Chapter Nine #2
He stared at me for a moment, then wordlessly picked up his fork again. For a couple of minutes we skewered our salads in silence, though not an entirely uncomfortable one.
“I’ve had maybe two proper relationships,” Kai said, after our plates had been taken. “One lasted for, oh, about a year. The other for maybe double that.”
“What happened?” I asked, figuring he’d tell me to butt out if he didn’t want to talk about it. Guessing, though, that he’d be a whole lot less reticent than I typically was.
“First one, me and the guy just weren’t a match, mentally,” he explained. “Good sex, but not much else in common.”
“Must’ve been very good, for it to sustain you for a year,” I observed, smiling.
He gave me a smirk. “Maybe I’ll save those stories for when we’re not surrounded by strangers.”
I sipped my wine, eyebrow arched. “Ah, so you do have limits; you’re not a total social monster after all.”
Kai nodded, conceding with a grin.
“What about the second guy?” I pushed.
“Girl,” he corrected.
I bit my lip. “That’s right, I forgot the... label-free fluidity.”
He rolled his eyes. “Don’t start that again.”
I mimed zipping my mouth shut.
“Anyway,” he continued, “we went to school together. Ended up living together, too. Met the parents, the whole deal. She was nice.”
“Nice...” I echoed.
Kai snorted. “That’s a bad word. She was great: clever, funny, sexy. Clearly on course to do amazing things. Some people just ‘get’ medicine, they don’t need a family tree to herd them into it. She was one of those people.”
It took me a moment to understand the feeling I was having in the pit of my stomach, what the weird churning there meant. A jolt as I recognized it to be a strange sort of jealousy.
“So what went wrong?” I asked, then kicked myself for my bluntness.
Kai didn’t seem to notice, though. “Oh, she saw marriage in that ‘course of amazing things’ and I... didn’t.
” He picked up his wineglass, twisting the stem between his fingers.
“Like, I wasn’t saying never, but at the same time I didn’t want to rush into that; to do it simply because it felt like a box you were meant to check off, alongside having a career and owning a car. ”
“Your car is broken,” I pointed out, trying to keep things light.
Kai smiled. “A fitting metaphor, then,” he said. “What about you, had you and your ex talked about marriage?”
I thought about that for a moment. Such a straightforward question, with nothing at all like a straightforward answer to it.
“There were lots of things we didn’t talk about, that being one of them,” I said, eventually. It was an explanation that covered a multitude of sins, plenty of them my own.
Maybe Kai recognized my reticence, perhaps he didn’t want to push things too far while we were out in public. Maybe it was just the arrival of the next course. Whatever the reason, he changed the subject.
“So were you and him monogamous?”
I stared at him over a forkful of mashed potato. “Uh, yes,” I confirmed. “That question was a little out of left field.”
He smirked, shrugging. “Just curious,” he explained. “Did you want to be?”
“To be honest, it wasn’t something we really had a conversation about,” I admitted. “It just sort of ended up that way, by unspoken assent.”
Kai nodded his understanding. “Would you have preferred things to have been different?”
I chuckled. “You assume there would be someone else who’d want to be...”
“Hey,” he interrupted, “positivity, remember.”
I bowed my head in apology. “Okay, sure,” I picked up the thread again.
“Something other than monogamy didn’t really occur to me.
And like I said, it was one of the things on the long list of stuff that didn’t get talked about.
I suspect...” I paused, swallowed some wine as I thought through the way I wanted to word the next part.
“I suspect that, even had we been sleeping with other people, it would only have delayed us breaking up. Not prevented it. And while that was a shitty situation all round, I guess I would rather have had it happen sooner, instead of later.”
Kai chewed, looking thoughtful. “Yeah, I can understand that. I’ve never been in anything other than a monogamous relationship, myself. It seems like the potential for something to go wrong could increase with each personality added.”
I smiled at him. “Well, I have friends who are in perfectly happy, successful thruples, and friends who are coupled but have negotiated playtime with other people. So I don’t think it’s impossible. It just requires an open mind and a little extra discussion, maybe.”
He giggled. “I guess it would be fun to get spit-roasted,” he suggested.
I spluttered on my wine; glanced around us to see if anybody had heard him. It seemed like we’d escaped again.
“I don’t think you need to be in a relationship for that,” I pointed out. “I imagine there would be plenty of people who would be happy to make such an ambition come true.”
“Would you help?”
