Chapter Nine #3
Meat secured, I guided a slice of green bean onto the fork’s tines. “Trust a wise old fossil,” I told him, my attention still focused on the maneuvers on the plate in front of me. “Some things are easier left unexplained.”
“Is that so, ‘Todd’?”
I glanced up at him. “I’ve been called worse.”
“I’m tempted to call you worse right now.”
Popping the steak into my mouth, I tilted my head in acknowledgment. Chewed, then swallowed. “So which are you leaning toward, the dick or the pussy?”
“Tate.” Kai sounded unimpressed.
I chuckled. “He’s your friend.”
“He’s a fucking idiot.”
“And again, I remind you, he’s your friend.” Frowning, I tried to spear a sliver of carrot. The butter glaze had left it slippery.
“You could’ve told him.”
It was tempting to let the fork drop, but I knew the clatter of that would only attract attention. “Told him what, that his friend had already got some summer action under his belt?”
“Tate.”
Suddenly, I was too tired to decode the many, varied meanings my own name could apparently carry, intonation-depending.
“It’s fine. It’s none of his business.” I gestured with my fork, at where Charlie had just been standing. “What was I meant to do, list off all the positions we’d had sex in? Ask the waitress for a crayon, so I could draw some helpful diagrams on the tablecloth?”
He made a noise, one which spoke of disgust as much as frustration.
I set the cutlery down, my appetite fleeing me. There was something about Kai’s indignance, his clear and unmistakable reaction: a charming and naive sort of outrage, that the world might dare be so uncooperative.
“It doesn’t have to be a big deal,” I told him, my voice softer. Coaxing. “Don’t let it get to you.”
“Rise above it, like you are, you mean?”
I dabbed at my mouth with the napkin. “You learn to fight your battles.”
“We’re back to ‘some things are better left unexplained,’” he said, frustrated.
“Easier, I said,” I corrected. “Easier left unexplained.”
“And anything for an easier life, right?”
I flashed him what I hoped was a devilish sort of grin. “I’m appreciative of easy things.”
Kai snorted. It was, at least, better than glaring and simmering frustration. “I don’t know what that says about me, then.”
I mimed zipping my lips, just like Charlie had.
“Eat your damn steak, asshole,” Kai said, shaking his head.
Still, he was grinning while he said it.
#
We’d made small-talk until dessert, tension defused and the flirtation a low simmer throughout. As the evening progressed, it started to become unexpectedly clear to me that, while obviously I was attracted to Kai, I also just plain enjoyed spending time with him.
He was enthusiastic, and irreverent, and generous with his laughter - and his compliments.
And, though the latter still made me feel awkward, he had a way of couching his praise so that, even if I didn’t quite believe him when he said it, I didn’t quite not believe him, either.
Suspend skepticism, and you could almost think that I enjoyed the attention.
I’d never admit it, though.
I tried to pick up the check, only to be told in no uncertain terms that we’d split it.
Then, it was back into a car - Kai joking that he would see me home safe - and back through the winding streets.
Quieter now, the evening air somehow oily and heavy, as the heat of the past few weeks settled onto the city like a blanket.
Kai asked the driver to turn off the A/C, opening the window and pushing his head out into the rush of air.
Hair unruly and eyes squeezed shut as he grinned into the tungsten-blushed night.
I watched him, feeling as though there was an unexpected whirlwind in my life. A storm that had picked me up, scattered the pieces of my routine, and flung me in unforeseen directions. It wasn’t so much a bad feeling, as it was a foreign one.
On the sidewalk, scant lights of suburbia barely touching us, I watched the cab’s taillights receding. Slivers of red soon lost around the corner. When I looked at him, I found Kai was already staring at me. Lips stretched into a smile; hands pushed into the pockets of his shorts.
“I should say goodnight,” I told him, a little hesitantly. Part of me wanted to invite him in again, to feel the way the gravity of the house shifted - somehow both imperceivable and yet unmistakable - when he was there with me. A feeling both attractive and terrifying.
“It is a school night, after all,” Kai observed, wryly.
I imagined being in the office, going through the routine that once had seemed so reassuring in its repetitions. Somehow that comfort had soured, now.
“Some of us do have to get our beauty sleep,” I joked, smiling awkwardly. I could see him shake his head in the shadows.
“Shut up and kiss me,” he said, “before the self-deprecation starts up again.” He took a half-step forward, closing the gap between our bodies.
A beat, and then I leaned into him.
It was a kiss that felt new, different somehow. Not quite the tentative, exploratory touch of lips upon lips that had been our first, and yet not the hungry, sexual clinch of earlier in the evening. Something that spoke of familiarity, even amid the newness.
“Thank you for the date,” I whispered, my mouth so close to his cheek I could feel the fine hairs there brushing against me. “I had fun.”
Kai smiled; I could feel it more than I could see it, the telltale way his muscles shifted. “Let me take you out again, sometime,” he suggested.
I pictured him, across from me in the restaurant, face lit up as he told me the punchline to a story.
His strong hand on the stem of the wineglass, fingers a sudden reminder of how he’d touched me just hours before.
It was an intimacy I’d told myself I wouldn’t succumb to again, and yet here I was, gladly stumbling back into it now.
You can either fight these things, or embrace them.
“Okay,” I told him. “Sure.”