spanked the hell out of me. He made me come three times. He fucked me hard enough that I’d feel it tomorrow. And I shook, called out, moaned his name, and begged him to do it some more.
Jax
Maybe not the best way to persuade a woman to stay with you.
By the end of it, we were on the floor, I was sprawled over her, and she was still panting.
I kissed the back of her neck, put a hand over her breast, and asked, “OK?”
She nodded.
“Too rough?”
I felt something in her body. A sort of . . . shaking.
Bloody hell. I’d made her cry. Now, the feeling gripping me by the throat was fear. “Karen,” I said. “Baby, I’m sorry.”
She rolled over, and she was laughing. The relief made me flop over onto my back and put a hand over my heart.
She said, “Hell of a time to ask.”
“I should have checked in more,” I said. “I got a little . . .” I cleared my throat. “Carried away.”
“Mm.” She was over me, kissing my mouth, her hand in my hair. “I think I figured that out. Also, if I’m begging you to do it some more, you’re probably on safe ground.”
“The, uh . . . spanking, though. You weren’t begging me then. Just sort of . . . calling out. I should’ve asked.”
“Uh-huh.” She took my head in her hands and kissed me again. Slowly, and with plenty of tongue. Whoever this Angel woman was, she wasn’t better in bed than Karen. Not possible. When she was done with me, she said, “I’d have told you if I didn’t want it. I guess you saw me getting dressed in there.”
“Yeh.” I had to smile. Too much relief. “I thought I knew why you did it. You didn’t want him to win, to make you feel ashamed. You could’ve put on some undies, though. Possibly not played with your rubies right there in front of him.”
“Maybe I wanted him to know that you won,” she said. “Which I think you just did, all the way around. I’m guessing he left with a pretty good idea of what was about to happen here. Or maybe not, because he’s not that discerning. He probably thinks you’re a nice guy, and nice guys don’t do things like that.”
“Well,” I said, “there’s the fact that I threatened to kill him, of course.”
“That’s right,” she said, sounding absolutely delighted. “I sort of forgot that. That was my favorite part.”
Now, I laughed, and smoothed my hand over her bare bum. She wriggled some and said, “Mm. Tingles.”
“Seriously, though,” I asked, petting her some more there, “too hard?”
“No. Just right.” She rubbed her cheek against mine and said, “I’m going to need to massage your leg. All that running, and then fighting.”
“That wasn’t fighting. That was a tap. But if you want to massage my leg, I won’t say no.”
“It’s hurting you.”
“A bit. We’ll take a shower first, though. You’re clean, and I’m not.” I hesitated a minute, then asked, “Are you going?” It was hanging out there, and I needed to pull it down so we could both look at it. So I could know.
“Yes,” she said. “I am. I think I have to.”
Karen
Jax didn’t argue. That made it harder. If he’d argued, maybe I could have felt like he was a jerk, somehow. Controlling. Pushing too hard, too fast, like those cautionary tales you read about. As it was, I couldn’t feel any of that. What he was—was a man who loved me. A man I was hurting.
We talked it over, and he listened while I explained. That I at least had to listen to what M&P had to say, what they were offering. It had been my dream for so many years. I had to find out how closely I’d have to work with Josh, for one thing.
“I could even tell them that they can choose between us,” I said. “That if they want me, they have to cut him loose. Nothing to lose, right?” Not that it would happen, not when they’d paid him tens of millions for the company.
“Nothing to lose but a million dollars,” Jax said.
“It’s not the million dollars,” I said. “It’s the dream.”
We were
on the deck again. I was wrapped in a blanket, with my feet up on the seat of the chair, my arms around myself. Jax was sitting back in his own chair, looking at the sea, his crutches leaning against the wall of the house.
He hadn’t put his leg back on after his shower, because the stump was too sore. He’d pushed it too hard, had run too far, trying to show me a good time up in Christchurch. I’d massaged it, and then had driven the couple of miles to the Four Square in Hampden and stocked up for him. After that, I cooked dinner for us, almost my first time doing it since I’d come to New Zealand. Almost my first time since that last day at Prairie Plus, come to think of it. That was irony. I was finally getting my mojo back, right when I was leaving.
