Chapter Fourteen
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Last night was too much.
Too quick, too easy, too much fun. Kya woke up in Quinn’s bed with one idea: get gone.
Fifteen minutes later, she sat fidgeting in the back of an Uber moving at a snail’s pace.
‘Sir, can you go any faster?’
‘It’s six in the morning. I’m running on two sips of coffee. So… you tell me.’
Kya shut up and sat back. She couldn’t outrun the scent of Quinn’s sheets clinging to her hair, anyway. Just as she’d succeeded in putting her face out of her mind, there she was on a billboard. She was so pretty, it hurt to look at her. Or was it the glaring sunrise?
She looked away and resumed fidgeting.
When she got home, Adrian threw open the door and greeted her with a scowl, reviving her PTSD. She was sixteen again, creeping home at dawn.
‘We were worried,’ Adrian said.
She slipped past him. ‘Worried? Really?’
Adrian followed her into the kitchen where Hugo, already dressed for the gym, was brewing coffee. ‘He was going to send out a search party.’
‘But why? You knew where I was.’
‘Quinn didn’t,’ Adrian said. ‘She messaged us, said you went missing.’
Kya gripped the edge of the kitchen island. ‘When?’
‘Just now,’ Adrian said. ‘I’ll let her know you’re okay.’
Before she could stop him, her ever responsible brother slipped his phone out of the pocket of his terry robe and sent a quick text to a group chat that Kya, obviously, did not belong to.
‘Next time maybe say goodbye,’ he said, sounding eerily like their dad.
Hugo passed her a cup of coffee. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll tell her you can’t party.’
‘Please don’t,’ Kya said. ‘You’ve told her enough.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Forget it. I can’t think.’
Kya sipped her coffee with new sympathy for her Uber driver. All she could think about was Quinn waking up alone, searching for her in the empty apartment.
‘Do you know Quinn bought our old place?’ Hugo asked.
‘Do you know she turned the second bedroom into a music studio?’ Kya replied. ‘It’s dope.’
‘I don’t know how dope it is,’ Adrian said, fussily. ‘Losing a bedroom hits resale value.’
Kya gave him a sharp look. ‘Were you always like this?’
‘Like what?’
‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘I’m going to bed.’
Kya headed to her room. The plan was to text Quinn before a needle of guilt pierced straight through her heart. She would’ve got right to it if Adrian hadn’t yelped like a puppy – only Lucky was napping in her designer doggy bed. She rushed back to the kitchen and took in the scene. Adrian had dropped the knife and the mango from the farmers’ market. He held his hand to his chest, and his face was contorted in pain. Blood trickled down his arm and stained his white robe. To say that chaos ensued would be a lie. Hugo had gone pale, and mute, too. Of the two men, her brother’s condition was more urgent. She went to him.
‘Let me see,’ she said.
He showed her the gash along the pad of his thumb. Even to the untrained eye, it required stitches. STAT.
‘Let’s get you to the ER.’ Kya whipped around to Hugo. His colour hadn’t returned, but he was still breathing. ‘Hugo, honey, get the car!’
‘Wait!’ Adrian called out. ‘We’ve got to get the bleeding under control.’
The surgeon had regained his composure and took charge of the makeshift operation room. He tasked Hugo with retrieving a first-aid kit and ordered Kya to grab a clean dish towel. They scattered to follow his orders. Adrian calmly walked them through the steps of rudimentary wound care. When Adrian was satisfied, Hugo helped him change out of his robe.
The nearest emergency room was only a fifteen-minute drive, a miracle in Miami Beach, but seeing its water views and a staff of attractive medical professionals, Kya wasn’t convinced they were at the right place. She whipped out her phone.
‘Guys, it says here Miami’s top surgical centre is downtown,’ she said once they were settled in the waiting room. ‘Should we go?’
Adrian balked at the idea. ‘A surgical centre for stitches I could’ve done myself?’
‘If there’s someplace better, we should go,’ Hugo said, twitching nervously. ‘Your hands are valuable.’
‘This is an accredited facility with a solid reputation,’ Adrian said. ‘Could you two please relax.’
They could not. Thankfully, Adrian was offered professional courtesy and was not made to wait long. A doctor came over right away. An acquaintance of theirs, she reassured Hugo there would be no lingering disability. ‘He’s off dishwashing duty for now,’ she joked.
The joke did not go over well.
Adrian winked at Hugo and walked off with his colleague.
‘I suck in a crisis,’ Hugo moaned when he and Kya were alone.
‘Don’t beat yourself up,’ Kya said. ‘At first, I thought you were going to pass out, but then you pulled it together.’
‘I’m scared of blood,’ he confessed. ‘I hate to see it.’
‘You’re scared of blood, yet you married a surgeon,’ she said. ‘Make it make sense.’
‘Opposites attract,’ Hugo replied. ‘Look it up.’
