Just Say [Hell] No

by Rosalind James

  “Oh,” her mother said. “Anyway. Can you come? We wanted family time.”

  “I really can’t afford the time off, but thanks. You won’t have the whole family anyway. Kane and Lukas won’t be there.” Because they’re adults with jobs and their own lives, she didn’t say. Just like me.

  “Don’t be silly,” her mother said. “They’re on contract, and they can’t. You know that. Oh, and I texted you a couple job postings. Did you get them? The ad agency one sounded perfect. That’s creative, and it pays well, too. Everything you need.”

  Nyree pressed her fingertips hard into her forehead, since putting her palms on her cheeks and screaming wasn’t an option. “I don’t want to work for an ad agency, Mum. You don’t need to bother to check the postings. And before you ask me whether my car’s still working—yes. It is. I’ve even got a second job added on to the restaurant, so I’m all good. It’s a sort of companion post. A caretaker, you could say.” She considered mentioning the Pookie portrait, but she didn’t think her mum would be impressed, and she knew Grant wouldn’t be.

  Her mum said, “A carer? I won’t say anything, but seriously, Nyree, think about the future. You have a good degree. Some of the work you did at the firm was really lovely. Why not do that again and have the money to take care of yourself properly? Painting is never going to be a job, love.”

  “Mum. You just did say something.”

  “Is there somebody new on the horizon? Is that why you don’t want to go to Fiji? You could bring him, too. That would be perfect. We’d leave you two alone, I promise.” Another rumble from the background. “I didn’t say we’d pay his fare.” Muffled again, because the phone was clearly pressed against her mum’s chest again. “You don’t know that he won’t be able to. Maybe this one’s in funds.” A pause. “Well, maybe she’s changed. She knows she’s not getting any younger, and she’s looking so much prettier. You said so yourself, other than the clothes. I’m sure she can do better now.”

  Finally, Nyree got her attention and was able to say, “I need to go, Mum. My break’s over.”

  “Oh. Right. Well, think about Fiji. You can bunk in with Kiri if you don’t bring anybody, so all it’ll be is the tickets, so no worries about not being independent. Oh—and I’m coming up for the match at the end of May. We can go shopping.” More rumbling in the background, then, “Grant sends his love.”

  I’ll bet. More like, Grant just set a budget. She didn’t want to go shopping anyway. She liked her clothes. She rang off, looked at Pookie, growled out loud, and said, “I love my mum. I do. Except when she makes me want to stab my eyeballs out. Families. Gah.” Then she changed the music to pop, turned it up loud, did ten minutes of bad dancing and mediocre singing, worked herself back to something like a more sweaty normal, splashed water on her face, and picked up her sketchpad again.

  “One day off,” she told Pookie, changing her music back. “And I’m spending it in my happy place, damn it.”

  She drove back to Marko’s at six-thirty with her sketchpad on the seat and her head full of plans. She’d have skipped dinner, except that she needed to equip herself with new canvas and paints before she moved ahead with her project, and, she needed to see how Ella was doing now that the shock had worn off and her mum and aunt had left. She also needed to be casual with Marko again before he left, or they were never going to make it until September.

  I don’t walk on a red light. That was good, then. That was perfect. Ground rules. No more hot kisses in the dark. No more big, strong arms wrapped around her. No more being hauled against all that hard chest. No more muscular thighs…

  Whoops. No.

  She walked in the front door, her stomach growled, and she realized she’d forgotten about lunch. The house smelled like a Maori wet dream, if girls had those. When she reached the kitchen, Ella was sitting, Cat in her lap, crunching carrots dipped in hummus, Marko was shaking a glass jar of liquid, and the smell was so delicious, Nyree could almost bite it. He was barefoot, in faded jeans and a gray Adidas T-shirt, both of which outlined every bulge of muscle and every… et cetera a woman could long to see, and he may have been biteworthy himself. If she hadn’t sworn off that. Which she had.

  Except… those arms.

  “Hey,” Ella said, not looking stricken by grief or tangled in troubles. “What did you paint?”

  “Can’t tell you yet,” Nyree said. “It’s still percolating. More to the point—what smells so good?”

