A waitress shows up with our order, takes away the metal placard, and leaves us to eat in peaceful silence.
Well, notsilence,but?—
I stare down at my salad and frown. "What the hell is this thing called?"
Denali looks up with a bite of hers on the end of her fork, three inches from her mouth. "A deconstructed BLT," she mumbles, sliding the fork into her mouth.
And now I'm sexualizing my new assistant's eating habits as she licks her lips to capture the dressing that lingers on the edge of her mouth.
Get ahold of yourself, you idiot.
Finding women in this city is easy. Hell, I can stick my hand out the window, wink, and end up stuck to twenty for the night. But I haven't bothered in at least a week, so I'm a little needy right now. That's the only explanation I have for why I'm suddenly salivating over this brand new assistant of mine like I'm starving and she's a steak.
"Sounds delicious," I say, shoving my fork aggressively into the salad like that'll solve my problems. I shove a bite into my mouth, and immediately, my body remembers what I've been denying it this whole time, and revolts against my plans to continue to feed it a water and protein bar diet.
And now, Denali Stone has ruined me, with nothing more than a simple lunchtime salad and the insinuation that I don't know what's best for myself.
I'll never recover.
chapter six
Denali
I makeit the first week as Kai's assistant. Then the second. Then, before I know it, it's been a month, and my whole life has turned around.
Rent is caught up. I paid next month's in advance, much to the shock of Steve, my landlord, who thought we'd play touch-and-go for a lot longer while I sorted myself out, no doubt. I bought a few new things for my closet, replaced household items that were so worn it's a miracle they lasted this long. Hell, I even got Taco a new collar with a cute bell and a bow tie. He's got a fancy new cat tower in the warmest spot in the house, right next to his favorite window now, and a litter box that scoops itself.
I've got enough money now to start a savings account and still make bills. And thanks to the raise that Mr. Kobayashi—Kai—demanded on my behalf, I'm able to go out once a week and do something fun for myself.
Life is good.
There's just one problem: Kai himself.
He's relaxed a little, sure, and he's eating on a regular basis now, but he's still a demanding, harsh taskmaster, and it's driving me up the walls. No sooner do I lay my head down fora moment than he's calling me, needing something that could have waited til the next morning.
I joked that he'd have to start paying me round-the-clock wages, and now he's having legal draft up a contract for on-call pay in exchange for me being a 24-7 always-on assistant.
I'm not so sure the money's worth it, though. I can't imagine being at the beck and call of yet another celebrity all the time, just to have him make stupid, frivolous demands of me whenever he's too lazy to do something for himself.
Well, in Kai's case, it's not an issue of laziness. More an issue of a lack of time to master yet another skill.
This week, he's in dance practice every day but Thursday, which means I'll be stuck inside a sweaty, hot, noise-filled dance studio while he works out choreography, learns routines for an upcoming music show performance, and practices until his body sweats out all the liquid inside it and he drops dead.
I've made his schedule for the next two weeks, I'm ahead on the administrative work he needs done this month, and I've got nothing to do but kill time.
So I pack up my laptop, an extra charge bank, and my phone, and plan to make myself available while simultaneously doing anythingbutwork.
Which is how I find myself sitting in the cafeteria of the most upscale dance studio in the city while he berates the instructor and choreographer for not understanding what artistic vision is and how to harness it.
He's insane for the demands he puts on his staff, in all aspects. The studio wants to shut down at five, so he pays them extra to stay open later so he can cram in more practice and do less days of it a week. He works around the schedule of a local producer to record clips of his new tracks (they're just borrowed songs from the man he's standing in for, songs he's covering for the company, but still), working sometimes as late as midnightin that tiny, cramped box they call a production booth while they pour over the clips and sounds and vocals and pick them apart.
I've fallen asleep on a stool there twice now, and fell off one once. I still have the nice bruise that earned me, though it's starting to fade—finally. Unlike the eternal shame of falling on my ass out of a three foot high stool in the middle of a recording session.
Now, I've mastered the art of napping on the fly—because when you're keeping up with someone as active and on the go as Kai Kobayashi, you need to be able to grab sleep whenever, wherever you can. And sometimes that means you're sleeping in the car for ten minutes at a time as you return from the last thing on his schedule, or taking a fifteen minute snooze as he does an interview with a local magazine or blog, or shoots MV scenes, or any number of activities he doesn't need anyone else for.
I'm a little behind on my catch-up sleep, though, so I'm dragging a little more than normal. I lean my head against the wall where I'm sitting in the booth and sigh, closing my eyes for just a second.
And then a hand shakes me awake quite rudely.
