Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
It was strange and almost guilt-inducing to be out of the house and in the city’s dazzle without trying to solve the mystery of myself.
To be dressed in a little black dress and high-heeled boots under my fine evening coat and to not stumble into places just to ask waiters and shopkeepers if they’d seen me before.
And yet, when I met with Kai, all of my doubts and disquiet melted away.
Instant soothing effect of his presence.
His luminous certainty against the darkness of my chaos.
For a while we walked side by side down the glimmering street. He told me I looked pretty and that he liked my blue scarf, and I said nothing, only laughed softly, feeling soft, feeling like the way he was looking at me.
“Sorry,” he said then with a repentant little smile. “Maybe this wasn’t a friendly thing to say.”
“No, it’s fine,” I assured him. “You look well too.”
He looked gorgeous, actually. In his long black coat and high-neck sweater, and with his hair combed back, away from his face. I wanted to kiss him. I wanted this to be a date so I could spend the next few hours riddled with the anxious anticipation of him kissing me.
If only I could turn back time. If only I could become normal again, just a person craving love but fearing vulnerability. For this to be my only reservation, my only obstacle to overcome.
“You’re not feeling tired, are you?” Kai asked, raking his gaze over me in his usual, irresistible way.
I shook my head, inhaling the damp, chestnut-scented air. “I love being out of the house when the weather is like this.”
And it was something to love, wasn’t it?
On a crisp October night, to walk with easy, unhurried strides along a rain-washed street, with the scent of petrichor in my lungs and the splendor of someone’s company by my side.
Now more than ever, it was incumbent on me to enjoy these fleeting pleasures, because for all I knew, I could wake up tomorrow morning and lose them as well.
“Glad to hear that,” said Kai, passing a hand over his nape. “I was worried I came off a bit too assertive on the phone.”
“Oh, I don’t mind,” I drawled. “I’m used to your dominant personality.”
He huffed out a laugh, baring his flushed throat at the sky. “No, Anya, you have a dominant personality. I’m just trying to keep up with you.”
Playfully, I nudged his shoulder with mine. “You’re doing alright.”
The avenue was dotted with fairy-lit trees, and the sidewalk was busy with people waiting in lines outside of bars and restaurants.
Streams of vehicles were speeding past the dappled road, and the bus at the stop remained staggeringly full, countless strangers’ faces floating in the fogged, velvet-looking windows. Everyone living. Everything moving.
“Very ambitious of me to think we would find a decent place to eat without a reservation on a Sunday night,” noted Kai as we passed by several oppressively packed restaurants.
“This place has really good hot dogs,” I suggested, nodding my head toward the arcade across the street, where a group of teenagers had formed a line before the canteen.
Kai frowned at the unromantic ambiance of paper plates and pinball sounds. “I promised you a proper meal.”
“They also have fries,” I added with a huge smile, hoping to tempt him.
He cocked a brow, affecting disapproval. “Very refined palate you got there.”
I laughed, stupidly happy to be standing here with him, arguing about our dinner plans. Almost like a real couple. “Yeah, to be honest, I’m a terrible cook,” I admitted. “I have such bad eating habits I have no idea how I’m still functioning.”
“Tell you what,” he said in an air of conspiracy, leaning closer with his hands in his pockets, “when I get back from my trip, I’ll cook you a nice dinner. Maybe multiple ones. Make sure you don’t pass out in the meeting room during your heated debates about corduroy miniskirts.”
“Ah,” I sighed at the stars. “Of course he cooks.”
“Well, not all of us can survive on fries and toast.”
“I like popsicles too.”
“Strawberry, I know.”
I squinted at him in mock suspicion.
He bit the corner of his bottom lip, looking all handsomely embarrassed. “Whenever we go out for lunch,” he explained, “you always stop at the convenience store afterwards and get a strawberry popsicle for dessert.”
“And you’ve noticed.”
Something vulnerable touched his face—a shift in our dynamic. I, the powerful one for once, while he was caught in longing. “And I’ve noticed.”
