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i.
David Ross is a big man. Well over six feet tall, dark blond hair with liberal streaks of grey, bright green eyes, huge shoulders that taper down to a trim waist; he looks like the poster child for post middle age virility. Chloe doesn’t have much trouble picking him out from the crowd in the airport terminal, despite not knowing what he looks like. He’s actually wearing the same t-shirt and khakis combo that Nadine’s currently sporting, down to the shade of olive green. Like a Ross family uniform.
There are two men in casual suits standing behind them. Chloe eyes them with some interest, but David Ross isn’t paying much attention to them, and neither is Nadine. She walks up to her father, drops her carryon near her feet, and holds out her hand to him. They shake, hug briefly.
“Good flight?” says Nadine’s father, of all things.
Chloe glances at her girlfriend. She’d been her usual self on the plane, sharing thoughts on the location of the last hostile Shoreline cell they know of, typing up a grouchy email to their previous client, holding Chloe’s hand as they nodded off together to a documentary on lemmings. She still seems her usual self now, which isn’t surprising, but it’s… something. Chloe had half been expecting some kind of momentous change at the return of the wayward daughter, but if it’s going to happen, it apparently won’t be here.
“All right,” Nadine replies. “Bit bumpy.”
David Ross nods. His eyes flicker, inevitably, to Chloe, who has also dropped her bag at her side. The sound had brought her to the attention of the two suited gentleman standing just behind Ross; they shift imperceptibly to watch her. She feels herself being sized up, and fights a brief interior struggle between laughing and rolling her eyes. With a valiant effort, she ends up doing neither.
Nadine’s father tilts his head.
“And this must be…”
“The wily partner turned girlfriend who seduced your daughter away from honest mercenary business and into the capricious and dangerous line of treasure hunting,” she fills in for him, thrusting out a hand and grinning winsomely. “Figured we might as well get all that out there.”
He raises his eyebrows placidly as he gives her a shake with a firm, dry hand. Nadine does roll her eyes, bumping Chloe with an elbow.
“Chloe, Dad; Dad, Chloe. I believe I mentioned her.”
“A couple times, ja,” he says drily.
“All good things, I have no doubt,” Chloe says with her most charming smile.
David Ross says nothing in reply to this, only gives her that same calm look with his bright green eyes. He turns on his heel.
“Come on,” he says. “I have cars waiting.”
*
ii.
Chloe has driven cars all over the world, from Russia to Ecuador, but it’s been a while since she’s sat behind the wheel of a right-hand car. Years, actually, but it’s not something she’ll easily forget. Her mum had taught her to drive, way back when she was fifteen, hours and hours spent on the back roads of Adelaide, Ganesh sitting and sometimes sliding on the dashboard. Good memories, those.
Nadine’s father leads them out into the mellow, early morning sunshine, and down to the parking lot. Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum, both of whom had shared a “Howzit?” and a brief fist-bump with Nadine, follow close behind him. There actually aren’t cars waiting for them; they come up towards a dark luxury truck parked next to a sturdy but expensive looking jeep. Before getting into the back seat of the truck, David tosses a set of keys to Nadine, who tosses them to Chloe. They throw their bags into the jeep, just the one each; they’re used to travelling light. Chloe slides behind the wheel, revs up, and follows the truck as one of the bodyguards guides it out of the airport lot.
“So,” Chloe says, making the turn on to the road towards Johannesburg, “did that go well, or no? I legitimately can’t tell, and I can usually read a room like nobody’s business.”
Nadine has fished out a pair of shades from the glove compartment, as if she’d known they’d be there, and slipped them on against the sun. After a bit of rooting around, she finds a pair for Chloe, too.
“It went just as I expected it to, really,” Nadine finally replies. Chloe cocks a brow at her.
“Is it already time for the non-answer portion of the day? Seems a bit early, doesn’t it love?”
It earns her a huff, a rueful laugh, and a warm hand on her knee, rubbing it briskly.
