Just For You (Escape to New Zealand) Page 3

  “Nah,” he found himself saying. “I’m staying on for another couple days.” He was? He was going to be taking the bus back, then, because the car was Nikau’s, and the boys were leaving today. “I’d make it more,” he hurried to add, “but I have to get back to Auckland for training. This is my last bit of time before the season. So have a heart. Go out with me, that’s all I’m asking. No strings.”

  “You want to go out with me? All right, then.” She picked up her bag, turned to leave. “I’ll be having a bit of a beach day here, tomorrow around noon with my family. You want to see me? See me then.”

  She didn’t expect him to turn up, of course. She helped Great-Uncle Matiu over the bit of dune and set up a chair for him, spread out a couple blankets for the rest of them, took herself into the water for a swim and barely looked around, because she didn’t want to be disappointed.

  But when she got out fifteen minutes later, there he was again, watching her. He waited for her to dry off, stood back until she introduced him to her family. She watched him greet Great-Uncle Matiu with a respectful hongi and handshake before turning to Auntie Kiri, then Ana and Ella, another cousin who’d come along for the day. Nothing wrong with his manners, nothing at all.

  Nothing wrong with how he looked, either. In togs again, thankfully not too long, which let her look at his thighs, at every hard, delineated muscle of them. She’d seen him on TV in his rugby shorts, and those were even shorter, but the effect was nothing to seeing him up close. His body was, if anything, stronger than the one she remembered. Extra time in the gym, she guessed. And just to make it better, he was wearing an NBA tank top that showed off the solid beef of his shoulders and arms. The whole effect was pretty overwhelming, and had Ana looking at Reka with a raised eyebrow that Reka ignored.

  He’d turned up. She hadn’t thought he would. A picnic with her family had sounded like the polar opposite of what he wanted from her. But he’d turned up, and her heart insisted on doing a Happy Dance at the thought of it, and the sight of him.

  “Who wants to go in the water?” she asked, laughing at the chorus of “Me!” from the kids. They had a few extras along, as usual. And then it got even better, because Hemi stripped off the tank top to come join them, and Reka got a bit distracted.

  Everything about him was perfect, and she remembered exactly why she’d danced with him, why she’d gone outside with him, why she’d gone to the hotel with him. The heavy bulge of shoulder muscle, the tapering vee of his torso, the horizontal ridges of his abdomen disappearing into the tops of his togs, which she didn’t want to look at too closely. The slabs of his pectorals, one of them completely overlaid by the intricately curved lines of his moko, the Maori tattoo that extended over shoulder and arm, all the way to his elbow.

  His pendant was a hei matau, a fish hook, she saw, rather than the toki, the adze she would have expected. She’d have thought it would have been all about strength and willpower.

  Take the kids swimming, she reminded herself, so she did that, and he helped, not trying to talk to her, focusing on the kids, diving with them, swimming with them, giving them tosses through the air that had them shrieking and begging for more.

  When they were back on shore again, and he was leaning back on an elbow on the blanket, still with that shirt off, his legs outstretched, eating a sandwich and seeming happy to be there with them, she gave in to temptation and looked her fill at his tattoo and his pendant—and the body they decorated.

  He caught her looking and smiled, and she smiled back, because she couldn’t help it.

  “Why a fish hook?” she asked him.

  Uncle Matiu answered before Hemi could. “Probably for safety over water. For good health and good luck. For the rugby.”

  “That’s it,” Hemi said, sitting up and nodding at her uncle with deference, holding the bit of carved greenstone in one of those clever hands, caressing its curves. “My dad gave it to me when I made the Under-19s. Letting me know that he believed I’d be traveling, that he believed I’d be doing this with my life. That he believed in me, I guess.” He smiled, and it wasn’t the cocky grin. It was sweet, real, and her heart melted a little.

  “Where’s your whanau, then, Hemi?” Auntie Kiri asked.

  “The Far North,” he answered. “Near Ahipara.”

  “Quite a distance from Auckland,” Auntie Kiri commented. “Must get lonely.”

