Page 145 of Just One Look
Bubble, Floating
Week after week,and once again, the days were going by. April turning to May, May turning to June and dwindling away toward July, and their schedules never aligning enough for them to make that trip north happen, until she wondered if it ever would. She worked, and Luka worked out in every possible way he was allowed to and attended every Blues training session, probably laboring harder in recovery than he would have if he’d been playing, and never talked about when he’d be back.
It wasn’t easy to plan for the future when your entire success depended on giving all your focus to the present. That was all right in your twenties. In your thirties, though … the days went by.
The problem was, the present was so good. Luka made her dinner some nights, and she took him out for it on others, and now and then, when she couldn’t make it home, on the kind of day when you were lucky even to catch your breath, he came to the hospital and ate a quick dinner in the cafeteria with her, then gave her the sort of kiss goodbye that made everybody turn and look. And all she felt was … triumph.
Which was reprehensible and thoroughly unevolved of her, but there you were. When you’d felt invisible for as long as she had, you were allowed to revel in this, weren’t you? She was floating through her days, somehow more sure of herself than ever in the OR, and so glad to go home when surgery was done. Like she was living in a bubble, delicate and translucent, glinting with all the colors of the rainbow, drifting on the wind.
She had a life at last, and right now, so much about it was beautiful. That first dinner with Marko and Nyree, for example, two nights after the most intense sex of her life, when she was facing Luka across the table in another intimate little restaurant. She wore the red dress and the high black heels and black lingerie like cobwebs, and when they went home, Luka didn’t grab her. He kissed her and took her hand up the stairs, and then he lit the candles she’d bought that day to put on the bedside tables, because surely she was allowed to have sex by candlelight if she wanted to. Why shouldn’t she get to have everything, here in her bubble?
The languorous fatigue in her muscles after a day spent walking miles along a beach, clambering over rocky promontories, walking through a narrow sea cave with her hand on its black wall, listening to the heartbeat of the surf like the blood in her ears, the world’s circulatory system. After throwing sticks into the sea for Webster and running with him in short spurts of effort, twirling in the wind, laughing as he sprinted into the water and flung himself joyously through the waves, then paddled back and shook all over her, the panting smile on his face telling you that if he was only called to rescue somebody, his day would be complete, because he was aNewfoundland.
After a long, steamy shower, too, a getting-ready session that hadn’t required a dark, sexy playlist, because she was there already, and a dinner where she’d eaten a little too much seafood and drunk a little bit more than that, had talked and laughed until the tears came to her eyes at the sassy tease-dance Nyree did with Marko and the performance he put on for her. And then walking into that bedroom again with her head spinning a little, the blue-green paua-picture glowing above the bed, and her breath already coming faster. And the flaring yellow light of those candles as Luka lit the wicks and turned out the light under the shell.
Their shadows dancing on the wall as he took her in his arms and kissed her, as she twined her arms around his neck and kissed him back. His mouth on her neck in the flickering light, their sole illumination in the depths of eleven o’clock darkness. Undressing her with careful hands, then laying her down still dressed in those black cobwebs and coming down over her.
Murmurs and kisses, hands and mouths and bodies moving languidly, savoring this moment. On her knees on the bed with Luka behind her, kissing her neck again, then her shoulder. His hand on her breast, and hers over it, hanging on. Looking at those hands, light on dark, smooth on rough, soft on hard. The barely-there friction of lace sliding down her thighs, the faintly audible click of a bra fastener releasing, and the delicate tracery of black flowers drifting down to land against white sheets. On her back again, and the surprised, urgent sound of her own voice, not quite forming words. The feel of Luka’s thick hair under her fingers, the rasp of his three-day scruff against her tender flesh as he kissed his way up her body, and the delicious shock of him sliding inside her at last.
Luka, threading his hands through hers, then slowly dragging them over her head. Luka, whispering things to her that were so dirty-sweet, she’d shiver later just remembering them. Luka, taking her up slowly, urging her into that next jump over the cliff, and when she was spiraling down, dragging her back up once more until, finally, he couldn’t be gentle anymore. Until it was fierce and hot, until his breath was hissing through his teeth, his hands were tightening around hers, and he was pushing hard to the finish line, giving it everything he had. Her voice calling out again, and his releasing in a low, agonized groan, because it was so good, it almost hurt.
Luka, afterwards, holding her close, kissing her face, wrapping his arms around her and easing her into sleep.
Other, more casual nights, too. Sitting at the island in Marko and Nyree’s thoroughly modern kitchen on a late-autumn night, the rain lashing the dark windows and Elizabeth holding the baby against her chest and patting her little back. Not because she was evaluating her, not now. Because she washoldingher. Marko across the counter, slicing the rack of lamb he’d prepared, Nyree dressing a salad and putting roasted kumara into a bowl, cubes of vibrant orange and purple, faintly charred and all the sweeter for it. Luka taking the baby, then, when Elizabeth got up to set the table, and his hands so careful on her. Not saying much, just holding her and looking at the little face until she smiled. Wide, gummy, and glorious, her dark eyes alight, her little fists waving. He smiled back, looking helpless to do anything else, and Elizabeth’s heart caught in her chest, so hard that she had to put a hand on it. Nyree looked at Marko, and he smiled, too, and after dinner, he played the guitar. Spanish-style, finger-picked instead of strummed, his face intense as he looked down at the instrument, giving his all to the music in the same way he played rugby, like he didn’t know the meaning of “halfway,” while Nyree fed their baby and looked like all she wanted in the world was more of him.