“Sorry.” Nadine waves a hand in a cavalier fashion. “It went well, all in all.”
Chloe hums. They’ve come up to a stop light, so she takes the time to put on her sunnies as well, dulling the bright South African sun to a muted sepia. The truck is right in front of them. The windows are tinted so darkly Chloe has to wonder if it’s legal, and she can’t make out any of the figures inside.
“He didn’t seem mad,” Chloe offers helpfully. Although, she doesn’t see why he would be, not now. According to Nadine, he’s had the news about Shoreline since it happened, which makes it a little over a year now. And she’s been in semi-regular contact with him since then, so he’s had all the time a body could need to get angry, get it out of his system.
“Oh no,” Nadine says, in what’s pretty much nearer a laugh than words. “Not mad, never that. He doesn’t do angry, my dad. Doesn’t even do disappointed.”
“No?”
“Nope. Anger is pointless to him; it’s one of those lessons that never quite got through here.” She taps at her temple, smiling, and then leans back in her seat, casting about for the words. “He just… he sees problems, and he sees solutions.”
“Does he now?” Chloe stares at the back of the truck in front of her as the line of vehicles starts moving once again. It’s a good descriptor; David Ross had looked to her like a problem-solver, through and through. “And what do you think will be his solution to this particular pickle?”
“Well… I’ve already told him that I’ve no intention of going back to Shoreline.” Chloe remembers that conversation; Nadine had spent more than an hour pacing the hallway outside of their hotel room, speaking in a voice of polite, but somehow strained calm. “Hurt him, I think, but he took my word for it. He’ll want to hear it again, from my mouth and face to face, and after that…” She shrugs. “He’ll want to get it back. Has probably started putting things in place already, for all I know. He built this company from the ground up, you know. Poured blood, sweat and tears into it, and not all of that is figurative. He won’t let this go.”
Nadine’s voice is very earnest now, as if she needs Chloe to believe this, really wants her to. Chloe takes a hand off the wheel to grip one of Nadine’s hands and squeeze it briefly. She understands completely. Nadine is a tenacious woman, and if what she says of her father is right, it’s clear where she gets some of that from.
“What’ll he do once he has it back?” Chloe asks. “Come out of retirement?”
“Unlikely, but not out of the question. He’s probably got an old lieutenant or two that he trusts for the job; Orca was never one of his. But what he’ll do after is all hypothetical; what’s definite is that he won’t want to just give up on it. He won’t be able to.”
“And you’ll want to help him,” Chloe says.
“Don’t see how I couldn’t,” Nadine says, simply.
It’s nothing that Chloe doesn’t know already. That Nadine is done with Shoreline, Chloe will never doubt; that’s been proven to her time and time again in the past year. But in this scenario, to just, what, give her father the little intel they have on Shoreline and wash her hands of it? That isn’t Nadine, and she knows it. Hearing those words, seeing the determined, resolved look in her girlfriend’s eyes just makes her love her more.
“Well, that settles it, then.” They pull onto the highway proper, and Chloe shifts gears, speeding them up. The wind blasts through Nadine’s hair, tossing her curls back from her forehead, baring her intent expression. “I’ll call off the New Zealand job for now; looks like our schedule is fixed for a couple of months.”
And really, there’s not a universe out there in which she’d give a different answer. They’re partners in every sense of the word.
Nadine never replies to her, not in words. Beaming softly, she stretches across to kiss Chloe on the neck. Chloe leans into it, feeling warmer on this already sunny day.
*
iii.
After the huge electronic gates, acres of yellowwood and wild almond trees giving off a sweet scent, copses of sausage trees all along the two mile long drive, Chloe is expecting to come upon a huge mansion of sorts. It’s not a particularly outlandish expectation; David Ross had retired a wealthy man, and from what Nadine’s told her, he has investments and business ventures that’ll keep him there for a long time.
