Kai wagged a finger at me.“Positivity, remember?”he scolded.
I gave him a lopsided grin.“Look, some things are just the honest truth, y’know?Failed relationship, moving out, turning into a 21st century hermit, that sort of stuff.Forgive me if I don’t attempt to sugar-coat it.”
He stared at me for a moment, then wordlessly picked up his fork again.For a couple of minutes we skewered our salads in silence, though not an entirely uncomfortable one.
“I’ve had maybe two proper relationships,” Kai said, after our plates had been taken.“One lasted for, oh, about a year.The other for maybe double that.”
“What happened?”I asked, figuring he’d tell me to butt out if he didn’t want to talk about it.Guessing, though, that he’d be a whole lot less reticent than I typically was.
“First one, me and the guy just weren’t a match, mentally,” he explained.“Good sex, but not much else in common.”
“Must’ve been very good, for it to sustain you for a year,” I observed, smiling.
He gave me a smirk.“Maybe I’ll save those stories for when we’re not surrounded by strangers.”
I sipped my wine, eyebrow arched.“Ah, so you do have limits; you’re not a total social monster after all.”
Kai nodded, conceding with a grin.
“What about the second guy?”I pushed.
“Girl,” he corrected.
I bit my lip.“That’s right, I forgot the...label-free fluidity.”
He rolled his eyes.“Don’t start that again.”
I mimed zipping my mouth shut.
“Anyway,” he continued, “we went to school together.Ended up living together, too.Met the parents, the whole deal.She was nice.”
“Nice...”I echoed.
Kai snorted.“That’s a bad word.She was great: clever, funny, sexy.Clearly on course to do amazing things.Some people just ‘get’ medicine, they don’t need a family tree to herd them into it.She was one of those people.”
It took me a moment to understand the feeling I was having in the pit of my stomach, what the weird churning there meant.A jolt as I recognized it to be a strange sort of jealousy.
“So what went wrong?”I asked, then kicked myself for my bluntness.
Kai didn’t seem to notice, though.“Oh, she saw marriage in that ‘course of amazing things’ and I...didn’t.”He picked up his wineglass, twisting the stem between his fingers.“Like, I wasn’t saying never, but at the same time I didn’t want to rush into that; to do it simply because it felt like a box you were meant to check off, alongside having a career and owning a car.”
“Your car is broken,” I pointed out, trying to keep things light.
Kai smiled.“A fitting metaphor, then,” he said.“What about you, had you and your ex talked about marriage?”
I thought about that for a moment.Such a straightforward question, with nothing at all like a straightforward answer to it.
“There were lots of things we didn’t talk about, that being one of them,” I said, eventually.It was an explanation that covered a multitude of sins, plenty of them my own.
Maybe Kai recognized my reticence, perhaps he didn’t want to push things too far while we were out in public.Maybe it was just the arrival of the next course.Whatever the reason, he changed the subject.
“So were you and him monogamous?”
I stared at him over a forkful of mashed potato.“Uh, yes,” I confirmed.“That question was a little out of left field.”
He smirked, shrugging.“Just curious,” he explained.“Did you want to be?”
“To be honest, it wasn’t something we really had a conversation about,” I admitted.“It just sort of ended up that way, by unspoken assent.”
