Chapter 34
34
Kit
We get into a rhythm, Jake and I. Every day and evening, we work at the restaurant and every night, we go back to his place and we do it. In his bed.
It’s almost—almost—like a relationship.
Except for the kissing part.
And the part where this thing has a deadline.
I haven’t gotten my period yet.
Nor have I bought a pregnancy test.
Why bother until I’m sure, right?
That’s the practical part of me talking, because false negatives on those things are common, so it seems wasteful, really, to buy one and then have to get another in a week or two.
But really, if I let myself be brutally honest for a second, I have to admit that I don’t want to know. If I knew for sure that I was pregnant, then I’d have to put a stop to what we’re doing.
And I don’t want to.
Every night, Jake is harder to leave and every day, it gets harder to imagine life without him.
Which is why, when the first truly viable candidate to replace him comes in after sending me her resumé, I almost turn her away. The job’s not available , I want to tell her. It’s taken.
But I’m too much of a survivor to do that. Instead, I lie and tell her I was going to reply to her email. I tell her to come on back and meet Jake, our current chef, who’s on his way out in less than a week.
Less than a week.
The pain that slices through me when I think that would be debilitating if I didn’t clench my jaw and stiffen my spine and pretend that my rib cage wasn’t collapsing in on itself.
I even invite her to the staff cookout we’re having at my place in a couple days. Cora and Riley are getting married and we’re closing for a full day to celebrate.
I bought a bunch of drinks and stuff to grill and we’re doing it at my place.
Jake, being Jake, shows up an hour early, with a huge, three-tiered cake in hand.
“It’s beautiful.”
“It’s lavender,” he tells me, like the cake’s for me, not for our guests of honor. “And lemon.” He sniffs, turning to one side maybe a little embarrassed to admit it, then back to face me with a look so intense it pummels me, straight in the heart. “Reminds me of you.”
The balm I gave him. The way sex smelled that day, the two of us, wrapped in beeswax and flowers and aloe in my bed.
I don’t want you to go , I think, letting the words vibrate inside me, painful and real.
He heads out to light the grills and I put together a few last things, throw on a sweatshirt against the early spring chill, and join him.
Just the look he gives me when I walk outside—just that—makes me feel more in my body, my bones, than I ever felt with Clark.
That, that’s why this is a bad idea. All of it.
When this is over, it won’t just hurt, like with Clark, it will break me apart, inside and out.
That’s how much he means. How much he matters.
Frida and Annette show up, followed by Toni and Raf. Then the new future chef, Yemi, who’s brought something called Mandazi, which is a fried Nigerian dessert that tastes like coconut and heaven in your mouth.
There’s a handful of buskids who work for me mostly during the summer when the patio opens and business triples. They’re all high school and young college students. Cora and Riley finally arrive and the party gets going in earnest.
There’s food and drinks, music. Annette, Raf, Yemi, and the buskids dig a football out of Lord knows where, Frida pulls out her guitar and starts singing exactly like Joni Mitchell, and Cora and I grab fleeces and blankets and watch as Jake lights the improvised fire pit he literally just built in my backyard with a handful of bricks from my basement and a shovel.
“What are you thinking?” I ask Cora as we sip on hot toddies and look out at the crew, happily enjoying the event.
As always, my eyes go back to Jake—always to Jake—as he heads out to join the others at football.
“I think I totally misread things a while a back,” Cora says.
“Huh?” Jake catches the ball with a theatrical oouufff sound, searches for someone to pass it to, and picks Raf, the smallest, shyest person out there. When he throws it, it’s with the easy, unconscious grace of a guy who knows his way around a football. And a restaurant. And a woman’s body.
There’s that feeling again. The emptiness. The loss.
I hate it, but nothing will make it go away.
“The Jake thing,” she replies.
I turn to look at her and she cackles, joint and mug in one hand, while the other slaps her knee. “Yeah.” She points at me. “Yeah, we got your number, right Frida?”
“Hm?” Frida asks in the middle of singing about holy wine tasting bitter and sweet. “What?”
“Jake will be missed.”
“By all of us,” I say, my cheeks the kind of red that comes from a blustery spring and a too-close fire and women I respect trying to pry their way into my soul.
