Chapter Twenty-Four
I told the office that I had the flu; that I wouldn’t be coming in all week. Staring at the mirror, at sallow skin and eyes sunk in dark circles, the lie almost felt like truth.
I’d almost exhausted the easy pickings from the kitchen, when what little appetite I had emerged.
Knew that, eventually, I’d need to restock the fridge, but couldn’t bring myself to think about it as anything more than a theoretical problem.
Most of the days I spent either in bed or, if I’d summoned the motivation to go downstairs, under a blanket on the couch.
Sleeping when my body wanted sleep; staring out of the window with unseeing eyes when I was awake.
At night the darkness seeped into the house, unrestrained by the lights and lamps I left switched off.
I thought about him sometimes. About Kai, the way he’d look at you and smile knowingly. How his body looked, in the briefest pause before he arched gracefully into the water. How he’d felt wrapped around me.
I was all cried out. There was only sorrow left.
At first I’d found myself staring, hungrily, at my cellphone on the table. Wanting it to light up with a message. After a while, though - wishful thinking resolutely unwilling to manifest as fact - I’d ignored it. Now, I was pretty sure the battery was dead, and had been for some time.
It was only the guilty thought of some emergency call going unanswered that made me plug it in to charge again. As it glowed back to life, I forced myself to read through the emails and messages filtering through in drips and starts. Mostly junk and a few group mails from work.
And then one from a name I hadn’t allowed myself to hope I’d see.
Clumsy fingers tapped the screen, impatiently waited for the text to load. That took longer than actually reading it did.
“Tate, I hope you’re okay. I don’t like how things ended between us that night. Please, let’s talk.”
Less than twenty words, and yet my heart was hammering in my chest. He’d sent it yesterday, according to the timestamp.
My fingers hovered over the keyboard. Uncertain what to say, and how to say it. Fearful, too, that his message had all been polite concern: the paternalistic ministrations of a doctor-to-be. Did he really want me to reply?
I bit my tongue, cursed my overthinking. If ever there was a time to take something at face value, this was it. If ever there was a moment to deny the paranoia, it was today.
Less thinking, Tate, more typing.
“I’m really sorry. I didn’t charge my phone. And for how I behaved, too. Do you want to come over sometime, maybe?”
I hit send before the second-guessing could start. Set the phone down on the table, feeling some weird mixture of relief and absolute horror, and then jolted as it buzzed with a new message.
“I’ll come over now.”
Shit. Shit, shit, shit.
He was meant to be back at school.
I looked around the room. It resembled a badly managed youth hostel, the kitchen a particular eyesore.
Of course, I realized, that was nowhere near my most significant problem.
I hadn’t so much as glanced at myself in a mirror for the past few days, so I could only imagine how much of a mess I was now.
“Give me 15 to shower, okay?” I hurriedly tapped out in reply. Paused only long enough to see his “ok” in response before rushing to the bathroom.
It was like the Tate staring back at me from the mirror was from some shadow world. The grimy, unpalatable version of the person I usually would be. He looked tired, and overwhelmed, and definitely not suitable for public consumption.
I dragged a razor across my face, then threw myself into the shower.
No time to dawdle over thoughts of the last time Kai and I had been in there together.
In maybe two minutes flat I was scrubbing myself with a towel and trying to find clean clothes among the pile of laundry I hadn’t bothered to put in the machine.
T-shirt. Jeans. Not exactly an outfit likely to win any sartorial contest, but at least they didn’t smell of stale coffee or have the creases of several days’ wear. Glanced at the clock to see I still had a couple of minutes to get the house in order.
I saw him as I rounded the corner from the stairs, his back at least. Sitting on the edge of a lounger out on the deck, staring down at the cityscape as he waited.
I watched him for a moment, eyes reminding themselves of the shape of his back, the contours of his shoulders. Realized I was clenching my fists at my sides from nerves and anxiety; forced myself to take a few deep breaths before stepping to the door.
“Hey,” I said, sliding it open.
Kai turned to look up at me, an expression I couldn’t quite decode on his face. I fought the urge to look away.
“Hey,” he said, eventually. He sounded... wary, maybe.
“It’s kinda messy inside,” I started to explain, only for him to interrupt me.
“I’m not here to judge your housekeeping skills, Tate.”
I tried my best to hide my wince. The thought of being “judged” by any metric left me feeling uncomfortable.
