Kiwi Strong (New Zealand Ever After Book 3) Read online

  Gray said in a wondering tone, “Chastity Worthy. You are joking.”

  “Yeh, well,” I said, not looking at him, “I didn’t choose it.”

  “You can’t change your name, though,” Obedience said. “Your name is revealed to the Prophet by God.”

  “No,” I said. “The Prophet—who’s a man, that’s all—makes up the name to remind you of your place. And that isn’t my place anymore. My name is Daisy.”

  “Daisy … what, again?” Gray asked.

  This was the oddest conversation I’d ever had in my life, except for all the other conversations I’d had with him tonight. I was sitting half-naked in a strange man’s ute with my cap-and-apron-clad sisters in the back, both of them feeling about as out of place as Neanderthals set down in the midst of New York City, talking about names. But names were as good a place to start as any, I reckoned. Names were your identity, so I said, “Daisy Nabhitha Kittredge. Nabhitha’s Indian, like me. Like us. Half of us, anyway. It means ‘fearless.’ That’s why I chose it.”

  “Ah,” Gray said. “Well, that works.”

  “No,” I said, “because I was terrified tonight. It’s an aspirational name.”

  He was grinning again. “Aspirational, eh. Like I said. It works. What about the other two names?”

  “Kittredge, because Dorian and I chose it off a list. “Our new family name. It means ‘cauldron of power,’ and the coat of arms is a gold lion on a black shield. Seemed good. Strong.”

  Fruitful said, “It sounds like a witch’s name.” Not in the way Obedience would have said it, with fear. With fascination instead.

  “Well,” I said, “that’s what I thought. The very last thing from ‘Worthy.’ I’ll be a witch, thank you very much. And ‘Daisy’ is just because I liked it. Daisies are straight, they’re simple, and they’re cheerful and easy. And that was going to be me. That is me.”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘easy’ was your defining quality,” Gray said. He stuck out a hand. “Pleased to meet you, Daisy Nabhitha Kittredge. Grayson Loto Tamatoa here.”

  “Samoan,” I said.

  “Samoan,” he agreed gravely. “My mum is, anyway. I didn’t choose any of those names, and Loto, as my mum likes to remind me, doesn’t mean ‘fearless’ or ‘warrior,’ or anything like it. A bit embarrassing, really. As we’re on the subject.”

  “Oh, yeh?” I felt much too cheerful for a woman who’d lost too many of her worldly possessions and been shocked by an electric fence all the way into next week. “Let’s hear it.”

  He grinned. Ruefully. Absolutely irresistibly. “Heart. It means heart.”

  “Oh, dear,” I said, and we both grinned like the fools we were.

  “Come on,” he said. “Switch around. I’m driving. I’m the one with the license.”

  I slid to the ground as he did the same, and did my best to pull the shirt and jacket down over my naughty bits both back and front as I passed him. I wasn’t very successful. He didn’t exactly look, but he didn’t exactly look away, either. The sky had some streaks of pink in it now, improving his view, and the air was springtime-chilly on my bare legs. When I’d climbed into the passenger seat, after doing my wholly inadequate best with the shirt again, and he’d pulled back onto the road and was driving toward Wanaka with the ghostly forms of foothills and mountains emerging with the dawn, I 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 lives, and where I stay. When I’m in Wanaka.”

  “You have two houses?” That one came from the back seat, from the bolder girl, the one who’d been in the Punishment Hut. I had a feeling that the Punishment Hut could be a badge of honor for these girls.

  Fruitful, her name was. Daisy had better get onto those names pretty smartly, because the
y were awful.

  “Yeh,” I told her, looking in the rearview mirror and seeing both girls look away fast. Not allowed to meet a man’s eyes? What kind of horrible place was that? “I do.”

  “I didn’t know anybody had two houses,” Fruitful said. “It sounds sinful.”

  I laughed out loud at that. “Oh, we’re all sinful,” I told her. “Haven’t you heard? The trick is knowing it and trying to do better. At least that’s what the man said.” I smiled at her in the mirror again. Let them get used to it this way, once removed. “My mum’s not very sinful, though. She’s pretty safe harbor, my mum. You’ll see.”

  9

  Hope and Change

  Daisy

  This time through, it was light enough to see the town.