His kitchen wasn’t huge, but it was perfectly outfitted. I made a venison, kumara, and mushroom pie, the filling cooked slowly on the stovetop along with a bottle of Guinness to make the taste richer, rolled out my homemade flaky pastry with a wine bottle on the enormous wooden island, then chilled it and rolled it again, twice over, obsessed, somehow, with wanting to do it right, with making him something delicious this one time.
He didn’t stick around to sit on a stool on the other side of the island and keep me company, but went into the other part of the house instead, the work area separated from the great room with sliding barn doors. Which he closed. Reading up on some technical stuff, he said. Reminding himself that he had a future to prepare for apart from me, I thought.
We ate my pie along with a salad out on the deck while the afternoon light faded and the last of the tourists left, with the murmur and roar of the surf as our backdrop. Now, I said, “I never even got to swim in the ocean down here. We don’t get to do our bike trip.”
He said, “The sea’s cold. You won’t be swimming here without a good wetsuit.” Remotely, like it didn’t matter.
I started to say something, then stopped, and he looked at me and asked, “What?”
“I want to talk about this,” I said slowly. “But I’m not sure it’s OK. If it’s just hurting you.”
“It’s going to hurt me anyway,” he said. “Just like it’s hurting you. We may as well talk about it.”
I raised my head from my knees and said, “I wish I knew. I wish I knew what to do, and I just don’t, you know? I keep thinking it’ll get clear, and it doesn’t.”
“Never mind,” he said. “Sooner or later, you’ll know.”
He didn’t promise anything. He didn’t say, When you do, I’ll be here. That was another thing we didn’t know. Another terrible thing. I said, “I’m not going back to him. That’s not happening.”
“Good,” he said, and that was all.
“Can I ask you, something, though?” I asked. “Was he gaslighting me?”
“I never know what that is.”
“It’s making you believe things that aren’t true. Manipulation. Reframing the story so you can’t tell whether to trust what you’re seeing and hearing, what your mind’s telling you, or what he’s telling you.” I shook my head like that would shake the thoughts into place. It didn’t work, of course.
“Ah,” he said. “Then—yes. That’s exactly what he was doing. Saying he hadn’t really betrayed you, when it’s so obvious he did, in every way. Saying it was your fault, somehow, that he slept with whoever it was.”
“Angel Obrigado. She’s very beautiful.”
“Doesn’t matter. You don’t get a pass because the person’s hot. That’s why they call it loyalty.”
“Wow,” I said.
He didn’t answer, but after a minute, he said, “It’s not about how they look anyway. It’s about being in love.”
The tears were rising, the emotion choking me, and I forced it all back. I couldn’t make him comfort me for leaving him. That would be unfair, and it would be cruel.
We went to sleep beside each other, not touching, and I wore my pajamas and didn’t cry. But when I woke up in the night to find my foot against his shin and his arm across my breasts, like it had happened in his sleep . . . it felt so right, and it hurt so much.
The next day, he drove me to the airport in Dunedin, so I wouldn’t have to see Josh. He took me to the terminal, but he didn’t come in, just got out of the car at the curb, lifted my two duffels out of the back of the squeaky-clean Audi, and set them onto the luggage trolley I pulled over from the sidewalk.
“Got your passport?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He nodded, and I said, “I love you.”
He looked at me. Blue scars. Black nerd glasses. Beautiful face, as remote as the moon.
He said, “I know.”
I cried all the way to Auckland, looking out the window so nobody would see. I boarded an Air New Zealand flight to Chicago, flying Business Select this time on somebody else’s dime, drank three glasses of wine without feeling them, and slept all the way across the Pacific. I drank orange juice and made notes all the way to New York, because I’d chosen to do this, so I had to do it right.
I missed him for nine thousand miles.
Karen
My plane arrived at La Guardia in the middle of the day, and when I walked out onto the curb from International Arrivals into the February chill, Hemi’s driver, Charles, pulled up in Hemi’s latest iteration of black Mercedes. Exactly like always, except that the cars were bigger now, because kids. This one was a three-row SUV.
Yes, I could have done something else. I could have had M&P pay for a car. I could have had them pay for a hotel, too. But I hadn’t been able to stand it.
Charles got out of the car, wearing the same dark slacks and polo shirt as always. He put my duffels in the back and asked, “Home?”
