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“Which is my truth?” Kai asks, impatiently.
“So eager to lose.”
“I want my answers.”
“Which do you hate the most, Kai?” I pick up my glass and swirl the water around as I contemplate my choices.
“The easiest and most obvious choice would be that you hate me. I tried to kill you. I left you in the ocean. I told you if you survived, to leave Miami. And then I caused torment worse than death.”
I pause, waiting for her to argue or yell at me for any of those points. She doesn’t.
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“But the most obvious choice doesn’t mean it’s your truth. Although, I have a hard time thinking you could hate anyone as much as you hate me.” But maybe she uses a different word in her head for what she thinks of me. After all, hate and love are two sides of the same emotion. And if she hates me, then it means she has the capacity to love me. She could never love me; therefore she could never hate me.
“Your father would also be easy to hate. He was supposed to protect you. Or at the very least rescue you. He didn’t.” But she’s too much of a daddy’s girl to truly hate him. Not for his incompetencies, even though she should.
“The ocean is worthy of your hate too. I left you in it to drown. Who knows what hardships you experienced on the sea?”
Her eyes dilate a millimeter.
“Have you made your choice?” she asks.
“Yes, have you?”
“I still don’t think you are capable of love. But between loving your family, the ocean, or money the choice is easy.”
I smirk. Bingo, I have her.
And I know her truth.
“You go first,” she says.
“You don’t hate your father. And as much pain as I’ve caused you, you don’t hate me. You hate the sea.” It’s plain as day. She hates the sea. Sea equals Kai. She hates herself. She hates what she’s become. She hates being broken and weak. She could never hate her father, and she sees me as nothing but a soldier following orders. Who ultimately kept her alive, even though she was tortured because of it. She hates the sea.
“And you love the ocean,” Kai says.
Neither of us blinks. Or breathes. Or moves. Neither reveals who the winner is. The thread of connection between us looms revealing our winner. One of us chose correctly, and the other wrongly.
“The ocean represents freedom for me,” I say.
Her eyes widen, realizing her mistake. “But you don’t long to be free anymore; you are free,” she whispers.
I nod.
“And you don’t love money,” she says.
I nod.
“You love your family.”
I nod. “I love my family. Those men, Langston and Zeke, are my family. Maybe not my blood, but they are my family in every other sense of the word.”
She nods. She doesn’t call it cheating. We both chose our words carefully. Family means whatever it truly means to me, not the technical definition of the word. Family means Zeke and Langston.
“The ocean represents everything I lost,” she says.
I nod.