  I tried to experience it as my sisters would. They’d have come here, same as me, every year or so for the odd dental appointment, or an illness or injury that wouldn’t resolve with home remedies. They’d have kept their eyes cast down as they crossed the pavements, aware of the looks, the whispers and laughter. Maybe they’d have looked around when their chaperone’s attention was distracted, though, trying to take in all the overstimulating excess and make sense of it.

  The scenic, much-photographed lake with the mountains rising above it in all their snow-capped splendor, you’re thinking. Wanaka, the beauty spot. That isn’t the part that overwhelms you, though, if you’ve grown up in the shadow of the Southern Alps and views like that have been the backdrop to your entire life. No, it’s the cafés spilling out onto the pavement, the tempting shops with all those different, decorative objects in the windows. It’s all that humanity, the boldness and the individuality of it. Everybody dressed differently, everybody expressing themselves, competing for the world’s attention. The singlets and shorts, the bare shoulders and legs, and the women with their loose hair, their makeup, the confident way they moved. As if they owned their own bodies and their own selves, as if they were entitled to take up their own space and nobody was going to tell them different.

  And then the dentist’s office itself. Had Fruitful jumped out of the chair the moment the dentist left the room to grab a copy of Woman’s Weekly or Next off the table in the same way I had, stuffing it down inside her undies like the contraband it was? Had she crept away to the hollowed-out trunk in the stand of poplars the next day to find the spot where she’d stashed it after Laundry Rotation, then sat on the ground with her knees pulled up and the magazine resting on them, poring over some blond celebrity’s description of her first crush, first kiss, first car? Had she rolled the idea over in her mind of a boy you could dream about and kiss and touch, a boy you could choose for yourself, when you wanted? Or not choose, if you wanted that? Had she been ashamed of her thoughts, known she couldn’t share them with anyone, but been unable to keep them from crowding in?

  Had she even, maybe, read an interview with the Prime Minister, jolted by the concept that a woman could lead a nation of men, and that they’d allow it?

  I gazed through my sisters’ eyes at the town, just starting to wake in the dawn light. A man in a fluorescent vest out collecting rubbish with a spiked pole, a woman opening the doors to a café. And I wondered how much of my impetus to run had come not from the treatment I’d received in Mount Zion, but from those tantalizing glimpses of Outside.

  If you want to keep somebody prisoner, don’t let her see outside the cell. It’s not so much your punishments that will drive her to escape, you see. It’s that square of blue sky.

  You can try to oppress a woman. You can hurt her and demean her. You can make her question her abilities and even her sanity, and make her doubt that she can survive on her own. You can do all of that, but it’s her hope that will defeat you in the end. It’s that article in a magazine, that glimpse of a different life. It’s the older woman on the street on the way to the dentist’s office, the one who’s cut her hair short and wears makeup, but who looks beyond your ugly dress and cap and cludgy white trainers and terrible otherness to smile at you and say, “It’s lovely to see the sun again, isn’t it, after all the rain?” She’s the one who makes you wonder. She’s the one who makes you hope, and hope is what gives you the strength to push past your fear and take that leap.

  This time, I could actually see the houses get posher as Gray drove up the hill, and when he pulled up the drive again and I saw the glass-and-steel rectangle of a house that was his, I wondered how I could ever have thought it belonged to anyone else. He was gray leather and shining bare floors. The comfortable woman I’d met? She’d have had a flowered couch and window boxes. I couldn’t be that wrong about Outside. It was where I lived now. It was my home.

  I wanted to say something comforting to the girls. I couldn’t think of a thing. Instead, I told Gray, “I need something to wear. Another blanket, maybe. Could you bring something out?”

  He stripped off his flannel jacket, revealing a red T-shirt beneath that was doing some work to cover all that chest. There was a tribal tattoo covering his left arm, too, emerging from the T-shirt like a painted sleeve and stretching all the way past the serious muscle of his forearm. The design was intricate, but of the more angular, coal-black, Samoan variety, more like a woven pattern and with less of the spiral Maori koru.

  I couldn’t help but notice it. It was right there, and I was an Emergency nurse. I saw tribal tattoos every day. Not necessarily on arms like his, but still.

