10. KAI
KAI
A Cardiovascular Response
Mira’s been bringing casserole to a house she no longer lives in.
She moved back to her apartment two weeks ago. The guest room at my place still smells like her shampoo.
But here she is at my parents' front door with a ceramic dish wrapped in a kitchen towel, acting like she hasn't been dropping off food every few days since she left.
"You don't have to keep feeding me," I say.
"I'm not feeding you. I'm feeding Mom's son. You happen to be that."
She brushes past me into the hallway. The kitchen is already warm and loud with the clatter of pots and the hiss of something on the stove.
Mom has three burners going. Garlic, rosemary, something with butter underneath it. The smell is heavy enough to fill the whole house and spill into the yard.
Dad is at the head of the table staring at his phone’s screen. His dark eyes lift when I walk in. He grunts once and goes back to his screen.
"Charles, put the phone away," Mom says without turning from the stove. "Dinner in ten."
Her light brown hair is pinned up, dish towel slung over her shoulder. She hums while she stirs.
He puts the phone face-down on the table. "I'm reading."
"You can read after."
I take my usual seat. At least I think it's my usual seat. Nobody corrects me, which I've learned to interpret as a win.
The kitchen hasn't changed much from what I remember before the memory gap. Same warm tiles and cluttered countertops, same framed photo of Mira and me as kids propped on the windowsill above the sink.
Mom's added a spice rack and different dish towels, but the bones are the same. This kitchen is one of the few places where the missing four years don't scream at me from every surface.
The maid—I’ve forgotten her name—serves the food while Mom and Mira sit. The first few minutes of the dinner feel normal. Dad interrogates Mira about a project deadline while Mom keeps trying to redirect ther conversation.
I eat and listen. My energy still drains faster than it should when conversations stack on top of each other. The headaches have mostly faded, but fatigue camps come right behind them.
"So how's Ava?" Mira asks, reaching for the bread basket.
She uses that deliberately casual tone of hers that tells me she already knows the answer but wants to watch me squirm.
"She's fine."
"Fine, sure." She folds her hands. "Is she coming tonight?"
"Why would she come tonight?"
"Because she's at your apartment almost every day. Because I walked into your hospital room and your tongue was in her mouth." She ticks these off on her fingers. "Want me to keep going?"
"That was one kiss."
"One very thorough kiss."
I recall the feel of Ava’s fingers twisted in my shirt, pulling me closer before shoving me away in that hospital room.
“Ava pulled away."
Mira tears the bread in half and butters it without breaking eye contact.
"After a full minute of very much not pulling away. I had to pretend I suddenly needed to be in the hallway. Do you know how uncomfortable that was?"
"Then you shouldn't have walked in."
"The door was open, Kai."
Mom watches me like a hawk circling something interesting on the ground. Dad's phone is back in his hand.
"The interior designer?" He doesn’t look up.
"Her name is Ava, Dad."
"Are you sleeping with her?"
Leave it to Charles Donovan to skip every available lane of conversation and drive straight through the guardrail.
"Charles," Mom says, spinning toward him, meat halfway to her mouth.
"It's a simple question."
"It's an invasive question at a dinner table."
"He's thirty-two. I think he can handle it."
"No, I'm not sleeping with her," I say.
Dad puts his phone down and cuts into his chicken. "Is she your girlfriend?"
"She hasn't said yes to anything. So technically, no."
"Technically," Mira repeats, her eyebrows climbing toward her hairline.
Mom tucks a strand of light brown hair behind her ear. "What does technically mean in this context? Either she is or she isn't, sweetheart."
"She says we're friends. She's been saying it since the hospital when I asked for more. "
Mira makes a sound halfway between a laugh and a cough. "Friends don't kiss like both of you did, Kai."
I think about Ava's pulse hammering under my fingertips the night I kissed her. The small, raw sound she made when my mouth found her neck. Her fingers curling into my shirt and pulling me closer while her words shoved me backward.
“So she kissed you and decided she’s not interested,” Dad says, lips twitching. “That should bring your ego down a notch or two.”
I frown. I don’t like the direction this dinner conversation is headed, but my family won’t stop until they choose to. So I lean into it.
“I think she’s interested.”
His dark eyes fix on me with intensity. "Based on what evidence?"
"She drives to my apartment every weekday. She’s memorized my medication schedule and texts Mira when I skip meals."
They all watch me in silence.
