“You cooked too.”
“I don’t think pouring olive oil on the salad counts as cooking, Kai.”
With exaggerated command, he pronounced, “Don’t move.”
Thanking him, I reclaimed the forgotten book and woolen blanket, and for a while I just skimmed through the pages, listening to Kai move around the kitchen. Over the clamor of crockery, I could barely pick up the static coming from the radio, although now that I was focusing on it, the noise did seem to echo louder, harsher.
Curiously, I turned to look at it where it hid in the far corner of the room, its silver antenna glaring in the dim. A sudden disorientation washed over me, as if I’d just woken up from a long afternoon nap. For several moments I was unable to discern where or when I was. The house slipped away from me. The sofa evanesced through the air, and the cushions beneath me dissolved one by one until I was floating in nameless, open space.
Breathless, I shut my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose, and for a split second, the light filtering through my closed eyelids was not the orange of the fire. It was blue.
Blue.
Heart pounding, I shot up from the sofa and stumbled toward the exit. “Hey, Kai?” I called out, reaching with tremulous hands for my shoes. “I’m going to go outside for a bit.”
I heard his muffled “Okay” just before I shut the door behind me.
Shivering, I stepped onto the porch. The nightly mist was coming down in waves, and the clouds hung over the sky like a blanket, comforting and oppressive all at once. The level of darkness was novel to me. There was no moon, no streetlights, no haze of neon signs, just a perfect, velvet-black void. I grabbed the railing with both hands to steady myself and took a few deep, cathartic breaths. In and out. In and out until I felt enough grounded to my surroundings that the pinpricks of panic settled down to a faint discomfort. And then the door creaked open, and the gentle sound of Kai’s footsteps approaching alleviated even that.
“You’re going to freeze to death,” he said in a low, smiling tone of voice as he wrapped a blanket around me from behind.
Warmed and relieved, I leaned against his chest, surrendering to the sublime calm of his presence. “Thank you,” I sighed.
His arms banded around mine, his lips moving hot over the tip of my ear. “Is this okay? I feel like I can’t stop touching you.”
“I don’t want you to stop touching me,” I whispered to him. “You’re the only thing that makes sense to me anymore.”
“I know,” he said, and there was pain in his voice about it. Pain and sadness and longing because he didn’t know how to translate this feeling any more than I did.
“Kai?”
“Mm?”
“When you had your assessment, did they ask you that question about life being in your hand?”
“Yeah.”
“And what do you think? Is it in our hands? Or is it all just fate?”
He considered it for a moment, the breath of his body moving us both as I rested the back of my head on his shoulder. “I think fate is just the feeling you get when you finally figure out how you want to live your life. A sense of purpose that gives meaning to an otherwise pretty pointless existence.”
“So it’s in our hands,” I decided.
“I think so,” he agreed. “We hold it, and we decide what to make of it.”
“And what happens when you unclench your fist?” I wondered.
“You don’t,” he said, and as if to underline the words, he tightened his arms around me.
“Never?”
“Never. You keep your fist clenched. And the more painful it gets, the harder you grasp it.”
Above, the clouds separated from each other just enough for a sliver of moon to appear, spotlight-bright in the absolute darkness. That was who Kai was to me. A radiant celestial object, tirelessly pushing through the unknowable black of my life.
Chapter Thirteen
In bed the sheets were cool and fresh-smelling, and the moonlight was streaming through the window just brightly enough to silhouette Kai’s profile against the dark of the room. I was exhausted, my eyelids heavy like iron, but there were too many thoughts racing through my mind to be granted the stillness of sleep. I could only watch him. Feel him. The scent of his skin and the slow measure of his breathing body.