Nights like that were dangerous. Nights like that felt like floating, like flying, but fallingwasflying, wasn’t it? Until you hit the ground, it was. And this wasn’t actually her life. It was her break. If she found it easier to believe in falling than flying … well, she had a reason.
Days go by. She focused on the days, one by one, stringing the memory of them together like a strand of beads, each one different and so many of them beautiful. Lapis lazuli and jade, amethyst and rose quartz. And those nights like pearls, creamy and luminous or shining dark and twisted.
When she talked to Jordan about those days, she didn’t say too much. If she didn’t say it, she didn’t have to analyze it. She didn’t talk to him much at all about those nights. She didn’t talk to anybody about those. Those, she held close.
Other outings, too, some she agreed to and ended up canceling, others she was able to keep. A shopping trip with Jenna, the redhead whose husband was one of the coaches, during which Elizabeth bought jeans and leggings and tried on tops with somebody as curvy as she was, but more secure in it than she’d ever been. Cups of tea in kitchens, coffee dates with babies in strollers.
They accepted so easily, these women. Jenna, inviting her to bring Webster any day she was free on what she called “my dog and baby walks.” Sometimes joined by two or three other rugby partners, sometimes just the two of them with the jogging stroller and the dogs, working their way up the steep path to the top of Mount Eden, or Maungawhau, as she was learning to call it, and standing there, buffeted by the autumn winds, to look over the city and the harbor and the sea, and all the way out to the green islands of the Gulf.
Josie Pae Ata, too, who was a TV star raising four children and married to a rugby captain, as busy as Elizabeth and still the most beautiful woman Elizabeth had ever seen, going for coffee at her neighborhood café in jeans and a T-shirt with the babies in a double stroller. Seemingly untroubled by her celebrity, chatting away like a woman with nothing to prove.
And, always, Nyree, who laughed so easily, who experienced so fully, who saw people in color, who wore her baby on her chest and coaxed Elizabeth to walk in the water on even the coldest, windiest day, and finally had her leaving her shoes behind. Nyree, whose work turned out to be astonishing, so much so that Elizabeth spent an impressive amount of money for a painting that Luka put up over his dining-room table against the worn pink of the bricks. A tablecloth in soft folds of blue, a rustic painted chair, and a basket spilling over with pomegranates, because Nyree didn’t just see people in color, she saw the world that way.
Every time Elizabeth looked at that painting, her heart was happy. That painting said,There are beautiful things in the world, and it’s not a sin to want them, or to enjoy them. There’s so much more out there than you ever dreamed of.And maybe, the sneaky thought kept insisting, she actuallywaspurple. Powerful and spiritual and sensitive.
Maybe not. But maybe so.
“Why is everybody so friendly to me, when I’m only here for a little while?” she finally got a chance to ask, one cold evening in early June, sitting in the stands once more with all of them and holding Arielle, because Nyree kept jumping up to cheer. Not now, though, because the teams were doing something called a “scrum reset,” which meant everybody shoved each other and looked extremely intense, the referee blew his whistle and pawed at the grass like a bull about to charge, because they’d done it wrong, and they started all over again. With somebody at the back of the knot of Blues forwards, somebody big and tall and tough who wasn’t Luka.
Luka himself? He was on a knee on the sidelines, watching the play and running out with water during every brief break. She could look at the set of his shoulders and know how much he longed to be out there, because men like Luka spoke at least as much with their bodies as with their voices, and somehow, she’d become fluent in his language.
Nyree said, “Probably because nobody knows how long their man will be out there, and how long they’ll be sitting here watching him. It’s skill and grunt, but it’s luck, too. He could be here today, then gone. Hugh, the skipper? Everybody knows it’s his last season. He’ll be off to England, him and Josie, to make that good money before he retires, and everybody will miss both of them, but somebody else will be skipper. There’ll be new faces out there, too. It’s not a long career, so you may as well enjoy it for now, and enjoy the people you meet. Besides, if you like somebody, you want to be their friend. Simple.”
“Especially since other people are so focused on the celebrity thing,” Elizabeth said. “Which makes finding company harder, if your new friend’s most pressing question turns out to be, ‘What’s he really like?’ Even in the hospital. You’d be surprised.”
Nyree laughed. “Yeh. We get each other. Something like that. We’re each other’s support system, too, during those long Northern tours, two months on your own with the kids. Also, rugby blokes tend to marry awesome women. You laugh, but it’s true. You need your own thing to do this, your own life. Otherwise, what are you going to do when rugby’s over and he’s not a star anymore? You’ll still have your friends, though, if they’re real. Ifyou’rereal. Which is why we like you. You aren’t looking to be queen of the rugby WAGs. You’ve got a life, and it’s awesome.”
A life of days. A string of beads, getting longer.
* * *
A Sunday in late June,and that four-day overlap in Luka’s schedule and Elle’s had finally happened. Not for a reason he wanted, but because the three-week June test window had put a pause in Super Rugby, and for the first time in years, he wasn’t part of that pause. The All Blacks, including his replacement at No. 8, would be in the gym today, looking casual amidst the joking, the pumping music, the thump on a back from your mate after he finished spotting you on that last, hardest bench press, but making every movement count all the same. Practicing their box jumps, the nimble backs, from their meter-plus perches, laughing at the subpar performance of the bulky forwards. Marko with his hands around the high iron bar, a 35-Kg weight hanging on a chain from the leather belt around his waist, dragging himself into a pullup, doing another one, and then doing three more, pushing past the point where he knew he had to stop, because you always had more in the tank, and you needed to trust that you could find it.
