Chapter Seven
I’d watched him looking around, curious, as I led him upstairs to the bathroom. Figured he’d have something to ask by the time the water was running; sure enough, he did.
“I didn’t see any personal photos up,” he observed.
I shrugged. “You don’t think I picked that charming abstract in the hallway myself?”
Kai laughed. “Oh, it’s definitely you, absolutely.”
I chuckled in return. “You could probably fit everything I actually own in this house into a suitcase,” I explained. “Maybe two, max. I signed the lease and they basically gave me the keys to a whole new life.”
He stepped under the spray, running his fingers through his hair. I paused, leaning against the doorframe as I watched him. What we’d just done outside seemed like some strange, foreign dream; something that had happened to another person, not me, and which I’d only watched from afar.
“What happened to the old life, did that go into storage?” Kai teased.
I grimaced, even though his eyes were closed and he wouldn’t see it.
“There wasn’t much of an old life left to store, after the breakup.
Just about everything we had in terms of furniture was his.
I should probably have left the hangers in the wardrobe, even, seeing as he bought the damn things.
” I sighed; rubbed a hand across my eyes.
“Perhaps I should write him a letter and tell him how grateful I am for his generosity.”
Something of the bitterness I guess still ran through me must’ve been clear in my tone, because when I glanced across Kai was looking back at me through the glass partition. I was finding it hard to tell what his expression meant.
“What?” I asked him, eventually.
He shook his head, slowly. “You haven’t really told me much about what happened. And I mean, obviously you don’t have to, either. But you seem pretty caught up in it still.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. Considering all it felt like I’d done, on and off for the past months, was recycle thoughts about my failed relationship, it remained oddly difficult to put it all into words.
“It was, god, more than fifteen years. After that sort of time, you end up with certain... expectations.”
Kai was still looking at me, his soapy hands rubbing under his arms. “Like what?”
How do you explain just how jarring it was to go from viewing yourself as part of a duo, to be used to considering another person in just about everything you did in life, to suddenly only needing to think about yourself again?
That, even though you might assume it would be liberating, in reality it felt like having a phantom limb.
A persistent itch there was no way to effectively scratch.
I sighed. “You start working on the principle that you’re always going to be thinking about two people in life. That there’ll be someone to support you when shit happens.”
“That must be hard to go back from,” he observed.
I chuckled, coldly. “This whole thing has been an eye-opening lesson in how much I had invested in someone else, and how little of me was left over when that all disappeared.”
Silence, bar the sound of running water. I began to wonder if I’d been too bitter, too pessimistic. Shown Kai a side he hadn’t expected and, frankly, would find deeply unattractive.
“It’s not like you’re old, or over the hill, or anything,” he said, eventually. “You could quite easily go out and find someone else.”
I gave him a small, tight smile. “It hasn’t been high on my list of priorities, really. And honestly, you’re the first person who has shown a hint of interest in me.”
An arched eyebrow at that. “Considering I practically had to bludgeon you with my dick to get you to realize that interest, don’t you think other people might have been, but you just didn’t see it?”
I opened my mouth to reply, sarcastically, then paused. While it was easy to be self-deprecating - it was my go-to reaction, frankly - there was the possibility that Kai was correct.
From the look he gave me, he took my being speechless as a win.
“Look,” I told him, finally. “Maybe you’re right, but it really hasn’t felt like the proper time for it. It was such a long time, I just... I needed more to get over it. To get over... losing him.”
Kai stared at me. “I understand, it’s tough,” he said.
“I hadn’t realized you’d been in a bad breakup after a decade-plus of being in love with someone.” The sarcastic tone was in my mouth before I knew it. I winced, but the words were out already. No way to take it back.
Kai, though, just looked at me with something approaching kindness in his eyes. “No, I haven’t,” he said, quietly. “And even if I had, that’s not to say it would be anything like the experience you had. I’m not trying to take away from how... serious this has all felt, Tate.”
I rubbed my face again, frustrated with myself.
“I’m sorry,” I told him, meaning it. Took a deep breath.
“After a while, all the people telling you ‘oh that must’ve been so bad’ start to roll together into one big frustration.
Like they’re telling you they can empathize so that you’ll just shut up about it and stop bringing them down.
I shouldn’t take that out on you, though. ”
He pushed the shower door open, and looked at me expectantly. “Come here.”
I let my legs take me, ignoring the niggling urge to overthink things still. As I stepped in, Kai took me by the shoulders and turned us, so that the water was thundering against my back.
“You get to be angry, and you get to take things as fast or as slow as you like,” he said, voice pitched just over the thrum of the shower. “If today, what happened between us, is a one-time-only thing, then that’s something you get to decide, okay?”
I stared at him. Tangles of hair plastered wetly to his scalp; face a little flushed from the heat of the water. An expression I couldn’t quite pin down, but which I was rapidly realizing I really didn’t want to let escape my gaze.
A realization that was as terrifying as it was exciting.
#
He’d given me space after that, and silence, as we’d scrubbed and soaped ourselves.
Probably assuming that I was busy working through my anger and emotional torment about how my relationship had fallen apart.
Whereas in reality I was too preoccupied trying to figure out what these burgeoning feelings I was having for him might mean.
I’d spent so long trying to avoid the nudging my friends had given to “get back on the market,” that I’d allowed my guard to slip when I was at home. Presumed it would be safe ground. An opening that Kai had then slipped in through.
Was that such a bad thing? There was a part of me crying foul, certainly, but an equal part wondering whether that was more about having bought too far into the “single and broken-hearted” identity I’d created for myself after the breakup.
An identity designed to protect my emotions, certainly, but which was now perhaps just stunting them.
At some point you have to let the shields down again, else they start to act like a tomb instead. Preventing you from getting out, instead of stopping other people getting in. If only it wasn’t so tough knowing which point that was.
“You could... stay over,” I said to him, as we each toweled ourselves. The fog of the shower still heavy in the air, making everything seem that little bit fuzzier.
Kai stared at me, gaze steady as he dried his chest.
“I can’t decide if you’re saying that because you want me to stay,” he said, eventually, “or because you think that’s what I want, and you’re too damn polite.”
I chuckled. “I don’t really know what you want,” I confessed, “or what I want, for that matter.”
“Well, I can only help with half of that,” he observed.
I flashed him a smile. “You can read my mind for me?”
Kai’s turn to laugh. “If only. No, I mean I can only tell you what I want. You just have to promise not to let that sway what you want, too.”
“Tall order,” I pointed out.
He gave me a half-shrug, as he scrubbed the towel under one arm. “Eventually you have to decide what it is you want to do, because you want to do it. Otherwise all this” - he glanced around, but I knew he meant more than just the house - “is just going through someone else’s motions.”
Turning away, I hung my towel up on the peg behind the door. “You make it all sound so easy,” I said, unable to stop the hint of frustration from working its way into my voice. I just had to hope that Kai would understand it really wasn’t him I was frustrated at.
“Baby steps, then,” he countered.
My ears hunted for it, but I could hear no trace of annoyance in his tone. I took a deep breath, then turned back around to face him.
“How about some dinner, then?”