Chapter 71 - Haven
Haven
My nose twitches at the stink of burning meat wafting through the air. Arms crossed, I lean my side against the white marble countertop, waiting for Kai to realize I’m in the kitchen with him.
Apparently, he’s too preoccupied.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he mutters, his arm whiplashing back when he tries to lift the edge of a rib eye from the pan with his fingers.
The smoke detector blares as another column of gray smoke carries the cow’s soul to heaven.
“Need a hand?”
Kai twists to look at me, rolls his eyes, and goes back to staring at the pan. “I think I burned it.”
“Think?” I step closer, peering down into the pan at the blackened piece of meat inside. “Oh, babe, that’s not burned.”
“Yeah?” He jiggles the pan, trying to get the meat to slide around, but it just sits there, fused to the scalding hot surface.
“It’s a sacrificial offering to the God of Takeout.”
He groans as he picks up the pan and heads over to the basin, letting it fall inside with a heavy thunk. “Well, dinner’s ruined.”
I wave a hand at the mess he’s made of the counter. “Your kitchen, too. This place had better come with a maid, because I’m not cleaning that up.”
He turns the knob, the blue flame on the range winking out. “Fuck it. Takeout it is. There’s a pizza place up the road—“
His green eyes widen when he sees me limping up to him, then close into wary slits when I clap my hand over his mouth.
“You’re overcomplicating this,” I murmur, smiling as I peel away my fingers from his lips.
“I wanted it to be—”
My hand is on his mouth again. “Special? Perfect? Domestic? We don’t need that crap.”
I can feel his eyes on me as I go into the pantry and grab some spaghetti. There’s an unopened bottle of ketchup on the shelf that I bring with me. He looks at the ingredients in my hands, and then shrugs.
“Fuck it. Why not?”
He fills a big pasta pot with water from the faucet above the range, then nods his head to the cellar door. “Can’t have pasta without wine.”
“Ooh, fancy. Red or white?”
“Dealer’s choice,” Kai calls after me as I open the door leading down into the wine cellar.
I pause at the top of the spiral staircase, waiting for the lights to flicker on below.
Any last doubt of the Jordans’s wealth evaporated the instant their beach house came into view.
Not only is it right on the beach, it has six bedrooms, all en-suite, two powder rooms, two living areas, a gigantic twelve-seat dining room table, three fireplaces…the list is as endless as the wine cellar.
All it took was Kai making a call, and by the time we got here, the fridge was stocked and the heating turned on. Vases brimming with fresh flowers stood in almost every room, and there was a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket waiting on the kitchen counter.
Knowing he’d been living like this when I’d been sleeping in the backseat of a car made me so jealous I felt ill.
Until I saw the ocean.
If it weren’t so damn cold out there on the deck, I’d still be out there, watching the waves roll in.
We’ve already finished the champagne.
Our tipsy state had nothing to do with Kai declaring he was going to make me the best Wagyu steak I’d ever had.
Jokes on him. I’ve never had Wagyu.
When I spotted the price on the label of the package he pulled out of the fridge, I realized why. It cost more than I spend on food in a month.
I don’t know a thing about wine except I think I prefer white to red, but I still pretend to browse the racks like a connoisseur.
I eventually find a bottle near the back that’s so dusty, I doubt anyone was going to drink it, anyway.
I take it upstairs and uncork it while Kai tosses spaghetti into the boiling water.
“You add salt?”
“I know how to make spaghetti, Heavenly.”
“Out of a can, maybe.”
He grumbles something about me being ungrateful.
I pour us each a glass of wine, suppressing a smile when Kai casually grabs the salt and adds some to the water. He glances over his shoulder, but I pretend I’m too busy studying the wine bottle to watch him.
He walks over, leaning across to read the label. “Good choice.”
“Is it?” I look up at him, honestly curious.
His green eyes drop to his glass. “Fucked if I know,” he mutters.
I laugh as I bump my hip against his. “Idiot.”
There’s a touch of a smile on his mouth, but he smooths it into a line, affecting a serious expression as he holds out his glass.
“A toast.”
“To…?”
His mouth works for a second, gaze touching my mouth, my nose, the crease between my brows. Then he grins, rallying with a bright, “To your first real vacation!”
The realization that he’s right sticks in my throat like I swallowed something without chewing. How many vacations has he had since he left Riverside? Five? Ten? A hundred?
