Page 128 of Faithful

Surprisingly, I have my answer faster than I expected. I still can’t imagine my life without him. “If you’re trying to give me reasons why I shouldn’t be with you, don’t.”

A muscle in Kai’s jaw bunches. He remains still, fists out in the cold.

“I don’t care,” I blurt out, stepping into his personal space. “I don’t care what you did and who you did it with five years ago as long as it didn’t involve purposely hurting others. I care about us. About now. It’s this moment we have. This moment, Kai.”

“I didn’t know who he was or that he was married when we met. He was just another rich guy who wanted to have a good time. I didn’t ask questions. He didn’t offer information.”

I reach for his hands and take them into mine.

There’s no resistance from him when I bring my mouth to his and brush our lips together. He tastes just as I remember–smoke and secrets. And my heart soars and sings in my chest because I consider this nearly chaste kiss a victory.

“Why would you?” Kai gasps as I slowly pull away.

“Do you really want me to list all the reasons? Is the fact that I love you not enough?”

“It’s not enough to make the photos go away, to make everything that’s in my head go away.”

“Maybe it’s not possible to make it go away. Maybe if you tell me about it, we can figure out how to contain it?”

“You don’t give up, do you?”

“For the first time in my life, I really want to live, and I think I like this feeling, and I think I want to at least fight for it until I’ve tried everything. And I haven’t tried everything yet.”

I reach out to cup Kai’s cheek, which he allows. “Are you sure you want to subject yourself to this darkness?”

“That place you mentioned before?” I wrap my other hand around his wrist, gently pressing my thumb into the fabric of his coat where his scars are hiding beneath the sleeves.

He nods, waits a second, then speaks. “It always seems easy enough at first. You think about all the things you can have. You shut off that part of your consciousness responsible for self-worth and self-respect. And it’s okay at the beginning. Kinda like the job you don’t like but work because you’ve got things to pay for and you have your eyes on something else, something beyond this, but after a while, it does something to you. It kills you slowly, part after part, until you’re so dead on the inside that you lose track of where you’re going. And you’re stuck in this endless loop and the only way out is painfully graceless.”

“But you’re here. So, you didn’t… take it?”

“I did.” His lips, now bluish from the freezing air, tilt up, forming a weak, mournful smile. “I loved music so much and I loved my mother so much that it took me somewhere dangerous. For the longest time, I wanted to die because I hated myself for selling myself like that, and one day it got to me.”

“That’s what these are?” I slip both hands down into the sleeves of his coat, finding the marks on his skin.

Kai gives a small, almost shy nod. “Yes, I suppose I even fucked that up. And then your sister came and saved me… And I failed to save her.”

Those words suck all the oxygen out of my lungs, replacing it with a void, and I find myself swimming between various realities, hovering in this emptiness that’s neither time nor space.

Kai attempts to free himself from my grasp, but I hold on. I hold on tight, tighter than I’ve ever held on to anything in my life. “I’ll fix it,” I whisper anxiously. All the facts are still bouncing around my brain, but they’re there and clear now. They are the enemy I can see. An enemy I can work with. “I’ll fix it. I promise. Just don’t push me away.”

“You believe I want to?” Kai scoffs. “I guess you really don’t know a single thing about your own family. Your father has someone watching me. We can’t keep meeting up like this.”

“Will you trust me, at least this once? Please?”

Several seconds pass by before he finally nods.

* * *

Shortly after, we get into our cars and drive back to the city. I lose Kai somewhere on the freeway when it starts snowing. One minute his van is ahead of me and the next, it turns into a blur and disappears behind a curtain of white.

I experience a short burst of panic, right there behind the wheel, but then it’s replaced with adrenaline almost instantly. The wheels in my mind are already spinning, giving birth to a number of ideas based on the facts I learned about Kai’s past today.

Fact number one: at some point he had a sugar daddy who’s deep in the closet.

Fact number two: Gavin knows.

Fact number three: I’m not a match for my father but Charles Heller is.

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