Just Say [Hell] No

by Rosalind James

  Marko dumped his bags inside the door of his new Auckland house and looked around with less enthusiasm than the place deserved. He still missed Dunedin, and his less glamorous but comfortable house there. He should buy something to hang on the walls, take advantage of the light. Art, maybe. How did you buy art? No clue. The question hadn’t exactly come up in his life before.

  After that, he thought about a second breakfast. He needed to loosen up first, though. A jog, a feed, and this afternoon, he’d play a round of golf and loosen up some more, then cook a steak and a baking tray of veggies. Start replacing the six thousand calories he’d burned last night, then get to bed early so he was ready for training tomorrow.

  For now, he made a quick smoothie with broccoli, blueberries, and oranges, added an extra scoop of protein powder and a couple organic eggs, and drank the whole mess down while unpacking his bags and pulling off his tracksuit. Finally, stripped down to a singlet and rugby shorts, he headed out the door and toward Dingle Dell, the bush reserve that stretched out behind his house.

  He’d take in a little birdsong and bush, then run up to the headland, down to the beach, and along the sand until his calves burned and his legs let go of the stiffness, then turn toward home, a shower, a soak in the spa tub, and second breakfast.

  It only took a block for the plan to go pear-shaped.

  She’d parked at the side of the road, in a yellow VW Beetle that had to be fifteen years old. A slam of the door, and she was off. Close to two blocks ahead of him, but you could say she caught his eye.

  Why? Couldn’t be the body. He went for tall, tanned, athletic blondes, and she was the last thing from any of it. She was running as slowly as a person could go and still call it jogging, in fact. Call it “walking while jumping.” She was far too short for a six-foot-four-inch man, her skin was nothing but pale, and her hair was black and messy.

  He passed her car, realized with relief why he’d noticed her—he hadn’t gone mad after all, knitting bag notwithstanding—and ran a bit faster.

  It wasn’t much effort to catch up. His legs were about twice as long as hers. She was all the way into the reserve, though, by the time he got close on the shadowy path. A tui called from somewhere to the left, the liquid notes answered by another bird on the right. A mate, or a rival, because this one was showing off. Clicks, then cackles and groans, the sound nearly eerie here amongst the fern trees and palms that draped the reserve in cool shade.

  Ahead of him, the girl looked tense. The running was new, probably. Felt too hard. That had to be it, considering the speed she was going. He caught up and said, “Excuse me.”

  She whirled on him so fast, he started running backward out of habit.

  “I have Mace!” she announced, all but baring her teeth.

  Oh. She’d heard him coming up behind her. He blinked, realized he was still jogging backward, stopped, and said, “Uh… no, you don’t. But no worries. You don’t need it.” There wasn’t room to conceal more than a car key in that kit she was wearing. A flippy little zebra-print skirt, and a black sports bra that dipped low enough in front to show some cleavage. She was a curvy little thing and no mistake. Not that he was looking. She was advancing on him like the stroppiest terrier in the litter, and despite her aggression, he could see the fear underneath.

  First the pub, and now this. He didn’t scare women. He was careful. He put up both palms and said again, “No worries.”

  She seemed taken aback for an instant, but recovered fast. “I’m not worried,” she said. “But maybe you should be, eh.” A hint of a Maori accent there. He considered explaining that he liked blondes, but she opened her hand, and bloody hell, but she did have a tiny metal canister laced between her fingers, together with her keys. An older couple was coming towards them with a Golden Retriever on a leash, and Marko had a sudden flash of his photo in another newspaper. Staggering around, tears streaming from his eyes, Maced on a bush track after attacking a jogger. That would be a good look.

  Brilliant.

  He said, “Gidday” to the couple, who nodded back at him with a “Morning” and a curious look at his new non-friend, who was on her toes, like she was deciding whether to stand her ground or make a run for it.

  She apparently decided, because she told him, “Make it easy on yourself. Keep running.”

  The older couple hesitated, then turned back. Wonderful.

  Marko said, “Don’t flatter yourself. I caught up with you to tell you your lights are on. On your car. You can go back and turn them off, or you can let your battery run down. Your choice.”