I bet he’s been more places than this beach house. Probably went to Europe, Asia…and other countries rich people visit when they’re bored and there’s too much money in their bank accounts.
And that’s it, isn’t it?
I don’t know what Kai did or didn’t do, because the first promise he ever broke, long before my sixteenth birthday, was the one he made when he left Riverside.
So, yeah, none of this should make me jealous, but it does.
Guess I’m as petty as I am pathetic.
Me and Kai, we were the same. We both had shitty families who forced us to grow up in shitty mobile homes in a shitty trailer park.
It’s not fair that he got out. That he got this.
But I guess I just have to accept it, same as I’ve had to accept every other injustice thrown my way since my mother squeezed me out of her womb.
“Yay,” I say dryly, clinking his glass a little too hard with mine before taking a big swallow of my wine.
Yuck.
It tastes like turpentine mixed with vinegar. But I down another big mouthful and put the glass down before slipping around Kai to check the pasta.
“Yay?” Kai repeats warily.
I don’t turn around because I don’t trust my face right now.
“Oh, sorry.” I pump a fist in the air. “Woo hoo! Yeah!”
I hear him set his glass down. “The fuck’s up with you?”
“Nothing.” I poke the spaghetti to make sure it’s not sticking together. “I’m having a ton of fun. Aren’t you having a ton of fun?”
“Haven—”
He cuts off when I spin around to face him. I have to grab the counter to steady myself as the world takes longer than me to stop spinning.
“No, really. I’m loving it.” I push away, grabbing my glass and taking it with me as I limp over to the closest glass window. Kai’s beach house is lousy with them. This one offers a gorgeous view of the deck, the white sandy beach, the frothy waves.
My stomach churns.
While I was sleeping in my car, counting quarters for gas money, he was vacationing in a fucking palace by the ocean. My green-eyed boy has become a stranger with money, and I’m simply the embarrassing reminder of where he came from.
No wonder he never replied to my letters.
His hand is warm and large and heavy when he lays it on my shoulder. “Are you angry with me, or something?”
“Why’d you think that?” I huff out a quiet laugh. “It’s not like you forgot about me the moment you moved out of Riverside or anything.”
He tries to turn me to face him, but I lock my knees and refuse to shift. Wine sloshes up the side of my glass, but thank heavens it doesn’t spill on the exquisite hardwood floors.
“Forgot you?” His voice is a few octaves too high. Way too defiant. “I—that—you can’t say that.”
“You’d prefer abandoned? Rejected?” I shake my head, swallowing down another mouthful of the awful wine. In its defense, it doesn’t really taste that awful anymore. Guess my taste buds have shut down in self-defense.
I throw him a sidelong glance when he doesn’t reply straight away.
Like me, he’s staring at the ocean. “I wasn’t allowed anywhere near the woods. And even if I was, I didn’t have the time. My parents forced me to take extra classes to get my grades up. Put me on the football team.”
“You could have invited me to one of your games. Could have invited me to your house. Think I didn’t want to see your fancy mansion in the hills?
” I turn to him, my hand on the cool windowpane.
“The moment you got money, everything changed. You changed, Kai. Soon as you moved to Hillside, I might as well have been living on a different planet. And I guess you didn’t like the idea of inviting E.T. over to your house.”
He drops his head, staring at his still-full glass of wine. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Yeah? So you weren’t ashamed of me?”
Kai shakes his head. Not denying it, but like he’s regretting it. “I…”
I slap my hand against the glass. “What, Kai?”
He flinches, but stays quiet as his eyes flick back to the ocean.
I hear my own breathing. Short and harsh and hot through my flaring nostrils, so I lean back on my heel and take a leisurely sip from my glass.
Hmm. Weird how all the acidity seems to have vanished. Guess this bottle just had to air out a bit. Because that’s what happens, isn’t it? Shit gets pent up, it goes rotten. Air it out, and all the stale resentment dissipates.
Damn, this booze is turning me into a Poe wannabe.
Is it the wine, or is it just time?
Time to get answers to the questions I’ve spent so many sleepless nights contemplating. No matter what he says, anything can be better than the bullshit I’ve come up with.
That I’m not smart enough.
Not pretty enough.
Not worthy of him…or his love.
Because what I felt when I used to play with Kai in the woods morphed from friendship to love in the blink of an eye.
One day in summer, one ray of light—that’s all it took.
The day Kai came to say goodbye. To tell me he was moving away.
The day he lied to my face.