I spread the pages of the book smooth in front of me and look over at him. “What's your deal?” I whisper. “Can you just cool it?”
Kai angles a look at me without sitting up straight. “Cool it,” he repeats.
“With all the jittering,” I say at last. “It's, I'm sorry, it's just distracting.”
“Well, isn't that too bad?” Kai mutters, catching his teeth on the piercing again.
I let out a short sigh. “Is something wrong?” I ask. “Like, what's gotten into you?”
Kai pokes his tongue in his cheek, considering. And I get the sense that it's not just for show, that he's really contemplating how to answer that question. Something about that makes me uncomfortable, like there's another secret I'm not being let in on.
“If you must know,” he says, now leaning in over the table so that he can speak it closer to a normal tone of voice, “my babysitting shift happens to fall in the only time I'd be able to get to the salle today. So I've…got a little bit of extra energy pent up, I guess.”
“Don't you practice in the morning?”
“I was otherwise occupied,” Kai says tersely. He leans back again, spreading his arms a little in his chair. “So yeah, you're getting the jittery version.”
I retreat too, a little bit, hands still on my book. I chew my cheek, look left, look right.
“We could go to the salle,” I say softly.
“What?” Kai darts a glance at me, like he must have misheard me.
“I said we could go to the salle,” I repeat. “I don't need to be reading here. It's just a book.” I hold it up. “It's portable.”
Kai sets his jaw, lifts his head a little, breathes out so hard his nostrils flare. “Yeah, all right,” he says after a minute. “Bring all your studying shit and we'll have a little party.”
I settlemyself on one of the benches and spread out my books as best I can. I really do just need to read, so it's easy enough to be wherever. But at the same time, it's hard not to be distracted by all the contraptions that fill up a fencing salle.
For a sport that's ostensibly so simple, there's an awful lot ofstuffinvolved in fencing.
There's jackets and underarm protectors and chest protectors, plus lamés, which are something different, gloves, masks, knickers, and a battalion of weapons, not to mention the electric wiring system that scoots around on pulleys overhead. And then there's targets. Hanging targets. Dummy targets. Square targets. Round targets. And all that's before even getting into the entire weight room full of conditioning things.
My eyes are darting from one piece of gear to the next, across the room and in front of me and basically everywhere except the page of my book, when something grabs their attention much more immediately.
Kai. Emerging from the locker room. Knickers on. Straps over his shoulders. No shirt.
My cheeks get warm, in spite of myself. He's in very, very good shape. Lean arms, and visible abs, and a broad chest. His skin smooth, and a little golden, even though it's the dead of winter and even the windows in the salle are blocked up with snowdrift.
But that's not all. There's . . . tattoos, crawling up his arms, the side of his neck, over his ribs, leaves and vines, dragons, swords, hearts. It's not all one piece, not interconnected in a sleeve, but it all sort of goes together. And there are letters, I realize, Greek and Latin. I feel the itch to get close to read them when I'm acutely aware of the fact that he's no longer moving.
“What's the saying?” he says flatly. “Take a picture, it’ll last longer?”
My face goes lava hot. “I'm sorry,” I stammer, and look down to break eye contact, which I quickly realize is a mistake because it has me staring directly at his very pierced nipples.
Holy…shit.
I try not to let my eyes go wide as I force my gaze down to my book page, swimming around for focus, not even remembering what this book is about, let alone what paragraph or sentence Iwas on. In my peripheral visit, I see Kai shrugging on a white jacket, and zipping it up in a single pull.
And when he does, when he turns, I see something else. Angry welts streaking across his back, line after line, like stripes. They look tender and red, as if something had clawed him across the back and not quite broken the skin.
“Jesus,” I whisper, too startled to remember to be quiet.
Kai's head snaps to me. His eyes glance down toward his shoulder, and he flattens his lips together.
“It's a contact sport,” he says shortly. “People get hurt.”
I frown. “But you don't turn your back,” I murmur under my breath.