  Reka wanted to snort at that, because if there was one thing she was pretty sure Hemi wasn’t, it was lonely.

  To her surprise, though, he answered seriously, “It does. I asked my mum and dad about moving to Auckland, but they didn’t want to leave, even though my sister and brother aren’t there. They’re both in Aussie, one in Queensland, one in Western Australia.”

  “That’s where my man is,” Ana put in, adjusting Tamati in her arms as she fed him, a nursing blanket draped over them for modesty. “Perth. For the mining. Wants us all to join him there, but I don’t know. So far, and having my kids grow up Mozzies, it’s hard. But we’ll probably go all the same, because it’s hard to be apart, too.”

  “Yeh. It is,” Hemi said. “That’s why my sister’s there. Her man’s in the mines as well. My brother’s working construction on the Gold Coast. Good money, both of them, but you’re right, far away. And a Maori Australian’s still a Maori, but…” He sighed. “Not so much a Kiwi, eh. Anyway, I thought maybe my mum and dad wouldn’t mind being closer to all of us, for holidays and such, visits. But it’s the big whanau, I guess.”

  “Important,” Uncle Matiu nodded. “Your own marae, your place, the cousins and aunties and uncles. When you get older, you appreciate it all more. That’s what matters in the end, isn’t it.”

  A short silence fell, broken by a small voice piping up from behind Reka where she sat, her legs tucked under her, on the blanket near—but not too near—Hemi.

  “Sorry.” It was Michael, seven years old, who’d been awestruck to see Hemi appear and had been hovering close ever since. He stood shifting from foot to foot with clear impatience, seizing his chance while the elders weren’t talking. “Would you kick the footy with us?” He held the oval ball out, looked at Hemi imploringly. “Please?”

  “Sweet as.” Hemi got to his feet in one fluid, easy move, and the little gaggle of kids followed him down the beach as if he were the Pied Piper.

  “Starstruck, that’s what they are,” Auntie Kiri said comfortably. “He’s a pretty good bloke for all the celebrity, eh.”

  Reka shrugged. “Not too bad, I guess.”

  Ana looked across at her and laughed. “Not too bad? I don’t call that not too bad.”

  Ella gave a sigh. “Yeh. You don’t want him, Reka, I’ll take him.”

  “Ian might not be too keen,” Reka said.

  “Yeh, well, a quick fling and no one the wiser, eh,” Ella laughed back. “Maybe if I weren’t quite so pregnant,” she added, running a hand over the swell of her belly.

  “That’s what it would be, though.” Reka was reminding herself as much as telling her cousins. “He’s not interested. Not serious, I mean. He’s just here because he’s…” She glanced at Uncle Matiu. “Trying it on.”

  “Nah,” he said. “I’m an old man now, but still a man, aren’t I. A man doesn’t turn up to meet your whanau if he’s not interested, if he’s not serious.”

  “Trust me, Uncle,” she told him. “I know.”

  “Nah, you don’t,” he corrected her. “You assume. A man’s a man, can’t help that, but he’s a person all the same. Give the boy a chance.”

  She’d already given him a chance, Reka thought uncomfortably. She’d given him more than that. That was the problem.

  “Tai! Oh, my God! Tai!”

  Everyone turned to stare at Ana. She was on her feet, still holding the nursing baby, frantically gesturing toward the sea.

  Reka whirled and saw him. Her five-year-old nephew, head appearing briefly, one brown arm flung skyward, then disappearing under the waves again.

&nbs
p; She didn’t even know she was running until she hit the water. A few strides, and she had dived in and was swimming. Five fast strokes, six, into the deeper water, because the tide was high, and she was treading water, turning in a half-circle, but she couldn’t see him.

  She saw Hemi, though, powering through the waves a little farther out, to her right, and then she saw the little head again, and swam.

  She reached Hemi as he got under Tai, lifted his head out of the water. The boy was gasping, choking, but breathing.

  “Caught on something,” Hemi told her urgently. “Can’t tell what. Hold him. I’ll dive down and see.”

