Page 48 of The Kiss Principle

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I walked Igz around the house, fed her, burped her, and then somehow, I wasn’t angry anymore, just tired. We both fell asleep on the couch. The doorbell woke me, and I put Igz in her swing and paid the delivery guy and carried the food into the kitchen. I fished out Zé’s salad and a fork, and I found a bottle of water and the Tylenol, and I carried it to his room. I knocked.

His voice was rough when he said, “Come in.”

He was sitting up, but it was clear he’d been lying down until I’d knocked. His hair was standing up in back where it had dried against the pillow. His eyes were red, and I thought that he’d been crying, and then I thought how stupid a motherfucker I was because, of course it made me feel bad.

“Dinner,” I said. I shook the bottle of pills. “If Tylenol isn’t strong enough, my mom probably has—”

“No,” he said quickly. He tried for a smile. “Tylenol is fine. Thank you.”

I was still standing there in the doorway like an ass-muffin.

“Could I eat with you and Igz?” he asked.

I grunted and made my way back to the living room. I laid out the meal on the coffee table, set the table at an angle to the sofa so Zé would be able to sit down, and got myself a beer. When I went back to the living room, Zé was lurking in the hallway. Apparently he did have a tiny bit of brains, because he was using the cane.

“Sit on the fucking couch, jizz-for-brains,” I said. “What the fuck are you going to do? Be a creep over there and eat your dinner telepathically?”

“I was waiting for you to come out of the kitchen so I could do that scene fromWilly Wonka. He’s walking on that cane and then he does that big surprise roll, and everyone is amazed.”

“This is because you didn’t have a big brother to bully the shit out of you.”

I don’t think I was supposed to see it, but a tiny smile darted across his mouth. Then his expression was carefully neutral again. He sat on the sofa. He kept his injured leg stretched out in front of him, and I was glad I’d angled the coffee table.

For a while, the only sounds were the television (CNN), the crinkle of plastic and foil as we went to work on our salads, the motor of Igz’s swing. I felt like I could hear everything. When he wiped his mouth with a napkin. When a piece of lettuce crunched between his teeth. When he shifted his weight, trying to get comfortable, the springs of the sofa protested. His thigh ended up pressed against mine. I thought I could smell his hair. I thought I could smell his skin. I thought I was going out of my fucking mind.

“I’m sorry,” he said and set his fork down. “Fernando, I am so, so sorry.”

There didn’t seem anything safe to say to that, so I grunted.

“Could we talk about this? Please?”

I turned the television up. They were talking about the president’s dog. Fascinating stuff.

“Okay,” Zé said and grabbed the remote and turned the TV off.

I looked at him. Slowly.

“I know you’re angry at me. You’re right to be angry at me.”

“Anger is about boundaries,” I said. “Isn’t that what you told me? Here’s my fucking boundary: you making the stupidest fucking decisions I can think of. You hurting yourself—”

“I didn’t hurt myself.”

“—instead of telling me what the fuck is going on!”

“I’m okay, Fernando. I am. I promise.”

“Because you were lucky!”

Zé took a deep breath. “I’m trying to tell you something. And it’s scary for me.”

I forked salad around in the plastic container. I stabbed the fork down. I looked him in the eye. “What?”

“Remember how I told you I dropped out of college because nothing caught my interest? Well, that wasn’t true. Not exactly.”

“So, you lied to me.”

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