Just in Time (14 page)

It wouldn’t be wrong, surely, to put her own submissions up there with the others. She wouldn’t be manipulating their rank, after all. Even if she’d known how to add votes for her chapters behind the scenes, the web developer would know she’d done it. Anyway, she wouldn’t, because that wasn’t the point. She just wanted to see if anybody wanted to read her story. She wanted to know what happened, how Hope and Hemi could ever find happiness. And she wanted to know if anybody else would want to know, too.

Will had apparently decided to forgive her for the pregnancy thing, because he approached her again while she was cleaning up after the shoot. Gretchen had already left, getting a hug and a kiss on the cheek from Will that were nothing but brotherly, Charlotte had taken herself off as well, and their three weeks of shooting were over.

“Bit of a celebration tonight?” he asked her.

She looked up from the fridge, where she was dumping leftovers into the trash. “Finished with this?” he asked, and at her nod, began to pull the bag out and knot it as he’d done every week since the first one. This was the last time Will would take out her trash.

“Sorry?” She realized he’d spoken to her.

“I was thinking that you might want to go for dinner.” He hefted the bag out of the can, and she couldn’t help watching the bulge of triceps as he did it.

He glanced down at himself. “You’re right, I’m not dressed for it. How about if we both glammed up, pretended we were Hope and Hemi?” He grinned. “So to speak. Minus any scenes you didn’t care to reenact.”

“Oh.” She was blushing again, she could tell, because for one horrible, heart-stopping moment, she’d thought he knew. But he couldn’t know. “Sorry. No, I can’t. I have plans.”

“Dinner with your mum again? You’re right, she probably doesn’t want me. Maybe a drink first?”

Did he really think her only possible evening entertainment was with her
mother
? “No.” She didn’t try to disguise the edge to her voice, “I actually have a date.”

She hadn’t been wrong, because he looked startled. She was steaming up a little now, and not from his tattoo. “With a fella, you mean.”

“Yes, this would be with an actual man.”

He looked like he wanted to say something else, but he stopped himself. “I’ll dump this and let you get to it, then.”

“I’ll come talk to you tomorrow, about keys and all.”

“Course,” he said. “Text me.”

She wondered all the same, while she was dressing to go out, what it would have been like if she’d said yes.

A mistake, that was what. She was getting on with her life, pursuing a relationship that might actually have a chance, because Will was leaving in two days. He was leaving forever, and New Zealand was six thousand miles across the Pacific. She’d done the research.

Will set his duffel and suitcase by the front door for the morning. For when he’d leave the apartment, and leave Vegas.

He’d had one final dinner with Solomon and his family, had made an early night of it because of the kids, as usual. He could have gone out again afterwards, found himself the female companionship he hadn’t had since he’d got here. But he hadn’t, and not because he needed the time to pack. After nine years in professional rugby, he’d packed so many times that he could have done it in fifteen minutes.

He could still go out, though. He could go out right this minute. It had barely gone nine, and he had a whole long day of flying tomorrow to sleep. Vegas to LA, then LA all the way to Auckland, and home. And he was restless. He sat on the couch, picked up the remote, and switched the TV on. He started flipping channels, settled on basketball, then muted the sound and watched the action with half his brain, the other divided between thinking about the day before and the time ahead. About whether he was sorry to be leaving Vegas, happy to be going home, or both. And about when Faith had come in last night. He hated to admit that he’d fallen asleep listening for the sound of her door closing, the soft little noises that meant she was in her bedroom, on the other side of the wall from his own. He’d gone to sleep without hearing them, and that wasn’t good at all.

He picked up the remote again and turned the sound up to drown out the thoughts. His hand stilled when he heard the bump, and then the footsteps. Directly outside. Not in the corridor, on the roof that covered the carpark.

Somebody breaking in? His blood stirred a little at the thought. That would be the perfect way to end his American odyssey, and the perfect cure for his restless doldrums, too. And then he realized that it might not be his apartment they were breaking into. It might be Faith’s.

He was moving on the thought. He flipped the light switch on the wall, then edged to the window, slid it open as quietly as he could manage, and peered cautiously out.

At first, he couldn’t see anybody. But he hadn’t imagined that noise. He got his head out there a bit more, and that’s when he saw her, sitting against the wall, wearing a jacket over her jeans, her arms wrapped around her knees. Her face shining in the light of the moon, nearly full tonight, while the glow of the Strip competed for attention to the east. Faith, on the roof.

He grabbed his jacket, shoved the window open the rest of the way, got a leg up there, and swung up and out. “This a private party?” he asked, keeping his voice low. “Or can anybody play?”

She turned her head, her cheek on her knees. “You still here? Not out…saying goodbye?”

“Nah.” He decided to take her answer as a ‘yes,’ went over and sank onto a bit of the blanket she’d brought out to sit on. “There’s nobody I want to say goodbye to more than you.”

She laughed, sounding startled, and he realized what he’d said. “Aw, geez,” he groaned. “I didn’t mean that. I meant…I’ll be sorry to go. In one way. In
that
one way.”

“Mmm. Still. Funny.” She reached for something beside her, held up a wine glass. “Want some? Got the bottle right here. I can grab you another glass.”

“Mind sharing?”

“No.” She handed the glass to him.

She wasn’t touching him. Not quite. Or he wasn’t touching her. Not quite. But she was right there all the same.

