20. KAI
KAI
The Girlfriend Play
The dream starts with Ava’s back arched off my mattress.
Her eyes are wide, lips parted, chest rising on shallow breaths that brush warm against my throat. Her legs tighten around my waist as she moans.
I know her body in this dream. The specific curve of her waist under my palm. The pitch of her voice when I hit the angle that makes her forget how to breathe. The way her fingers dig into my shoulders with a desperation that leaves marks.
"Keep your eyes open," I tell her.
She does. She watches me with a rawness that strips every defense I've ever built.
I feel her pulse hammering where our wrists press together, her heartbeat so fast it blurs into a single tremor beneath my thumb.
There’s an open condom wrapper on the nightstand.
She says something sharp and funny that I almost hear, her mouth curving even as her hips roll up to meet mine.
Then the image fractures like a puck deflecting off a post, dissolving into a darkness I can't follow no matter how hard I reach.
I open my eyes.
I’m in Ava’s bedroom.
She’s pressed against my chest, her breathing deep and slow, her hand still resting over mine on her stomach. Her hair spills across the pillow.
My pulse is hammering. My shirt is damp at the collar.
I lie still, breathing through it, waiting for the dream to release its grip.
But I can still feel the ridge of her knuckles between my fingers, her hips beneath mine. I can hear my own voice saying words I've never said to her while awake.
I press my face into her hair, breathe in citrus and sleep warmth. She murmurs something I can't catch and burrows closer.
I close my eyes.
It takes a long time to fall back asleep. And when I do, the dream doesn't return.
But it comes back some nights later.
It’s the same mattress in my penthouse. It happens the same way with our eyes open and our fingers locked.
Except now there's more.
Her nails score down my chest. Her laugh breaks into a gasp when I change the angle. There’s also a torn condom on the nightstand this time, and there's a glass of water beside it that catches the ambient light from the city through the bedroom window.
I sit up in bed in the middle of the night and write it down.
It comes again four nights later. Then twice the following week.
The detail sharpens each time. My hand finding the side of her face with a tender touch. The whole sequence where I’m in her and can see every expression on her face, even the ones she tries to hide.
The mornings after are the worst. I lie in whatever bed I'm in, mine or hers, staring at the ceiling until daybreak.
I miss easy passes at morning practice. I overshoot a shot so badly that Wyatt skates a wide circle around the puck in the corner and looks back at me with a raised eyebrow.
Easton notices too. He skates beside me during a transition drill, his eyes moving over my face.
"You're dragging. How's your sleep?"
"I'm managing."
He lets it go but starts watching me more during the private drills.
It's not the lack of sleep that eats at me more. It's the consistency and sameness of the dream.
Dreams shift. They wander, collapse, rearrange themselves into nonsense.
Mine plays back like a recording. Same room, same woman, same words every single time.
I lie in the dark one night after the latest one, Ava asleep beside me. For the first time, I let myself think the thought I've been pushing back.
What if it's not a dream?
I shut it down. My memories came back, Dr. Harold confirmed it. If this were a real memory, it would have surfaced with everything else.
But the thought persists. By the following week, I pick up the phone and call Dr. Carla. She's the team's sports psychologist. Her office is on the third floor of the facility, wedged between the nutritionist and the video room.
She fits me in that afternoon.
The office is plain. It has window overlooking the practice rink and two chairs facing each other; no couch, no framed degrees doing the heavy lifting of credibility. Dr. Carla is mid-forties with frameless glasses.
"Walk me through what's been happening. Tell me about the dreams."
"They started a few weeks ago,” I say, then tell her about the dream.
She removes her glasses and folds them on her knee.
“How vivid is the dream?”
“It keeps getting clearer each time. They were mild at first, but now they’re more detailed and come almost every night.”
"And the content is always sexual?"
"Always."
She's quiet for a moment. When she speaks again, it seems she’s deliberately choosing her words.
"Based on everything you've described, you’re experiencing a real memory your brain has walled off. It’s surfacing through sleep because the emotional charge attached to it is too strong to stay fully suppressed.”
"But I got everything else back. Why would my brain hand all of that over and hold back this one thing?"
