Just My Luck (25 page)

“Wasn’t me. Not with me getting my shoulder buggered in the first half, it wasn’t. That was all Toro, in the sheds at halftime. Fair blistered the paint, telling the boys to . . . to go back out there and play with some intensity, would be the polite way of putting it.”

“Well, it worked,” she said. “They did. It was like a different game in the second half, even I could tell that.”

 “Good. But just now, we’re here, so let’s get you up on this wall.”

“You can’t climb, though,” she protested. “Let’s just go for coffee or something.”

“Why? I can still belay you.”

“With one arm?”       

“No worries. I’ll just do the work with the left.”

“Well,” she said doubtfully, “maybe a couple climbs. If you’re sure you can.”

And he was right. He could. Well, one of Liam’s arms was definitely equal to two of a normal man’s, so that probably made sense. She kept it short, though. She wasn’t going to aggravate his injury.

“We’ve got a bit of extra time,” he said when she’d finished, changed, and joined him again. “We could take a walk, do a bit of window-shopping before lunch, maybe.”

“You know I’m never going to say no to that,” she laughed.

“Want to look in here?” he asked hopefully when they were on Lambton Quay again, walking past Bendon.

“Mmm . . . no.” She cast him a sideways look, unable to avoid a smile. “You just keep walking. You’ve already seen me in my underwear.”

“Yeh. And once was enough, eh. Heaven forbid I’d have to look at
that
every day. Bloody nightmare.”

Her smile turned to a laugh. “Shoes. Moving right along next door here. Much safer.”

“Found the funkiest ones for you,” he said after a minute. “Inside, there,” he pointed. “You’d look a treat in those.”

“Wow,” she breathed. “Those are amazing.”

“Let’s go, then,” he urged. “If I can’t look at you in your undies again, this’d be the next best thing.”

She laughed in delight when she had them on, posing in front of the mirror and twisting so the light caught the conical spikes sticking out from the sides of the high-heeled pumps in fiery, glittering red.

“Shoes as weaponry,” she turned to tell a grinning Liam. “Amazing.”

“Pretty accurate,” he said. “Specially with that short skirt. Telling all the boys not to get too close, or you’ll stomp all over their hearts. Dead fierce.”

“Really? That’s how I look?” she asked with pleasure. “Fierce?”

“Yeh,” he assured her. “That’s exactly how you look.”

“We need to stop doing this,” she sighed when they were in another cafe, one Liam had scouted out specially last week for her, but he wasn’t telling her that. He caught her sneaking a peek down at her new shoes. The spikes still made her smile, he saw. And seeing her put them on, strut around in them hadn’t been too bad from his point of view either. He had a quick image of her wearing them with red lingerie to match that he had to shove out of his mind fast. That one, he’d save for tonight.

“Nah.” He did his best to keep his thoughts from showing on his face. “Makes me happy, makes you happy. What could be bad about that? I hope you have some more room in your closet, because I can tell we’re going to be doing this again.”

“Oi,” he protested as she shot him a look. “A man can live without sex. He can’t live without romance. Buying you shoes is as close as I’m coming to romance just now, and I’m doing it.”

“Well, buying me shoes and sending me flowers when you were in Brisbane,” she pointed out. “I loved that, but you didn’t have to do that either.”

“Nah, I didn’t. And what d’you reckon, I did it anyway. Because I wanted to.”

 “I’m glad you were playing at home this week, though,” she said. “I’d rather have tickets than flowers. And I loved watching you play in person, seeing you be so strong.”

Here was the chance he’d been waiting for. “If I impressed you, you know I want to keep doing that as often as possible. And I was thinking, it might be better if you had Sky Sport. MySky, too. That way you could see every game. If you wanted to, that is. Could record the ones coming up in Safa, watch them at a reasonable hour. Watch those movies you like, too, at night. Not too many movies on, otherwise.”

“I know it can be a bit spendy,” he went on hurriedly, “but maybe that’s one thing I could do. That and the shoes, since they’re both actually for me.”

“Well . . .” She looked down at her salad, poked at it a bit with her fork. “Actually . . . I already signed up for it.” She met his gaze again, laughed a little. “I’m just waiting for them to install it. Although now I’m having second thoughts. If you’re going to keep getting hurt, I’m going to stop watching. I love watching you play, but I hate watching you bleed. I
hate
it.”

