Page 16 of A Heart of Winter
It was cozy, and the menu was mostly German food, interestingly enough. Fortunately, I was right at home with that, and it seemed that Kai was as well, ordering rouladen with dumplings as though he spoke German. Hells, maybe he did.
When he saw how I was looking at him after the waiter left us, he ducked his head. “You grow up in the Midwest, it doesn’t matter how Japanese your family is, you learn German food. For community potlucks and restaurants if nothing else, but I took the language in high school too. Then Spanish in college.”
“Are you telling me you speak four languages?” I blinked at the very thought. Most people I knew were lucky to manage with one, in this day and age. I still technically spoke a handful, but I’d had hundreds of years to learn them.
And honestly, my Swedish was probably mostly gone, since I hadn’t lived there in hundreds of years. I was better with Latin and Gaelic, which weren’t that helpful in the modern world, unless reading ancient magical texts was the goal.
He waggled his hand back and forth in the air. “High school language classes aren’t exactly thorough. I might be able to ask where the restroom is if I visited Germany, but that’s probably about it.”
I shrugged and waved off his embarrassment. “I was born in Sweden, and I’d probably be the same there. Regular use is important for language skills.”
We spent the rest of lunch trying out our dubious Swedish and German on each other, to the point that the owner of the restaurant came out to deliver our dessert and joked to him that his German wasn’t so bad, if he was going to be in grade school in the coming year.
It was that moment that I saw him.
Saw who Kai Mori really, truly was.
“Maybe they’d let me start over,” he said to her, his smile wide and genuine. “I could shove myself into one of those tiny little kid desks and start from kindergarten. They have kindergarten in Germany?”
“They call it something else, but all children have to start somewhere,” she agreed. “At least then you wouldn’t be a lawyer.”
And he laughed.
No hesitation, no puffed up pride, no annoyance at his career being mocked. Just sheer joy, head thrown back and shoulders shaking with it.
Oh yes. I could definitely date the hell out of this man, even if I had to fly across the country constantly to do it.
Magic Moment
By the time we finished lunch and headed back outside, the flurries had become a regular snowfall, and more was accumulating on top of what the blizzard had dropped two nights earlier.
Kai frowned, pulling out his phone and looking at it for a second. “Weird. It wasn’t supposed to snow more today. Just the storm last night. This is why I don’t want to stay in Minnesota. But I guess at least we get some more couch time.” He shot me that roguish grin that was swift becoming my favorite thing, but even that couldn’t thaw the ball of ice growing in my stomach.
This was why he was leaving Minnesota. Snow.
Snow that was my fault, because I couldn’t control my own damned powers.
I tried to smile back, but it was weak. Immediately, he went from flirty to worried. “Everything okay?”
“We should . . . we should get your things,” I said, trying to distract from the weather. “You’ll want your clothes if you’re going to—” to stay at the cabin with me. While I continued to trap us inside for who knew how long.
“Okay,” he agreed easily, seeming to brush off his concern.
I should have known better, though. He was a lawyer, and a good one. He knew people, and he knew how to get us to talk. He let silence reign as we walked to his truck, that he’d driven us into town in that morning. As we put the bag in the back and climbed in. Halfway to his house.
Just as I was about to take up chewing on my fingernails, sitting there in the passenger seat of the silent car, he oh so casually asked, “Want to tell me what’s bothering you?”
This was it.
I had two choices: the truth or a lie. There were a thousand lies, but eventually, if I wanted to have a relationship with him, I would have to tell him the truth. Eventually, he would know that I had spent the first part of our relationship lying.
It was up to me whether I had to explain a few days of lying, or longer. The longer I kept lying, the less forgivable it was.
“I don’t,” I admitted, glaring at my right index fingernail. There was a tiny sliver of a hangnail. Automatically, I reached up to bite it off, and barely stopped myself.
Dammit.
Finally, I took a deep breath and turned to him, just as he pulled into the driveway of his parents’ house and turned off the engine. He seemed to sense that I was going to talk, as he didn’t reach for the door handle, but turned to me, serious, concerned expression in place, his brows knit and soft lips slightly pursed.