  She took over from him, got Tai under the arms, his body hauled back against hers, her legs kicking hard to keep both of them afloat, as she felt whatever had caught the little boy trying to pull him down. She couldn’t see Hemi below, couldn’t focus on him anyway, not with Tai choking and coughing.

  “Hang on, love,” she told him. “We’ll get you out.”

  Ana was in the water, she saw, and in another few seconds, she was there, too, face distraught, reaching for her boy, more hindrance than help.

  But where was Hemi? The tugs Reka felt, threatening to pull Tai under, told her he was still there. But he had to come up soon. He had to.

  Long seconds ticked by, and she had a sudden, irrational flash of panic that whatever it was under there had got Hemi, too, had pulled him down, and even as she was fighting the fear, he shot to the surface in a splash, heaving breath back into his lungs.

  “Got fishing line wrapped around one foot,” he got out through the gasps. “Can’t pull it off by myself, line’s too tight. I dove down to see if I could free it from whatever it’s stuck on. No go.”

  He looked at Ana, who had her hands under Tai now. “Hold him for a minute,” he told her. “Reka, I need you to dive with me, give me some slack on the line so I can work it off his foot.”

  “Got it,” she said. She filled her lungs with air, saw him doing the same, and they dove together.

  Luckily, the water was clear, and she could see. She obeyed Hemi’s beckoning gesture, swam down below Tai’s kicking foot, reached for the thin, translucent, painfully strong fishing line stretched taut beneath it, tugged up on it with all her might to give Hemi slack as he set to work to loosen it from around the boy’s ankle. She didn’t dare look to see if it was working, just held on, even as she felt the line slice into her hands from the force of her grip. The pain didn’t register, just the desperate haste, and the message from her lungs.

  As the seconds ticked by, she struggled with the attempt to hold her breath, and knew she was losing. It got worse and worse, until she had to breathe. She had to.

  At last, she couldn’t hold on any more. She shot to the surface, heaved in a few gasping lungsful of breath, didn’t answer Ana’s frantic question, and dove again. No choice.

  Hemi had felt the moment when Reka had let go of the line, had fought to maintain the precious progress he’d made. He had managed to work the barely-visible snare most of the way over Tai’s heel, and he held it in place grimly until she returned, then set to his task again. He was getting a bit lightheaded now, but he wasn’t giving up.

  He forced his mind into the calm place he went when he kicked. A crowd of eighty thousand in Twickenham Stadium, though, roaring and stomping out their attempt to distract him from a final-seconds, match-winning penalty kick, couldn’t hold a candle to this. Because this was a life, a child’s life.

  He held his breath, and he stayed patient, and he worked, and Reka held on beneath him, giving him the slack he needed, and, at last, the heel was clear and he was able to shove the line the last few desperate centimeters over the boy’s foot. And Tai was free.

  The instant he saw the little body bobbing up like a cork, he grabbed for Reka, aimed for an arm and caught her hair instead, the braid floating above her, and hauled her by it to the surface, shoved her up before surfacing himself, where he heaved and gasped and felt the precious oxygen returning to his depleted lungs, unable to do anything else for a full minute.

  When he could focus again, he saw Ana struggling towards shore with the boy, swam to help her as Reka, who had been gasping beside him, did the same. Hemi took the boy from his floundering mother, saw Reka reaching for her cousin, talking to her, helping her, and he put an arm across Tai’s chest, got on his back with the boy, holding him tight.

  “Kia kaha, little bro,” he told him. He sensed Tai’s struggles easing as he tried to obey, as he tried to be strong, and felt a flash of admiration for his courage even through the residue of fear and adrenaline.

  He side-stroked to shore like that, his body knowing exactly what to do, stood when he felt the touch of the sandy bottom against one foot, swept Tai into his arms and ran with him to the blanket, set him down in the midst of his anxious family.

  The boy was all right, he saw with relief. Eyes wide, crying a bit, but excited, too, the little bugger.

  He ran back down into the water to help Reka, who was supporting a weeping Ana up onto the beach.

  “No worries,” he told the sobbing mother, wrapping his own arm around her and half-carrying her to join her son. “It’s all good. He’s had another adventure, lived to tell the tale.”

