Chapter 11 #2
Kalea and I could have worked on our relationship, rebuilt anything that was broken so we came back stronger.
I would not have thought her tainted, weak, or disgusting—nor did I think so now.
But her insistence on keeping secrets bothered me.
Even now, when there was a chance we could rebuild, she was not being honest.
Beetle was in the kitchen. Though only a lowly Prospect for us, Dr. Kevin Jang was a Professor of Entomology and did something relating to bugs for the Hawai‘i Department of Agriculture.
Personally, I had nothing against bugs. They were important to our environment and ecosystem, but I certainly did not want any for a pet or to have them tattooed onto my body.
When Doodles came to Prospect for us, he also brought this scrawny little nerd with him.
Despite the tarantula tattoo crawling up his neck, none of us honestly took a second glance at him.
But the North Korean refugee had a trick up his sleeve.
He was also a Hapkido Third Dan black belt and an Ironman athlete.
I didn’t know or care his legal immigration status, though I figured he had to have something arranged with the government to be able to work for them and a private university.
The guy was wicked smart, even if he tended to talk about the mating rituals of tongue-eating louses during meal times.
Since I needed to meet with Kayl, Lucifer, and Neo—and apparently Bacon—I couldn’t leave Kalea and Pualani here alone. I sent out a message to the Prospects that the first one to get their ass here got to eat her cooking. Sucked to be Beetle, because Kalea’s cooking lacked taste and texture.
“Anything happen while I was gone?” I asked him, going to the fridge for a can of iced tea with pineapple juice.
Beetle shook his head. “She used her phone once, but Neo traced it to a girlfriend’s and hasn’t sent any messages that they can find.”
I popped the can open. Part of Neo’s assignment was to watch Kalea’s cyber activity.
I believed her story without a shadow of a doubt, but the fact that she wouldn’t tell me who or why troubled me.
I was missing a huge puzzle piece, including the key to her statement of how her actions were protecting me.
Regardless, I couldn’t risk her sending a message to her blackmailer to inform him that I was now on his trail.
If it wasn’t for Pualani’s existence, I wouldn’t be so narrow minded as to assume the blackmailer was a “he”. It was less common, but women could also be rapists. What they couldn’t do was impregnate another woman.
I gave Neo and Kayl a list of men that I knew of in Kalea’s life that I thought could possibly be her blackmailer.
I knew it wasn’t her abusive ex, because he was now shark poop floating around in the oceans.
I went as far back as middle school and high school teachers, college professors, her dance instructor when she attempted to learn hip hop when she was eleven…
Since I didn’t know what the blackmail entailed, I had no idea how far back to go.
I couldn’t wrap my mind around what she could have possibly done that was worth keeping a secret like this about. And why couldn’t she just be honest—with me, at the very least? How could she even consider us trying to patch things up if she couldn’t tell me what was going on?
What if we did get back together and I wasn’t hunting down the kanapapiki, son of a bitch?
Was she just planning on continuing to pay him for the rest of her life?
When did it end? I didn’t even know how much he was demanding.
Enough that it affected her bottom line when Aloiki sold their family farm.
A noise brought me back to the present and I remembered Beetle was still in the room. “Go,” I told him.
He packed up his computer, making the tattooed ants on his skin look like they were moving along his hands and forearms. As he exited the back door, Kalea stepped into the kitchen. She hesitated in the doorway, despite that she’d spent the last two nights in my arms.
I crooked my finger at her. “Come here.”
Kalea hurried over, wrapping her arms around my middle as I brought my left arm tight around her shoulders.
I pressed my face into her hair, and just breathed.
There was a sense of peace, a settling in my soul, at having her in my arms again.
Kalea had always been such a big part of my life, making the last two years without her feel like I was adrift without my anchor.
Yet, as I closed my eyes, a pair of sea-green irises stared back at me.
Silently, I cursed myself. I needed to move on from Caroline, and as much as it pained me, that meant Samantha too.
I had to give both of them up, because I couldn’t have one without the other.
I felt sick to my soul at the knowledge, but maybe that was my penance for my fuck-up with Kalea.
Who knew what the hell Māui had planned for me.
