Page 42 of The Kiss Principle

“I’m sorry about earlier,” Zé said, and his voice was so quiet that over the whoosh of the fans, I barely heard him. “It’s…hard for me.”

“You’ll have to be more specific, dick-drip. What’s hard for you? Because it sure doesn’t seem hard for you to boss me around and tell me what I can drink and, let me guess, what I can eat.”

“Either the shrimp tacos—grilled, not fried—or the beach salad.”

In spite of my best efforts, I smiled. “That’s got kind of a controlling vibe.”

“Or I guess it could be your cheat meal. You want a burger, don’t you?”

“I want you to tell me what’s going on. I’m not exactly a master of communication, but believe it or not, I picked up on some weird fucking energy a few minutes ago.” I took anotherdrink of my beer and, after a minor struggle, added, “I’m sorry for shouting at you.”

For some reason, that made him smile, and he relaxed—those long limbs loosening, his shoulders opening. “Fernando, I don’t care if you yell at me. It’s kind of cute, actually.”

“No, it’s not. It’s terrifying.”

“If I cared about you yelling at me, I would have quit, like, the second day.”

“I was nice to you on the second day! I was nice to you the whole fucking time, right up until I caught you living like a sneak-ass bitch out of your car!”

“I was playing the xylophone with Igz, and you screamed—screamed, Fernando—from your office that you were on the phone, and maybe it could be musical playtime literally at any other point in the day.”

“Oh my God, I forgot about that.”

Zé wiped condensation from his glass with his thumb.

“But I didn’t swear,” I said.

“But the xylophone ended up in the trash.”

I burst out laughing. “I didn’t think you noticed that.”

He gave me those fuzzy, quirking eyebrows again, and I laughed harder.

“I don’t mind you yelling,” he said again. “Honestly, it doesn’t bother me. Or the language, although I wish you’d watch what you said around Igz. I—I’ve worked hard to be independent. That’s important to me. This isn’t about you. You’re such a good person. You’re so generous, so kind. I appreciate that you want to give me something. But I need to live life on my own for a while.”

I ran my thumb around the mouth of the bottle, tracing the ridges in the glass. “God, you ended up in the worst fucking family, then.”

“That’s another reason: you have all these people who need things from you. I don’t want to be another one of those people in your life. You’re already giving me a place to live—”

“That’s part of the job,” I said. “That’s your compensation. You earned that.”

He gave me a sad smile.

It took me a moment; my throat was tight, and I didn’t trust my voice. “I…appreciate that. Honestly, I do. You don’t know—” But I didn’t know either. Didn’t know how to finish that sentence. Didn’t know how to put into words how hard it was sometimes, or what it meant to have someone who didn’t want something from me. Didn’t know how to explain, even to myself, why Zé’s stubborn refusal to accept anything from me also awoke a baseline panic in me, why it made me feel, with doubled urgency, the need to find something, anything, to give him. I managed to add, “I’m sorry again. Sorry I ruined the day. I was having a nice day.”

“Even though people thought we were a couple.”

“Real fucking funny.”

That slow smile was spreading across his lips again.

I pointed my beer at him. “You should be so lucky, with that badger-fucker excuse you call a face.”

It only made him laugh, of course.

When the waiter came, I ordered the shrimp tacos. Grilled, not fried. Zé got ceviche. Igz was asleep in my arms, and I thought about putting her back in the stroller, but she felt good where she was, the weight of her grounding me. And maybe someone will think, again, that we’re together. That thought came out of nowhere, and when it did, I didn’t know what to do with it.

“You didn’t ruin our day,” Zé said, and it took me a moment to track the words back to what we’d been saying. He was playing with the napkin-wrapped bundle of silverware, tearing littlestrips off the paper. “We had an argument. But we worked it out, right? I mean, that’s an important part of any relationship. If we’re going to be in each other’s lives like this, we’ve got to know how to work out disagreements. And it’s good that we’re, you know, compatible. You can yell at me, and I don’t care. And then, when we’re both calm—well, you’re good at making me feel...safe. So we can talk. Even when I might not, you know, want to talk.”

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