But the house itself, when it comes into view, is about the size of that of an average, middle class, two point five kids and a dog family. A pretty little homestead, not newly built, but well maintained; two-storied, big porch, large windows, painted all white. Nadine’s an only child and the only animal in sight is a fat orange tabby lazing on a window sill, but the first image in Chloe’s head is the one that sticks. It looks like a home that’s loved, that’s generated love.
“Childhood home?” she guesses as they ease up the drive.
Nadine shakes her head, flipping off her sunnies and rooting around in the glove compartment for something. A hair-tie, judging by the way she’s been fiddling with her curls for the last ten minutes or so. Chloe holds out a wrist, and lets Nadine slip off one of the hair-ties she has there.
“Not quite,” she says, scraping her hair up into a ponytail. “We moved here when I was about sixteen; never really got used to the place.”
“Too isolated?”
“Nah, not that. Our first home was on an even lonelier stretch, believe it or not.” A smile touches her lips as she thinks about it. “And I missed it a lot. We kept a few animals that couldn’t come along when we moved. Goats, sheep, a couple cows.”
It’s not hard to divine that Nadine had missed the animals more than she did the house.
“What happened to them?”
“Dad gave them over to a friend; I visited every now and again.”
The truck pauses to let David out on the pathway up to the house before rolling into a large nearby garage. There doesn’t seem to be any room for the jeep in there, so Chloe parks in the first likely spot that she sees.
The large front door opens as they’re getting the bags out of the back. Chloe glances up, and raises her brows. Nadine’s a looker and she gets some of it from her father, no doubt. This must be the other half of the equation. The woman hurrying down the path is one of the most beautiful Chloe has ever seen; large brown eyes set in a round face, flawless dark skin, a wide smiling mouth, hair wrapped up in a patterned scarf and tied off with a bow. David Ross looks like he smiles perhaps once a quarter; this woman looks like she does it for a living. There are lines creased all over her face, and the hair that she can see at her temples is stone grey, but she doesn’t look like one strand of it belongs there. She breathes youth.
Chloe and Nadine watch as she floats down the steps and pelts herself into David’s waiting arms. They share a long kiss and a longer hug, twirling around each other on the flower-lined path.
“Reunited, and it feeeeeels so good,” Chloe sings under her breath. She stays where she is for the time being; it would be rude to intrude. It’s adorable, honestly; she hadn’t been aware that David had been away.
Nadine laughs, shaking her head. Chloe glances at her.
“What?”
“Those two—” She gestures at her parents, rolling her eyes affectionately. “—actually haven’t spent a night apart since he retired. They’re just… like that. All the time.”
Chloe presses a hand to her chest, looking at the still embracing couple. She’s a tiny woman, is Nadine’s mum, and even standing on her tiptoes doesn’t get level with her husband.
“Good god, now it’s even cuter.”
“Trust me, it gets a little old,” Nadine drawls. She leans on the hood of the jeep, and Chloe comes round to sit next to her. She still sounds affectionate rather than annoyed. “I’m not kidding when I say all the time. Mum will pop out to visit some friends for the afternoon and Dad’ll be moping around his office like he’s waiting for her to come back from a war.”
Chloe laughs. Usually public displays of affection like this don’t warrant much reaction from her, other than a smile before she goes along her business, but this is different for quite a few reasons. One of them is the way David Ross cups his wife’s face in his hands, and tips a kiss onto her forehead, then her chin, then her left and right cheeks, and then smartly on the tip of her nose. A sweet gesture, and it would be nothing more than that, if not for the fact that it’s one that she knows well. Nadine does it, to her. Not often, but just often enough that it’s etched into Chloe’s mind now, as one of their things. Seeing the source that Nadine had gotten it from just makes her feel… well, precious.
She can feel Nadine eyeing her in periphery, and knows that she’s noticed.
“What?” Nadine says, in the resigned yet amused tones of one who knows she’s about to be teased. Chloe raises both her palms in protest.
“I didn’t say anything, partner,” she says, grinning hugely. Nadine ducks her head, shaking it.
