Just for Fun (23 page)

“I shouldn’t have had this second glass,” she sighed. “I’m
getting too sleepy. Can you drink the rest?”

“Reckon I could,” he said with a smile. “As I’m on holiday.”

She stood up and stretched languidly, her back arching, arms
reaching overhead. He paused, arrested in the act of drinking, watching that
little shirt ride up, exposing a couple centimeters of belly. Bloody hell. Did
she have any idea what she was doing to him?

“I’m going to bed,” she said, running both hands through her
curls, her breasts lifting with the action and sending another surge of heat
through him. “Being at the beach always does this to me. Makes me so sleepy.
And I don’t know what you have planned for us tomorrow.”

He set his glass down, stood up as well. “Are you doing this
on purpose?”

“What?” she asked in obvious confusion, her eyes widening.

“Being so . . . so sexy? I didn’t think I was such rubbish
at reading women, but I don’t have a clue if you’re trying to send me a message
or not. So I’m just going to come straight out and ask.”

“Oh. No. Unless . . . no. I wasn’t meaning to.”

He sighed. “I was afraid of that.”

“Goodnight, then.” She smiled at him. Too sweet. Too soft.

He reached for her, kissed her on the cheek, wanting so much
more. His lips brushed her skin once again, then he lost the battle and gave
her a soft kiss on the lips, held her close for just a moment more before he
released her reluctantly and stepped back. “Goodnight.”

Another smile, and she turned and walked to her bedroom. He
watched her go, saw the outline of her bra strap under the snug little shirt,
the smooth lines of her bum under the tight, faded jeans. Either she wasn’t
wearing anything under those, or it was a thong. Either way, it was making him
ache. And he was going to bed alone.

 “What are we doing today?” Zack asked the next morning, when
he and Graham were sitting at the scrubbed wood table with their bowls of
Weet-Bix. “Are we going to the beach again? Or on the glass boat?”

“I was thinking about the cave, up at Waipu,” Nic said. “See
the glowworms, do a bit of exploring. What d’you reckon? Anybody scared of the
dark?”

“A
cave?”
Zack said. “Sweet as, huh, Graham?”

“Yeh!” Graham agreed. “Cool!”

“Is it safe?” Emma asked doubtfully. “And is your ankle up
to it?”

“Course. Long as we have torches. I’ve been there before,”
Nic assured her. “More than once. I know the twists and turns of it.
And
I’ll
wear my ankle brace, Mum. You coming to make sure of it, or would you rather
stay here?”

“I’d like to come,” Emma decided. “It sounds fun.”

“You’re not scared of the dark, then, yourself,” Nic asked.

“Nah. Mum’s just scared of spiders,” Zack told him.

“Shh,” she said with a laugh. “Don’t tell Nic my guilty
secrets.”

“Spiders are good, though,” Graham piped up. “They kill
flies. And they won’t hurt you. There aren’t any bad spiders in En Zed. Not
like in Aussie. You don’t have to be scared, Emma.”

“Thanks,” she smiled at him. “I know you’re right. But it
isn’t rational, I’m afraid. It’s just that they’re so . . . crawly.” She
shuddered. “It’s all those
legs.”

“She screams,” Zack told Nic with delight. “When she sees
them. And then she gets out the glass cleaner, and she squirts them, and she
really
screams. And then she picks them up with a tissue and flushes them down the
loo.”

“I don’t
scream,”
Emma said, laughing but completely
embarrassed now. “Unless they’re those really big black ones.
Then
I
scream, I admit. But usually I just . . . make scared noises. Because I
hate
them.”

“Like this,” Zack said, ever-helpful. “Ewww! Aahhhh! IHHH!” 

“You s’posed to pick them up and put them outside,” Graham told
her as Emma succumbed to the giggles, seduced by Nic’s burst of laughter. “You
get a piece of paper, and put it under them so they walk on it. Then you carry
the paper outside and let them go, so they can catch flies!”

“Ugh,” Emma shuddered, still laughing. “Ugh, ugh, ugh.
They’d walk on my hand.”

“Hardly ever,” Graham assured her. “And then you just brush
them off.”

“Please stop talking about this,” Emma moaned. “Let’s talk
about caves instead. I’m not scared of caves.”

“Right. Everybody ready?” Nic asked, coming into the lounge
with his day pack. “Where are your gumboots?” he asked Emma.

“Oh, I just wear my trainers,” she told him.

