Chapter Twelve #2
Dish towel knotted between my hands, I turned. Forced myself to hold his eye.
“My ex told me I was an asshole. So, maybe you’re in good company.”
Kai tilted his head. “Told you while you were dating, or while you were breaking up?”
I tossed the towel down. “Does it make a difference?”
“Someone telling you that because they want to help you to improve, versus telling you that because they want to hurt you? Yeah, Tate, I think it makes a difference.”
The truth was that I couldn’t recall where, on the timeline of our collapsing relationship, that conversation fell.
Not in the better times, certainly, but not when we’d been at our most cruel, most callous, either.
Some barb, casually traded, most likely: never intended or expected to stick.
Even now, I wasn’t sure if my ex would see it as a victory or an accident that his accusation still clung to me.
You got lucky, sometimes. The dagger sneaking between the ribs.
“I did asshole things,” I told Kai, plainly. “Not all the time, but sometimes. We both got hurt, along the way.”
“Very human of you.”
“I suppose I have to trust your definition for that,” I agreed, “you being a medical man, and all.”
His fingertips were warm on my bare arm.
“Forgive me? For being thoughtless before, I mean.”
No way to shrug, to make some awkward gesture of dismissal. Not if it risked those five points of gentle contact.
“I’m just not used to talking about this stuff,” I admitted. “Or being so easy to read, really.”
“I’ll apologize for being blunt, but not for wanting to know you better.”
“And who could blame you, with my kitchen expertise what it is.”
Kai laughed, as he leaned in to wrap his arms around me. “Your attempts to escape emotional vulnerability using humor are transparent,” he murmured. “You know that, right?”
It was tempting not to say anything, to simply savor his warmth.
“What’s the alternative, actually getting to know someone?” I teased.
“I mean... yes?”
“You’re funny,” I told him, burying my face in his shoulder.
#
“How did you meet? You and your ex, I mean.”
It was strange, someone taking an interest. Stranger still to feel inclined to answer.
“Friend of a friend.” I bit back on the urge to joke about how it had all been pre-apps.
Courting done analog, without the convenience of software to break the ice and hold rejection’s sting at arm’s length.
Sometimes, my eagerness to remind Kai of our age difference felt like it bordered on self-harm.
“Love at first sight?” The humor was clear in his voice.
“Hardly.”
Alistair had thought me prickly, distant, and I’d believed him false, a creature of artifice.
Doubted that anyone could be so mindful of their fellow man, so genuine with their expression of wide-eyed curiosity.
The first time he’d struck up a conversation, I’d spent half the time searching for the joke made at my expense.
I’d ended up chased, not the punchline. Forced to reckon with my inclination to solitude, and how incompatible that was with what, finally, I accepted was us dating.
He’d called it only-child syndrome, blamed the self-sufficiency of my solitary play.
I’d never had the heart to explain that the problem was myopia not independence.
“Did you not want to date?” Kai looked genuinely fascinated.
I shrugged. “Just never thought that was on the cards. Not for me, anyway.”
A chuckle. “And you went straight from that, to a fifteen year relationship?”
“Sixteen,” I corrected. Even though it felt ridiculous to insist.
“Sixteen, then.” Kai hissed through his teeth, awe blended with disbelief. “That’s not a bad run.”
“Enough that you start taking it for granted,” I told him, a little shocked at my own honesty.
“And you never saw it coming? The breakup.”
Every day, I wanted to tell him, every damn day: doom forecast on the dot, regular as clockwork.
The boy who’d never foreseen love, suddenly cataloguing all the ways he’d lose it.
Until it became a concept, not an outcome; a habit, lists their own reward, and so occupying that I barely noticed the reality of decay seeping in until it was already too late.
“I wasn’t easy to live with.” It had the intonation of a confession, but there was something liberating about saying it out loud.
“I doubt he was entirely innocent, either,” Kai said.
I shrugged again. That didn’t feel like an observation I was qualified to pass judgment on.
“We don’t have to talk about this stuff.” He frowned. “If it’s something that makes you uncomfortable, I mean.”
“It’s more just that I wish there was an explanation, one that sounded more insightful than ‘we both fucked up,’ but I don’t know what it is.
” The deck lights glinted off the wine glass, so close I could feel my fingers itching to reach out, pluck it up.
“Maybe there was always a countdown attached, and I was too naive to recognize it.”
Kai grinned at me. “You, naive?”
I tried to mirror the expression, muscles feeling as dull and awkward as if I’d already downed the glass and several more like it. “I know; shocking, isn’t it.”
“Not much of a romantic, are you, Tate.”
A realist, perhaps.
“Endings are normal, natural,” I told him. “The difficult part is recognizing when they’re meant to be. Not fighting it.”
I reached for the glass, only for Kai to stop me. His fingers around my wrist: not tight, but brooking no argument, either. Guiding my hand to his bare chest, still wet from his swim.
“Sure. But you have to remember to enjoy what time there is, too.”
Heat, and smooth skin, and the steady throb of his heartbeat against my palm.
I looked up, from my fingers to his knowing smile, and wondered what Alistair would say if he could see me now. From across the pool, perhaps; the sunset shimmering in its ripples as though the world Kai and I had created, this bubble we occupied, was forever on the cusp of tearing apart.