Instead, Kya looked up the hospital’s credentials. ‘Is this place even in your health insurance’s network?’ she asked. ‘If not, the co-pay will be through the roof.’
‘Who knows?’ Hugo said.
Kya wanted to point out that he, the policy holder, should know, but then he brought up Quinn.
‘Do you know healthcare is free in the UK? I don’t know why Quinn ever left.’
Kya felt queasy just at the thought of her. She rested her head on Hugo’s shoulder. Notting Hill was playing on a wall-mounted television. She envied Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant. Their happy ending was assured.
‘How do you two do it?’ she asked her brother-in-law.
He yawned. ‘Do what?’
‘Stay together,’ she said. ‘Make it work. You’re very different. It sounds nice, but you’re essentially incompatible.’
Kya put no credence in convenient theories advancing romantic delusions.
‘I’ve dated my type of man, and I can tell you this: I never want to date someone like me again. Eu sou louco . I’m erratic, inconsistent. I party too much. I talk through movies.’
That was a gross understatement. ‘You practically narrate the movie!’
‘Exactly! I’m annoying AF.’
‘You’re lovable, and you’ve made Adrian so happy.’
‘I give him what he needs to be happy,’ Hugo said. ‘He’s not high maintenance, but he needs quiet time to read and study, watch documentaries, and the movies I’d talk through. He says he’s distant, but he just needs to disconnect sometimes.’
When they were kids, Adrian preferred to spend time in his room, reading, playing video games, watching sci-fi marathons. His friends complained he never wanted to hang out. She hadn’t thought this would carry over in his adult relationships. Maybe there was something to this theory. She and her ex, Rosana, couldn’t make it work, despite being on the same page of the same book of every topic known to man. And yet, even with all that common ground, they’d sit down to dinner and not have a single thing to say to one another.
‘I’m ready to start dating again,’ Kya declared.
‘As you should!’ Hugo said. ‘Don’t take it so seriously this time. You’re young and hot. Get out there and do some damage!’
‘Calm down! I’m not starting today,’ she said, even as she slipped an apology text to Quinn. ‘I’ve got to find a job first. Once that’s taken care of, I’ll look into the apps.’
‘Take your time,’ he said. ‘I’m happy for you, either way.’
It took a trip to the ER for Adrian to take a day off. Kya didn’t judge; she was the same. Nothing short of a natural disaster could get her to skip work – a pattern she would like to break. It was only right they spend the day together.
They ended up at the new art museum. Adrian had long wanted to catch the digital art exhibit before it closed. Like nearly every venue in Miami, the museum sat on the waterfront with a set of stairs linking it to the bay where patrons sat and stared at distant cruise ships and the causeway, wheezing with traffic. Kya and Adrian sat with outstretched legs, the midday sun beating down on their shoulders. It was a perfect day, but it wouldn’t be Miami if a storm cloud wasn’t forming in the distance.
‘H says you might want to start dating again?’
‘H’ stood for Hugo, husband, or honey. Why did they have to be so nauseatingly cute?
‘When did he tell you this?’ Kya asked, to dodge his question.
‘As soon as he could,’ Adrian said with a laugh. ‘He’s a lot of things, but discreet isn’t one of them.’
‘When things settle down, I’ll hop on an app,’ she said. ‘Anyway, my expectations are low. I’m not looking for what you and Hugo have.’
‘I hope not,’ Adrian said. ‘We nearly broke up last summer.’
‘Don’t be dramatic. You had a fight last summer.’
There’d been some bickering and mounting tension over when and where to buy a house, but that was the extent of it. The marriage was far from collapsing.
‘It was more than that,’ he said. ‘We were stuck, and I couldn’t get us unstuck. I spared you the details because I didn’t want to burden you.’
Burden her? When he said things like that, Kya could easily forget their age gap wasn’t all that great. Adrian had taken on many dad duties in recent years, their parents now devoted to their grandchildren. It was nice but unnecessary. Adrian took on too much.
‘Thanks for staying together,’ she said. ‘For my sake.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
Kya kept her eyes on the ever-expanding black cloud, darkening the horizon. ‘I’m never going to sacrifice my personal life for work again. It’s not worth it. I lost the job and had no one—’
‘You have us, Kya!’ Adrian protested. ‘You’re not alone.’
‘You know what I mean.’
She’d meant someone like Quinn, who’d listened and supported her and done everything she could think of to cheer her up, but definitely not Quinn because how was it her business dating a Miami DJ featured on billboards? How did that fit into a day in the life of a girl in tech? That’s right. It didn’t. She’d sent an apology message, but it would no doubt ring hollow. There was no making amends for what she’d done, and she knew it.
Kya pressed her hands to her face to hide her burning cheeks. There were no words to describe how badly she’d messed up.
Adrian folded her in a paternal embrace and whispered, ‘You’ll get over this.’
Her brother thought she was crying over her career yet again. Meanwhile, she hadn’t thought of that stupid job for a while.