Against all reason, I stirred a little closer, close enough for him to hear me whisper, “Don’t stop.”
“Don’t stop what?”
“Noticing.”
A hint of a smile, his eyes on my lips. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He went to get us some food while I was left with the daunting task of finding us somewhere to sit.
Wading through the crowd, overwarm under the colorful fluorescence of several coin-operated games and loud kiddie rides, I finally spotted an empty bench next to the claw machines no one was lining up for.
Moments later, Kai, a head taller than everyone else, scanned the place for me, and I waved my hands back and forth to catch his attention. When he finally spotted me, he came over and set out on the bench our picnic of hot dogs, fries, ice cream sandwiches, and cherry-flavored sodas.
“They were out of the popsicles, sorry,” he said as he unbuttoned his coat. “I got you some ice cream instead. Hope that’s alright.”
“Yeah, don’t worry about it,” I chuckled, patting through my bag for my wallet. “How much do I owe you?”
“No,” was all he said, settling down on the other side of the bench.
“Kai,” I persisted.
“No, I’m not taking your money. I asked you out.”
“Yes, but it’s not a date.”
He popped one of the soda cans open and held it out for me. “So what? Friends cannot treat friends?”
Flattered by his generosity, I dropped my wallet back into my bag and accepted the soda. “Fine. But next time, I’m definitely treating you. Hopefully they’ll have the popsicles too.”
“Are you planning on making me eat like this again?”
“Only if you let me.”
He laughed under his breath, shaking his head. “I’m doomed, then.”
Yes, Kai exercised and cooked and watched his diet.
I’d seen his polished cooking pans dangling over the stove that day at his apartment.
I’d seen his CDs and the black-blue bottle of his cologne on the nightstand.
I’d seen his unmade bed and his fresh laundry swaying in the wind.
What an odd pleasure I found in knowing these things, in knowing him in a way that perhaps others didn’t.
After we were finished eating, Kai went to discard the empty plates and napkins in one of the trashcans and returned with a new pack of cigarettes, slim and unflavored, the kind I liked to smoke.
Neither of us reached for them, though. With nothing on the bench between us, we found ourselves sitting closer, so close that for several moments I stopped producing coherent thoughts.
I could only feel him, the measure of his breathing and the radiating heat of his body making me all tender and weak.
Every time I moved, my shoulder brushed his arm, and every time I took a breath, I was able to smell the fragrance of his cologne. Fresh. Masculine.
“You know,” he rasped, breaking at last the tension of our silence, “there was an arcade like this in my old neighborhood too.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I used to go in with my friends all the time. Sometimes right after school. It drove my mother crazy.”
At the mention of his mother, a sprout of unease flourished in my chest. Warily, like sailing upon a sheet of frost, I asked, “Are you close with your parents?”
A divot carved between his brows as he too came to realize the unpleasant turn this conversation could take. “Yeah, but we don’t have to talk about that.”
“No, I’m interested to know,” I claimed, constrained in my response.
He looked at me, unconvinced. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well,” he exhaled, “my dad is a kindergarten teacher, and my mom has a shop over at Green Street. She sells jewelry. They live close by, so I see them a lot, especially on the weekends.”
“That must be nice,” I murmured, observing the people lining up for the photo booth so I wouldn’t have to meet his gaze.
But Kai wouldn’t have that. “Hey,” he breathed, so close to my lips that if I lifted my head a mere inch we would be kissing. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you sad.”
Pulling back on the bench, I chanced a glance at him. “You didn’t. You’ve been really good to me, actually. I want you to know that I appreciate it. And for covering for me at work. I… I might’ve told Betty that we were together that night.”
“We were,” he said, not quite catching my meaning.
“Yes, but she might tell people.”
Confused still, he nodded. “Okay.”
“I wanted to give you a heads-up just in case.”
“In case I have ten girlfriends at work or something?” he realized. “Yeah, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not nearly as insatiable as you think I am.”
I let out an exaggerated scoff. “I’ve seen you flirt with literally everyone at the office.”
