“But…” I said again.
“No buts,” Hemi said. “Three-day waiting period after the license, and we’re there. Call it five or six days, maybe, from today. Time to buy you a dress, find Karen something new as well, get the details sorted, and get people invited. It’s better anyway,” he went on, overriding anything I might have said, “as we’re on holiday already. I’ll take you to the Far North for a honeymoon, if you like, where it’s warmer. Or to the islands, if you want the tropics. Samoa, maybe. It’ll be short, but we’ll do it better later. And then we’ll go home and get you moved.”
I had my hands over my face. “Wait,” I said. “Wait. I can’t…that’s too fast.”
“What?” Hemi said, his face closing.
“Hope,” Karen said, “that’s just stupid. You have to want to marry Hemi. Come on.”
I tried to think of what to say, and couldn’t.
“Karen,” Koro said, looking at me. “Quiet, now. Come help me in the garden. We’ll leave these two to get themselves sorted.”
Hemi
“Right,” I said to Hope when Koro and Karen had disappeared outside again. “What?”
You could say my mood had changed. You could say that.
Hope jumped up from the table. “Do you want another cup of tea?”
I grabbed her hand and pulled her to sit beside me again. “No, I don’t want a cup of tea. I want you to sit here and tell me what’s wrong, so we can fix it. When I asked you last night, you seemed keen. What happened?”
“Keen? I seemed keen?”
“Happy. Excited. This isn’t a bloody vocabulary lesson. It’s our lives. And Karen’s.” Right, so I wasn’t playing fair. “Fair” was for some other bloke who didn’t need it this much.
Hope looked down at her slim hands, clasped together at the edge of the table. Her absolutely unadorned hands. “I wasn’t thinking it would be so soon.”
“That’s what I asked you, though. If you wanted to get married here. Now. And you said yes.”
She flinched at the tone of my voice. The color was rising in her cheeks, and she rubbed her hands over the wood until I grabbed one of them again, because I had to hold her. Somehow.
“I don’t think I was listening too well,” she said.
I sat and tried to breathe, then finally said, “Well, listen now. I don’t care what the problem is, I’ll fix it. If it’s that you don’t have your friends here, we’ll bring them over. If you’ve got some family you haven’t told me about, tell me that. Whatever it is, tell me now.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t have anybody else. And that’s…that’s part of the problem. You’ve got this. Your family, your place. All this…” She gestured wildly, though I couldn’t have said what she was pointing to. Koro’s house wasn’t exactly the Taj Mahal. I’d offered to buy him a better one, of course. And he’d said no, of course.
Just like Hope was saying now. “This is going too fast. It doesn’t give you a chance to think it over.”
“I thought it over already. I’m done thinking. You mean it doesn’t give you a chance. You’ve never been scared with me. Why now?”
She stared at me. “I’ve never been scared? Whose life have you been looking at? It sure hasn’t been mine.”
I tried to step out of myself and study her, the way I would in a tough negotiation, but I couldn’t get past my own emotion, and it was frustrating the hell out of me. “All right,” I said. “You’ve been scared. It’s never stopped you from telling me what you thought, or from doing what you had to do. So why now? Unless you’ve changed your mind.” The thought was freezing my blood, but I’d never run away from the truth, and now would be the worst time to start.
I tried to remember what she’d said, what she’d done when I’d made our announcement, and couldn’t. All I’d thought about was how I felt. “That’s it, isn’t it,” I said slowly, not wanting the words out there, and knowing they needed to be. “You’ve changed your mind. You’ve had a night to sleep on it, and you’ve decided you can’t. I thought you just wanted to be quiet this morning, but it’s more than that.”
Her eyes had widened as I spoke, and now, she put a hand on my arm. “Hemi, no. It’s not that. I’m not—I’m—it’s what Karen said about college. Everything. How does this change things? We need to work all that out first. We need to know. We need to figure out what we’re doing.”
“No,” I said. “We don’t. We need to get married, and everything else will take care of itself.”
“Will it?” Her hand was still there, tight around my forearm, like she was hanging on, when that was the last thing she was doing. When she was cutting me loose. “How?”
“What do you mean, how? I’ll tell you how. I’ll take care of you, and I’ll take care of Karen. And whatever else needs to be done, I’ll do it.”
I waited, but she didn’t say anything, just sat there. “Well?” I demanded.
“There’s so much wrong with that,” she said, “I can’t even tell you. That’s a one-way street.”
I would have said something. What, I don’t know. But Karen came back into the kitchen then. “Sorry, guys,” she said. “I just have to get a jacket. It’s starting to rain.”
“Right.” I stood up and pulled Hope with me. “We’re out of here.”
“What?” she said.
“Going to a hotel for the day—and the night as well,” I decided. “We’re going to fix this. Go get dressed and pack a bag. Right now.”
She wasn’t moving. She was folding her arms across her chest. “You are ordering me,” she told me through her teeth.
If she’d been scared before, she wasn’t scared now. And she ought to be, because I was furious.
“Well, yeh,” I said. “I’m ordering you. I’m saying, pack a bag so we can go work this out until we’re done. If you don’t want to change and don’t want a bag, I’ll take you as you are.” I knew she was naked under the dressing gown, and having her naked during our “negotiations” would work for me. “I’ll carry you out to the car if I have to, but we are leaving. Now.”
Hope
“No,” I told Hemi.
“No? Are you sure you want to say that to me?”
Hemi, unlike most men, didn’t shout. Instead, his voice tended to get quieter and more controlled—if more Maori—the angrier he got. Which didn’t mean he looked any less powerful. Or call it what it was. Menacing.
And despite that…
I’d been scared plenty in my life. You bet I had. But about one thing, he’d been right. I’d never been scared that he’d hurt me.
So I didn’t run away, not this time, and I didn’t walk out. I was dimly aware of Karen moving behind me, ducking out the back door, but I didn’t acknowledge her. Instead, I took two steps around the table, put my hands on Hemi’s forearms, looked up into his forbidding countenance, and said, “Hemi. I love you so much, and I want this to work between us more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life except for Karen to be well. I’d do almost anything to make that happen. But I know that—I feel that—” I had to stop and breathe before I went on. I had to trust that I was right, and it was so hard to do. “That we have to be equal partners, and that’s going to be tricky, especially for you, but for me, too. I can’t let you run me over, because then I won’t be happy, and I won’t be able to make you happy.”