“By you,” they say simultaneously and, without warning, the tears come.
“Oh, oh, honey.” Cora’s up and scoots over to my side of the fire, while Frida keeps strumming, her dark eyes warm and knowing on me. “Oh, come on, no. No! Frida!”
“What? Can’t stop Joni midway through.” She tilts her head over to where the others are still playing. I glance over and catch Jake watching me and go redder still. “They’ll hear us,” she stage whispers and, I guess she’s right.
“He’s leaving,” I say, as if they know everything already anyway. Which they probably do. I’m the one who’s been fooling myself that a restaurant’s not just exactly like a family. “Five days,” I whisper, voice clogged.
“He’ll be back.”
I shake my head. “No, he won’t.”
“Wouldn’t be so sure,” Frida half-sings in a low, bluesy voice.
Cora’s arm tightens around my shoulders. She blows her smoke away from me. “You guys have kept the whole thing awfully secret.”
“It’s not a relationship.”
The women share a look. “Sure looks like one.”
“How? How does it look like one? We don’t even kiss.”
The guitar strums to a dissonant stop and both of them look at me, hard, before going back to what they were doing. Smoking and playing.
“What, exactly, does that mean?”
“I… Shit.” I slug back my drink and set the mug down, wrap the blanket tighter around me, and drop my forehead to my knees, and I let myself imagine, really hard for the first time, what it would be like if he stayed. If we had a baby together—or not—if this could be real. Like, just the two of us.
“Holy shit,” Cora whispers, sounding scandalized and excited in a way that does not bode well for the notion that she might ask no more questions. “What are you two up to?”
I sigh and then, after catching another look from him and going even redder, I’m sure, I admit, “We’re trying to, um, get me pregnant.”
Saying it deflates me so fast, I’m almost floating. Relief, oddly, is what I feel most of all. Saying it, admitting. Sharing.
“Holy, motherfucking shit.” Cora shakes her head in obvious shock. “That is baller, babe. Baller.”
“Don’t know what baller means.” Frida bends to snag her joint back from Cora. “But I’d be willing to bet this isn’t the last we see of that man.” She takes a long, deep toke and looks over at me, her dark eyes narrowed against the smoke. “Mark my words.”
I don’t even dare let myself hope. The disappointment, at this point, might kill me.
Jake
What if? I keep thinking while leaving her house the next morning. What if?
What if I come back? What if I make Kit my home base?
No. No, she needs someone around, if she’s gonna be a mom. The dream for her doesn’t involve an absentee dad.
Does it involve a dad at all? Nope.
But the thought’s there. Constantly. Every second. So present it takes my breath away, makes me worry about the state of my lungs. Maybe I should get checked out before heading out to the next platform.
“Where’s the real estate agent?” asks Ricky, the second I get into the gym. “And where you been all night?”
“Okay, first of all…” I stop, given that he’s blocking my path, and turn to look at a couple guys sparring in the ring. “I still haven’t called. And second, none of your business.”
“Oh, really? That so?”
“Yep. I’ll call her today.”
“Wish you wouldn’t.”
“Then why’d you ask?”
“You’re leaving in a couple days, boy-o. And Dolores wants her cruise.”
“Well, tell Dolores…”
“What?”
“I’ll pay for the cruise. You deserve a break.”
Ricky’s face—all soft wrinkles and bones that lost their structural integrity in fights that happened before I was even born—goes hard as his battle-scarred fists. “You’ve got a woman here.”
“I don’t?—”
“You’ve got a woman and you’re still leaving, when what you really want is to keep the gym running, because you know it’s a good place—a necessary place—but you’re an idiot who thinks you don’t deserve happiness. That’s what’s happening. That’s why you won’t call, why you’re still acting like you’re leaving.”
There it is again, all the air’s left my body—I’m out of breath, empty, only this time it hits me like a bowling ball to the gut. Or one of Ricky’s fists.
“You could stand to stick around for a while, you know, kid.”
“I’m not a kid.”
“No. No, you’re a man. A good man. You’re a man who deserves a break. A man who could use a good woman. Or, hell, maybe you’re seeing guys? Dude, I’m not gonna judge. Whatever floats your?—”
“She doesn’t want that. Me. A… Fuck, Ricky. This isn’t about that, okay? Just…leave it alone.” Up in the ring, Travis, a kid who’s here literally every day, and quite a few nights, delivers a punch that sends his opponent to the mat.
