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,