“How long will she be occupied for?” I asked Kalea.
“Elmo’s World just started, so maybe ten minutes.”
I pulled back from her, putting my fingers below her chin to tilt her face up towards me. “Good,” I said, and then I kissed her.
The first time I kissed Kalea, she was in a hospital bed. Aloiki and I were taking turns between caring for her and keeping our businesses running. Kayl stopped by when he could, but with his schedule as a beat cop, he couldn’t stay for long periods of time like us.
The fucker who put her in that bed was already fish food, and Kalea had no idea her brother and brother’s best friend were now murderers. She never asked what had happened to whats-his-name, and we never told her.
I had a meeting that afternoon with a real estate agent to look at the very house we were in now.
There had been a fire, almost an obsession, inside me since Aloiki and I first discovered Kalea on the floor, battered and broken.
I couldn’t shake the thought that, if she’d been with me as she was meant to be, she wouldn’t have gotten hurt.
Kalea was mine, and I would be as patient as she would need me to be, but it did not change where our lives were heading. I had already informed Aloiki of this—not so he could give me his blessing, but so he knew exactly what my unapologetic intentions were in regard to his sister.
So when Kalea woke up from one of her many naps, and I knew she was cognitive enough to have such an important conversation, I leaned over her hospital bed, declared myself to her, and kissed her.
It had been our first kiss—and our last, at least for some time. But it had been perfect. Our touch had been electrifying, invigorating. It sparked a bone-deep hunger within me that only affirmed what I already knew: she was mine.
I didn’t know what I had been trying to prove or maybe justify by kissing her now.
Since our divorce, I’d kissed countless women, including professional sex workers and porn stars.
There was a difference in kissing to express emotion and shared passion, to form a connection with a person that could be both loving and demanding, and kissing as a performance, an act, to get to a goal of mutual pleasure.
As Kalea’s mouth worked against mine, I waited for the first to take over. The unrivalled, almost animalistic passion that had driven me for nearly a decade. The ignition that fueled a fire within my soul that only a negative paternity test had been able to quench.
Instead… I felt nothing. Well, nothing towards Kalea.
The moment it hit me that she could have been anyone, that I felt no different kissing her than I had Yooko’s employee all those weeks ago, I truly hated myself.
Because even as the kiss continued, as my mouth and tongue went through the practiced motions, my body did not react.
My dick had a small reaction that I chalked up to its pathetic attempt to fulfill its biological requirements, but that was it.
There was no fire, no passion, no wanting.
I couldn’t deny I cared for Kalea. She was important to me, likely always would be. I felt guilt and responsibility for what she’d been suffering through on her own, the weight of a secret she mistakenly felt she had to carry alone. But I did not feel love.
I pulled back, jerking so badly that I nearly knocked the iced tea can over on the counter with my elbow.
Kalea gasped in surprise at my quick reaction. Followed by a husky and confused, “What?”
I stared down at her, my heart caught in a cyclone of nostalgia and true desire. My discombobulated thoughts were jumbled to the point I was starting to feel dizzy.
How deluded could I have been? How could I have thought I could so easily step into the past?
Staring down into her familiar, dark eyes, I realized that I wasn’t fighting to forgive her, but myself.
I’d done something heinous, unforgivable.
I’d taken the trust instilled in me by someone vulnerable, and I’d destroyed it, stomped on it by my selfish needs.
I wasn’t here to try and reconcile the past. I was here to try and relive it. Like a factory reset on a computer, I was trying to put my life back together to the last time it made any logical sense.
Māui must be laughing his demi-god ass off at me, his joke finally revealed, and I his most impressive fool.
Not wanting to hurt Kalea even more than I already had, I carefully extracted myself from her grip.
Walking over to the wall, I leaned my hand heavily on it.
I’d left the woman I fell in love with and tried to replace her with another, one from my past that felt comfortable, familiar.
I couldn’t replace Caroline, and this fucked-up attempt to was an even further slap in her face.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t or shouldn’t have Caroline anymore because of her past and age: I did not deserve her.
I didn’t deserve anyone. I was no one’s white knight, and I needed to own that.