The first timeI kissed Kalea, she was in a hospital bed. Aloiki and I were taking turns between caring for her and keeping our businesses running. Kayl stopped by when he could, but with his schedule as a beat cop, he couldn’t stay for long periods of time like us.
The fucker who put her in that bed was already fish food, and Kalea had no idea her brother and brother’s best friend were now murderers. She never asked what had happened to whats-his-name, and we never told her.
I had a meeting that afternoon with a real estate agent to look at the very house we were in now. There had been a fire, almost an obsession, inside me since Aloiki and I first discovered Kalea on the floor, battered and broken. I couldn’t shake the thought that, if she’d been with me as she was meant to be, she wouldn’t have gotten hurt.
Kalea wasmine, and I would be as patient as she would need me to be, but it did not change where our lives were heading. I had already informed Aloiki of this—not so he could give me his blessing, but so he knew exactly what my unapologetic intentions were in regard to his sister.
So when Kalea woke up from one of her many naps, and I knew she was cognitive enough to have such an importantconversation, I leaned over her hospital bed, declared myself to her, and kissed her.
It had been our first kiss—and our last, at least for some time. But it had been perfect. Our touch had been electrifying, invigorating. It sparked a bone-deep hunger within me that only affirmed what I already knew: she was mine.
I didn’t know what I had been trying to prove or maybe justify by kissing her now. Since our divorce, I’d kissed countless women, including professional sex workers and porn stars. There was a difference in kissing to express emotion and shared passion, to form a connection with a person that could be both loving and demanding, and kissing as a performance, an act, to get to a goal of mutual pleasure.
As Kalea’s mouth worked against mine, I waited for the first to take over. The unrivalled, almost animalistic passion that had driven me for nearly a decade. The ignition that fueled a fire within my soul that only a negative paternity test had been able to quench.
Instead… I felt nothing. Well, nothing towardsKalea. The moment it hit me that she could have been anyone, that I felt no different kissing her than I had Yooko’s employee all those weeks ago, I truly hated myself. Because even as the kiss continued, as my mouth and tongue went through the practiced motions, my body did not react. My dick had a small reaction that I chalked up to its pathetic attempt to fulfill its biological requirements, but that was it.
There was no fire, no passion, no wanting.
I couldn’t deny I cared for Kalea. She was important to me, likely always would be. I felt guilt and responsibility for what she’d been suffering through on her own, the weight of a secret she mistakenly felt she had to carry alone. But I did not feellove.
I pulled back, jerking so badly that I nearly knocked the iced tea can over on the counter with my elbow.
Kalea gasped in surprise at my quick reaction. Followed by a husky and confused, “What?”
I stared down at her, my heart caught in a cyclone of nostalgia and true desire. My discombobulated thoughts were jumbled to the point I was starting to feel dizzy.
How deluded could I have been? How could I have thought I could so easily step into the past? Staring down into her familiar, dark eyes, I realized that I wasn’t fighting to forgive her, but myself. I’d done something heinous, unforgivable. I’d taken the trust instilled in me by someone vulnerable, and I’d destroyed it, stomped on it by my selfish needs.
I wasn’t here to try and reconcile the past. I was here to try and relive it. Like a factory reset on a computer, I was trying to put my life back together to the last time it made any logical sense.
Maui must be laughing his demi-god ass off at me, his joke finally revealed, and I his most impressive fool.
Not wanting to hurt Kalea even more than I already had, I carefully extracted myself from her grip. Walking over to the wall, I leaned my hand heavily on it. I’d left the woman I fell in love with and tried to replace her with another, one from my past that felt comfortable, familiar. I couldn’t replace Caroline, and this fucked-up attempt to was an even further slap in her face. It wasn’t that I couldn’t or shouldn’t have Caroline anymore because of her past and age: I did not deserve her.
I didn’t deserve anyone. I was no one’s white knight, and I needed to own that.
“I’ll send someone over to protect you,” I told Kalea, not looking at her. “I’ll still avenge what was done to you. But I can’t be with you.”
“I don’t understand… Is it me? Am I not?—”
I stopped her mid-word, spinning around quickly to gather her up into my arms. “Don’t ever think that this is about you. You’re perfect, beautiful, and incredible. But I can’t be with you,Kalea.” I kissed her forehead. “Our history needs to stay where it is. I want to repair our friendship, rebuild that trust to what it once was, but I can’t be your lover or your partner. Not because of what was done to you,” I added to ensure she knew. “Maybe you don’t believe me now, but you will eventually. This is for the best.” I stepped away from her. “I’ll be outside until someone else arrives to watch over you.”
I rubbed my tired eyes,feeling like the inside of my lids had turned to sandpaper. “Are you fucking with me right now? How do we have nothing?”
It was the day before Aloiki and Lu’s wedding, and I was barely holding onto my sanity. This meeting was just Kayl and Neo. Lucifer had been called away to deal with something at the youth center, and Bacon had something going on with the renter he had on a connecting piece of land. I knew that cottage existed, because we used to use it as a fort when we were kids, but I hadn’t been near it since my age had turned double-digits, and I was a bit surprised to learn Bacon had a renter in it. He must have fixed it up when he bought the property, because it certainly hadn’t been in a livable condition when I was a child.
Mako was staying with Kalea. They’d met a few times over the years, and as our Cleaner put it, why wouldn’t he want to stay and protect the damsel in distress?
The temptation to get drunk again had been strong, and it was a bit of an eye opener to realize just how regularly I partook in the hard stuff. I hadn’t touched a single drop of alcohol since that revelation, which was likely adding to my already irritable state. I wasn’t saying I was sober forever more, but at least for a little bit. I needed to work on myself, and right the wrongs done to Kalea, if Iever wanted to have a hope of being worthy of Caroline and Samantha.
Tuesday morning, I left a message for Caroline. Her phone went straight to voicemail, and I wasn’t sure if that was because she had blocked me, her phone was off, or she had Neo set it so all her calls went to voicemail and was treating her phone like it was a portable answering machine. Regardless, I hoped she listened to it:
“Hey, it’s me. I hope you and Samantha are doing okay. There’s so much that I need to apologize to you for—both of you. But I can’t apologize for falling in love with you. I should, it would be the right and honorable thing to do, but we already know I’m neither of those things. What I can promise you is peace, Caroline. Peace of knowing that I won’t be around, that I won’t be there to pressure you. I’ll still look after you. I always will. I miss both of you so badly, it feels like there’s an open wound in my soul. I’m giving you the space to grow and heal, to figure out who you are as a woman and a mother. I may not have kept you locked in a basement, but I still kept you locked up. How can you explore who you are with me shackled around your ankles?
“So here’s my promise to you, and I’m sorry for this message being so long. Then again, you don’t have to erase it to make room on the tape so maybe you’ll want to keep it and play it again later. Anyway, this is my promise: I’m working on bettering myself. To also figure out who I am without you. Four years feels like an eternity, right? I wanted to offer a year, but you’d only be eighteen then. What if you wanted to go to college? What if you needed more time to forgive me? Then I wondered, is four years too long? What if she forgot me? And that’s why I chose it. I don’t want you to forget me, but I also know that I need to give you enough time for you tochooseme. For you to discover and grow into the incredible woman I have no doubt you’ll be. And then ifyouchoose to, you can come to me.
“And I’ll still be here, Caroline. I’m not going anywhere. I’m just going to be in the shadows rather than standing in your path.Kiss Samantha for me, and tell her how much I love her and miss her. Tell her I’m sorry I had to leave her too. She’s the daughter of my heart, and if she’ll have me in four years, there would be no greater honor than to become her father.
