“That must be nice,” I murmured, observing the people lining up for the photo booth so I wouldn’t have to meet his gaze.
But Kai wouldn’t have that. “Hey,” he breathed, so close to my lips that if I lifted my head a mere inch we would be kissing. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you sad.”
Pulling back on the bench, I chanced a glance at him. “You didn’t. You’ve been really good to me, actually. I want you to know that I appreciate it. And for covering for me at work. I… I might’ve told Betty that we were together that night.”
“We were,” he said, not quite catching my meaning.
“Yes, but she might tell people.”
Confused still, he nodded. “Okay.”
“I wanted to give you a heads-up just in case.”
“In case I have ten girlfriends at work or something?” he realized. “Yeah, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not nearly as insatiable as you think I am.”
I let out an exaggerated scoff. “I’ve seen you flirt with literally everyone at the office.”
“You’ve seen me ask about their day and their spouses. You’ve seen me be polite,” he argued.
“You and I have very different definitions ofpolite.”
He smiled then, grandly, his cheeks dimpling. “Are you jealous, Anya?”
Perhaps I was a bit jealous. Or perhaps I really had seen him be polite not just to the girls but to everyone at the office and had deliberately misinterpreted it so as to give myself a reason not to like him. Because to like him, knowing that he liked me back, meant a disturbance, an irreparable rupture in my carefully constructed life.
But now it was too late to be regretting this, wasn’t it? Now I had no choice but to accept that I had nothing to offer to this man. No stability, no clarity, no love. Yes, I wanted to be loved. Desperately, selfishly, I wanted to be loved, having no idea how to love someone in return.
A hot, uncomfortable sensation crawled over the sides of my face, and when I raised the heel of my palm to my forehead, I found the skin damp and almost throbbing.
“Are you feeling warm?” Kai asked, noticing the gesture.
“Yeah, it’s boiling in here. I think it’s from all the machines and the lights.”
Without warning he bent over me and pressed the cold soda can to the underside of my jaw. A droplet of condensation glided down my throat. Cool. Incentivizing. “Here. That helps?”
“Mmm,” was my sole response. A ribbon’s breadth was his mouth from mine, and the sight of his throat bobbing I found oddly erotic.
“You know,” he said in a low, tactile voice, “all jokes aside, I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“Do what to me?”
“Look at you the way I do and then flirt with other women in front of you like it doesn’t mean anything. Because it does mean something. To me, at least, it does.”
Again this hot feeling flared under my skin, different than before, though, more cerebral than sensual.
Staring at his lips, I asked, “How are you looking at me, Kai?”
Undone, pained almost, he cursed under his breath. “Fuck, Anya. Youknowhow I’m looking at you.”
And despite everything, I would have kissed him then had he not drawn back, had he not made it so painfully clear that we shouldn’t be kissing. Kind of him, if you thought about it, to realize the vulnerability of my predicament—a woman with only a year-old consciousness, confused and scared and desperately clinging to the only people that felt familiar to her—and to not take advantage of that. A good man.
It only made me want him more, and at the same time forced me to realize that I had nothing to compare this desire to. Had I felt this way about someone else before? Had someone else looked at me with longing in their eyes, and had I looked back? Perhaps I got my heart broken, and that was why I requested the procedure. But then again, why delete all of it? Why not leave my childhood intact?
Decisively, before I could respond, Kai cleared his throat and stood from the bench. “I should get you home,” he said.
“Yes,” I agreed halfheartedly. “You should.”
Sauntering down the sleek sidewalk, I couldn’t tell if the wind was falling in mist or if it’d begun to rain again. Stretching back my neck, I squinted at the streetlamp, where light-dazzled pinpricks appeared dashing under the glass.Raining, I decided just as Kai shrugged off his coat and held it up over our heads like a canopy.