"If she does all that, then what exactly is the problem?" Dad asks.
"She's scared."
He shakes his head. "Scared of what? You're the one who lost four years. If anybody at this table has the right to be scared, son, it's you."
"Charles, that's enough." Mom turns to me. “Whatever is holding Ava back, it isn't you."
A smirk forms on Mira’s face. “Then what is it?”
My mind goes back to all the times I told Ava why we can be something more.
I shrug. "Something she hasn't told me."
Dad snorts. "A mystery woman with baggage. Fantastic."
"Everyone carries baggage, Charles." Mom's voice can slice glass. "Including the man at this table who refused to speak to his own brother for six years over a boat."
"That was a fifty-thousand-dollar boat, Laura."
"It was pride. Don't dress it up."
Mira bites the inside of her cheek so hard her face goes red. She loses the battle and a laugh sputters out. Dad stabs a potato and chews like a man trying to kill the argument with silence.
It doesn't work.
"Bring her to the lake house this weekend," he finally says.
I look at him. "What?"
"We organized a weekend getaway to celebrate your recovery. Your aunts, uncles, and cousins wil be there." He takes a drink of water, sets the glass down, levels his gaze at me. "If this woman matters enough to argue about at my dinner table, she matters enough to show up. Bring her."
"She won't agree to that."
"Did I ask whether she'd agree?"
Mom puts a hand on my forearm. "What your father is attempting to say, with all the subtlety of a freight train, is that we'd like to thank Ava for helping you and get to know her better. You're both invited.”
‘Exactly. No pressure," Dad says.
Oh, there’s a lot of pressure.
Mira carries her plate to the sink and squeezes my shoulder on the way past.
"She'll come."
"You don't know that."
"I know she drove to a hospital in the middle of the night because a stranger called her from your phone." She turns on the faucet. "Women don't do that for a man they want to be friends with."
After dinner, Dad catches me in the hallway. He leans against the wall with his arms folded, filling the corridor with his shoulders.
"I have one question."
"Go ahead."
"Do you actually want this woman?" His voice has dropped the dinner-table edge.
I've been asking myself a version of the same question all the time.
In the dark of my apartment when the penthouse is too quiet. During physical therapy when my muscles burn and the only thing that distracts me is thinking about her.
Every time she walks in with food and a joke and the kind of attention that makes four years of nothing feel survivable.
The answer hasn't changed once.
"Yes," I say.
He watches me for a long beat. Whatever he finds in my face must satisfy him because his shoulders drop a fraction.
"Then stop letting her decide this for both of you."
He pushes off the wall and walks back toward the kitchen. I stand alone in the hallway, listening to the muffled sounds of Mira laughing and dishes being stacked.
I want Ava.
And I’m going to do my fucking best to get her.
***
The next evening, Ava lets herself in with the spare key Mira gave her without consulting me.
She stopped knocking a week ago. I haven't minded for a second.
She drops her bag by the door, unclips Biscuit's leash, then places paint swatches on the living room floor.
She's wearing a thin sweater that's too big for her, the neckline sliding wide across one shoulder, and jeans that sit low on her hips. When she folds herself cross-legged on the floor, a strip of bare skin appears between the denim and the hem.
I'm in the kitchen doorway. She hasn't looked up yet.
Her hair is in the careless knot she builds without thinking when she's about to work, strands falling loose against the back of her neck.
There's a pen between her teeth. She bites down on the cap, her lower lip pressing around it, and frowns at the paint swatches.
The sweater slips another inch. The strap of her bra cuts a thin line across her shoulder, pale against the flush that's spreading down her collarbones.
She shifts, pulling one knee higher. The movement stretches the sweater taut across her chest.
I can see the shape of her underneath it. The soft swell of her breast, rising and falling with each breath.
My mind conjures an image of her. The curve of her waist under my palms. Her back arching off the living room wall as I drive into her. The gasp she tries to swallow and can't.
I cross the room, pull the pen from her teeth, and sit beside her. My thigh presses the full length of hers, hip to knee.
She blinks up at me. "I was using that."
"You were destroying it." I set the ruined pen on the floor. "What's the crisis?"
Ava holds two nearly identical shades of blue up to the window light, squinting between them. She rotates them slowly.
"The client wants the color of the ocean at sunset. She calls this one pacific blue and this other one coastal calm. But both look like a public pool."
"They look the same."