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It was her intention to push him until she found out.
“Kal?”
He flashed her a smile. “Yeah?”
“I owe you an apology. I shouldn’t have sprung that on you at lunch.”
Kal looked away from her to the cranes, then down the zoo pathway. “Let’s walk. You should see the aviary. It’s really something.”
“Will you talk to me in the aviary?”
“I’m talking to you now.”
He was already walking. She followed him along the asphalt, the sun warming the top of her head, her feet sore in the unfamiliar heels, her animal self only too happy to inventory the shape of Kal’s back, his arse moving in black trousers.
He looked good, running from her.
“I’d like to speak to your mother again,” she said to his back.
“You do that.”
“I’d like to tell her story, if she’ll let me.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“There will be press when I do. More questions. Uncomfortable questions, I imagine. For you.” He kept walking, his pace measured, his arms swinging loose at his sides, his bubble tea bumping his thigh now and then, as though he hadn’t a care in the world. But he didn’t look at her. “That article about her from a few years ago—”
“I don’t want to talk about the article.”
“I do.”
Rosemary stopped. Kal walked. He didn’t slow down or speed up. He didn’t cease bumping his thigh with the tea, even though he ought to have if his movements had been natural, if there’d been anything remotely normal about his charade of ease.
“Kal!”
He turned, twenty feet away. “What?”
“That article about your mother should never have been published, but it was, and it’s the only story that’s out there, so people are going to tell it and keep telling it.” Rosemary clipped across the asphalt to close the distance between their bodies. She bumped him in the chest with her fist wrapped around her cup. “The only thing to do about it is give them another story.”
She waited for his face to go blank and bland, for him to turn away, but he didn’t this time. His dark eyes were intense with whatever he was feeling—anger, frustration—and he let her see it, frankly, for once.
“The only thing to do about it,” she repeated, “is to write something better. Something real. That’s what I want to do, and if you intend to stop me—”
“I’m not going to stop you.”
“Then help me.”
She could feel his heartbeat in the backs of her fingers. She could feel the breath moving in and out of him, the heat of him, and she pressed herself back—pressed her own heartbeat, her own breath, the warmth and weight of her will.
She’d been wallpaper. For years, she’d blended into the furnishings, and then she’d broken her life open and left it behind so that she could have something else. This was what she wanted. Right now, besides seeing Beatrice, it was the only thing she genuinely seemed to want: this story to tell, and this man to help her get it. It felt important to pursue that, though Rosemary couldn’t put her finger on why.
Kal dropped his chin and sucked the last of her tea up through the straw. He chewed up her boba, his square jaw working, and swallowed it. “All right.”
“All right?”
He nodded. This time, when he turned his body away, he grabbed her hand with cold fingers. “Come on. The aviary’s fun. I used to take my little sister Patricia here.”
Rosemary let out a long exhale, relieved.
