Chapter Four — Rooftops and Long Drives
It became a rhythm neither of them named out loud.
Tuesdays at the diner. Sometimes a Thursday, if his schedule and hers lined up, which she noticed took an unusual amount of coordinating for a man who claimed to work in logistics — trucks didn't usually require a man to disappear for entire weeks at a time and then resurface with a story about "quarterly reviews" that never quite added up when she thought about it later.
She didn't think about it much, then. She was too busy noticing the other things.
He took her to a rooftop bar downtown one night in June, one he said belonged to a friend, and they sat with their feet up on the ledge looking at the skyline while he told her, slow and a little reluctant, about his grandmother — a woman named Ruby who apparently ran her household the way some men ran armies, who had opinions about everything and had never once, in Zaire's entire life, told him she was proud of him without also telling him three things he could have done better.
"That sounds exhausting," Kamiko said.
"It's love," Zaire said. "Just filtered through a woman who came up hard and never learned to say it soft."
"You love her."
"More than almost anybody."
"You say almost a lot," Kamiko observed. "Almost anybody. Something like that. You ever just say the whole sentence?"
He looked at her for a long moment, the city lights doing something complicated to his face, and she thought — not for the first time — that he looked like a man standing at the edge of a decision he hadn't made yet.
"I'm working on it," he said.
They drove around for hours some nights, no destination, just his car and the highway and the radio low, and those were the nights Kamiko fell hardest, because there was nowhere for either of them to perform.
No club, no VIP room, no rooftop with a view designed to impress.
Just two people and a windshield and the particular honesty that comes from talking to someone while looking at the road instead of at them.
"Why haven't you kissed me?" she asked him once, three weeks in, somewhere on 285 with the windows cracked. "You've had opportunities. I've given you opportunities."
"I noticed," he said, dry, and she laughed despite herself.
"So?"
"So I don't want to be one more man who took something from you before he gave you anything," Zaire said, eyes on the road, voice careful. "I've got — " He stopped. Started again. "There's things about my life I haven't told you. I want to tell you before I kiss you. Feels like the order matters."
Something cold moved through her, brief, easy to override with the warmth of everything else he was. "What kind of things?"
"Family things. Complicated things."
"Everybody's got family things."
"Not like mine," he said, and there was something almost like a warning in it, though she wouldn't recognize it as one until much later. "I just need a little more time before I lay it all out. Can you give me that?"
She thought about every man who'd ever asked her for something and given her nothing in return.
She weighed it against three weeks of a man who listened more than he talked, who never once made her feel like the club was the whole of who she was, who'd built her a kind of safety she hadn't known she was starving for.
"I can give you time," she said. "I can't give you forever, waiting on a secret. Eventually you gotta tell me something."
"I will," he said, and it sounded, in the dark of the car, like a vow he intended to keep and knew, somewhere underneath, that he was going to break.
They sat in that parked car another hour, past the point where either of them had a real reason to still be there, the radio down to almost nothing, the city's noise a distant hum beyond the windshield.
"Tell me something true," Kamiko said, "even if it's small. I don't need the whole secret tonight. Just — give me something real to hold onto while I wait."
He was quiet a long moment, and she watched him actually consider it, the way he considered everything, like a man weighing the cost of every sentence before he let it out into the world.
"My grandfather used to say a man's only as good as the version of himself he can't perform," Zaire said finally.
"I think about that a lot. I think I've spent most of my life performing.
Boardrooms, family dinners, half the conversations I have in a given week.
You're the first thing in years I haven't had to perform for.
That's true. That's as real as I've got tonight. "
Kamiko felt something in her chest go soft and dangerous at that, the specific, familiar danger of a woman who'd spent a decade reading performances for a living finally meeting a man who told her, point blank, that he'd stopped performing around her — and believing him, because nothing about the way he said it sounded rehearsed.
"That's a good something," she said. "I'll take it."
"There's more," he said. "There's a lot more. I just need a little longer before I can say the rest of it out loud."
"I heard you the first time," she said, softer now, reaching over to lace her fingers through his in the dark. "I'm not going anywhere yet, Zaire. Just don't make me regret the waiting."
He brought her hand to his mouth and pressed a kiss to her knuckles, slow, deliberate, the closest thing to the real kiss neither of them was ready for yet, and neither of them said anything else the rest of the drive, because some silences, they were both learning, said more than a month of careful conversation ever could.