No way to shrug, to make some awkward gesture of dismissal.Not if it risked those five points of gentle contact.
“I’m just not used to talking about this stuff,” I admitted.“Or being so easy to read, really.”
“I’ll apologize for being blunt, but not for wanting to know you better.”
“And who could blame you, with my kitchen expertise what it is.”
Kai laughed, as he leaned in to wrap his arms around me.“Your attempts to escape emotional vulnerability using humor are transparent,” he murmured.“You know that, right?”
It was tempting not to say anything, to simply savor his warmth.
“What’s the alternative, actually getting to know someone?”I teased.
“I mean...yes?”
“You’re funny,” I told him, burying my face in his shoulder.
#
“How did you meet?Youand your ex, I mean.”
It was strange, someone taking an interest.Stranger still to feel inclined to answer.
“Friend of a friend.”I bit back on the urge to joke about how it had all been pre-apps.Courting done analog, without the convenience of software to break the ice and hold rejection’s sting at arm’s length.Sometimes, my eagerness to remind Kai of our age difference felt like it bordered on self-harm.
“Love at first sight?”The humor was clear in his voice.
“Hardly.”
Alistair had thought me prickly, distant, and I’d believed him false, a creature of artifice.Doubted that anyone could be somindful of their fellow man, so genuine with their expression of wide-eyed curiosity.The first time he’d struck up a conversation, I’d spent half the time searching for the joke made at my expense.
I’d ended up chased, not the punchline.Forced to reckon with my inclination to solitude, and how incompatible that was with what, finally, I accepted was us dating.He’d called it only-child syndrome, blamed the self-sufficiency of my solitary play.I’d never had the heart to explain that the problem was myopia not independence.
“Did you not want to date?”Kai looked genuinely fascinated.
I shrugged.“Just never thought that was on the cards.Not for me, anyway.”
A chuckle.“And you went straight from that, to a fifteen year relationship?”
“Sixteen,” I corrected.Even though it felt ridiculous to insist.
“Sixteen, then.”Kai hissed through his teeth, awe blended with disbelief.“That’s not a bad run.”
“Enough that you start taking it for granted,” I told him, a little shocked at my own honesty.
“And you never saw it coming?The breakup.”
Every day, I wanted to tell him, every damn day: doom forecast on the dot, regular as clockwork.The boy who’d never foreseen love, suddenly cataloguing all the ways he’d lose it.Until it became a concept, not an outcome; a habit, lists their own reward, and so occupying that I barely noticed the reality of decay seeping in until it was already too late.
“I wasn’t easy to live with.”It had the intonation of a confession, but there was something liberating about saying it out loud.
“I doubt he was entirely innocent, either,” Kai said.
I shrugged again.That didn’t feel like an observation I was qualified to pass judgment on.
“We don’t have to talk about this stuff.”He frowned.“If it’s something that makes you uncomfortable, I mean.”
“It’s more just that I wish there was an explanation, one that sounded more insightful than ‘we both fucked up,’ but I don’t know what it is.”The deck lights glinted off the wine glass, so close I could feel my fingers itching to reach out, pluck it up.“Maybe there was always a countdown attached, and I was too naive to recognize it.”
