Just Come Over

by James, Rosalind

  “Oh,” Zora said. “I’m not sure I ever said it at the time, but I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not. Anyway, I was coming in for provisions, as my furnishings arrived today and were unloaded, from what I hear, and this is my day to get out of that hotel. Unless they dumped it all on the driveway, in which case, I’m buggered. But yeh, I’m a resident. And a hungry one.” He threw all caution to the winds. He needed to know how she was doing, and Isaiah as well. What was that about her needing to do a payment plan? He needed to find out. Also, his house would be shocking. It would also be empty.

  That was why he said yes. Surely.

  Rhys drove his own car to the house, which gave Zora a few minutes to collect herself. Or it would have, if Isaiah hadn’t asked, “Why don’t you like Uncle Rhys?”

  “I like him fine,” she said. That was the problem. When he’d climbed up into the van and turned that fierce gaze on her, it was like all the air had been sucked out of the car. She’d had to remind herself to breathe. He might be coaching now instead of playing, but he still looked like all he wanted in the world was to lace up his rugby boots, run out there into the storm, and bring some men to the ground. With emphasis. It might be the black scruff and the too-long hair, it might be six-foot-three of hard muscle that hadn’t gone anywhere in the years since he’d finished playing, or it might just be the elemental essence of him. Rhys was twice as much there as everybody else. You knew it. You felt it.

  She’d felt it the first night she’d met him. When Rhys’s Crusaders had played Dylan’s Blues in Auckland, and she’d gone out after the game with the two of them, and some of the rest of the Blues, too. Dylan had been the life of the party, as usual, laughing, joking, jumping up to dance between the tables. Rhys had been nearly silent, his forehead and cheekbone bruised red from the game, the lines of his jaw squared off almost aggressively, a day’s stubble covering the cleft in his chin. That, and his unexpectedly sensual mouth, were the only things about him that didn’t look tough, and she had a feeling that if he could have changed them to match the rest, he would have.

  He was Dylan’s older brother, though, so she did her best. She wasn’t sure if she liked him, she was fairly sure he didn’t approve of her, and that flutter in her stomach when he looked at her had to be nerves. It was important that he like her, though. However complicated the relationship was between the brothers, there was nobody Dylan looked up to more. So she asked, “Where did the nickname come from? Drago?”

  He turned to look at her. He had to turn, because he’d been watching the three young women standing at the high-top next to them in an idle sort of way. Probably because they were flipping their hair back over their shoulders and casting glances over at the two rugby-intensive tables, especially this particular spot. Just before Rhys had turned away, one of them had touched her finger to her lower lip in a move that would have done justice to a schoolgirl. Or, rather, a porn star pretending to be a schoolgirl. It was so hard not to laugh.

  When Rhys finally looked at Zora, his expression was amused. Not that he smiled. He just . . . expressed amusement. Around his eyes, maybe. They were a startling hazel-green, not what you’d expect with the swarthy skin, the black hair, or the Maori tattoo that ended just below his elbow. A single half-arm tattoo, instead of Dylan’s full sleeve, not to mention the ones on Dylan’s calf and his chest. She knew about Rhys’s unadorned arms and legs because she’d just seen him in a rugby uniform. She was guessing about the chest. The intricate black tattoo on his upper arm, with its emphatic pattern of chevrons, triangles, and the curve of koru, said, “I’m Maori, yeh, and I’m proud of it. But I don’t need to shout about it.” Actually, all of him said that.

  “Does that work?” she asked him, then inclined her head toward the table of girls in a saucy way she was quite proud of. She got more amusement from him, and she had to smile back.

  Dylan slid into the chair opposite her and asked, “What?”

  “An invitation from across the way,” Rhys said. Even his voice was almost gravelly. How much testosterone did this man have in his body? He was very nearly frightening. He should have been frightening. Instead, he was just . . . something close.

  “Don’t let us stop you, mate,” Dylan said. “I’ve got my girl.” Which made Zora feel fluttery again, for a different reason. Or the same one, probably. She was excited because Dylan was exciting. Because over the past few months, her life had gone from black-and-white to full color, like she’d started taking some powerful drug, and now, she was addicted.