“Hey, hey, hold up, hold up. That’s it. Ding ding ding! ” Ricky yells as he runs over to check on the fighters.
I take advantage of the opportunity to head up to my place, where I lock the door and put on music. I sit at my computer and check the weather to see if that North Sea storm’s going to affect things, and then, because I know I’ll need to eventually, I start packing my shit up.
Hours later, toward the end of the shift, Kit and Cora and I stare out at the rainy parking lot and watch the last customers drive off through a sea of puddles.
I’ve got four days left and Yemi’s starting tomorrow. There’s probably just enough time for me to get in a truckload of gravel and fill those potholes so they don’t ruin Kit’s car.
“It’s a mess,” Kitty says.
“It’s not letting up.” Cora’s clearly glum at the idea of staying any later than she has to.
“Go home, Cora. I’ll finish up.”
“I’m not leaving you to do all the closing stuff. It’s mop night.”
“Go. Seriously.”
“Frida left an hour ago,” I remind her.
“You know I’ll pay you your hours.”
Cora makes an ugly sound and rolls her eyes at me. “She’d tip me, too, if I let her.” She looks at Kit. “No. No, you can’t pay me extra out of pocket because it’s been a slow night. That’s not how restaurant work goes.”
“Okay, but you shouldn’t have to?—”
“Uh-uh.” Cora shakes her head at me. “You’re already the only place in town that does health insurance and a retirement plan. I’m not letting you tip me for existing.”
Kit sighs as Cora walks off, still staring out at the sheets of rain.
“Want to close now?” I ask her.
She shrugs. “Doesn’t seem worth staying open.”
“My place?” I ask, low enough that only she hears.
I watch her chest lift and fall at a decidedly quicker rate. Watch her mouth drop slightly open. She barely nods and that tiny movement pushes my own breath right out of me, sending me into what feels almost exactly like anoxia. Like I’m stuck at depth without oxygen and I’ll never make it back to the surface in time.
We close up quickly, though neither of us ever cuts corners. I follow her to my place, slow as hell through a rain like I haven’t seen in ages.
At least not on land.
We race through it and get inside the gym, lock up and run upstairs, the metal steps squealing under our rubber soles.
I throw open the door and grab her waist while she walks in, give her a tickle and smile when she giggles and squirms.
Then, before she’s gone five paces, she stops short.
I close the door with a clang, follow her gaze, and see the bags I packed earlier.
Slowly, like slogging through water, I watch her look over at me, watch her eyes get big and sad. It’s terrible knowing I put that look there, although I’m not sure I get how it happened. Or why.
“You’re ready to go.” Her voice is light as air.
I nod.
It takes a while for the pressure to ease out of the moment and when it does, I see right away that everything’s changed.
“Kit,” I say as she finishes toeing off her shoes and heads straight down the hall to my room. “Wait up.”
Her pace doesn’t change. She continues on, all business. My favorite sultry, hip shaking walk a thing of the past.
By the time I get my boots off and grab a towel, I find her sitting up in my bed, under the sheets, naked.
I open my mouth to comment and then hold it in because, fuck, this shit is complicated.
Wasn’t supposed to be, but it is.
I hand her the towel and soak up every second of her body doing practical, everyday things.
Instead of the easy banter we’ve worked up to these past couple of weeks, it’s with a kind of thick quiet that I undress and get into bed.
She watches me every second, though, and I wonder if it’s the same for her. Will she miss this like water? Like air? Are her insides shoring themselves up, too, against what’s about to happen?
Once I’m naked and, contrary to every other time we’ve been together, only half hard, even with her eyes on me, she slides over and I get into the warm place in my bed and fuck if that isn’t the strangest, most beautiful thing I’ve ever felt. A warm spot, waiting for me.
I clear my throat, thinking I’ll say something to improve the mood, but not a solitary word comes to mind. So, instead, I do what works for us. I move under the blankets, down her body, one slick slide of my tongue at a time, to that uncomplicated, hot, fragrant place between her legs. And I make love to her. Maybe for the last time.