“Now you know how I felt last month, then,” he said, looking into those sapphire eyes, “watching you strip down to your undies. I loved seeing it, and at the same time, I hated it too, because I could see how much it hurt you to do it. We’re even now, that’s all.”

“Except that I’m going to be watching you get hurt a whole lot more times,” she pointed out. “And you’re never going to see me doing that again. No more walking around in my underwear for me, because you were right. I’ve been working on my boundaries, like you said, for a while now, but I didn’t even recognize that that was what was making me so uncomfortable. It’s so hard to know, isn’t it, at the time?”

He was about to answer her, but stopped at the sight of the woman walking through the door.

“What is it?” Kristen asked in alarm. She turned to see what had arrested his attention. But Liam was already standing, because Anahera had noticed him now. He saw the hesitation, then the decision on her face, the lift of her chin as she came to meet him.

“Liam,” she said, stopping next to the table.

“Anahera.” He thought about kissing her cheek, settled for taking the hand she offered, giving it a gentle press, and dropping it again. “This is my friend Kristen. Kristen, this is Anahera.”

Kristen looked confused, he saw.

“His ex,” Anahera explained briefly, then turned back to Liam again. “How are you?” she asked.

“I’m good. You? How’s Joseph? And your mum and dad?” He cast another quick glance downward, then looked hurriedly back at her face again.

“All good as well. And yeh, we’re expecting.” She put a protective hand over the swell of her belly and smiled for the first time. He could see how happy she was, and was happy for her sake too. Because she deserved it.

“Congrats,” he said, tried to put all the sincerity he had into it. “And to Joseph too.”

She nodded. “Good to meet you,” she said to Kristen. “See ya, Liam.”

“You don’t have to . . .” he began.

“Nah. I’ll go. But . . .” She hesitated. “I’m glad to see you doing well. I really am.”

“Thanks,” he said over the lump that rose in his throat. “Thanks.”

And then she was gone.

“Talking of choices,” he sighed, sitting down again and watching Anahera walk away, walk out the door. “And wrong ones.”

“Your ex,” Kristen said slowly. “Your ex what?”

“My ex-wife. Married to somebody else now, having a baby. Having the life she wanted to have with me.”

He paused a moment, but she didn’t answer, just looked at him, waiting for him.

“So, yeh,” he said. “When you keep telling me how many mistakes you’ve made . . . I think you’re giving yourself too much credit.”

He saw the jerk of surprise at that. “Yeh. I’d say you’re an amateur. What’ve you done? Married the wrong bloke? Pssh.” He made a dismissive gesture. “One bloody thing. Amateur.”

“You mean,” she said hesitantly, “your marriage. Was it to do with . . . the drinking?”

“No secret about it. My marriage, and everything else. You haven’t looked up the story yet, eh. Because it’s still there for everyone to see, and it’ll never go away.”

“No. It never occurred to me, actually. But no. I wouldn’t do that, invade your privacy like that. If you want to tell me, though, I want to hear. I want to understand.”

“Right,” he said. “Right. I should do that, then. Before you
do
see it online.”

He paused a moment to think about it while she sat quietly opposite him, her gentle gaze on him, waiting.

“Rugby’s a funny old thing,” he said at last, sitting back, looking down at his clasped hands. “There you are, a young fella, not nearly as clever, not nearly as strong as you think you are. Some of the boys seem to do all right. Some of them learn quicker than others, maybe, because they never put a foot wrong. But I wasn’t one of them.”

“Too much money,” he went on, looking up at her now. “Too many people who think you’re special. Girls paying attention to you like they never did before. And you’re gone half the time, away from your family. Feeling the pressure of it, too. So you tell yourself you need to relax, cut loose a bit. That you deserve it.”

Going out after the games at first, he remembered, getting pissed. Getting angry. One confrontation after another, some of them coming to blows before a teammate, usually Toro, pulled him away. The coach finding out about it, putting him on the bench for a game or two, which had only made him angrier at the time, but had made him more careful too. For a while. And then being selected for the All Blacks, the thrill of it. More money, more pressure, more weeks away. And more drinking.

And then the day he’d awoken in a cell in an Aussie jail, barely able to remember what had happened the night before. That he’d got in a fight outside a bar, had thrown some punches that had done some real damage. Had gone that one step too far, and there was no taking it back.