When they finally walk up to meet Nadine’s mother (‘Mohau’, she insists that Chloe call her) there are warm greetings for them both. Nadine lifts her mother off her feet and spins her round, before standing still to be hugged and petted and looked over. Chloe is pulled down for a hug and a kiss on the forehead, and is then inspected just the same. Mohau exclaims over how beautiful they both are (there are tears in her eyes when she directs this at Nadine) and then scolds them both for their atrocious nails and the state of their hair.
“Don’t think you’re too old for me to grab a comb and park you on the floor between my legs, because you’re not,” Mohau says, brandishing a finger. Chloe observes this, and Nadine’s blush, with barely controlled glee.
“My hair’s fine, Mum,” Nadine says long-sufferingly.
Mohau looks to have a retort ready for this, but David places a hand on the small of her back.
“Nadine will still be here for your scolding in an hour, bokkie,” he says, kissing her temple. “For now, our daughter and I need to talk.”
Gentle words, said in a gentle voice. Asking, not demanding. Still, in the tone of a man who knows, however apologetically, that he will have his way. Chloe flicks her eyes at her girlfriend. Nadine’s face is still brimming with all the good humour that her mother had brought out, but now there’s a flicker of steel in there as well.
“Sounds serious,” Chloe opines brightly. “Am I invited?”
Just a calm look from David’s bright green eyes, and a grateful but apologetic one from Nadine’s brown ones.
“Nah, you go on ahead. I’ll see you in a bit.”
I need to do this part alone, goes unspoken, but not unheard. Chloe nods, touches Nadine’s wrist briefly.
“Gotcha. If you need me, I’ll probably be rifling through your childhood things, looking for nerdy pictures, getting embarrassing stories out of my new best friend Mohau.” She links arms with Nadine’s mum. “You know, normal stuff.”
Mohau tips her beautiful face back to the sky, laughing.
“I like her,” she announces to everyone, and starts leading Chloe up to the front door.
*
iv.
After indeed plying her with a silly story or two, Mohau leads Chloe on a short tour through the house, and then up to Nadine’s old room to freshen up and rest if need be. She’s still there when the attack comes.
Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum bring their bags up to the room, unasked. Nadine had referred to them as aides, and David called them friends when he introduced them (using names that Chloe, regrettably, has already forgotten), but they’re obviously bodyguards, and that’s how Chloe thinks of them. It’s not a surprise that David Ross employs them. He’d left the business, sure, but no one ever leaves this line of work as much as they just take long, unannounced sabbaticals. Who knew when some conquered enemy with a grudge would be back, looking to settle a score? He sees problems, and he sees solutions. David Ross would want to have contingencies.
One of these contingencies gives her the first warning. Chloe has just started looking around Nadine’s room. It’s much as she had expected it would be; nondescript apple-white walls, a small neat bed, animal posters plastered on every wall, an old punching bag leaning up against a corner wall. It’s not difficult to picture teenage Nadine in here: taking out her frustrations on the punching bag, staring up at her posters on the walls and the ceilings, restlessly hopping through articles on Wikipedia late at night when she couldn’t sleep, staring out the window at the copious trees on the drive.
The room has the same air as the rest of the house; utilitarian, but prettily, cosily so. It’s clean, dust-free, and Chloe has the feeling it remains that way all year round, not just when Nadine comes back to visit. She picks up a picture on the dresser and grins immediately. It’s Nadine at perhaps fifteen or sixteen, bloody-nosed and black-eyed, looking as grimly satisfied as any old boxer. She stands between her parents, Mohau beaming widely, David looking placid and unsurprised, and holds a huge golden trophy above her head. Near the left frame of the picture, Chloe can see the pouting face of the boy who’d gotten second place. Unsurprisingly, Nadine’s career of hitting the boys and making them cry had begun long ago.
