“And?” I asked, heart in my throat, heat coursing through me at an embarrassing rate. Kean looked directly at me, fire in his eyes, and ripped off the rest of the tape.
“It’ll do if you don’t mind a little sting.”
I snapped my eyes back to the road, unable to take the intensity in his. Kean huffed, but made no other ripping noises as we spent the drive to his place in silence. The whole ride, I kept my thoughts specifically on the act of driving. Which route should I take, will that red car cut me off, will we run into tourist traffic if we take 98. It was like I was mentally reading my options out loud so my thoughts couldn’t dwell on the ache between my thighs and the man responsible for it.
When we finally parked in his spot, I was literally just listing the state of every plate we passed. Thankfully tourist season meant a lot of variety for that game.
“All right, can you get yourself inside?” I asked, turning towards Kean but looking at the collar of his jacket instead of his face.
“Come inside with me,” he said and before I had a chance to argue, he stepped out of the car. I huffed, dropping my hands in my lap and tried to think of an excuse. Maybe I’ll get lucky on Uber and there’ll be somebody in the area. Or maybe I could say —
My door opened and Kean leaned in to unbuckle me, overwhelming me with his soft musk accented by shea butter. Seriously, what man knows to use shea butter?
“There’s something I want to show you,” he said, taking my hand and pulling me out of the car. I didn’t have the capacity to argue, too occupied by thinking about Kean’s possible skin care routines and how I, as his PA, had no clue what soaps he used.
Kean took his keys from me when we reached the front door, scanning the key fob to open it, eyes still on me. His look was …skeptical. Like he was having an internal battle over something, brows furrowed, lip pinched between his teeth.
Maybe he was finally sobering up and regretting everything he said before. Maybe he was trying to find a way to take it all back.
“Look, Kean,” I started to say as he unlocked his door and we stepped inside. “If you want to pretend that nothing happened, then —”
“Stay right here,” he instructed, finally dropping my hand to stride down the hall to his room.
Alone, I sighed. This was so stupid. Why should I wait around for him to reject me? For things to get more awkward? No, I’ll just get my Uber set up, maybe even put it on his card, then go. I’m not gonna let this ruin my evening, I’m not gonna be upset over this. I’mnotupset.
“This is so stupid,” I mumbled to myself, wiping away tears.
“Kodi?”
I turned to see Kean in the hallway, bow tie loosened, jacket left behind, and a handful of discolored envelopes in his hands.
“What?” My voice was hoarse, but I was too confusednotto ask what he was doing. We’d had some tension that was doused with a fire hose and he brings outletters? What the hell was going on in this man’s head?
He stepped closer, one hand cupping my face to wipe away the tears. His other hand pressed the papers into my hands and I looked down without a single clue what this was about.
But then I saw the addresses on the envelopes and everything stopped. My heart, my breath, my ability to think. The only thing I could do was stammer, “Why do you have my Ollie’s letters?”
“YourOlli?” he said with something between a huff and a laugh.
“Yeah, my Ollie.” I started shuffling through the envelopes, ten in total, all with return labels on them. My childhood best friend, my first crush, had gotten my address wrong. He’d switched aseven with a one. “These are addressed to me. How’d you get them?”
“How’d I get them?” This time it was all scoff and I looked up at him, my eyes narrowing in anger. Becausedamn, it might’ve been a hot minute since I thought of Ollie, but I was hit with all that childhood pain of losing him to a military family that moved without knowing their forwarding address. Every so often, I tried to look him up on socials, but I had no clue what his last name was, so I never found anything.
But there’d beenletters. If these had just made it a few doors down, I would’ve been able to keep Ollie in my life. I would’ve been able to tell him about all the Dastards games I went to, shared with him the crushing defeat of the 2015 finals, gotten to know who he was as an adult. I had a sudden chestful of grief at the thought of the friendship I could have had with the sweet boy that introduced me to my love of soccer.
“Kodi,I’myour Olli.”
“What?” Now it was my turn to scoff. “No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am,” he said, voice going rough like he was frustrated with me.
“No, you’re not. My Ollie was blond.”
“My hair darkened as I got older.”
“Well …” I guess that was a relatively common thing, but — “My Ollie spelled his name with an E at the end.”
“No, my bike plate had an E because that’s the only one I could find. Remember, we bonded over having names we could never find souvenirs for?”