  “Oh.” She looked disconcerted, as well she might. Then her pale face tightened again. “That can’t be. When you set the parking brake, it automatically disables the daytime running light switch, and I always set the parking brake. It’s an old car.”

  He said, “Right, then. Suit yourself.”

  He would run on, that was what he’d do. No point in this, no matter how much he wanted to stay and… what? Get Maced?

  It was her face. And, yes, the rest of her. He could see cleavage in the vee of that black sports bra, and it was pale and perfect. Those bras were meant to be unsexy. He’d been told so. This one was sexy, no matter what anybody said, or maybe it was the body beneath it. And then there was that little skirt.

  She wasn’t any hardbody. She had curves a man could cuddle. Which wasn’t what he looked for, so what did he care?

  That wasn’t it, either, though. It was the story, one of many his mum had read to him and his sisters every night before bed. Fairy stories as often as not, to his male disgust. The stories must have sunk in, though, because he remembered this one.

  The queen was doing her needlework by the window one winter’s day when a raven flew by, startling her so that she pricked her finger. A single drop of blood fell onto the snow outside, and as she looked at it, she said to herself, “How I wish I had a daughter with lips as red as blood, skin as white as snow, and hair as black as a raven’s wing.”

  Remembering it, he thought, Wait. Why was the queen sitting by an open window in winter? Stupid, especially with no central heating. But still.

  Snow White. This girl’s skin was pale, her lips were rosy and all the way full, taking up too much space in her square little face, and the hair pulled back into the messy ponytail shone blue-black and wavy, shiny as a… tui’s wing, more like, with that blue in it.

  It was her eyes, though, that held him fast and sent… something… down his spine. A chill. Or a thrill, like someone you remembered from a past life. His mum would’ve had something to say about that, no doubt. The Six of Cups crossed by some Major Arcana card. He wasn’t proud he knew that.

  Those eyes, though. They weren’t the brown ones he’d have expected. Instead, they were a pale sea-green with darker flecks, fringed by sooty black lashes. It wasn’t mascara, because this girl wasn’t what you’d call “ornamented.” She just was. Even her hair seemed to be crackling with life, like you couldn’t contain her.

  Was she beautiful? Probably not. Maybe she was just different. He couldn’t decide. He knew for sure that she wasn’t blonde and athletic. Also, the brows above those startling eyes were straight and black, sending a completely different message from her lush mouth. She had something brown smeared along her neck, too, like she’d been careless with the chocolate. Messy all the way around.

  Snow White? Not so much. He didn’t think she’d be singing to any animals. Or doing the housework for seven men, either. This one would put you through your paces and no mistake, and he didn’t have time for difficult women.

  Not that she was asking him to. Those eyebrows were practically drawn into one long line across her face, and he said, not knowing quite why he was doing it, “I’ll run back and switch them off for you if you like, so you can keep doing your run. Take me five minutes.”

  The bloke with the Golden Retriever said, “Marko Sendoa, isn’t it?” Probably clued in by the dark bruise on his right cheekbone and the matching ones
on his arms, or maybe the taped-together fingers and the Adidas singlet. He’d gone with the sponsor today.

  “Yeh,” Marko said, and mustered up a smile. “How ya goin’.”

  “Pity about last night,” the man said. “I was hoping for a better outcome straight up to the end. The tackling was pretty average. But then, the season’s young, and that’s why you actually have to play the game, eh. New blindside flanker for the Blues,” he explained to his wife. “Drew Callahan’s position. A real replacement at last, one hopes. Just moved to Auckland from the Highlanders.”

  “I know who Marko Sendoa is,” she said. “For heaven’s sake, Walter. I do look at a newspaper occasionally. Never mind,” she told Marko. “I’m sure you players—and the coaches—know what you’re doing better than the punters.” Her husband opened his mouth like he wanted to say something else, but she was talking again, telling the young woman, “You could give him your keys, surely. He’s an All Black, isn’t he? If he steals your car, we all know where he works.”