It’s a quiet house; peppered, of course, with the muted activity of David and Mohau’s small staff, a meowing cat somewhere on the first floor, all the background noises that are the hallmarks of a lived-in space. But mostly, it’s quiet, and that’s how Chloe hears it.
She’s looking out the window when she does. A muffled beeping sound, coming from the ceiling. At first she thinks it’s the fire alarm, but when she looks up to check, it isn’t making a peep. No, the sound comes from the hallway ceiling, muffled because of the thick door between it and Chloe. Chloe hops off the sill and strides to the door; the closer she gets, the easier it is to recognise the sound for what it is; an alarm.
Before she can open the door, Mohau does, holding two sniper rifles and wearing an expression that dances between sickness and steadiness. Just beyond the opened door, Chloe can see Nadine and David emerging from the study and rushing down the stairs. Nadine is flicking her gun’s safety off; David appears to have already done so. Chloe hopes for a look from her girlfriend, and gets it just before she slips out the door; their eyes lock, and Nadine nods once before following her father.
Chloe’s eyes flit back to Mohau.
“Can you use one of these?” Nadine’s mother asks, thrusting out a rifle. “David wants cover from as many windows as we can manage.”
“Sure,” Chloe says. She takes the gun, checks the stock and the ammo. It’s a model she’s familiar with. “I know my way around these. What’s the situation?”
“A breach near the gate, they took it out completely. No one’s ever…” Mohau’s hands flutter, and she presses her lips together. “Well, I suppose that doesn’t matter, they have now. And they’ll be here soon.”
Chloe bites her lip; part of her wants to be down in the thick of things brawling side by side with Nadine. It would be silly to give up the high ground, though. She nods again, mostly to herself.
“Okay then, let them come. We’ll be here to meet them.”
“Good.” Mohau gives her that same sweet, sick look, grips her own rifle more tightly, and turns to go. “I’ll be at the study window.”
“You all right?” Chloe can’t help calling after her, because she doesn’t look it.
Mohau smiles grimly. It’s a pale shadow to the full bodied thing she’d worn not thirty minutes ago, greeting her husband and daughter outside in the full sunshine.
“I’m not used to it,” she says. “Foolish, really; you’d think with the husband and daughter I have, I’d have nerves of steel by now. But I’ll be all right. I have to be.”
She gives Chloe a last shaky smile, and disappears.
The window of Nadine’s teenage bedroom doesn’t make a perfect sniper’s nest, but it’s what she has, so she takes it. The tinny alarm continues to blare as Chloe sets up. She stuffs the box of ammo Mohau had slipped her into her pocket; it nestles next to Ganesh on her thigh. Before India, before the Western Ghats, she’d rarely taken the little figurine out of storage. Now, it travels with her always.
She lines up the scope, bringing the front yard, green-brown lawns, and the long drive into sight. It’s a stony, unpleasant surprise to see that the squads of encroaching men are wearing the iconic red and blue kit that she’s gotten to know so well over the last year. Shoreline. Chloe grits her teeth. Last they heard, the remaining men loyal to Orca were chasing them towards Norway; things have obviously changed since then.
The day doesn’t give her time to think of it. There’s no calm before the storm, no slow motion sequence of events; things happen like dominoes falling round a table. Bullet fire goes off like a storm, crackling the air around them. She lines a machine gunner up in her sights, brings him down with a snap before he can get more than a few shots off. From the far right window there’s a resounding crack of another sniper rifle, and one of the heavies goes down on one knee.
Down on the ground, nearer to the house, Nadine and her father are taking on the troops that have already gotten close. The Tweedles are nearby, vested up and on the front lines. Even the plump housekeeper is taking cover on the porch, a machinegun balanced on her shoulder. One of the heavies gets closer; Chloe has time to see Nadine and David take a swing in almost perfect unison, left and right hook meeting to bring down the soldier with a bone-cracking crunch, and move to meet another one. Chloe whistles lowly. It’s one thing to hear Nadine say “my father taught me how to fight”, and another to see them cleaving through the soldiers like two arms of the same machine.