  “It was this,” she said. She put her index finger on her lower lip, opened her mouth just a little, and widened her eyes at Dylan, who burst out laughing. She laughed herself and asked Rhys, “Did I do it right?”

  He wasn’t laughing. His face had hardened instead. “Yeh,” he said. “That was it.” He took another sip of beer. He was still on his second. Dylan was putting away his fourth. But then, Dylan’s team had lost. “You asked about my nickname,” Rhys said. “Dunno. Got it a long time ago.”

  “Drago?” Dylan said. “Because that’s what Rhys means, in Welsh. Dragon. Our Nan told us that when we were little kiddos. Well, I was a little kiddo. Rhys was all of ten or so, and already shaving.”

  “Nah, mate,” Rhys said. “Eleven.”

  “So I started calling him ‘Drago,’” Dylan said. “Thought it was cool as. Dangerous as. And it got picked up. Of course, I may have been a wee bit jealous of it, too.” He raised his pint glass at his brother. “Always, bro. Whatever I did, you were still older, you bugger. Bigger and stronger, too. Then Dad took you to Aussie, and I didn’t have to compare anymore. Good times.”

  That last part had carried an edge. If Rhys was aware of it, he didn’t show it. His voice was calm when he asked Zora, “How old are you?”

  “Mate,” Dylan protested as the player beside him put a palm to his face. “That work for you? You pull in the pub with that often, do you?”

  Another slow look from the hazel eyes, and Dylan said, “You probably do. Still—no. Or, rather—yeh, you’re right, Zora’s the prettiest thing you ever saw. And she’s doing her degree in architecture. She’s not tall, that’s all. And then there’s that pretty bit, because that’s exactly what she is. A pretty bit.”

  Rhys looked Zora over some more, and she could feel herself flushing. “I’m twenty,” she said, with a snap to her voice. “I’m five foot two, I weigh forty-nine kilos, this is as big as I’ll ever get, and I’ll have my degree in a year and a half. Does that answer your question?”

  “Yes,” he said. Fifteen minutes later, he stood up to leave, still with only two beers under his belt. Dylan walked out with him, and when he came back, his brown eyes were sparkling more than ever. There was an edge to him when he said to Zora, “Let’s go. We’re still celebrating, eh.”

  Another rush at the heat in his eyes, the faint roughness of his voice, and the fact that he’d said it in front of his mates. Something primitive about it. And when they got back to her flat and her roommate was out? They didn’t make it past the foyer. And she felt . . . claimed. Overwhelmed. Excited in a way that was almost too much to take, and completely and utterly sexual.

  Later, lying in bed, her hand on Dylan’s chest, still giddy at the thought that somebody so beautiful and so exciting was hers, she asked, “What did Rhys say to you, earlier?”

  “Said to get up faster from the tackle,” he said. “Bastard always thinks he’s a coach. He’s been doing that all his life as well, with a notebook and all. Bloody annoying. ‘You won’t be playing any rugby from the ground.’ Like I need to hear it from him.”

  “How much older is he?” Her heart was beating harder at what Dylan had shared with her tonight, and that he’d wanted her to meet his brother. Whatever she thought of his brother.

  “Five years. Thinks it’s ten. Twenty-five and thirty isn’t much of a gap anymore, but try telling Rhys that. He was born old.” Suddenly, he laughed, his mood flipping back to ‘sunny’ in an instant.
Dylan could never stay angry. “He also said you were too young, and it wasn’t right, so you can be narky along with me, if you like. I told him you were older than me in every way that counted, and he said, ‘Not old enough to make that choice. She’s blinded by it. The rugby. What she thinks is the glamour. She doesn’t know better yet.’ And I said, “What do you want me to do about it, then? Tell her she’s too good for me and nobly let her go? Fat chance of that, mate. I get hard just looking at her.”

  Zora sat up in bed. “You did not tell him that.”

  Dylan laughed, pulled her down again, and kissed her. She was still outraged, and she was still so keyed up, too. Her body switched on again like it was in a perpetual state of need, which was pretty much true, and it was fifteen more gasping minutes before Dylan said, a laugh still in his voice, but tenderness, too, “Nah. I didn’t tell him that. I’m not going to talk about you, baby. Not when I’m this crazy in love with you.”