“You’ve seen me ask about their day and their spouses. You’ve seen me be polite,” he argued.
“You and I have very different definitions of polite.”
He smiled then, grandly, his cheeks dimpling. “Are you jealous, Anya?”
Perhaps I was a bit jealous. Or perhaps I really had seen him be polite not just to the girls but to everyone at the office and had deliberately misinterpreted it so as to give myself a reason not to like him.
Because to like him, knowing that he liked me back, meant a disturbance, an irreparable rupture in my carefully constructed life.
But now it was too late to be regretting this, wasn’t it? Now I had no choice but to accept that I had nothing to offer to this man. No stability, no clarity, no love. Yes, I wanted to be loved. Desperately, selfishly, I wanted to be loved, having no idea how to love someone in return.
A hot, uncomfortable sensation crawled over the sides of my face, and when I raised the heel of my palm to my forehead, I found the skin damp and almost throbbing.
“Are you feeling warm?” Kai asked, noticing the gesture.
“Yeah, it’s boiling in here. I think it’s from all the machines and the lights.”
Without warning he bent over me and pressed the cold soda can to the underside of my jaw. A droplet of condensation glided down my throat. Cool. Incentivizing. “Here. That helps?”
“Mmm,” was my sole response. A ribbon’s breadth was his mouth from mine, and the sight of his throat bobbing I found oddly erotic.
“You know,” he said in a low, tactile voice, “all jokes aside, I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“Do what to me?”
“Look at you the way I do and then flirt with other women in front of you like it doesn’t mean anything. Because it does mean something. To me, at least, it does.”
Again this hot feeling flared under my skin, different than before, though, more cerebral than sensual.
Staring at his lips, I asked, “How are you looking at me, Kai?”
Undone, pained almost, he cursed under his breath. “Fuck, Anya. You know how I’m looking at you.”
And despite everything, I would have kissed him then had he not drawn back, had he not made it so painfully clear that we shouldn’t be kissing.
Kind of him, if you thought about it, to realize the vulnerability of my predicament—a woman with only a year-old consciousness, confused and scared and desperately clinging to the only people that felt familiar to her—and to not take advantage of that. A good man.
It only made me want him more, and at the same time forced me to realize that I had nothing to compare this desire to.
Had I felt this way about someone else before?
Had someone else looked at me with longing in their eyes, and had I looked back?
Perhaps I got my heart broken, and that was why I requested the procedure.
But then again, why delete all of it? Why not leave my childhood intact?
Decisively, before I could respond, Kai cleared his throat and stood from the bench. “I should get you home,” he said.
“Yes,” I agreed halfheartedly. “You should.”
Sauntering down the sleek sidewalk, I couldn’t tell if the wind was falling in mist or if it’d begun to rain again.
Stretching back my neck, I squinted at the streetlamp, where light-dazzled pinpricks appeared dashing under the glass.
Raining, I decided just as Kai shrugged off his coat and held it up over our heads like a canopy.
“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” I reassured him, searching for his eyes.
But he was not going to look back this time. Perhaps because he didn’t want to; perhaps because he couldn’t. Didn’t trust himself to do so.
Outside my building, I stood on the steps while he remained on the sidewalk.
His hair was damp, his face stippled with droplets, his gaze turned up to me, soft and revealing.
And if my life wasn’t constituted by a mere handful of months, I would say that this was the kind of thing I’d been reading and secretly dreaming about my whole life.
“Tomorrow,” he said in a surprisingly firm tone, “call me after your assessment. I’ll leave with the night train. Just in case something happens.”
My breath turned into a thick film of fog as I exhaled, “Thank you, Kai.”
He lowered his eyes a bit, and even from this distance I was able to see the column of his throat narrowing. “Get some sleep, alright?”
We said our goodnights, and I went back upstairs to find the apartment warm and watery with light from outside.
I took off my clothes and makeup, and for an hour or two I lay in bed with eyes wide open. I could not close them. I could not sleep. I was full of words from another world. I was full of loneliness I no longer wanted.