  “I know who he is,” the girl said without looking at Marko. “And thanks, but I’ve got it.” And off she went, back toward her car. The world’s slowest runner.

  White skin, black bra straps. Zebra striped skirt. A Coke-bottle shape to her, and the kind of waist you wanted to put your hands around just to see how close they’d come to touching. Lifting her down from something, maybe. That’d be nice.

  Yeh, right.

  The bloke looked at Marko pityingly and said, “That’s twice you’ve been shot down, I reckon. Some days are like that.”

  He clearly hadn’t read about the knitting bag yet.

  On the bright side, Snow White hadn’t actually Maced him. There was that.

  He hadn’t recognized her. He certainly hadn’t wanted her. The man was so not her fated mate.

  And, yes, she’d been in her teens most of the times they’d been around each other. Slightly chubby and all the way awkward, not to mention felled by the most massive of crushes. It still wasn’t much of an ego boost that he didn’t remember.

  Never mind. Heaps of men found her attractive. Some men, anyway. All right, a few men. Normal men, not men who went through blonde sport stars and TV presenters like chocolates in a box. And rugby players weren’t special. They were just blokes, and blokier than most. Entitled blokes, too.

  Her stepbrother Kane had told her once, “Half dog, and the other half not much better. If you’re tempted—ask me about him first. Or say ‘no’ up front and save yourself the trouble.”

  By the time he’d said that—because sex ed always came too late—she’d already been well aware that there were players out there who were quite happy to have an excuse to score against her stepfather and stepbrothers, to tick the “winner” box in the most elemental way there was. She’d also discovered that a photo gallery of rugby WAGs tended to look like you’d stumbled into a blonde convention, and that she wasn’t long-term material.

  So it wasn’t like it was any surprise. Still. He might at least have remembered her.

  It was hard for her not to remember how a nineteen-year-old Marko had looked through the eyes of an almost-fifteen-year-old girl trying to fit in with a new stepfamily and desperately ill-at-ease in her new posh school, new city, new island where it was always too cold and nobody seemed to be Maori.

  Come to think of it, it was just as well he didn’t remember her. Not necessarily her finest moments.

  The first time she’d seen him up close, it had been at a barbecue at her stepfather’s house, a preseason get-together to welcome the new forwards to the Highlanders. Her stepfather Grant had just been appointed forwards coach, so it was an icebreaker for him, too. You’d never have known it, though, from his manner, as in-charge as it was possible for a man to look without saying more than ten words at a stretch.

  Her mum Miriama, already pregnant with Nyree’s sister Kiri, had moved around the hillside terrace that day as serene as if she’d been born to it, as if the shabby little flat outside Whangarei had already faded far into the distance and Dunedin was where she’d always been meant to be. The hulking mass of muscle that made up the forward pack of a rugby squad had eaten, talked, and joked, on their best behavior in front of the coach. And Nyree, the only other female in the place, had sat taking nibbles at her hamburger from her spot on the concrete wall at the edge of the semicircular terrace, imagining that she was looking thoughtful and mysterious.

  She was rewarded for her efforts when a lanky young giant sat down beside her.

  “Hi,” he said. “It’s a nice view, eh.” His dark hair had been too long, his nose too big, his body all arms and legs. He’d seemed like a prince out of a Disney movie all the same, recognizing her as his princess and coming to her rescue like it was meant to be. She’d had that kind of imagination at the time.

  Almost-fifteen wasn’t the easiest age, especially when you were short, still carrying too much baby fat, and could fit your entire fist into your enormous mouth like a trout. If a trout had a fist. She’d sat, frozen, and wondered how she could eat her burger without showing him the new braces on her teeth. Wishing she’d left her spectacles off, too, although her mother would have noticed and made her put them on. “Yeh,” she said. “Nice.” And then wondered what to say next.

  “I’m Marko,” he said. “I guess you’re Grant’s daughter.”

  “Stepdaughter. My mum just married him a few months ago. I don’t really know him.”

  His black brows rose, and he said, “Sounds like a change. Have you always lived in Dunedin?”