It only holds her attention for a second; there are more mercenaries than she would have expected, and they don’t seem to be slowing. Chloe stares down the sights of the long weapon, and gets back to work.
*
v.
When the shooting is over, David spends a few brief moments in conference with the Tweedles, and an even briefer moment on his mobile (talking, as it will later turn out, to a friend of his in the police department). He then makes a beeline straight into the house.
Chloe, sitting on the windowsill of Nadine’s room with casings all around her, is unsurprised but pleased to see the room’s old occupant walking through the door. There’s blood running down the side of her face from a cut on her temple, and a shallow wound on her arm where a bullet had grazed close, but she’s thankfully, blessedly okay. Chloe had made sure of that.
“Bollocks,” she says in greeting, beckoning Nadine towards her.
“Balls,” Nadine agrees. She leans over for a kiss that Chloe arches up into, tugging her back in to prolong it when Nadine would pull away. She cups her girlfriend’s face, fingers pressing tattoos into her cheeks and jaw. Having someone to worry about again is both a joy and an ache, and to hell with laughter; touch is the best kind of medicine for that sort of ailment.
“On the bright side,” she says when Nadine is well-kissed and settled at her feet, head resting against her thigh, “at least Shoreline was kind enough to come to us. Your parents’ place served as the barrel and they were obligingly the fish. Glub glub.”
Nadine rubs her temple with two fingers.
“S’pose so. I don’t like it, though.”
“Honey, I can count the things you like on one hand. Three of the fingers are me.”
She is who she is, and can’t resist putting a dirty slant on the joke. It makes Nadine smile, weak and brief though it is. Her mind is elsewhere.
“They were ballsy. It’s not the first time that the house has been targeted, but not a whole lot of people have been dumb or brave enough to try it. And I mean… think about it. We haven’t seen hide or hair of Shoreline for months, been barely able to track their movements, but I’m soon as I’m back in South Africa, as soon as I’m within ten feet of my father, they attack?”
Chloe can see where she’s going with it.
“Doesn’t exactly smack of coincidence, no.”
“It’s exactly what I would have done. Mitigate the risks.” She says this phrase self-effacingly, with muted disgust. “They kept eyes on us, and then as soon as I’m back in a place where they think they can catch me emotionally off-kilter…” Nadine’s lips twist, and she punches a fist into her palm in lieu of finishing her sentence.
Her head still rests on Chloe’s thigh, pillowed by her cloud of soft hair. Chloe’s hand cups her jaw in an absent caress; it’s hard and still, made of absolute iron. It makes Chloe think of the first time she’d met Nadine, in the lobby of a four star London hotel. Even before approaching her, it was clear to see the lines of defensiveness in Nadine’s face. Her expression now is a vague mirror of that; lips pressed together, deep furrows gathering in her brow.
“Hey.” Chloe tilts her chin, so that Nadine is looking back at her. “It all worked out, didn’t it? We beat them back, they’re gone and we’re still here. Their big plan to catch you off-guard failed. So…”
“Ja, but…”
“So,” Chloe continues doggedly, “who are you really mad at?”
She says it gently, thumb running along the iron curve of Nadine’s jaw, and it’s meant to be rhetorical. But Nadine answers anyway, head tilted back, looking at the ceiling of her teenage years.
“Dunno. Myself, really. I should’ve seen this coming.”
“Mhm.” Chloe shifts them, slides onto the ground next to Nadine. “And do you need me to tell you how silly it is to blame yourself, or do you reckon you’ll come to that revelation on your own?”
Even battered and evidently guilt-riddled, Nadine can still muster up the strength to roll her eyes in good humour.
“Don’t get smart with me, Frazer.”
Chloe lifts her palms, all innocence. “Physically impossible not to, I’m afraid.”
“Smart-aleck.”
