“You don’t know that,” I halfheartedly protested.
“Yes, I do,” he argued. But his tone was gentle. Affectionate. “I know you don’t like asking for help.”
This was the principle of my life, wasn’t it? To need other people as little as possible. But was my inability to rely on others truly so glaring, so severe? And was this the proof I’d been looking for, after all? The behavior of a person in pain. A person who’d rather delete their own memories than ask for help.
But I didn’t want to think about that right now. What I wanted was for him to keep talking to me, keep making me feel better even if this feeling was superficial.
Clumsily, I maneuvered the conversation. “Do you have plans for tonight?”
“Oh, yeah. Grand plans, in fact,” he proclaimed. “I’m going to make dinner, vacuum the floors, and do the laundry. Might even fix myself a strong cup of tea in the process.”
“Okay, go easy now,” I teased him, loving that we had somehow grown into two people who could tease each other like that. “But seriously, why aren’t you going out with James and the others?”
“I don’t know,” he exhaled into the phone. “I’m just so tired of everything.”
“Of me?”
“No,” he said. “Not of you.”
Smiling into my pillow, I wondered how it was possible for a person to feel so many different emotions at once.
“You’re smiling now, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I chuckled.
“I like that,” he murmured, almost as if to himself. “I like thinking of you smiling.”
Biting the corner of my lip, restless suddenly, I turned on my back. “Do you think of me often, Kai?”
A tense, meaningful silence came between us, and just thinking of him tempted by me made my whole body flush. His touch, I imagined, and pressed the back of my hand over my mouth to suppress the sound that wanted to escape me.
Kai muttered something too—a curse, perhaps. Then with a sharp exhalation he added, “This is not a very friendly question, Anya.”
“Well, I did promise to be a terrible friend,” I said as a joke. But it didn’t sound like a joke. It sounded like a plea for irresponsibility.
“You also promised to make it easy for me,” he reminded me, his voice darker now, commanding.
Girlishly, selfishly, I asked, “Am I not making it easy?”
“I think we both know that you’re not,” he rasped.
Behaving myself, I hummed peaceably, “Alright. Make me a friendly question then.”
Several seconds slipped past us before he was able to speak again, and even then his voice sounded strained, his breath unsteady. “Did you have dinner?”
“Yeah,” I replied, clearing my own want from my throat. “I had some toast.”
“Again?”
“I know, I know. I need to go to the store.”
Another pause, another indecipherable process of thought. Then, “Get dressed.”
Something stirred in my chest, a rush of wakefulness stealing over me. “What? Why?”
“I’m taking you out for a proper meal,” he decided, and that was the Kai I knew from work. The confident, charming, slightly dominant side of him. The side I liked to conjure in my most private moments.
“You don’t have to do that,” I reassured him.