“It’ll be wet in there,” he objected. “Muddy, too.”

“So I’ll wash them, afterwards. It’ll be fine.”

“Thought you were a citizen,” he said. “Didn’t they check
that you had gumboots, when they vetted you? Isn’t that one of the rules? You
have to know all the words to
Aotearoa,
own a pair of gummies, and be
able to shell and eat a plate of prawns in under five minutes?”

 “I can do the rest of it, but I don’t have gumboots. Put
the cuffs on me.” She held her wrists out, laughed up at him, and Nic was
overcome by a flash of imagination that left him aroused and exasperated. This
was ridiculous. He was a grown man, not a teenage boy.

“Yeh, well, guess you’ll have to get muddy then,” he said,
doing his best to stay cool. “Ready, boys?”

“Yeh!” Zack said enthusiastically.

“Let’s go, then.” But as they were walking down the steps to
the car, with the boys running ahead, he called them back.

“Why are you walking like that?” he asked Zack. “Something
wrong? A blister? Let’s get that sorted, before we go.”

“Nah,” Zack said, embarrassed. He glanced at his mother,
then hastily away. “My gummies feel funny, that’s all.”

“Hang on.” Nic reached down to feel his foot in the boot,
then glanced sharply up at Emma. “His toes are curling under,” he told her.
“These are too small for him.”

“What?” She knelt down, felt Zack’s toes. Nic was right, she
realized. “Oh, sweetie. Why didn’t you tell me you needed new boots?”

Zack glanced uncomfortably at Graham, dropped his eyes. “I
didn’t want to say,” he muttered. “Because.”

“Because why?” Emma asked.

“Because you said,” he told her reluctantly. “That we’re not
s’posed to spend money. Because of the car. You
said
, Mum!”

“Oh, baby.” She went to hug him, but he squirmed away.
“Mum,”
he said, scarlet with embarrassment. “Don’t.”

“Can we go now?” he pleaded to Nic. “I can walk.”

“Yeh,” Nic said, unsmiling. “We’ll go by way of Warkworth.
With a stop for gumboots.”

The trip was a success despite its inauspicious start, to
Emma’s relief. Nic had insisted on buying her a pair of gumboots as well, when
they’d reached the shop. She’d picked out an inexpensive black version of the
knee-high rubber boots, but he’d seen her longing glance and had asked the salesman
to bring out the floral ones with pink edging.

“I love them,” she said when she’d slipped them on, stood
admiring herself in the mirror. “I don’t need them, though. Black is OK.”

“Whyever would I buy you black boots, now that I’ve seen you
in those?” Nic asked. “If anyone was ever meant to wear gumboots with flowers
on—which I’d have doubted, before—it’s you.”

“We’ll take them,” he told the young salesman. “And the
others, the kids’ ones, as well.” Zack had insisted on black boots rather than
anything more colorful. “You have black,” he’d told Nic. “I want ones like
yours.” Then had looked down, shy again.

Theirs was the only car in the Waipu Caves carpark, and the
boys were delighted to find horses pastured in the paddock that also served, in
typical New Zealand fashion, as the start of the walking track and cave
entrance. After a pause for petting and carrot-feeding—taking care of most of
the vegetable content in the lunch Emma had packed so carefully—they made their
way to the sign marking the cave entrance.

“Why didn’t I know this was here?” Emma asked, switching on
her torch to enter the cavern.

“Because you needed somebody to show you,” Nic said smugly.
“And here he is.”

“Are you sure you know the way, though?” she asked with concern
as they penetrated more deeply, leaving the light at the entrance behind. She
was glad for the gumboots with their ridged soles. They were skirting a running
stream now, its banks muddy and slippery.

“Dead sure,” he said. “Look at this, fellas,” he told the
boys, playing his torch over a large formation hanging down from the ceiling.
“D’you know what this is?”

“It’s a stalactite. Or a stalagmite,” Emma said when the
boys confessed ignorance. “I can never remember.”

“Stalactite. ‘The mites go up, the tights come down,’” he
quoted. “That’s how to remember.”

“Ew,” she said. “Nasty imagery. But effective.”

“Shut off the torches, now,” he directed them. “And you’ll
see something.”

“Glowworms!” Graham said, looking at the pinpricks of light
overhead. “Like at Waitomo!”

“Been there, have you?” Nic asked.

“I haven’t,” Zack said.