  “Lamb.” Ella sighed. “With potatoes and carrots. And salad. Still ten minutes to go, though.” She laid her forehead on the marble and wailed, “Forever.”

  “But who’s counting,” Marko said. He set down his jar, looked Nyree over, smiled, and said, “Productive day, eh.”

  “Oh.” Her hand flew to her face. “What?”

  “Charcoal, I reckon. And some additional decoration as well. You have ten minutes, like the pregnant lady said. You could stay like that, but I can’t promise not to laugh.”

  She did have charcoal on her, she found when she reached the yellow-toweled bathroom. On her arms, and on her face. And oil pastel as well. Red, yellow, and blue, which had somehow ended up on the side of her neck. How had she done that? She took a quick but scrub-intensive shower, put on a velvet shirt over her gray jeans, and came downstairs again just as Marko was slicing two racks of lamb into chops, crusty outside and succulent pink inside, then laying them on a platter around an enormous pile of tiny potatoes and new carrots. Beside that was a butter lettuce salad in a white bowl with the contents of the jar on it. “Olive oil and pear balsamic,” Marko said when she asked. “Salt and pepper. Easy. The secret’s getting the good stuff.”

  “You make food like this,” she told him twenty ravenous minutes later, when they were gnawing on bones, “and then you eat it on a chrome stool off round white plates set on your marble breakfast bar in your white kitchen. Pure negative space. It’s like…” She waved a denuded chop in the air. “Hanging a Van Gogh in a museum.”

  “Which is what people do,” Marko said. “And we aren’t eating in the kitchen, thanks to you. Cheers for comparing my cooking to a Van Gogh, though.”

  “Yes,” Nyree said, “but they both deserve a more interesting setting.”

  “Mm,” he said, his iron-dark eyes lit up by something much more like humor than animal lust. “So you know—I’ve been waiting for this moment since the first night. If there’d been a betting pool, I would’ve lost. Surprising restraint.”

  “What?” Ella said. “Nyree said your stew was awesome. I remember.”

  “The white dishes,” Marko said. “Life’s too short for brown and white, apparently.”

  “Well,” Nyree said, “color’s good, that’s all. Or at least contrast. People are afraid of it. They think they won’t know how to match. You don’t have to match. That’s the point. Do you mind if I put a regular table in here while you’re gone?”

  “Let me guess,” he said. “TradeMe.”

  “Possibly,” she said. “So much cheaper. You could give me the money for the Android World one you’d buy, though, if you’d rather. I can get the TradeMe table and set up my narcotics business, and you’ll never know the difference. Paying retail for furniture is mad.”

  “If Ella’s going to be pregnant with twins,” he said, “I reckon you’d better find us a table and some chairs. Otherwise, she’s going to sit on the floor at some point and not be able to get up again. If I’m not here to haul her to her feet, you could be calling the ambos.”

  “Ha, ha,” Ella said, gnawing at her own chop. “You’re supposed to be being supportive, Marko. Except that it’s true. Caro and I were looking at some websites about twin pregnancy, and your belly gets freaking enormous. I’ll be like St. Heliers School’s very own cautionary tale. And I mean next month. Maybe I could go around with them when they’re showing how condoms work. They could give me a couple of free extra-extra-large uniform blouses for doing it. Ha. Joke.”

  “How’s that been, th
en?” Marko asked. “School?” Nyree had to admire how casually he brought it up, seeing that Ella hadn’t said a word about it before now.

  Ella shrugged. “Oh, you know. A bit embarrassing. I’ve had two Year 13 girls joining me for lunch every day like they’re protecting me from being ostracized or something. Obviously sent by the head, since one of them’s Head Girl, which isn’t humiliating much at all. There I was the first day, minding my own business and doing my Maths homework, when they sat down and started to chat like it was their job. They keep doing it, too. I’m like, I’ll just focus on these quadratic equations, OK? Then there’s the P.E. teacher checking in like she’s envisioning me fainting dramatically during netball. That’s not embarrassing, either.”

  “Ugh,” Nyree said. “When I was in school, I just wanted nobody to notice me.”