"Your brain doesn't hide things it considers safe." She leans forward slightly. "If these specific memories remain sealed while every other gap has closed, the most likely explanation is that there's associated emotional content your mind is treating as a threat."
"A threat to what?"
"To you or to your sense of the relationship."
"What kind of threat?"
"I can't tell you that. Only the full memory can. But I can tell you that selective retention like this almost always involves pain. Something happened connected to this woman that your subconscious considers damaging enough to protect you from, even at the cost of leaving a gap in your recovery."
I leave her office and walk to the parking garage. My car is parked in the far corner, away from the exits. I sit in it for a long time, hands on the steering wheel.
I had sex with Ava before the accident, but my brain refuses to remember because something about that night hurt one of us.
I don't believe I'm the kind of man who harms a woman physically. Nothing in my character, recovered or otherwise, suggests that.
But there are other ways to hurt someone.
A promise broken. The kind of casual cruelty that doesn't register as cruelty until you see its effect months later in the eyes of a woman who likes you, wants you, sleeps beside you, and still won't call you hers.
Ava flinches from commitment the way a player flinches from the boards after a bad hit.
What if the man I was before the accident did something to this woman that I can't remember but she can't forget?
I start the car and drive home.
Over the next few days, I take her out.
Tacos in Silver Lake, where she steals from my plate and acts offended when I retaliate.
A sunset walk along the Venice canals, where Biscuit launches herself into the water twice, paddles in hysterical circles, and emerges looking profoundly satisfied.
An evening at my apartment where I attempt pasta and Ava quietly takes over at the stove, bumping me aside with her hip and telling me my technique has "the confidence of a man who has never been corrected."
I watch her on every date.
She’s warm and present and funny and close. She leaves her toothbrush in my bathroom and her shampoo in my shower.
She's happy with me. That part isn't a question.
But she refuses to be my girlfriend despite everything.
One day, I take her to a ceramics studio in the Arts District.
The ceramics studio sits above a coffee shop on a narrow side street. It’s a wide loft with scarred wooden tables and shelves crammed with glazed bowls and lopsided vases.
The instructor sets us up at a shared table with all the tools we need.
"I've never worked with clay," I tell Ava.
"That's going to be very obvious very quickly. Just feel it out."
She tears off a chunk and starts working it. Her long fingers press and shape in quick strokes.
I watch the way she bites the inside of her cheek when she's working through a shape. The smear of grey along her cheekbone she doesn't know is there.
I reach across the table and wipe it with my thumb.
She blinks, startled, her eyes flicking to mine.
"You had clay on your face."
She smiles. “Thank you.”
I pick up my block. It has the density of cold butter and the cooperativeness of a rookie defenseman.
Within minutes, Ava holds up a miniature figure.
It’s about four inches tall with a broad chest, stubby legs, and two arms folded tight across its torso. The crooked nose is exaggerated. It’s got a scowl on its face and something resembling a stick in its hand
"This is you when the barista misspells your name. I'm calling it Grumpy Kai."
"I don't look like that."
"You look exactly like that. I should know. I've been on the receiving end of this face when I accidentally threw out your protein bars."
I look down at my own clay. It's still a rectangle with finger dents.
I try to shape something female. The head comes out too large. One arm is significantly longer than the other.
Ava leans over, her hair brushing my forearm, sending tiny sparks of desire into me. She laughs.
"Is that supposed to be me? That looks like a sweet potato having a panic attack."
"Your proportions are challenging."
"My proportions are perfect." She reaches over and adjusts the head with two quick pinches of her thumb. "There. Now she only looks mildly distressed instead of actively dying."
She returns to her station and produces a second figurine. This one is bent forward at the waist with its rear end elevated to a comical degree, a tiny stick on a flat surface in front of it.
"You, digging a puck out of the corner."
"Nobody's ass sticks out like that during puck retrieval."
"Yours does. I've watched tape."
"You've watched game film?"
"I've watched your ass, Kai. The game film was incidental."
Heat climbs the back of my neck. She grins and starts on a third.
The third figurine takes the longest.
She hunches over it, shielding it from my view with her forearm, her tongue pressed to the corner of her lip. Her shoulders shake once with a laugh she's trying to suppress.
When she turns it around, my mouth opens.