Читать книгу Anything but Ordinary - Madelynne Ellis, Madelynne Ellis - Страница 10

Kara did the only sensible thing she could think of after Ric and Zach left. She stripped the bed, then got in the shower. Her brother was home and would no doubt want his room back, which meant she’d be kipping on the couch, unless she could find a more appealing place to sleep. Beachcomber’s Barn lacked a spare room.

However, it wasn’t the prospect of backache from the battered old leather couch that had her stomach in knots. That was down to having to face Chris. Somehow she suspected no matter how long she hid upstairs it wouldn’t be long enough.

God, just find your sense of humour and see the funny side, please.

When she crept down the stairs forty minutes later, smelling of talc and her favourite perfume, she was still trying to concoct ways to avoid a confrontation. Maybe she could sneak out of the back door and join Ric and Zach at the fort for the night. Sharing a bed with her lovers was certainly preferable to defusing the bomb that was her brother’s temper. She’d even overlook the fact the two of them had run off and left her to deal with this alone – cowards.

Actually, the fact that they’d left her smarted more than she wanted to admit. They’d only gone and given roots to the doubts Chris had seeded.

I’m not an interloper.

I’m the link holding this together.

Prior to her involvement, Ric and Zach had been fuck buddies and nothing else. No relationship, no solidity and definitely no emotional attachment. At least on Ric’s part there’d been none. Zach was another story.

‘Kara, is that you?’

Damn, he’d heard her. She ignored the summons, and headed into the kitchen to bundle the soiled bedding into the washing machine.

Chris had littered the kitchen surfaces with items. He’d always been untidy. It was something both their mum and his live-in lover had complained about in the past. On this occasion, she was prepared to forgive it, given he didn’t know where anything went, and it gave her an excuse to postpone the confrontation an extra five minutes as she put everything away.

I know I only came here to housesit, but Liddell Island has become my home. Don’t screw that up for me, Chris. I’m happy. I’m really, goddamned happy.

OK – she was going to have to face this…face him.

Kara meandered her way around the stack of luggage in the hall to reach the living room, where to her relief she found Chris crashed out in the armchair with his open laptop balanced on his knee. Yay! Storm temporarily averted. He’d have a clearer head if they left this until morning.

‘I’m not actually asleep,’ Chris muttered as she turned away. ‘Come back in and let’s talk.’

Kara peered over her shoulder to find him adopting a more upright pose, though his head still lolled against the armchair back as if it was too heavy for his neck to support.

‘I dunno. Maybe I should let you get some rest. We can do this in the morning.’

Chris looked at her through the gaps between his fingers as he massaged the sleep from his eyes. His normally smooth jawline was currently softened by a line of golden fuzz, and his mouth kept on opening wide around successive yawns.

‘I don’t want to leave this and have it eating away at me all night. Get a drink or whatever you need and let’s get it over with.’

‘Talking, or pissing one another off some more?’

He closed the computer lid with a decisive snap. It seemed it was going to be the latter. She realised not all the grim lines etched into his face were down to tiredness, a lot of them were down to his current opinion of her.

‘Chris, you do realise whatever it is you’re going to say isn’t going to change anything, right?’ She settled uncomfortably on the sofa arm, legs spread wide, but her arms folded.

Rather than mirroring her pose, Chris set the laptop aside and leaned forward.

‘You could at least hear me out, or is it too difficult to hear the truth? For heaven’s sakes, Kara, what are you doing? A one-off with two guys I could just about get my head around. We’ve all had our slutty moments, but long-term? Have you considered what people will think and say about you? I mean, I understand that you needed to let rip when you got here, and it’s far away enough from Mum for you to be uninhibited, but don’t you think this is taking it a bit far?’

‘No. I think it’s perfect.’

‘You know it can’t work indefinitely?’

‘Actually, I don’t see why not.’ They’d survived nine months without any significant issues arising. It wasn’t like they were all riddled with jealousy and constantly checking up on one another. That and none of Liddell Island’s permanent residents had said a damn thing. At least, not to her. The only condemnation had come from her ex and the odd conservative tourist, like the woman on the beach.

‘What about marriage, children…’ Chris insisted, as if those things were inevitable and not optional. She’d already ruled out marriage after the fiasco with Gavin. Ric was set against tying the knot again, having already done it once, so the first of Chris’s arguments was void already. As for children – they practised birth control.

‘I don’t need either to be happy. The same goes for them. Having one another is enough.’

Actually, they hadn’t really discussed the long-term future. She had no idea if either of the guys wanted kids. The subject hadn’t arisen. In any case, they were prepared to take life a day at a time and live in the moment. That was what island life was like – quiet, even with the recent influx of tourists. Days slipped into one another, and weeks and months passed without the need for constant planning. It wasn’t like living in the city, where even going to grab a coffee had to be recorded in triplicate on numerous electronic devices and tweeted about afterwards.