  “Exactly,” Ella said, sitting up straighter. “At my school before, I knew everybody for yonks, since kindy, mostly, and I was just me. And here I’m like… new. And pregnant. Like…” She threw both hands in the air and made a noise like a bomb exploding.

  Nyree was laughing. “I shouldn’t. I know it’s awful. But I started a new school myself when I was fourteen. I wasn’t pregnant, but I’d probably have thought that would be better, that at least I’d be interesting. I either wanted to be interesting, or anonymous. Depending on the day.”

  “Really?” Ella said. “But you’re pretty.”

  “Ha,” Nyree said. “Not so much. Especially when everybody seemed to be blonde and tall and I was Maori and short and—well, yeh, pretty chubby. Unibrow. Hair. Spectacles. Braces. Et cetera.” Ella made a face, and Nyree was laughing some more. “Oh, it was terrible. I’ll show you photos sometime. I saw that film Carrie and thought, that’s going to be me. That’ll be my documentary. I’m going to get asked to the dance by the cute boy as a cruel prank and have pig blood dropped on me in front of the whole school, then drown in a pit of shame. OverEmoters Anonymous, eh.”

  Ella said, “You’re joking. Really? Pig blood?”

  “You never saw it? We’re going to have to find it and watch it. It’s awesome. At the end… but I’m not going to tell you. Best girl revenge film ever, though, that’s all.”

  “Mean Girls,” Ella said.

  “Better than Mean Girls. I promise.” Nyree looked at Marko’s face and had to laugh some more. “We’ll do it while you’re gone, Marko, no worries. But I promise, Ella, when it’s over, you’ll be able to say, ‘As long as there’s no pig blood, I can do this.’ Or, alternatively, you’ll imagine the ending. Immensely satisfying. If all else fails, Marko can pop by and give them the stare that melts steel.”

  “I could,” Marko said. “And I would. Say the word.”

  Tuesday morning on the way to the airport, and Marko was telling Nyree, who was wearing a clingy tie-dyed T-shirt that he was having trouble not staring at, “You’re being surprisingly restrained. I’m not even gripping my armrest. You’re not fooling me, though. You’ll drop me at that curb, and it’ll be Formula One all the way home.”

  “They have speed cameras on this stretch of motorway,” she said. “If you’d done that background check like you should have, you’d know how I know that. You’d know that I’ve never had an accident, too. You could’ve enjoyed being horrified and then being reassured. Like riding the roller coaster, eh.”

  “What d’you think I am, an accountant? Could be I have enough excitement in my life. Or could be that I don’t, but this isn’t the kind I need.”

  “Fortunate, then,” she said sweetly, “that I’m being so careful with your new car. Though you could hardly blame me. Why do you think they named it like they did? It’s not a Ford Stay-In-Your-Lane, it’s a Ford Escape. And if you didn’t want me to test it, maybe you shouldn’t have got the one with the turbocharged V-6. Just asking for trouble, weren’t you.”

  He should be frowning at her. He couldn’t quite manage it. If only she weren’t so bloody cute. And if only her body didn’t always seem to be reeling him in. Which was pointless, seeing as she didn’t want him. And seeing as she wasn’t his type anyway.

  He could like her. He didn’t have to think of her when he was alone at night. For now, he could keep it light. Flirtation-free. “I’ve gathered that, no worries. I’m only leaving it with you because I value yours and Ella’s safety. Five-star crash rating on this thing. It could also be because otherwise, you’ll be putting that TradeMe table on the roof of your Beetle. And the chairs hanging out the windows.”

  “I told you. No accidents. And how do you know I don’t have a mate with a trailer?”

  “Because if you did, you’d have used it when you moved in. Which was—oh, yeh. A couple weeks ago.”

  “I can’t make a mate in two weeks? Ever met Colin Murray?” At his blank look, she said, “Ha. I knew it. You should get to know your neighbors. Colin’s going to help me put a trailer hitch on the Beetle, too, so I don’t have to use your beautiful car in future. Isn’t that lucky?”

  She gunned that turbocharged V-6 to shoot past the airport bus lumbering along in the left lane, then headed for International Departures in front of it, and Marko said, “Next time some journo asks me whether I worry about the dangers of rugby, I’ll explain comparative risk. Some people would slow down and let the bus go first. And who the hell is Colin Murray that he’s offering you his trailer?”