He took the glass from her, sipped, and handed it back. She took a drink of her own, not bothering to turn the glass. Her lips were where his had been, and for some reason, even that…

Her eyes caught his over the rim for one arrested moment before she looked away and set the glass down again.

“So how was your date?” he asked, and then could have kicked himself. He didn’t want to know.

“Well…” She sighed. “He was a back-door guy.”

“Sorry?” he managed to ask through a mouth that had gone dry.
What?

“No! Not…not that,” she stammered, then laughed. “Well, probably, but only if he’d bought you a really expensive dinner. The hundred-dollar bottle of wine, which he’d have made sure you saw the price of, and if you didn’t, he’d have told you. He’d have had a whole conversation with the wine steward about it, too. Then he’d have thought you owed it to him. Oh, man. I never thought of that, but he would totally have been that guy. But, no. Not what I meant. I’ve never said that to a man, obviously. All right. Rephrasing. He was a
leave
-by-the-back-door guy.”

“Oh. Good. Brilliant.” His heart settled down again. “Explain.”

“When it’s so bad that you excuse yourself to go to the ladies’ room, and then you leave by the back door?”

“Women do that?”

“Well, not to you, obviously. And I didn’t either, actually. These days, I try to be a little more up-front.”

“So tell me.”

“You really want to know? You want me to describe my
date
to you?”

“Well, now that I know it was bad, I do, because I know you’ll make me laugh.” He smiled into the eyes that looked up at his own. “Before, when it was the back-door thing? Not so much, then.”

“You’re not…” she began, then stopped.

“Not what?”

“Not…jealous, are you?” She laughed a little. “Of course you aren’t. Forget it.”

“Yeh,” he found himself saying. “Yeh, I am. Last night? I was jealous.”

“Oh.” She looked nothing but startled.

“Can’t help myself, it seems. Surprised myself all over the shop with you, haven’t I. I’m not used to being friends with women, and you don’t make it easy.” She wasn’t coming up with an answer to that, so he went on. “So…date?”

“Oh.” She seemed to pull herself back under control. “Well, you know. He works in one of the casinos, and I met him at a work party. I guess he did better in a crowd, because it turned into one of those interview dates, and I kept flunking. What I did for a living, where I went to school. Apparently I’m not impressive.”

“Yeh, you are.”

“You might think so,” she said solemnly. “But you don’t have an MBA, and he does. I went to UNLV for my undergraduate degree, and he went to Harvard. Know how I know?”

He laughed. “Because he told you?”

“Yeah. Sneakily, the way people who go to Harvard
always
tell you. They say ‘Cambridge.’ It’s like a little code, because Harvard is in Cambridge. ‘I played lacrosse for a while, back in Cambridge. Of course, you’re competing with all the kids who grew up playing it at their prep schools, because lacrosse is big on the East Coast, but I managed to acquit myself pretty well.’”

“Sounds like a dickhead.”

She laughed out loud, and he could see the little gap between her teeth in the moonlight, and the tiny, perfect spot of her mole, too. “He was. I was already planning on an early end to my evening when he asked me what my five-year plan was. Can you believe that? My five-year plan?”

“Well, I’ve never asked a girl that, put it that way. What did you say?”

“I told him I was working on getting my criminal record expunged so I could pass the employment checks and get a more prestigious job.”

Will’s bark of laughter rang out in the night. “And then what?”

“He sat there with his mouth open, looking like a very expensive fish, and I said, ‘But when it’s a violent crime, it’s so hard to get them to even consider it. Even though the guy
totally
deserved it, because don’t you think all pimps deserve to roast slowly to death?’ She grinned happily at Will. “I could see him writing the memo to my boss at the Roundup in his head even as we spoke. Luckily, my boss has a great sense of humor. I’ll be livening up our next meeting for sure. And then I stood up and said, ‘But you know what? I’m getting that same vibe off of you, and I’m working on my anger-management issues. So I think we’ll call this a night.’ And I walked out.”

He liked her. He liked her so much. “So tonight, you’re up on the roof instead.”

“I am. Much better date. One of my favorites.”

“Come here often? And, yeh,” he said with a smile. “I meant to do that.”

“Sometimes. Especially if the moon is full. I look at the lights, and pretend…” She laughed again, sounding a bit embarrassed.

“What?”

“That they’re…stars. I always wanted to see a whole sky full of stars. You know?”

“Yeh. I do. That’s why I’m going home. So I can see a whole sky full of stars. So I can see the Milky Way, and the Southern Cross, too. So I can see the moon the way it’s meant to be.”

“What? The moon’s different there?”

“Upside-down here. Or we’re upside-down Down Under. Something like that. Didn’t you know?”

“No. I didn’t. So you’ve missed it a lot? But still, you came here. You thought about staying, too. I guess you didn’t know that you’d miss it.”

Why was she living in Las Vegas, if she wanted to see a sky full of stars? He’d ask her about it, he decided. Later.

“I didn’t know what I’d want, when I came,” he said. “I was looking to get away. But I got away from all the good, too. And I brought all the bad with me.”

Her cheek was on her knees again, and she was looking at him, her eyes soft in the moonlight, and the mood had shifted completely. The traffic noise was there, a constant, dull hum in the background, the neon lights of the Strip glowing harsh to the east, and the asphalt of the roof cold beneath him. And Faith beside him, the opposite of all those things. She didn’t say anything, so he took another sip of her wine, and after a minute, he continued.