Kyla walked in wearing a fitted black dress that had no business looking that good on her. She smelled like something that I immediately had to take a step back from because my body was responding before my brain could catch up. She was soft and feminine, but very classy. It was like, even when she was dressed down, it was still looking good as hell.
I hugged her at the door and she hugged back. Her skin was soft and she smelled incredible. I let go faster than I wanted to because if I stood there holding her one more second in that dress I was going to be in a situation I wasn’t ready to be in standing in my own doorway.
She stepped inside, looked around and I watched her take it in. The space, the layout, the way I had it set up. She turned in a slow circle with a small smile growing on her face.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.” She was still looking around. “It’s just — you actually have taste.”
“Why does that surprise you?”
“Because men don’t decorate. Like as a rule. You walk into most men’s places and it’s a couch, a TV and maybe a plant that’s been dead for six months.” She looked at me. “This is actually nice Xavier.”
“I’m full of surprises. I like nice shit, and up until a couple years ago, I couldn’t almost afford to live like this. Now that I can, I take pride in how my place looks and feels.”
“I can definitely tell that you do. And I love how humble you are.”
She walked further in and ran her hand along the back of the couch and looked at the candles on the table and back at me.
“Did you light candles? Just for meee.”
“The ambiance came with the place.”
She laughed and it was genuine and it did what her laugh always did which was make the room feel lighter than it was a second ago.
“Sure it did,” she said.
The food arrived twenty minutes later and we sat down at the dining table and ate. We talked and caught up on the rest of each other’s day. It was easy and real with no performance behind it. She had brought wine. I had the food. Between the two it was the most normal evening I had been part of in longer than I could remember.
I was halfway through my food when I looked at her across the table and said what I had been thinking since she walked in.
“You’re too good to be true. I mean, everything about you.”
She looked up from her plate. “What does that mean?”
“It means nobody is this put together. Nobody is this easy to be around and this perfect.”I leaned back. “There has to be something. Some flaw that nobody knows about. What is it?”
She looked at me for a second and then laughed and looked back down at her food.
“You don’t want to know.”
“I really do.”
She set her fork down and folded her hands on the table and looked at me straight.
“I am incredibly controlling,” she said. “Like to a degree that most people find exhausting. Everything in my life has to go a specific way or I completely unravel. I don’t handle the word no well at all. I don’t handle losing. I don’t handle things notgoing according to plan.” She paused. “If I don’t win this city council seat I genuinely don’t know how I’m going to deal with it. Rejection is something I have never figured out how to process like a normal person.”
I looked at her.
“That’s a lot. You do know that life will never be perfect right? Things can’t always go your way and that’s just part of being human.”
“You asked.”
“I did ask.” I picked my fork back up. “So basically everything has to go your way or you lose it?”
“I wouldn’t say I lose it. I just—” She thought about it. “I become very difficult to be around.”
“Nobody can have everything go their way all the time.”