  “No. Northland. I mean, we were in Northland. Before.”

  “Different.”

  “Yeh.”

  Again, she was stuck, but he wasn’t. He said, “New school as well, then. I remember when I came down at first for boarding school. Dunedin seemed like LA to a kid from a sheep farm in the Southern Alps, from all the way out in the wop-wops. Nowhere to run away to when you needed to be alone, no place to take a breath deep enough.” He grinned at her. “I even missed my sisters. That’s desperation.”

  “You have sisters?” Ask about him. She’d read that in a magazine. Oh, no. What if she had bits of hamburger stuck in her braces? He was close enough that she could see the dark shadow on his cheek where he’d shaved, and she got a shudder she’d never felt before, and a thrilling twist of something low and hot in her belly. She thought she could even smell him, and his scent, a little bit spicy, was making her dizzy. He was so… so manly, and he was talking to her. Out of everybody here.

  “Three,” he said. “All younger. One of them your age, I’m guessing. Thirteen?”

  She could tell she was turning red. “Nearly fifteen,” she mumbled, and looked down at her plate.

  “Oh. Sorry. And no sisters?”

  “No. Just, uh… I guess, stepbrothers. You know. Not really brothers.”

  “Luke and Kane,” he said. “They seem like good blokes. What? They’re not nice to you?”

  “Yeh. I mean, no. Kane gave me his room. He didn’t want to, though. He had to move in with Lukas so I could have a room.”

  “Well, why shouldn’t he?” Marko answered. “Luke’s up with the Crusaders now, eh. What does he need a room in Dunedin for? When you leave the house, your parents get the room back. It’s the rule.” He grinned again. “Ask me how I know. When I went home for Christmas this year, I slept on the couch. Course, that suited me. The beds are too small. I’m a bit of an oversized fella, like your stepbrothers.”

  “No,” she answered, knowing she must be beetroot-red. “I mean, I know. It’s fine. Everybody’s nice to me. They’re all…”

  She trailed off, because Marko wasn’t looking at her anymore. A shadow fell over her untouched plate, and she looked up to see Kane standing over them. Six foot eight and still growing, not quite eighteen, and even more gangly than Marko. The expression on his face wasn’t friendly.

  Nyree scrambled to her feet, and her hamburger slipped from her plate. She watched as if in
slow motion as the whole mess fell to the stones of the terrace in a mini-explosion of tomato sauce and salad. Onto Marko’s shoes.

  Oh, bugger.

  She crouched down to pick it all up as best she could and shove it back onto her plate as best she could. She couldn’t do anything about the tomato sauce, a splash of red on Marko’s enormous white trainers, and she wished she could sink straight through the stones.

  Marko hadn’t noticed. At least, when she stood up again, he was facing Kane, ignoring her.

  Kane said, after a long moment, “My dad would like a word. Now.”

  Marko’s face hardened to match Kane’s. He looked at Nyree, then back at her stepbrother. “You’re joking. Mate. She’s a little girl.”

  “I know,” Kane said. “That’s the point, isn’t it.”

  “Fine,” Marko said. “Whatever.”

  So much for her fated mate.

  Today, once again, he’d shaved, the aggressive jaw free of black stubble, allowing his deep-set dark eyes and strong nose, with its hump that said, “Broken! The hard way!” to send their ferocious message all by themselves. She happened to have noticed over the years that he normally played with a week’s worth of scruff, possibly to look more intimidating, as if that were necessary. She guessed he shaved after the match. But there were still the two hundred forty pounds of muscle, another thing that had changed between nineteen and thirty-two. In a singlet, so you got the full benefit of all that shoulder and arm. Almost indecent, a raw display of power completely unsuited to this genteel beach suburb.

  She was rattled, and she shouldn’t be. She was used to tall men. Tough men. Rugby men. A supersized man wasn’t any kind of sexy treat. She knew better. They ate all the eggs and left you with the empty carton, drank milk straight from the bottle and put it back in the fridge, left their size sixteen shoes out for you to trip over, watched too much sport, and talked too much about cricket and not enough about anything interesting. No treat.