“Okay,” I conceded, “do you want coffee?”
Kai stood up, brushing his hands down his jeans. “Sure.”
“It’ll have to be black,” I remembered. “The cream has expired.”
He shrugged, clearly waiting for me to stop blocking the door.
I bit my lip and led him into the kitchen.
“Sorry about the state of things,” I apologized again, giving a half-hearted gesture intended to encompass the whole room and, quite probably, myself as well.
Kai glanced around. “I see you decided to redecorate with a college dorm theme.”
I chuckled, awkwardly, as I heaped coffee into the machine and filled the water tank.
“Something like that,” I conceded. “The past few days have been... challenging.” I couldn’t bring myself to look at him as I said it.
Silence, then. Only the hissing and gurgles of boiling water to break it. I reached deep into the cabinet to pull out a couple of clean mugs, and then stood awkwardly waiting for the carafe to fill.
“Tate,” Kai said, eventually.
I squeezed my eyes shut, wanting him here but at the same time not wanting to listen, to have to have the conversation I knew was inevitable.
“Is it good to be back?” I asked him, instead. He’d have caught up with his friends, now, would be getting used to his new schedule. Normalcy once more.
A pause. “Kinda,” he answered, finally.
For a moment, I thought one word was all I’d get.
“I mean, it can be frustrating and a pain in the ass,” he concluded, after a moment, “but it’ll all be worth it in the end, right?”
I treated his question as rhetorical, not sure how to even begin to answer it.
A little apathy before the hard work struck up again was understandable, despite the whole medical school thing having started out much more a dream of his father’s, than of Kai’s himself.
Even if now it felt like he’d finally begun to find a groove of his own to fit into.
I poured the coffee; took a gulp from my mug, then another. As if familiar motions could save me, even if my movements were jerky.
“Who knows,” I told him, “you might meet someone.” Hated the words as soon as they came out of my mouth; felt their weirdness hanging in the air between us like a haze of mosquitos. The room thick with them, and with tension; something to push through, as I walked outside.
Kai sat down, on the lounger opposite me. Frustration in the set of his shoulders.
“I don’t get why you’d say that,” he replied, finally. There was a little heat in his tone, yes, but mostly Kai just sounded tired. Forlorn, even, as he looked away from me, out across the valley.
“I just...” I started, then trailed off. It was the classic ‘bad topic you know you shouldn’t bring up’ that I couldn’t help but, well, bring up.
Silence again.
When he spoke, his voice was low. Hollow. None of the sparkle, the energy I’d come to associate with him.
“I get that this had to be a temporary thing, but I kinda resent the idea that I’m just going to ricochet from one warm body to the next.”
I had to play it over in my head a few times before I could understand it. Even then, I was struggling.
“I’m sorry if I made it feel like I wanted more,” I said, eventually. Could hear, even as I said it, how mediocre it sounded. Not so much an apology as the wheedling excuse even a child would’ve been embarrassed to give.
He turned to me, his expression incredulous. “Tate. Literally nothing you’ve said, or done, has made it sound like you’ve wanted this to be anything more serious than us fucking, sometimes.”
I could feel my uncertainty, my frustration, shifting to simmering anger. I’d tried to give him the out he wanted; I’d tried to make it as easy, as low-hassle as I could. And even with all that, I was still getting blamed?
“What more could I have done?” I demanded, the heat catching in my voice, rough and ragged around the edges. “I’ve tried to make this as fucking easy as I could.”
Kai opened his mouth, staring at me. Closed it. The look he was giving me was one you’d give some sort of alien species spread out in front of you. Bizarre and unfathomable.
“Tate, what is it that you actually think I want, here?” he asked, eventually.
I grit my teeth; fought the urge just to shrug like a sullen kid. I felt out of my depth, floundering in seas I didn’t understand.
I drained my mug, then rolled its lingering heat between my palms. “I was trying to make it easy for you to go back to your life,” I said finally.
I didn’t expect the snort from him in response.
“Jesus. What is all this, if it isn’t my life?”
Gesturing around us, as though that would explain it all, I tried to find the words to explain.
That bubble of unreality I remembered from my own summer breaks; the way things seemed to operate in blissful isolation, away from the mundane reality of the real world.
How the things that happened in that strange, liminal space never crossed back over, when life resumed again.