‘Having one another…’ Chris forced a laugh. ‘That’s a good one. How exactly do you have one another? Are you there for each other when you get sick? Do you go for candlelit suppers and sit on the back row of the cinema snogging each other?’

‘Only teenagers do that.’

‘Oh, hang on,’ he continued, ‘I’ve already had a demonstration. What you mean is that you let them fuck you both at once. You know fucking isn’t the same as love, don’t you, Kara? The two don’t actually equate.’

‘They’re not mutually exclusive either,’ she shot back.

‘So it’s love? You’re in love with two men and you’re all equal? Yeah, right.’ He sat back as if he’d scored a point.

‘Yes, actually,’ she blurted, leaping to her feet. She began to pace. All right, so when you got down to the nitty-gritty not everything was perfectly balanced, but she and the guys were fine with that. Things weren’t skewed in a way that left anyone out. Zach favoured Ric over her, so what? No relationship was ever uniform. Couples didn’t always love one another equally.

‘They’re using you.’

She stilled.

‘What?’

‘They’re just avoiding climbing out of the closet.’

God, he was so full of himself. He’d only been on the island for an hour, and spent thirty seconds with her lovers, and already he was making judgement calls on their integrity.

Kara shook her head. ‘Oh, you are so full of shit, brother. First you accuse me of being a slut, then tearing a relationship apart, and now they’re using me because they’re frightened people might think they’re gay. Do you know what Ric does for a living? He’s a photographer. He takes explicit pictures of people having sex. He’s not worried about what people think.’

Ric was a little commitment-phobic, but he had absolutely no qualms about his sexuality.

‘Really, he doesn’t give a shit what anyone thinks. He doesn’t even think in your narrow terms of orientation. And Zach – Zach’s his model. He doesn’t care either. They’re shacked up together, for God’s sake.’

‘Hmm, they’re shacked up and you’re living here.’

‘You hired me to housesit. I’ve been house-sitting.’

She resumed pacing back and forth across the worn brown carpet. She had done some decorating since she’d been here, but had avoided making changes that involved significant expense. She didn’t have any money, and Chris was forever forgetting to wire it. What he had sent had covered a few tins of emulsion and some new curtains.

‘Now you’re home, you won’t need me for that any more.’

She could move into the fort with Ric and Zach, and be all equal. Hopefully that would shut Chris up. She wished she knew what his goddamned problem was. What had happened to the reasonable, liberal-minded man she’d grown up with? He’d never been this blinkered or bigoted before. Confrontational sometimes, yes, but normally over stuff that mattered. Things like equal rights and social injustice. Things he seemed determined to deny her.

She stared at him. His lips were drawn back into a scowl, and his blue eyes burned with righteous fury.

‘Where’s this coming from, Chris? What’s your problem?’

‘You’re being damned irresponsible for one, and short-sighted for another. You’ve barged into a pre-existing relationship on a whim and now you’re exploiting the fuck out of it. It’s all going to end in ruin because you couldn’t keep your knickers on.’

‘How dare you? You know nothing about my life for that last nine months. You don’t know Ric and Zach. You’ve no idea what I walked into. They were fuck buddies before I came along, OK. There was nothing deep and meaningful.’

‘But I suppose there is now. You’ve healed everything with your magic pussy, because that’s really what every gay guy needs.’

Kara stared at him, mouth agape. When he’d hinted at much the same thing upstairs, she’d taken it as his temper getting the better of him. Deep down, she hadn’t believed for a minute it was what he actually thought.

‘As I told you in the bathroom,’ she hissed indignantly, ‘neither of them are gay.’

If they were, Zach wouldn’t have picked her up in that nightclub the evening her wedding was supposed to have taken place, and Ric wouldn’t have hidden the keys to the barn the night she’d first arrived on Liddell Island and proposed a kinky challenge that involved getting her off if she didn’t happen to find them.

Their relationship was not built around the notion of the guys curing themselves of an obsession with one another.

It wasn’t.

‘Oh, my God, Chris, I thought you’d seen enough of the world to accept that people swing in many directions. What happened? Did you join a brainwashing cult in New Zealand? Just because you don’t get off on the idea of fucking women doesn’t mean that some other guy who also happens to sometimes do men feels the same way. We don’t just get it on while we’re all together, you know? They’re not shy about touching one another, or me. It’s stable. It’s good. It’s been fucking fantastic, actually. How about you try and be happy for me? I’ve found two guys who aren’t dickheads that I adore. That’s a vast improvement on what I had the last time we spoke face to face.’

‘Your relationship with Gavin was never going to hurt anyone but yourself.’

‘What?’ she gasped. Her former fiancé had been a manipulative control freak, but apparently that was all right because she’d chosen to be with him and the only person getting screwed was her.

Except she hadn’t been getting screwed, at least not to her satisfaction.

‘I think we’d better end this discussion right now, because I can’t believe you just said that.’

‘Said what?’