  “I told you. Some people are dull.” She braked hard, swung in to the curb in front of Air New Zealand, and stopped with enough force to test his shoulder harness.

  He should be getting out of the car. He wasn’t doing it. He’d told her a few nights earlier that he didn’t walk on a red light, but at this moment? Taking that walk was all he wanted to do. His body was forgetting again that she wasn’t his type, and his mind was following along. And she looked at his face and smiled. Sweetly. “Eighty-two last birthday. We bonded over the creation of Ella’s new desk. Very sound on the subject of varnishes, Colin. And you’re much too easy to tease. What are you going to do when those Reds boys start in with the sledging on Saturday night? Queenslanders aren’t known for holding back their unflattering opinions.”

  “I’m going to hit them hard,” he said. “I love my job.”

  She gave him that husky, sweet bedroom laugh. It sounded good. “I’ll be watching for that.”

  “You’re going to watch me, then?”

  “Somehow,” she said, “I just can’t help it.” She wasn’t doing as well with her teasing. He held her gaze a long moment, and he could swear she wasn’t breathing steadily. Of course, he couldn’t swear he was, either.

  “Good to know,” he finally said. “I’ll try to make it worth your while.” He wanted to say more, but like it or not, he needed to get out of this car and go meet his team. Plus—red light. Instead, he said, “Let me know when you need more money in the account. And text me after Ella’s OB appointment. And one more thing. I know she said she’d wait to check out parents until after the next scan, but if she doesn’t, don’t let her go meet them without me. Somebody needs to ask the tough questions, the ones they don’t want to answer. That’s going to be me. I don’t want her having regrets later.”

  “Marko. That’s…” Her expression had changed. Now, she reached out, put a hand on the side of his face, and said, “I know I tease you too much, but I’m not teasing now. You’re a good cousin. You do know that. A good man.”

  It took him a moment. He put a hand over hers where it lay against his cheek and said, knowing the words were coming out hoarse and not able to help it, “Not so good. Not always. And Ella’s not going to be in my house forever.”

  “No. She’s not. And you’re doing that…” He saw her swallow, and wanted his lips at her throat. If he kissed her just right, in that perfect spot on the side of her neck, she’d arch her back for him. She might even moan. He wanted to find out. “. . . that thing with your eyes again,” she finished.

  He blinked. “Pardon?”

  Her smile trembled around t
he edges. “The stare that could melt steel. I shouldn’t kiss Colin while you’re gone, is that what you’re telling me?”

  “That would be it.” He answered automatically, because he wasn’t paying attention. Because he was being lured beneath the waves like the most hapless sailor there ever was.

  A siren song, they called it. The pull of a woman whose voice called to yours, whose hands belonged on your body the same way yours belonged on hers. Like it or not. Resist it or not.

  “Maybe,” she said, “you could be a wee bit careful yourself. In the pub, say, after the match, when the blondes and the beers come out. Maybe so.”

  “Would that make you happy?”

  She smiled, slow and sweet, and she wasn’t taking her hand away. “Oh, yeh,” she said. “It would. Could be a sacrifice, though.”

  “Or,” he said, “it could be easy. You never know.” He took her hand from his cheek, pressed his lips to her warm palm, felt the current run between them, and knew she felt it, too. That song was playing in her head the same way it was playing in his. It had to be. He couldn’t be the only one. “I may not know what color you are,” he told her, falling into those mermaid eyes and happy to go, “but I know it’s beautiful.”

  A car behind them hooted, Nyree jumped and pulled her hand back, and Marko swore inside and said, “They can wait.”

  “I’d better go. But I’ll text you your Ella reports.” She was moving on, and he wanted to throttle that bloke behind him. And then she smiled, a bit of wobble to it again, and said, “If you text me your card of the day.”

  He knew his mum would be more than happy to send Nyree her very own card of the day, but he didn’t say it. He didn’t want his mum texting her. He was a DIY type of fella at the best of times, and with Nyree? He could definitely do it himself.

  Do not, Nyree told herself on the ride home. Don’t you dare.