“We’ll have to take you, then, another time,” Nic told him.
“But there’re heaps of glowworms right here, for us to find ourselves. First, though,
we have to make it through this tricky bit. Torches on. And if you come along
in back, Emma, we’ll just keep them between us. I can help them over, if they
need a bit of a hand.”

It
was
tricky, Emma found, wading through the water,
climbing up and down through rocky passages and edging around corners. Some of
the boulder-scrambling was too much for the boys, and Nic did have to reach
down and give them a hoist over. She was glad he seemed to know where they were
going, because her sense of direction was soon thoroughly confused by the
twists and turns in the dark.

“Are you sure you’ve got this right?” she asked him
nervously as he directed them to a right at a junction of passages, developing
an uncomfortable mental image of the four of them, lost and cold in the
deserted cavern. “Should we have brought string, or something?”

His voice echoed back to her. “Nah. Don’t need string. I
know where we are. Another turn or two, and you’ll really see something.”   

Five minutes on, and she realized what he meant. They dropped
down out of a passage to find themselves in a huge underground space with a
level floor. They shone their torches around at the carved, twisted rock surfaces,
the spectacular stalac-
‘tites,’
Emma reminded herself, hanging down from
the ceiling.

“And here’s the real show,” Nic told them. “Let me give you
a bit of a boost, and you’ll see what I mean.”

He lifted the boys up onto a large, flat rock formation,
like a king-sized bed in the middle of the room, then offered Emma a hand up.

“Now, lie on your backs,” he instructed. “Torches off. And
enjoy.”

It was a full glowworm panorama, Emma found with delight. For
all the world like a night sky, the distances deceptive here in the dark. They
lay in silence, resting after the effort of climbing through the tunnels. Lying
next to Zack on the hard stone, listening to the stream, its sound magnified a
hundredfold by the echoing rock passages, looking up at the hundreds of little
glowworm stars, Emma realized that she was, at this moment, absolutely,
perfectly happy.

The journey out was slower, a bit more difficult. The
boys were getting tired now, requiring more help to clamber over the boulders
in the dark. They remained enthusiastic, though, to Emma’s relief, encouraged
by Nic’s good humor. And when they were once again blinking in the daylight
outside the cave entrance, the horses grazing peacefully in the paddock beyond,
she had to laugh.

“I’ve never seen anything so muddy,” she told them both.
“How did you manage to get mud all the way up to your
necks?”

“That’s why there’s a shower over here,” Nic told her,
leading the way to the toilets which did, Emma saw, feature an outdoor shower
on one side. “And why I had you bring them dry clothes.”

“I don’t have to take a shower, do I?” Zack asked dubiously.
“It’s going to be
cold.”

“Not a real shower,” Nic assured him. “But you do have to
get some of that mud off. Drop your gear, and we’ll get to it. Sooner you’re
clean, sooner we can eat.”

Emma ran for the bag of clean clothes and the big towel,
tossed them to Nic in deference to Graham’s modesty, then went into the ladies’
toilet herself to change and clean up. It was such a relief to have somebody
else taking charge, not to have to look after Zack before she could think about
herself. She could hear Nic joking with the boys, their squeals as he scrubbed
their muddy arms, necks, and faces in the freezing water. She waited until she
could tell by the conversation outside that they were finished, then popped her
head out.

“Everybody decent? Safe for girls?” she asked.

“Good as gold,” Nic told her. He was scrubbing his own arms
and hands under the tap now, rinsing the worst of the mud off his gumboots, and
she went to join him.

“It’s
freezing,
Mum!” Zack said happily.

“Brr,” she shivered. “It is.” She reached for the towel,
dried herself off, handed it to Nic. “Thanks,” she told him.

“For what?”

“For taking care of them.”

“No worries. Hoping you did a proper job on that picnic,
though. Because you’ve got three hungry men here.”

The boys were quiet on the twisting road home, the winter
dusk falling early, the interior of the ute warm and cozy. Thank goodness Nic
had thought to warn her, and Emma had been able to give Zack a carsickness
tablet. Both boys were nearly asleep by the time Nic pulled into the bach’s
driveway, but rallied themselves enough to climb into the big shower together
and scrub down the rest of the way under Nic’s direction. Emma could hear him
in there, washing hair and issuing instructions. She caught the high-pitched
sound of their excited responses as she threw muddy gear into the washing
machine in the laundry alcove nearby.