CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE #3
“Oh, I did,” he replied. “Short answer is: I won the romance lottery like five times in a row. Longer answer...will take a bit to explain.”
Kim stared at him for a long moment, then just laughed softly and shook her head. “I’m sorry, a lot has come at me all of a sudden. Ten minutes ago I was being hit on by an annoying idiot. Just...wow. I’m glad to see you, I can at least say that.”
“I’m glad to see you, too. I have another question.”
“Shoot.”
“Why did you decide you were going to kiss me the next time you saw me? I am admittedly getting mixed messages. Or, well, I guess that’s not fair to say, but given where we were when we last spoke…”
“No, that’s fair. That’s completely fair.
I...basically, I didn’t reject you because I wasn’t into you.
I rejected you because I was in no place to date.
Anyone. I was trying to get my shit together and my head was just...
it was not a good time for me. And I kind of regretted it.
When we started hanging out while you were still dating that one girl, I started to like you.
It was easy to tell myself it didn’t matter because you weren’t single, but then she broke up with you...
did she break up with you because of me? ” she asked suddenly.
“Um...kinda?”
“Oh, wow. I’m so sorry.”
“No, don’t be. She was convinced we were fucking around when she wasn’t around and just…
” He sighed and shook his head. “But it wasn’t really about you.
The relationship was already tanked. It was doomed from the start because we didn’t work well together.
We were dating each other because we both wanted someone to date.
That didn’t really have anything to do with you, I think she was just looking for an excuse to break up by then. ”
“Ah. Well...okay, then. Um. I had another question.”
“Fire away.”
“Why do you have a black eye?”
He laughed. “Ah, that. Um, well...suffice to say me and one of my wives were–”
“Wait, wives!?” Gabe held up his left hand. “Oh, shit. Wait so...wait, how? You can’t legally marry more than one person.”
“There hasn’t been any kind of ceremony yet and technically the tatted redhead you saw and the other girl you haven’t seen are still my girlfriends, but they’re going to get rings.
We don’t really care about the ceremony right now.
I asked each of the other three to marry me, with a ring, and they said yes, because they asked me to ask them. So, wives.”
“Huh, holy shit. Um, sorry, go on.”
“Right so, we were messing around and we got a little...carried away. Or, if you really want the truth: I wanted to lick her abs, she said yes, I kept licking when I shouldn’t have, she accidentally punched me in the face because she’s ticklish.”
“Abs...wait, is the other girl that really jacked tomboy I saw walking around with the-oh. She also had that medallion, too...holy shit. What the hell happened!? How did you-man! This feels like I walked into a fucking movie or something. Or a hentai game.”
He looked at her. “You play those?”
“Yeah! Don’t judge!”
He laughed, holding up his hands. “I’m not judging! That was pleased surprise! But I kind of agree. Living it is incredibly bizarre. I mean I’m kind of used to it now, sort of? But it’s still crazy to me. It doesn’t really seem real sometimes still.”
“Yeah, I bet.” She laughed suddenly. “Your tomboy girlfriend punched you in the face because you were licking her abs too much.”
“Accidentally, but yes.”
“That’s kind of funny.”
“Yeah, it was funny to me in the moment, too. She felt really bad, but she did warn me...so what’s your life look like right now?”
She groaned. “Annoying and boring and endless. I moved out when I got that secretary job because I wanted to try and get my life together more and I do better on my own and I found a cheap, crappy attic that had been converted into an apartment. Well, I use the term ‘apartment’ loosely, because it was shitty, but it worked and it was six hundred bucks a month. And...I’m still there.
It’s been two years and I’m still at that job, still in that shitty apartment, but I’ve mostly killed my debt and now I’m just saving up. I don’t even know for what anymore.”
“Do you still box?” he asked.
“No. I had to stop after I got a concussion and it almost lost me my job because I was down for a week. I’ve been considering getting into jiu-jitsu. There’s a couple of places that teach but they’re kind of expensive. Mostly I’ve just been working out.”
“Clearly,” he replied. Before he could think better of it, he said: “You wanna go out sometime?”
Kim looked over at him with another surprised look. “Did you just ask me on a date?”
“Shit, um, nevermind. I don’t know why I asked that.”
“Wait, so you were asking me on a date? I expected the normal retraction of ‘no, not a date, just to hang out’.”
“Um...I guess I was. I-sorry, the kiss really threw me off.”