A sudden, stark mental image of Kai on all fours, the narrow taper of his waist between my hands as I slammed my hips into his ass. Looking up, seeing his face being pounded with equal enthusiasm, as his body twisted and shuddered in the middle. I could feel myself starting to blush.
“I mean...” I paused. “Look, it’s difficult to answer that truthfully but in a way that doesn’t sound like I’m being negative about myself.”
Kai sighed. “Okay, one exception for the evening - but just the one, mind.”
“Well,” I explained, “I mean the idea is hot, obviously.”
“Obviously,” he echoed, smirking at me knowingly.
I rolled my eyes. “But I’m self-conscious, and so I think that in practice I’d get freaked out by the idea of being naked and intimate with two people. I mean, you saw how I was with just you.”
He nodded. “I can understand that. I mean, I don’t agree with it, because I think you’re hot, but I get that you don’t necessarily feel the same way about yourself.”
Now I was definitely blushing. “Can we stop talking about me for a while, please?”
“But you’re so cute when you’re all flushed and nervous,” he teased.
I glared at him. “I’m going to get them to poison your meal.”
Kai’s smile was positively filthy. “I can think of better ways for you to take it out on my mouth.”
Sighing, I decided there was really little way to sustain any sort of anger at him. At least, not if you also wanted to have sex with him, which I absolutely did. That urge, it seemed, made maintaining exasperation almost impossible.
Still, I made sure to hold his eye pointedly when I stabbed into my steak.
“Kai?”
“Charlie? What the hell...”
The guy - Charlie, I figured - gave Kai an unimpressed look. “Don’t get all possessive. It was your parents who recommended this place, remember?”
Kai laughed, pointedly brushing Charlie’s hand off his shoulder. “And I bet you’ve told a dozen people about it since.”
Charlie mimed zipping his mouth across.
The sweep of his stare across me felt like a tangible thing, a physical one. Enough to make my skin prickle.
“And what am I interrupting?” The question was for Kai, clearly, though Charlie’s eyes remained on me.
“Oh, shit. This is Tate. Tate, this is my friend Charlie; I know him from, damn, way back.”
“Way, way back,” Charlie corrected. He cocked his head at me. “Are you also training to heal the world and delight insurance companies?”
I set down my knife and fork, and tried to smile. “Definitely not.”
His nod was approving. “That’s a relief, I didn't think I recognized you. So you and Kai are...”
The question hung there, jagged and impossible. It was ridiculous, but it almost felt like the volume in the whole room dimmed, slightly. As if everyone present was suddenly fascinated to hear the answer.
“Neighbors,” I supplied, before Kai could say anything.
Charlie laughed. “Got it. Man, for a minute I almost thought you guys were on a date.” He nudged Kai in the shoulder. “Thought you’d found yourself a daddy.”
Kai’s eyes were fixed on me, his expression unreadable. He opened his mouth.
“I live next door to his parents,” I said, quickly. Trying to ignore the way Kai’s stare narrowed.
“Do they still live up in that neighborhood with the killer view and the retirement village vibes?” Charlie seemed blind to the fact that his friend was glaring daggers across the table.
As the recipient of said-daggers, I found myself wishing I could be so blithe.
“Yeah,” Kai confirmed, coldly.
“Well, remember me to them, won’t you?”
A nod, delivered with a tightness that I couldn’t quite believe Charlie was blind to.
“And call me, asshole. We need to get you out, away from the fossils up the hill.” He glanced at me, an afterthought. “No offense, Todd.”
“None taken,” I told him. It didn’t seem worth correcting his mistake.
Charlie winked, as though I’d confirmed myself a willing collaborator. “We need to get my friend some action for the summer. Dick or pussy, it doesn’t matter which.”
“Admirably flexible,” I agreed, dryly.
It was easier, I decided, simply not to look at Kai at all. That way I didn’t have to think about his expression, to decode it.
“All work and no play,” Charlie said, squeezing Kai’s shoulder. “Don’t make me come up there and drag you down, before you wither away.”
“A narrow escape,” I suggested, earning another grin.
“Anyway, our table’s ready, I think.” Charlie beamed at me. “Good to meet you, don’t let him bore you with the Junior Doctor 101 stuff.”
I risked a look at Kai, then regretted it. “I’ll steer the conversation onto safer ground,” I promised.
“Wise,” Charlie agreed, and then - just as rapidly as he’d appeared - he was gone.
It was too much to hope for, that Kai’s sour mood would’ve left with his friend. Retrieving my knife and fork, I concentrated on carving out a chunk of steak.
“Neighbors,” Kai said, finally.