They sit there for a spell; not speaking, but knowing that they can later. That Nadine has more to say is evident, but Chloe knows her well enough by now to suss out the meat of it. The responsibility she feels, the sense of duty. Shoreline is her bed, and she needs to lie down in it one more time. Chloe’s never had much of a problem shedding old attachments; they slide off of her like moulted skin. Nadine’s loyalties though, the real ones, not just attachments made for duty and profit… a part of her deep down clings to them. Chloe thinks it’s probably something else she has in common with her father, little though she’d like to say it.
Looking at her girlfriend’s profile, her bloodied cheeks and noble brow, Chloe can’t think of it as a flaw. She thinks Nadine beautiful, and kisses her, just for the heck of it.
The sun streams through the window. Rising to her feet, Chloe busies herself with searching the little room, all the little nooks and crannies and childhood hidey-holes. She finds some antiseptic that hasn’t gone off and little children’s band-aids (a couple Snow White, several more 101 Dalmatians) and sees to the worst of Nadine’s cuts. Nadine talks to her while she works, telling her stories of old matches she’d fought, tournaments she’d won.
When David and Mohau appear in the doorway with their hands links, Chloe and Nadine are sitting on the bed, hand in hand as well. It’s the first they’re all seeing of each other since the fighting stopped; David had gone straight to Mohau just as Nadine had come straight to her.
True to Nadine’s word, David doesn’t waste any time being upset about the attack; everyone is fine, other than a few cuts and bruises, and the majority of the mercenaries had been taken out. A few of the mercs had stumbled back to their truck, but that fact doesn’t seem to concern David Ross. The safety of his wife was paramount; that assured, he seems to take everything else in stride.
He nods to Nadine.
“I suppose this changes a few of the things we discussed before we were so rudely interrupted.”
Nadine shakes her head, curls bouncing.
“Not as many as you think. There’ll be stragglers, maybe a more organised core group; I want to help you deal with them.” A beat, and then she shakes her head again. “I have to help you deal with them.”
No surprise, no denial, no refusal of aid; just a pause to process and then a quick nod. Mohau doesn’t look surprised either; just understanding, and proud. It’s one thing to be said for this family, Chloe thinks. Above all else, they understand each other.
“I’m coming too,” she pipes up cheerily, raising a hand. David’s lip twitches; almost a smile.
“I’d be glad to have you,” he says.
“Oh, you say that now. I’ll just warn you, plans have a tendency of going arse-upwards anytime they get in my general vicinity. I’m sort of the anti-plan. ‘Wing it’ personified.”
“She’s not joking,” Nadine interjects drily.
Mohau giggles, covering her mouth with her hand in a move so dainty (especially for a woman with a sniper rifle slung across her back) it’s cute. David doesn’t laugh, though his little not-quite-a-smile is still in place. He looks at Chloe with those bright green eyes.
“Maybe so,” he says, stepping closer into the room, and holding out his hand. “I have a feeling we’ll be lucky to have you all the same.”
Chloe smiles. Her fingers are still linked with Nadine as she stretches out to clasp that of her father, for the second time that day.
*
vi.
It’s a warm night in Johannesburg. Before they’d turned in, Nadine had opened up the windows to her bedroom, flicked on the fan, and warned Chloe that it still might not be enough. And it wasn’t, not really; sweat is gathering on the small of her back, only a few errant breezes ever sweep in through the window, and the heat drapes, despite their nakedness and the lack of blankets. But she’s content like this anyway. It’s the kind of warmth that she loves.
Chloe’s thighs are still wet, and Nadine’s breath is slaked with the scent of her as they kiss; long and slow and leisurely. Chloe breaks away, but only to press kisses into the other spots that she loves just as much as Nadine’s mouth; her cheeks, her jaw, the sturdy line of her neck. She bites and nips at the skin there absently, loving the feel of Nadine’s hard body melting to putty beneath her hands.
She thinks that their evening is winding down, is ready to give Nadine one last kiss and settle in to be the little spoon. But then Nadine speaks up. Chloe can feel the reverberations of her words from where her lips still rest on her girlfriend’s neck.