I said, “Yes, please,” and got into the front seat beside him.
He didn’t talk to me, because Charles never talked. Usually, I filled the conversational gaps, but today, I didn’t have the heart. I got out my laptop instead and looked over my notes, and then I put it away.
New York was busy, and it was noisy. No surprise. Beautiful, in its own way, even on a chilly February day with the snow still lying in patches of gray slush. Especially when I was stepping out of the elevator and straight into the apartment’s foyer, then into the living room, and looking out over Central Park, the Hudson, and the Manhattan skyline. I was carrying one of my duffels, and Charles was carrying the other, not at all happy about not carrying both. Exactly like Jax.
My heart felt like it had been ripped straight in two. It hurt. I thought, It’ll get better, and then Inez, Hemi’s housekeeper, came out and hugged me, her arms wiry and strong despite the fact that she only came to my shoulder. I might have dropped my duffel. I also might have teared up.
She got her hands on my shoulders, looked me over, and said, “Too skinny.”
I tried to smile. “Missed your cooking, that’s all.”
She sniffed. “And who taught you everything? If you are not feeding yourself, that is not my problem.” And then absolutely contradicted herself by saying, “Charles will put your bags into Maia’s room. Come. I have made you pepián.”
“I ate on the plane,” I said. “About four times.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “Come and eat.”
She was right, of course. I could somehow manage to choke down a bowl of chicken stew made with tomatillos, peppers, cilantro, lime, and the magical mix of spices that Inez shared with nobody. Nobody but me, that is.
“Why is yours always better, when I follow your recipe exactly?” I asked her, finishing my last bite of pupusas stuffed with red beans and queso Oaxaca and wishing my stomach had room for more.
“Because it is made with love,” she said, and I laid my head down on my arm, right there at the kitchen table, and thought, I can’t.
She asked, “When is this meeting?”
I sat up. “Tomorrow morning at ten. I need to . . . get ready. Go get clothes from my apartment. Can Charles take me?” I was shaking in that way you do when you’ve been traveling too long, like your body hasn’t gotten used
to being stationary yet.
“No,” she said, and I thought, Oh. Right. It isn’t my house. I’ve never even lived here. And Charles doesn’t work for me. She went on, “Hope went to your apartment last night and got clothes for you, of course. Charles says this place you have is terrible. Terrible.”
That was a surprise. Charles and Inez waged an ongoing silent war for control, one that Inez always won. Charles didn’t normally share anyway, and he shared least of all with Inez.
“Oh,” I said. “That’s good, then. How are your kids?”
“You do not need to think about that now,” she said. “You need a shower, then a swim, and bed.”
“Why would you baby me?” I asked. “You shouldn’t. So I’m tired. I’ve still got everything. I’m sitting here.” I gestured at the window, which in this case, looked out over the Hudson. “This meeting is about having even more. About getting everything I’ve ever dreamed of.”
Another sniff. “Then you have not dreamed enough. I am making you a mocha. Decaf. You need to sleep.”
I would have said that I’d make it myself, but I knew better. I got up instead, leaned against the kitchen island, and watched her absolutely sure motions as she did everything exactly right to make me the best mocha in the world. No chocolate fish, but I didn’t even like the chocolate fish. I asked, “Doesn’t it ever bother you, that you still work here, and that Hemi and Hope have so much? Don’t you ever . . . compare?”
“For a smart person, you can be very stupid.” She was frothing milk, paying attention. “Why do you think I still work here?”
“Because you need a job?” Inez had one of those faces where you couldn’t read her age. She still looked the same to me as when I’d first met her, fourteen years ago. She’d had grandkids then. How old was she? Sixty? Sixty-five? She’d worked for Hemi forever even then.
She said, “You are wrong. Hemi bought me an apartment long ago. Ten years, at least, when he also began to pay for the other cleaners, although they do not do it well unless I show them what they have missed. He said that I had worried long enough, and it was time not to worry. I also have a pension. That is not why I work.” She got a spoon, poured the foamed milk over the coffee into my favorite pistachio-colored mug, drew a fern onto the top with foam, and sprinkled the whole thing with cocoa. “A fern because you will be missing New Zealand.”
Kiwi Rules (New Zealand Ever After Book 1) Page 39
