Page 195 of Hate Mates

“I like that singer, Leigh Brighton.”

Amelie laughed. “Like? You’re obsessed with her. He had, like, a million posters of her when we were in high school,” she told Kai.

He glanced at Amelie’s dark blonde waves. “I didn’t take you for a redhead man.”

Amelie rolled her eyes. “Don’t change the subject. If you can’t think of a celebrity, think of someone from real life. No one ever caught your eye?”

“If you must know, there was a woman.”

“Was?” I asked, realizing too late that perhaps he was referring to a dead wife or girlfriend, and we had invited some unpleasant memories. I closed my eyes. “Sorry. That’s none of my business.”

“Don’t be, it was years ago.” He took a long, slow sip of his Manhattan as if biding his time. “My company used to recruit new hires at university campuses. I was invited as the keynote speaker for one of the job fairs and saw her. I was immediately smitten. She was one of a kind, the type that can stop traffic but also looks like the girl next door.”

“What happened to her?” Amelie asked tentatively, unsure if he was recounting the events of a dead girlfriend.

He chuckled at her apprehensive glance. “Don’t look so mortified. She’s alive and well.”

“Oh. So…”

“Back then, we had too big of an age gap. She was a freshman in college, and I was the CEO of a thriving company. The optics were bad, and the media would have had a field day if they thought I was preying on a young, impressionable female student.”

Amelie appeared unconvinced and called him out. “I don’t believe you,” she announced decisively. “What’s the real reason you stayed away from her?”

He gave her a crooked smile as if expecting the very reaction. “She was innocent and skittish around strangers and men in general.”

“Every woman is wary of strange men,” she asserted. That was the thing about her. She looked like Little Ms. California—sunny and bright—so no one caught on to her shrewd nature. She never let people off the hook if she saw through their bullshit.

Kai lifted a shoulder. “I couldn’t predict how she’d react to a grown man and didn’t want to start on the wrong foot. I wanted to learn about her first and approach her in a way that wouldn’t scare her off.”

“And did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Learn about her?”

He dwelled on a thought before speaking. “You’d be surprised by how well you can get to know someone despite never having a proper conversation with them. There is something to the power of observation. I watched her interactions, and soon, I knew her like the back of my hand. Optimistic but a straight shooter, hardheaded yet reasonable, compassionate but not a pushover. Fiercely loyal. Her moral compass was based on her situation rather than predetermined values. She didn’t stick to something simply because that’s how she was raised. She adapted based on what her circumstances demanded. I loved her flexibility the most because people either died with their archaic values or didn’t have them to begin with.”

I glanced at Amelie. That was how I saw Amelie.

“This is all so romantic,” Amelie awed. “I can’t believe she left such an impression that you’re still thinking about her after all this time.”

I beamed at her. My lovely wife tended to romanticize things. Even if Kai had told her it was a simple crush, Amelie would have turned it into a Disney fairy tale. But in this case, she was on the money. Kai seemed smitten with a woman he had met eons ago.

“Did you ever tell her how you felt?” she asked.

He tilted his head. “She was all I thought about, every second of every day until it became unbearable. I decided it was time to approach her. But that was before?—”

“Before?”

“Before I saw her with her boyfriend.”

I blinked, finding it outlandish there was a woman Kai Cavendish couldn’t get. “What happened then?” I asked.

“She got married,” he replied, voice devoid of emotion.

Silence befell us, and Amelie’s lashes dropped like someone had given her the worst possible news. There was a finality to the word marriage, leaving no hope for a jilted lover.

Nevertheless, my sweet wife’s empathy worked overtime. “That’s so sad. I—I mean, maybe not for her if she loves her husband, but… it’s just so sad.” She had already built a fantasy world around Kai’s love story and didn’t know how to console him or herself.

---