Chapter Eleven
The shower had been, despite all of my bitching about getting there, the perfect come-down. Hot water soothing my complaining limbs. I’d stopped being too vocal about just how much they were complaining, lest Kai decide he was messing about with a very old man.
The more time I spent with him, the less I wanted anything to potentially put him off. Watching as he’d soaped himself, the suds cascading down the contours of his body, it was all I could do not to reach out and pinch him. Just to make sure he was actually real.
“I’m really glad we did that,” he told me, voice warm and low, later on. After he’d pulled his shorts back on, and half-buttoned his shirt. For some reason I had zero doubt that he meant it, too, even if it sounded corny and unbelievable. Probably a useful skill for a doctor to possess.
I’d fixed him with a sober, serious look. “I’m really glad my first time was with you,” I admitted.
Kai stared at me, blinking, for a moment. Then rolled his eyes as I started to chuckle. “You bastard. For a minute there I thought... I mean, I wondered...”
“Whether you’d just stolen my innocence on the living room floor?”
He rubbed his hands across his face in exasperation. “My god,” he exhaled, “you’re honestly a monster.”
I’d had to laugh at that. “Yeah, I’ve heard that before.”
With some unspoken agreement we’d both known he wasn’t going to stay over.
Even if the bed he was going back to was only a matter of feet away, on the other side of the fence.
I’d watched him pick his way through the darkness, path lights a firefly glow around his ankles, then give me a quick wave before he turned the corner.
The house seemed disappointingly empty with him gone.
Wine glass in hand, I leaned against the patio doorframe.
The city unrolled like a glistening patchwork in front of me, lights a sparkling mesh cast haphazard across the contours of the valley.
I imagined the sound of traffic, even though the only noise to make it up here was the thrum of crickets and the occasional car.
It felt like looking down through the curve of a snow-globe.
For all that, the make-believe seemed much greater. Kai’s unexpected presence in my life was welcome but still inexplicable, and though I knew I was starting to sound like a broken record - even if only I was privy to its tune - it was a struggle all the same to get a grip on what was happening.
Nothing about the situation said “future” in any way, shape, or form.
He was a pre-med student on summer break.
I was... well, I was trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do next, after the implosion of the life I’d thought I had.
It wasn’t just the years between us that seemed insurmountable, it was the fact that we were simply in very different places.
“We need to get my friend some action for the summer,” Charlie had said, at the restaurant. He just hadn’t known that Kai’s summer fling was close enough that he could walk to each assignation.
Every time I settled on the concept of it just being sex, though, something came along to unseat that. Feelings, usually. That traitorous little voice somewhere in your brain that says “maybe this could be more...?” but then leaves before actually filling in the blanks.
I sighed, draining the rest of the glass.
A sensible person would just ask Kai what he wanted to happen.
A sensible person wouldn’t torture themselves in some weird tug-of-war between libido and emotional needs.
A sensible person would have a fucking clue what he was doing, and why, and where he was going next.
I was not, it was already clear to me, a sensible person in this scenario.
I slid the door shut and went to bed.