  No lasting harm done to anyone, in fact. Except that it might have taken a few years off his own life, and Reka’s and Ana’s, too.

  “I’m sorry,” he had to say as the family made hasty preparations to depart. “That I didn’t see him go in the water. We were kicking, and I just…I missed it.”

  “Not your fault,” Uncle Matiu said. “Our fault. Somebody needs to be watching the kids all the time near water. We forgot that. We all did. We won’t forget it again.”

  Ana nodded, holding her baby to her in one arm, her son cuddled close with the other, looking drained. The tears were still trickling, and Hemi could tell that her mind was going over and over the sequence of events, imagining the worst and suffering with it.

  “Come on, love,” Kiri urged her stricken daughter. “I’ll go home with you, look after the kids, fix you a cuppa, let you have a lie-down. Soon be better.”

  Hemi helped Reka pack up blankets, towels, the remains of their picnic, threw a bag over one shoulder and supported Ana up the path to the cars. Kiri got behind the wheel with Ana and three of the kids, while Ella situated Uncle Matiu in the front of the other car and loaded up the back with five more kids, which involved some double-buckling of seatbelts and was probably, Hemi thought, making everybody think twice. Nothing like a near-miss to highlight the risks.

  He shoved the picnic bags into the boot, slammed it shut again, looked at Reka. “No room, eh.”

  “No.” She still looked shaken herself, and no wonder. “I walked.”

  “Walk you back, then,” he suggested.

  She nodded, and they watched the cars depart, then set off up the hill in their wake.

  “I just—” Reka began. “I was so scared. Now I’m thinking, why didn’t I swim back for a knife?”

  “Did anyone have a knife?”

  “Uncle Matiu will have had. But I didn’t think.”

  “Hard to think, in the middle of it. For anyone.”

  “You were thinking. You knew what to do.”

  “Because I’m used to thinking under pressure, making decisions fast, backing myself,” he tried to explain. “That’s the job. That’s being a first-five all over. You just get into the zone and focus. And the adrenaline helps, too.”

  She nodded again, shifted her grip on her bag as they stepped onto the footpath leading through the Domain, and he saw her wince. He took the thing off her shoulder, put it on his own, then stopped. “Let’s see your hands,” he said.

  She lifted her palms, and they both looked at the slices across them, the cuts lacing the sensitive flesh of her fingers.

  “Hurts, eh,” he said.

  “Yeh.” She laughed a little. “Didn’t even feel it, at the time. Guess you know about that, too.”

/>   “I do.” He frowned at the red lines. “We’ll put something on that,” he decided. “Got some stuff back at your place, or do we need to pop into a shop on the way?”

  “Think I’ve got it,” she said.

  They started walking again, and he let her talk it out, understanding the need to rehash, to relive the experience, to reassure herself that it had all turned out all right. And when they got to her house, he went in with her, up the stairs and through to her tiny granny flat around the back.

  She hesitated, though, in the lounge. “I want a shower,” she said, feeling her braid, what he knew was the salt-stickiness of it. “Otherwise, I’ll have to do it all over, the bandaging and that.”

  “I’ll wait here for you then, shall I?” he asked.

  She stood a moment, and he found himself holding his breath again, for an entirely different reason this time.

  “Yeh,” she finally said. “If you don’t mind. I could use the help. So hard to do your own hands.”

  He sat and waited, and then, when she came out again, wearing the green skirt, her hair back in its knot, he followed her into the little bathroom, took the ointment and plasters, and doctored up her hands as best he could. Stood close beside her, holding one hand at a time and dabbing the cuts gently with ointment, feeling her trying not to wince, and completely aware of her presence. It was more than the heat, now, though that was still there, too, pulling him towards her like a magnet, the electricity of the contact powerful, and all he was doing was holding her hand in his own.

  “There,” he said when he finished, sweeping the rubbish into the bin. “You’ll do, now.”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Can I…” He hesitated. “D’you have to work tonight, or could we have dinner? Just dinner,” he went on hastily. “I promise.”

  “I’d like to have dinner,” she said. “But going out, everyone seeing us…”