  “You . . . are?”

  “Yeh. I am. And if you feel half as much as I do . . .” His hand went out to brush down her cheek, and her heart melted. It wasn’t just that he wanted her. It was that he needed her. She was sure of it. “I think you should move in with me,” he said. “The flatmates aren’t bad blokes, just a couple fellas far from the whanau and missing home, and it would be sweet to have you there with me.”

  The next day, he’d helped her move, and her life changed again, just like that. The next exhilarating downhill run on the roller coaster, your hands in the air, accepting the challenge and embracing the ride, so much more exciting than you’d imagined your life could ever be. Dylan had been selected for the All Blacks on the Northern Tour the season before. His brother was a perennial fixture. The two of them were New Zealand celebrity, manliness, and glamour personified, and if that excited her—what girl wouldn’t feel that way?

  That eager, headstrong, heedless girl had left the building a long time ago, though, and they were nearly home. Rhys was following in his unfortunately dented SUV just behind her, and surely, Isaiah had asked her a question. “What did you say, love?” she asked.

  “Why you didn’t like Uncle Rhys,” Isaiah said. “And you said you liked him fine. But then he must not like us. Because he never comes to see us, not like Uncle Hayden.”

  “Uncle Hayden lives here in Auckland. Rhys was coaching in Japan when Dad fell ill, remember? But he came back to see Dad every chance he could.”

  “I remember a bit. So that means he liked Dad,” Isaiah said with all his relentless logic. “But he’s only come two times since Dad died, so I think he must not like us.”

  They were home. She pulled into the driveway, and Rhys pulled in behind her. Boxing her in. The thought made her breath come faster, even though it was the only place to park, and he’d be leaving once dinner was over.

  She needed to see some men besides her brother. Preferably ones she could breathe around.

  A couple weeks ago, Hayden had asked, after he’d finished mowing the lawns at her house and wiping the sweat off with the hem of his T-shirt, “So when are you going to be getting out there? You’ve got some fit blokes driving by and taking a peek. Why isn’t one of them here mowing the grass instead of me?”

  “If they’re looking at you,” she said, “they’re not going to be spending time with me.”

  He sighed. “Would you kindly trust the gaydar? Who was out here with me, weeding the borders in her cute little skirt?”

  “Skort,” she said. “And they were not. Looking.”

  “Oh, yeh,” he said. “They were. They are. You’re still bloody adorable, even as old as you are, and you have to know it.”

  “I am fourteen months older than you. We’re practically twins.”

  “Except that you’re older. But no . . .” He waggled his fingers. “Sparks? No pixie dust settling over the two of you when you meet Sophie or Caleb or Anthony’s gorgeous single dad at the school pickup?”

  “First,” she said, “you’re vastly overestimating the number of gorgeous single dads out there. Second—I think my pixie dust left me a good while back.” She tried to make it a joke, but it didn’t come off. Something about the lump in her throat.

  Hayden put an arm around her, and she rested her head on her brother’s shoulder and thought about how good that felt, and how completely inadequate. He said quietly, “It’s been nearly two years.”

  “And three since he fell ill.”

  “Three since you decided to leave him, too,” Hayden said with that bluntness that could only come from a brother. “You stayed instead, because he did fall ill. You did the right thing, I guess, though I don’t think I could have, but what did it do to you? Killed something inside, maybe.”

  “Nah,” she said, and tried to smile. “Stunned it, more like. I notice now, a bit, if somebody’s good-looking. Sometimes I even notice if they’re being flirty. I just don’t want them, is all.”

  “Not your type.”

  “I don’t think I have a type anymore.”

  It wasn’t true. If she hadn’t known then, she’d just been reminded. When Rhys had got into the van, and all the air had left.

  The truth? The last time she’d felt sparks? It had been at her husband’s tangi, at the marae in Atawhai, outside of Nelson. One more gorgeous day at the serenely beautiful north end of the South Island. A gorgeous day for something other than a funeral, anyway. Dylan’s home, and not hers. His family, too, and not hers.