‘That it’s fine if I’m blisteringly unhappy because I chose that, but it’s not fine for me to choose to be happy because it might make someone else sad. Not that it is, since both Ric and Zach are thoroughly on-board with the threesome thing.’ She stopped pacing and stood with her hands on her hips, shaking her head. ‘I’m going to go and pack my things. It’s a bit late to go anywhere now, so I’ll leave in the morning, and you can wash your hands of me.’

‘I don’t want to wash my hands of you. Kara,’ he called after her as she headed towards the stairs.

‘No!’ she yelled back. ‘Just no. Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it, Chris. I hope this is jet-lag talking and not the new you, because if it’s the latter, you need to sue whoever gave you the personality transplant.’

Kara marched up to the bedroom, where she retrieved her suitcase from the bottom of the wardrobe. She hadn’t arrived with all that much and, since Liddell Island had no shops, she’d acquired very little during her time here. Packing was therefore the work of minutes. It’d be fine. Ric and Zach would welcome her. Maybe she ought to go tonight. Sure, it was late, but it had only just turned twilight.

The only problem would be if they were in the studio, because they might not hear her banging on the door, and in any case Ric tended to ignore callers if he was working.

She was in the bathroom shoving toiletries into her vanity case when Chris thudded his way upstairs.

‘You don’t have to go,’ he said, sticking his head around the bathroom door. ‘Actually, I’d rather you didn’t.’

‘Yeah, but only because you don’t want me shacked up with the two of them, not because you want my company, or you’ve realised you’re being a prick.’

He opened his mouth as if he was about to say something, then closed it again. Kara pushed past him and returned to the bedroom. She dumped the vanity case alongside the open suitcase on the bed.

Chris followed her.

‘I changed the sheets,’ she told him. ‘So you needn’t worry about getting cooties.’

‘I can’t believe you were screwing in my bed in the first place. That’s just…’ He grimaced and stuck out his tongue.

‘Sorry, I must have missed the memo explaining that house rule. Would you rather I’d restricted my activities to some other item of furniture, or was I supposed to act like a nun?’

Chris threw wary glances at various other items of furniture, and then at the camera tripod that Ric had left behind. Some of the colour drained from his face.

New Zealand had aged him, Kara decided. The changes were deeper than his new, shorter haircut. He looked leaner and harder somehow, like all his soft cuddly qualities had been stripped away.

He was right to contemplate the rest of the furniture though, as nearly every item had been christened in some way, along with most of his kitchen utensils. Ric liked to be inventive, and Zach liked to hug walls and shag in doorways. As for her, she was just happy to get her mitts on two such genuinely gorgeous guys. Everything else was just set dressing.

‘Kara, stop,’ Chris said, sticking his hand in the way of her closing the suitcase. ‘This isn’t what I expected to come back to. Look, I don’t like it, but you’re a grown woman. It’s not like I can force you to break it off.’

‘I’m glad you realise that. I’m still going. I refused to move back to Mum’s after I broke it off with Gavin because I wasn’t interested in being emotionally mind-fucked, hence I’m not going to stay here and take it from you. I don’t care what you think, Chris, your assumptions are all wrong. It’s stable between Ric, Zach and me. It’s secure, and very, very real. It’s not a fling, or some sort of rebound. It’s absolutely what I want and the fact your moral compass says it’s wrong is not going to mean it ends.’

‘OK. I hear you,’ he replied around an enormous baying yawn.

Kara guessed it was the best response she could hope for under the circumstances. She dragged her luggage off the bed and waved Chris towards the pillows. He looked about ready to drop, and even if she was contemplating kicking him, she still cared enough about him to look after him.

‘Get in, before you fall over. You can tell me about New Zealand in the morning.’

‘I thought you were leaving,’ he said, while kicking off his shoes.

‘I am. You can tell me before I go.’

Chris pulled off his shirt and draped it over the footboard. ‘Wake me. Don’t just leave.’

Kara shook her head, then turned away, leaving her possessions stacked beside Ric’s tripod.

‘Just go to sleep.’

She tramped back downstairs, and then stretched her legs by walking a little way along the clifftop. The tide was out in the cove, which left a large semicircle of soft white sand below, but the glow of the sun was no longer on the water, so that it was a dull slate-grey, instead of the blue it had been earlier. She watched the foam lap at the shore and tried to find some peace there.

Something had obviously happened in New Zealand, something that had turned a perfectly reasonable human being into an idiot. She supposed she ought to try and find out what, just not right at this minute. She needed to think about her own situation first.

Moving into the fort might not actually be as straightforward as she’d like. Zach wouldn’t be an issue, but Ric…

Her muscles pulled tight, making her belly ache. Ric could be…

Well, he might actually say no.

Not because she was a crutch as Chris suggested, but because he was funny about people encroaching on his space. It had taken a near tragedy for him to agree to Zach moving in. Her current circumstances weren’t nearly as dramatic.

‘There’s no point fretting all night about it,’ she told herself, making the decision to return to the barn. ‘You’ll just have to see what tomorrow brings.’