Appearing in court had been bad enough. But the press conference—that had been the worst. That had been the bottom.

“Knew I had to front up,” he told Kristen when he’d finished the long, sad story. “Not that everyone didn’t already know what had happened, because trust me, they all knew it. It was big news, specially because I was an All Black, and it wasn’t the first time I’d been in trouble. And that I was being sent down from the Super 15 for half a season, that I was going to be playing club rugby for a good long while. Maybe forever, if I didn’t get myself sorted. So, no. It wasn’t news to my teammates, or my family. Or my wife. It wasn’t any kind of news to Anahera.”

“Is that what broke up your marriage?” she asked. “Being arrested, and . . . the rest of it?”

“Nah,” he said bluntly. “It wasn’t being sent down. It wasn’t the drinking, or even the fighting. It was the lying. And the cheating.”

He could see her wince, but went on. If he wanted her, and he did want her, she needed to know who he was. Who he’d been then, and the man he was now.

“Told myself I wasn’t hurting her,” he said. “That what I did when I was away from home . . . that it was separate from us, from how I felt about her. And that I never touched her, even when I’d been drinking. More ways to hurt a woman than hitting her, though. And I reckon I did every one of those.”

“So what happened?” Kristen asked. “What changed?”

He shrugged. “Stopped drinking. Easy to say, hard to do. The NZRFU helped. The football union,” he explained. “Therapy, all that. Helped me see what I’d been trying to hide from with the drink, helped me find ways to deal with the pressure that wouldn’t destroy my life. And my family helped too, my mum and dad. Fronting up helped, and my dad was there with me for that. Told me I had to do it, in fact. That I’d got myself into this, that I’d let down my whanau, my wife, my mates, my team. Let my country down too. And that it was down to me now to front up, and to be a man. He went with me to the press conference, stood by me that day and every day since.”

“The rest of it,” he told her, “that took a while. Learning how to be the kind of man my dad is, the kind of man I wanted to be, one step at a time. Working my way back onto the team, the ABs. Getting my confidence back, in my game and in myself. Working my way back into some self-respect, so other people could respect me as well. Which took a good long while, I can tell you that.”

“But you didn’t get your marriage back,” she said, her eyes full of compassion.

“Some things you can’t fix,” he said, and felt the familiar stab of regret. “Some things, when you break them badly enough, they stay broken.”

“So.” He gave a little shrug, shook it off, “when I say I know what it’s like to be at the bottom, I mean it. And what it’s like to make hard choices that leave you with your self-respect, too.”

“Like not wearing your underwear in front of the general public,” she said with a little smile.

“Not if it makes you feel bad. Not if it makes you feel cheap.”

“Can I just say,” she told him, and she had a hand on his arm now, tears in her eyes too. Had clearly forgotten, in the intensity of her emotion, all about the careful distance she normally kept from him.

“Can I just say,” she repeated, “that the man you are now is amazing? That you’ve never done anything less than impress me, since the first day I met you? Maybe it’s been a hard road. Maybe I’m just seeing what you are now, at the end of it. But what you are now,” she said, and he could read the sincerity in her face, in the press of her hand, “is something so . . . so special. Something so strong.”

He swung his chair over, put an arm around her. Couldn’t help it. Held her against his side for a moment, right there in the little café.

“Well, you know what they say,” he told her, and his eyes weren’t any too dry themselves.

“What’s that?”

“That when you mend something, sometimes the mended bits are stronger than the original. And I have heaps of mended bits.”

“Well,” she said with an unsteady laugh. “I guess that’s better than still having the cracks there.”

“Which is you,” he guessed.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “Which is me. But I’m working on mending them. And knowing that you did it . . . that helps. That helps a lot.”

Nate’s Birthday Present

“Is that guy going to be in trouble?” Ally asked. “Because he should be.”

“Could be.” She could hear the smile in Nate’s voice all the way from Johannesburg. “He got red-carded for it, and they lost the game, neither of which will look good to his coach, or his skipper either. Probably be fined as well. But he’s not a bad bloke, really. Just one of those things that happens sometimes in the heat of battle. I decided not to pass your text along to him. Didn’t want to scare him, add to his woes.”