Page 38 of The Player in New Zealand
“You don’t like talking about your rugby career. How is that different?”
Tane threw a glare at me before turning to face ahead again. “What, you want a quid pro quo? Fine, my rugby career was taken away from me after a bad tackle and now I’m just a fat fucker who drinks too much. Your turn.”
His bitterness flooded the car, crawling into my senses; I could smell it, taste it.
“Used to,” I said.
“What?” He glanced at me, eyebrows scrunched up.
“You used to drink too much.”
He did a double take, eyes on the road and back to me, back to the road and back to me.
His face softened, shoulders dropping an inch or two.
“It wasn’t that long ago that I gave it up.”
I shrugged. “Doesn’t make it any less true. You used to drink too much.”
He nodded, looking thoughtful, and I watched the road pass by outside for a while.
“I had a group of friends,” I started, “that I played D&D with. Like, when I was thirteen, there were six of us. We met in the back of one kid’s parents’ bar. It was probably, like, a mobster spot or something for illegal gambling, but they let us use it on Saturday mornings.”
He said nothing, just nodded in acknowledgment.
“It was all guys, of course. And I was a stick prepuberty. You know, unlike my voluptuous curves today,” I said, gesturing at my flat chest.
Tane glanced over. “Curves don’t make women sexy, Claire. Women make themselves sexy.”
I flushed, even though his perusal was quick. “Well, whatever. I grew up playing games with a bunch of boys who basically looked like me but with acne and crooked teeth and then braces and changing voices. They were my best friends, but we started to grow up. And people change.”
I looked out the window at the two-lane highway, the occasional car coming by. We were out in the middle of nowhere, rural New Zealand.
“Do you still keep in touch with them?” he asked me.
“No.”
“What happened?”
It took a few breaths for me to get the words out. I hated how they always sounded, conceited, even if I wished everything were different. “There was one guy in our group. He was my best friend. We had, like, no parental supervision and we’d thought it was so cool of our parents.”
I stared at the road ahead, remembering the good times. Others in our game lamented about things like curfews and having to keep their bedroom door open. We played our own games, staying up late at night, hardly spending time apart.
“But it was like a switch was flipped one day for him. I was no longer his best friend. I was a girl. I was an easy target for him. We spent all our time together anyway—what was a kiss here or a touch there?”
I glanced over at Tane, watching for reactions, but he was silent, staring out the windshield and flexing his hands on the steering wheel.
“I was a stupid teenager, and so confused, and when I complained, my parents said, ‘Boys will be boys.’ They’d barely been parental figures when I was a kid; it just got worse after I graduated high school. That’s when Devon really started getting bad.” I paused, gathering up my thoughts. “He started talking about plans for us, like we’d move in together, and I had no say in it. He said I owed him. Like he’d put up with me for years, been my best friend just so that when I got ‘hot’”—I air-quoted the words—“he’d get to sleep with me.”
Tane stroked his face, keeping his eyes on the road, but his jaw was tense. It felt delicate, unintrusive, when he finally asked, “How bad did it get?”
“I never slept with him. But it scared me. One time he got me alone and pushed me up against the wall of an alley. I—I don’t know what would have happened if a coworker hadn’t interrupted us.” I took a deep breath and Tane let me gather myself.
“It took us years—and some help from a lawyer friend of Iris’s—to get a restraining order. Devon would hang around for a while, disrupt my job and get violent with anyone he thought I was dating, whether I was or not. Then he’d disappear again. Every time, I’d think maybe he was finally gone for real. But he always popped back up. Anyway, that’s one reason I decided to come to New Zealand. I needed a change of scenery, and he doesn’t know I’m here. He wouldn’t think to look for me here.” I turned my attention out the window, feeling too fragile to see Tane’s reaction.
“I’m sorry, Claire.”
“Thank you. So, yeah, I hate it when people compliment my looks.”