  He didn’t notice me noticing, because he said, “You could wear that as a skirt, maybe. Hang on a sec, though. You and the girls.” He jumped out of the car with the same sort of loose-limbed grace he’d shown all night, then took the four steps to the front door in one leaping stride as if all of this had only been his warmup, and he was ready to get stuck in at last.

  Gray

  My mum still wasn’t in bed. I doubted she’d been there at all since I’d first woken her, because she was folding the washing now on the kitchen bench. At the moment, that was Daisy’s undies. They were red cotton. Bikinis. They were very small. The bra was red as well. Also small. And with no padding to it.

  Women always did padding, in my experience. I wasn’t sure if it was to make their breasts look bigger or to keep their nipples from showing. Either way, I wasn’t a fan. And, yes, I knew enough to keep my opinion to myself.

  “Hi, Mum,” I said, bending to give her a kiss. “I brought those girls home, I’m afraid. All three of them. Couple nights’ emergency lodging, that’s all.”

  “Course you did,” she said. “I’ve made up the bed in the spare room, and done your room as well. Thought you’d like to switch with them, give them the good bath and all. I think Daisy liked that bath. Where are they, though?”

  “Still in the ute.”

  She slapped her hands down on the benchtop. “Well, bring them in, Gray, for pity’s sake. What did you imagine I’d say? ‘Be off with you, you heathen wretches?’ They’ve been up all night and likely scared to death. They’ll need food, hot baths, and sleep. Go get them, and let’s get cracking.”

  Daisy

  The minute the truck door closed behind Gray, Fruitful asked, “Will he really help us? Why?”

  “Is he your appointed husband?” Obedience asked. “Is that why?”

  “No.” I wrapped Gray’s shirt around my waist and tied the sleeves into a knot over at the side, feeling marginally less naked and definitely warmer. I was still giddy, and I was also monstrously, impossibly hungry. I should be collapsing in a fit of tears. All I wanted, though, was a pizza. Not a slice of pizza. A whole pizza. I told Obedience, “There’s no such thing as an appointed husband Outside. And if he says he’ll help us, he will. He already did, didn’t he?”

  “But why?” Fruitful asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe he’s a helpful person.”

  Gray came out the door again the same way he’d gone in, leaping down the stairs in one go and jogging lightly over to the driveway, and I flashed back, despite my exhaustion, despite my emotion, desp
ite all of the mad things that had happened tonight, to the way he’d vaulted up into the truck bed earlier. I sat there, his flannel jacket, still warm from his skin, draped over my thighs, saw the tattoo and the close-cropped, wanting-to-curl black hair, all that chest and athleticism and hard body, and got a rush of heat that made me shudder.

  Why, after everything I’d done to change my life, was my libido still so stuck on physical strength, on hardness, on that exact kind of male … otherness? I could say it was the adrenaline talking, or that he’d been so sweet when he’d held me and laughed. I knew better. It was the way he’d jumped into that truck, and worse—it was the way he’d held that shovel like he could hold off the world, including my father, and the way he’d made me go on to safety.

  I resented the rigid gender roles I’d grown up under, and I rejected them. Masculinity and femininity weren’t opposite poles, they existed on a continuum. I knew that, and I so wanted to want a man like Dorian, my twin. A gentle, cerebral type who’d indulge my take-charge tendencies with a tolerant smile, because he wasn’t threatened by them. Or like Matiu Te Mana, the Emergency doc I’d thought could be my destiny a couple years back. A take-charge type himself, because he had to be in that job, but safely fifteen years older than me. Safely easygoing, good-natured, and quietly competent, too. That had never gone anywhere at all, though, much as I liked Matiu, and I didn’t think it had just been him.

  No spark. No rush of inappropriate heat up the legs. No flustered, unsettling catch in my breath.

  I refused to think I had PTSD. But if not, why did I have this glitch in my wiring? Why, unless I was actually damaged, would I only be attracted to the kind of man whose masculinity scared me, the kind who drove dusty trucks and wore work boots, who knew how to use tools and had too much muscle and didn’t seem afraid of anything? Why couldn’t my brain let go of that impossible attraction and let me, you know, actually have sex? With somebody I could trust not to hurt me?