24. Kai #2
I liked holding you afterward. More than I expected to.
Take care of yourself for me, Little Ember.
—Ghost
By the time I finish reading it back, I’m already considering crossing out the last few lines because they are softer than anything I have given her so far, but the pen only hovers above the page for a moment before I decide that pretending tonight meant less than it did would be considerably more pathetic than admitting I liked holding her.
After everything that happened upstairs, this hardly qualifies as the reckless part.
I leave the words exactly where they are, fold the page once and place it on the kitchen counter where she will see it when she comes downstairs.
My eyes catch the coffee machine as I turn to leave, and for one genuinely dangerous second I consider setting it up for her too.
That thought lasts just long enough for me to realize I am approximately ten minutes away from checking whether she has eggs and accidentally becoming someone’s husband before sunrise.
“No.” Apparently I do still have limits.
I leave before discovering what else they are.
The cold outside catches the exposed strip around my eyes immediately, sharp enough to finish waking me when everything else about the last several hours failed.
Dawn hasn’t properly broken yet, but the sky over Julia’s neighborhood has begun fading into deep blue-gray, softening the houses and bare streets around me.
A newspaper delivery car idles near the corner, while somewhere behind one of the neighboring houses a dog gives a single suspicious bark before apparently deciding I’m not worth leaving bed for. Smart dog.
I take the familiar route back toward where I left the bike, pulling the balaclava off once I am safely away from Julia’s street and stuffing it into my jacket pocket.
The ZX10R waits beneath a streetlamp exactly where I left it, its black body beaded lightly with moisture from the colder night air.
The engine turning over sounds obscene in the quiet morning.
Once I reach the wider road, I open it up enough for the wind to cut through the exhaustion settling into my bones.
Usually riding clears my head because the bike requires enough attention to leave very little room for whatever followed me out of work that day.
Speed, vibration, traffic and cold air reduce everything to manageable pieces.
This morning, Julia comes with me anyway.
I see her hand against the wall downstairs and remember the way her body folded against mine when I told her to come.
I hear the sounds she made upstairs, feel her nails across my back and remember the moment she touched the tattoos I have spent months hiding beneath dress shirts as though she had all night to learn them.
Then the memory shifts, because apparently my brain is determined to make this difficult.
Julia asleep with my arm around her. That one catches the hardest. Of fucking course it does.
By the time I pull into my garage, the sky has brightened enough that Minneapolis is beginning to wake properly.
I leave the bike cooling behind me and head straight upstairs, where a hot shower removes the smell of her house from my skin without doing much about the faint scratches across my shoulders.
I catch sight of them in the bathroom mirror while drying off.
Four thin red lines travel over one shoulder. My mouth curves before I can stop it.
“Grow up.”
I’m thirty-seven years old and apparently pleased about being scratched like a college kid after his first good night.
The smile remains while I get dressed. The charcoal suit makes the transformation easier than it should.
A clean dress shirt covers the ink Julia spent so much time tracing, the cuffs button neatly at my wrists and the jacket hides every physical trace of the man she had beneath her hands only a few hours ago.
My glasses go on last. They are always the final piece.
The man looking back at me belongs behind a desk — controlled, presentable.
Respectable enough that nobody looking at him would assume he spent the night inside a patient’s bedroom wearing a balaclava while she called him by a name she invented for the man hiding outside her windows. That should probably reassure me.
I stare at my reflection for another second, then leave for work.
Mara looks up the second I walk into reception, and the expression on her face tells me immediately that expensive tailoring and coffee have not accomplished nearly as much as I hoped.
Her gaze travels over me slowly before returning to my face, one eyebrow rising with enough suspicion to qualify as interrogation. “No.”
I stop beside her desk and take a long drink of coffee. “Good morning to you too.”
“You look terrible.”
The concern is somewhere beneath the insult, but she no longer feels obligated to lead with it.
“Thank you. I made a special effort.”
“I can tell.” She leans back in her chair, studying me more openly as though she is deciding which theory will annoy me most. “Did you sleep at all?”