“I’m just like him, aren’t I?”
No need to ask who.
“‘Just like’ is pushing it, I think,” Chloe replies honestly. “‘A lot like’ gets us closer to truth.”
Nadine hums, and Chloe feels the music of it.
“‘Closer to truth, closer to god’,” she recites. When Chloe looks at her in askance, she shrugs. “Something Mum says all the time.”
“I see,” Chloe says. To say anything else would feel like an interruption, because something tells her there’s more to come. And sure enough, after a minute or more of quiet breathing and slow kisses, Nadine speaks up again.
“There was this poem that we studied in secondary school. Poetry and literature and all that… not really my thing. So I won’t lie to you and say that I remember the name of the poet, or even the title of the poem. But part of it just… stayed with me, you know? It was a pretty short one, which was why I liked it, I think, and it was about this woman musing that she’s becoming just like her mother. Not in a bad way or anything; you got the feeling that she really loved her mum. But I’d think of that poem all the time, and I’d know that that was what I had in store for myself, except with my dad.”
Chloe props herself up on her elbow, eyes going soft.
“Oh, honey. What did I just say? You aren’t your father; good a man as he might be, you’re better.”
Nadine looks up at her, not smiling yet, face betraying no emotion save for curiosity, perhaps. The moonlight brings out the flecks of green in her eyes.
“‘What do you mean Chloe?’” she says in her terrible South African accent, and there it is, a tiny scoff of a laugh bursting from Nadine’s lips like a waterfall in miniature. It hasn’t gotten old yet, making Nadine smile. “Sure, I’ll tell you what I mean, china. This. All this.” She gestures around the room with its faded posters and half-forgotten relics. “Your father would have never had to return because he would have never left. You were right, Shoreline’s in his blood. And maybe it’s in yours too; you’ve definitely got his loyalty. But you don’t just listen to your blood, you listen to this.”
She rests a hand just under Nadine’s left breast, against the slow thump of her heartbeat. Nadine looks at Chloe’s hand, tanned and scraped and scabbed, and rests her own atop of it.
“You came to a turning point and you took the fork in the road for something that you knew you’d enjoy, something that would make you happy.”
“Someone, too,” Nadine’s says. She looks completely serious as she says it, and if that couldn’t make Chloe melt then nothing could. She smiles brilliantly.
“Well, I was trying not to give myself too much credit, but sure, there’s that too. You understand what I’m saying though? You chose something different for yourself; going back to help your father now doesn’t reverse that. Change doesn’t seem like his cup of tea, if you’ll pardon me saying so, but you… you’re changing with me, and we’re changing for the better.”
These are things Chloe has felt for some time now; she hadn’t pictured herself saying it at a time like this, had not indeed known that it would come out of her mouth until the words were in the air and Nadine’s face was softening, slackening with a look of such deep fondness it makes Chloe want to blush.
Nadine trails a callused finger down her cheek.
“What’s it with you and always knowing the right thing to say, eh?”
“Ah, I’m just a regular old Ross expert now,” Chloe says, grinning. “I’ll send you my consultation fee.”
“Come here,” Nadine says, a full grin finally blossoming to life on her face, and pulls Chloe towards her to be kissed. She doesn’t just get one; she gets five of them. Forehead, chin, cheeks and nose.
Soon, they’re back where they started: lazily making out with their arms around one another, sinking into the bed. It’ll be an early morning tomorrow, but Chloe doesn’t mind losing sleep for a few more minutes of this; closeness with the woman she’s come to care about more than she could ever say.
When they’ve settled in, Chloe reaches across to the bedside table to turn off the light. Next to the lamp is her little figurine of Ganesh, standing guard where she’d put him after taking him out of her pocket. Chloe smiles to see it. A flick of her wrist envelops the room in darkness, the shadows broken only by the pearly moonlight shining in through the open window.