It’d be a lie to say that I didn’t, although I had absolutely no interest in leading ahealthy lifestyle. It would also be a lie to say that I didn’t find pleasure in knowing I was the subject of his attention even when we were apart. That I had this power over him while he had this power over everyone else.
Cautiously, I accepted the salad. “Thank you.”
He cocked his head to the side, eyes lowered, all languid and forgiving. “Now, see, you could have opened with that.”
“Yes, but then I wouldn’t be me,” I argued.
“No, I guess you wouldn’t,” he agreed.
For a moment longer we went on staring at each other, barely noticing the people streaming back into the office. Then Kai straightened to his full height, smoothed down his shirt, and strode around the partition to his desk. “Now eat,” he urged. “Before you pass out on your keyboard.”
With exaggerated gestures, I opened the lunchbox, removed the plastic fork from the underside of the lid, and took a huge bite from the salad, which was surprisingly fresh and flavorful. “Happy?” I asked him.
“Elated,” was his wry reply. And yet as I made myself comfortable so I could properly enjoy the meal, readjusting the tortoiseshell clasp in my hair and lifting my heels from the confinement of my ballerina flats, I sensed him observing me through the partition as if I were the most fascinating person in the world. And when I picked up the juice box, he commented in a deliciously low voice, “Good girl.”
Ah, yes. With such effortless skill he did that, I wondered if I was the only one he was doing it to.
“You do realize how unprofessional this is, right?” I muttered, biting at the little plastic straw.
“You should get me fired,” he mused.
“I should get you ostracized,” I countered.
“For making sure you eat?”
“For distracting me from my work.”
He leaned back on his chair, making himself fully visible. His eyes were bright with mischief as he asked, “Is that what I’m doing?”
Unamused, I arched a brow, and he relented with a gruff shake of his head. “You know,” he said, his long, elegant fingers moving fast over his keyboard, “you’re wasted as a fashion writer. You should have gotten into a more aggressive field.”
“Well, it’s never too late. Maybe tomorrow morning I’ll wake up and decide to change my whole life.”
Satisfied, at last, with today’s back and forth, he smiled luxuriously at his computer screen. “Maybe you will.”
Chapter Three
Back at the apartment, in my familiar, moon-drenched solitude, the thousand unnamed feelings in my chest gave way to exhaustion, and after I showered and polished off a bowl of instant noodles, I slumped facedown on the bed and fell asleep almost immediately.
It was an hour, maybe two, later that the ringing began.
With my brain shut off, I propped up on my elbows and gazed around, trying to place the sound in the room. I felt strangely disoriented, as if the direction of the bed had changed, but after another hazy, slow-blinking moment, I realized it was the telephone.
In my half-asleep effort to untangle myself from the duvet, I toppled to the floor and ended up crawling to the little table next to the TV, where the telephone sat atop a stack of old RAM issues. Stretching the spiraling cord as far as it could go, I lay down on the rug and pressed the receiver to my ear. “Hello?”
Nothing. Yet the ringing persisted with a shrill urgency.
At last, it occurred to me that it was my mobile phone, which I rarely used and sometimes forgot its existence altogether.
Growling, I stumbled my way to the hall where I had left my work bag and patted around for it in the velveteen dim.
Flipping the phone open, I mumbled again, “Hello?”
“Is this Anya?” It was a male voice, low and muffled by the clamor of chatter and music.
“Um, yes?”
“Are you sure? You don’t sound very confident about it.”
