said, “Once the adrenaline surge wears off, I’m going to be lucky not to fall across the bed in a heap. If I had a bed, that is. I hope you’ve got an idea for that backpacker’s, and that your generosity of spirit runs to the loan of a couple nights’ lodging fee. Besides risking your life and reputation.”
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”
“Pardon?” I couldn’t believe it. He wasn’t going to help me, after all this?
“No,” he said again. “You’re coming home with me.”
Gray
She was going to argue. The woman was going to argue.
You had to hand it to her. She’d chosen the right name. That ‘fearless’ one, because Chastity Worthy … It boggled the mind. It made me want to grin every time I thought of it, and it made me furious, too, to think of all that spirit and strength locked up in that terrible place.
I was going to stay with smiling for now. That was what the occasion called for. If she’d admitted to being tired, which I’d bet almost never happened, it meant she was more than that. She was knackered, physically and mentally. But then, escaping from a submerged car, swimming a freezing river for your life, getting two sets of electric shocks, facing down the biggest dog I’d ever seen, and engaging in a perilous nighttime rescue without your trousers or undies could do that to a person.
She had a very pretty little body, too. I was trying not to notice, but bloody hell, those legs. And then there was her bum. For a little person, she had one glorious bottom, round and tight and …
Yeh, well. Juicy. Like her thighs. I wasn’t going to say that. I probably shouldn’t even think it, not at an emotional moment like this.
Nah, couldn’t help it.
I fought my mind back onto the right track and said, “It’s five in the morning. Everybody’s traumatized.”
“I’m not traumatized,” she said, because of course she did. “I’ve done what I came to do.”
“Everybody other than you,” I said. “I’m traumatized, then.”
“You are not,” she said, but she was laughing again, like you couldn’t keep her down. “I’d swear you enjoyed it.”
“Well, maybe in retrospect,” I said. “But your sisters are traumatized.”
“No,” she said. “My sisters are strong. But we all need a rest and a cry, maybe, and a chance to talk and make a plan. Which is why the backpacker’s.”
“Or,” I said, wondering why I was pushing it and having a pretty good idea of the answer, “it’s why my house.”
“I am not taking my sisters to a man’s house. Obviously not because of …” She waved a hand. “Anything. But they’ve spent all their lives in Mount Zion. They haven’t been allowed to look directly at a male who wasn’t their brother or dad since they were eight. This is … call it reentry. Or call it entry, because that’s what it is. They’re entering a brand-new world. They’re thinking they’re doomed to Hell already just being Outside, and now you’re greasing the skids.” She twisted in her seat, flashing me in the process to the point where I nearly drove off the road—what was this, the world’s most frustrating porno?—and told the girls, “You’re not going to Hell for leaving, and the Devil doesn’t walk out here. It’s a lovely world full of lovely people, you’ll see. Once we’re in the backpacker’s.”
“And,” I said, slowing for the outskirts of Wanaka and noting that she’d argued the entire way here, “one of those lovely people is my mum.”
“Oh,” she said, with a couple extra syllables of relief in there. “Your mum’s house. Why didn’t you say? Not sure how keen she’d be on having all of us disrupting her household, though.”
“But you see,” I said, “it’s my household.” I hadn’t wanted to tell her, before, that the house was mine. Part of that “keeping your distance” thing you learned after about one season as an All Black, and that became second nature after your tenth season. I had to smile a bit more at that idea. She hadn’t reacted one single iota to my name, because she had no clue who I was. She’d asked if I were a landscaper. The fella back at the accident site had recognized me, in the middle of the night, in extremis, and she still had no idea.
“Your household,” she repeated. “But you said you lived in Dunedin.”
“I do,” I said. “And I have a house in Wanaka as well. Where my mum