  Her mum and dad had come for the last bit only. “A funeral’s hard enough,” her mum had said. “Why do they drag it out so long? I can’t imagine.”

  At least Hayden had stayed for all of it. “If you have to do it,” he’d said, “I have to do it. Case closed.” Thank God for Hayden.

  Worst of all, the sparks had come at the end of those three days, after all the songs and speeches and endless hours of sitting beside Dylan’s body, taking turns with the aunties and uncles and cousins, because there was no grandma and no mum to sit there anymore. Days when she’d waited until the marae’s flag had been lowered at the end of the day to eat, and when the food had turned to chalk in her mouth, her throat closing around her attempts to swallow despite the long fast.

  And then, on the third day, the final haka had been performed, the crowd following after the hearse and through the red gates of the marae, sending her husband on his way. When Dylan had been put in the ground and the earth had closed over his casket, she’d dipped her hands in water outside the cemetery, flicked the moisture from her fingers, coached Isaiah to do the same, and walked, her arm around his skinny six-year-old shoulders, toward the car. The whanau had held the feast, the hangi that had been roasting in the ground for hours, there’d been singing and more speeches, and she had eaten barely a bite and felt as old and tired as she ever had in her life. More than all the time in hospital, more even than at the end.

  She was twenty-eight. She felt eighty.

  She’d been waving away a group of cousins in their cars when she’d become aware of Rhys beside her. He stood there, filling the night with his solidity and his size, and asked quietly, “All right?”

  No, she’d wanted to say. She’d wanted to scream it. No, I’m not all right. All I’ve done for the past year is this, and now I don’t even have this to do, and I don’t know how I’m going to do all the things that will come next. All the things I can’t shut out, because they’re there, and there’s only me to deal with them. I’ve spent a year trying to keep my son going and my husband alive. I’ve been watching the money going out and not coming in, and I haven’t been able to do anything about it, and now, I have to. I weigh forty-five Kg’s, and my black dress is too big, even though I waited to buy it until three weeks ago, because I didn’t want to jinx him, like I’m afraid I already did. I was planning to leave him, and it seems like I’ll feel guilty about that for the rest of my life.

  Extremely helpful thoughts to share. “Yeh,” she said instead. “I’m good.” She was an expert, now, at holding bac
k, even though there would have been no shame in letting go. You were meant to express your emotions at a tangi. Dylan’s whanau probably thought she was cold, but she couldn’t help it. Maybe it was that she wasn’t Maori, or maybe it was just that, if she started, she wouldn’t be able to stop.

  A sigh from him, felt rather than heard. “I don’t reckon you are.” He put an arm around her, and that arm felt solid. She turned into him, and his other arm came out to grasp her. Her head was on his chest, and that was a secure place to be, acres wide, fathoms deep, and strong enough for anything. His hand stroked over her hair, and he said, “It’ll be better. Sometime.”

  She hadn’t cried all those three days, or during the days before, when Dylan had been slipping away, a pale wraith of the laughing, irresponsible, impossibly handsome rugby player who’d alternated his brilliance with frustrating lapses, on the field and off, and had never understood why. She’d watched him leaving her, and she’d been numb. Stunned into silence even in her mind, pulled into the ghost realm where the almost-dead walked.

  Now, if you believed in Maori tradition, Dylan’s wairua, the quicksilver brightness that was his soul, free of the suffering and the fear, had winged its way northward to Te Rerenga Wairua, the leaping-off place of the spirits at the northernmost tip of New Zealand. The essence of him, the best of him, had slid down the pohutukawa root and into the sea, and had gone home to Hawaiiki to be with the ancestors. But she was still here. And it was so hard to be here.

  The sob ripped from her chest like it was taking a piece of her with it. And then the rest came, and she could no more hold them back than the Tasman could keep its waters from merging with the Pacific. The tears rolled down her cheeks and soaked Rhys’s white shirt, and he held her in those strong arms, said nothing, and waited them out like the shelter waited out the storm. And when she’d finished crying at last, she hadn’t wanted to go.