“Some.” The answer comes fast enough that neither of us believes it.
Mara’s eyes narrow. “That was suspiciously immediate.”
“I have a patient soon.”
“You have a patient in fourteen minutes, because unlike you, I know how clocks work.”
I start toward my office.
Her voice follows me. “Were you on the bike all night?”
“Not all night.”
A beat of silence lands behind me. “Kai.”
I glance over my shoulder and find her watching me with the expression of someone who has just been handed a far more interesting answer than the one she expected.
“No.” I clip.
“I haven’t asked anything yet.”
“You were about to, and I’m exhausted enough that preventing the question seemed more efficient.”
A smile spreads across her face. “That made it worse.”
“Fantastic.”
I open my office door.
“Asshole,” she calls after me, laughter already breaking through the word.
I lift my coffee in acknowledgment without looking back and disappear inside, grateful that at least one part of my life still functions exactly as it always has.
My first patient arrives several minutes later, and work does what it has always done well: it demands enough of me that everything personal moves to another room whether I want it to or not.
For the next few hours, there is no Julia sleeping beneath a sheet or little handwritten note waiting on her kitchen counter.
There are medication side effects, follow-ups, a patient convinced one difficult week erased months of progress and another whose answers tell me she is doing significantly worse than she admitted when we spoke two days ago.
I listen because they deserve my full attention.
I ask what needs asking and leave silence alone when silence is more useful.
There is something almost unsettling about how easily the parts of my life separate once the office door closes.
I can sit here and be exactly the doctor I have always been while another version of me waits at home inside a black backpack with a balaclava that should probably be burned for several reasons.
What I am doing with Julia hasn’t made me worse at my job.
If anything, it has made me more rigid about every other boundary I have, as though knowing exactly how badly I am destroying one has turned me hyperaware of all the rest. That probably isn’t the reassuring fact I sometimes try to make it.
Shortly after noon, Mara knocks once against the frame of my open door and leans inside, her expression more businesslike than it was this morning.
“Renee’s on line two.”
I glance toward the phone. “Thanks.”
She starts to leave, then looks back at the coffee cup sitting near my keyboard.
“And eat something.”
“I have eaten.”
The look she gives me makes it clear she understands that I mean coffee. “You’re not allowed to count liquids.”
“You’re not my mother.”
“No, but apparently somebody needs to be.” She disappears before I can answer.
I pick up the call. “Hey.”
Renee’s voice comes through with enough noise behind her that I immediately picture the safe house in full weekday chaos, somebody speaking nearby while what sounds suspiciously like furniture scrapes across a floor.
“Please tell me you’re sitting down.”
I lean farther back in my chair. “That sentence has never preceded anything inexpensive.”
“It isn’t catastrophic.”
“That was not the reassurance you thought it was.”
She laughs briefly, although I can hear tiredness beneath it.
“The contractor opened the wall in the east upstairs bathroom this morning. The leak we thought was limited to the shower line has apparently been there longer than anyone realized, so there’s moisture farther into the wall and part of the framing needs to come out. ”
I close my eyes and rub my thumb against my forehead. “How much farther?”
Renee hesitates just long enough to answer the question without saying anything. “Would you prefer the optimistic estimate or the one he actually gave me?”
“The one that ruins my afternoon.”
She gives me the number.
I open my eyes again and stare at the ceiling. “Jesus Christ.”
“That was almost exactly what I said, except mine involved more vocabulary.”
“Any mold?” I ask.
“A little, but he thinks it’s contained. I already told him nothing gets closed back up until we test properly and know what we’re dealing with.”
“Good.” I sit forward and reach for the pad beside my keyboard. “Can we isolate that side of the floor without moving everyone?”
“We already moved the family in the closest room downstairs, and the bathroom is sealed off. Nobody loses a bed unless the inspection finds something worse.”
That’s good, that means more than the number she gave me.
“Then have them do it properly. If the framing needs replacing, replace it. I don’t want somebody opening the same wall six months from now because we saved a few thousand dollars today.”