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“Fine.” Jun grabbed her gym bag and threw it over her shoulder angrily. “So, just so we’re clear, if you care more about getting laid than surfing, you won’t ever get back on that board.”
Kai just glowered at her. Jun had no choice but to leave, and she felt Kai’s stare burning into her back as she strode toward the door.
The man couldn’t be helped, and she’d been a fool for even trying.
CHAPTER NINE
LATER THAT EVENING, Kai gripped the steering wheel of his Jeep, blood still boiling after his run-in with Jun. She had some nerve reading his texts, spying and ordering him around. She was his personal trainer, not his wife.
Kai still couldn’t believe Jun thought he’d give up sex just like that. Sex wasn’t his problem. His knee was the problem, and he could live like a monk and still not get any better at surfing.
Chi had nothing to do with surfing. Surfing was about strength and balance, and the tsunami had taken both of those things from him.
Her out-there alternative-medicine ideas were crazy. Probably because she hasn’t had sex in so long. All that built-up tension is rotting her brain. He’d seen how uncomfortable she was about the whole topic and knew there had to be a story there. He also realized that he’d made assumptions about her he probably shouldn’t have. He knew she’d gotten pregnant young and had Po out of wedlock. He’d assumed that was because she had sex, and lots of it. He wasn’t sure how he felt about this new information.
But it didn’t matter now. She wasn’t going to work out, and that was that. He turned off the two-lane road to his aunt’s house, the small, modest one-story where he and Jesse had grown up.
Their aunt had raised him and his half sister as her own after his mother died. They would’ve been orphans without Aunt Kaimana’s guiding hand, and thanks to her, he and Jesse had always felt love. Kai had sketchy memories of his biological father, the most vivid one when he came to Hawaii for his mother’s funeral. He’d come to ask Kai if he wanted to go home with him to the mainland, where he’d moved when Kai was just a baby. Kai was eight at the time, too little to make the decision, really, but he didn’t want to leave his Aunt Kaimana’s side, or Jesse, who was just five. His father didn’t really want him anyway, letting him go with no fight. After that they had a distant, barely there relationship of an occasional Christmas or birthday card, sporadic support checks to his aunt and one plane ticket to the mainland during high school, where Kai discovered that his father had a steady job and a loving new family in Chicago, a boy and a girl, whom Kai had no desire to get to know—then or now.
Unfair, perhaps, but the fact that his father had run away from him, only to go start a new family, rankled, even to this day. He still remembered the #1 Dad mug in the kitchen and the way those little kids worshipped the man and how he catered to their every need, giving them bouncing shoulder rides and bandaging up skinned knees. The revelation hurt him more than he ever admitted, even to himself. He was an amazing father to them, but not to him. Why did they deserve it and he didn’t?
Kai was seventeen on that trip, and it was the last time he’d ever visited his father.
When he returned home, he redoubled his efforts to become the best surfer he could be. The bigger the waves, the better. Anytime he surfed one, it felt like a little battle won against the powerful emotions raging inside him. If he could keep upright, he thought, it would be a little victory against his father. That was why he’d surfed waves more than eighty feet high at the most dangerous breaks in the world: Teahupo’o, Ghost Tree, Mavericks, and of course, Jaws.
Not that his aunt approved. Or his sister, for that matter. They both thought he was crazy for doing it, and maybe he was. But surfing monstrous waves was the only way to keep the typhoon inside him contained.
He pulled up to his aunt’s house and cut the engine.
He’d promised he’d help her fix a cabinet that had come loose in her kitchen and now here he was. She’d be asking questions about Jun, too, about when she should look after Po. Now what was Kai going to tell her? She’d been looking forward to the babysitting. Well, she’d have to find another part-time job.
