The Heart Principle (The Kiss Quotient #3)(39)

“My boyfriend and I …” She frowns and brushes the hair away from her face with an impatient swipe of her hand. “He wanted us to be in an open relationship. I should have told you earlier, but I didn’t know that we would—that you would—that I—” She gives up trying to explain.

It takes me a moment to understand what she’s saying, but then a weird mixture of feelings boils inside me. I was wrong. She wasn’t trying to get over someone. She just wanted to try something new. Because her shitty boyfriend was. It stings that she didn’t tell me, but I get why she didn’t. We were never supposed to be anything.

“Are you angry?” she asks.

Hell if I know the answer to that, so I ask the only question that really matters right now: “Do you still want to be with him?”

She worries her bottom lip and then shakes her head slowly but decisively. “I don’t.”

My heart jumps. My hands ache to touch her, but I keep them down at my sides. “Do you want—”

“I want to be with you,” she says, holding my gaze in a way she rarely has before.

I take a step toward her. “How long have you guys been … doing this?”

“Basically since you and I met. It’s surprisingly easy to be apart,” she says. “For the record, there’s only been you.”

I have to smile at that. I’m the only one she hid from in the bathroom.

“Since we’re being honest with each other …” Nausea washes over me, and I exhale through my mouth, trying to breathe it away.

She watches me with a frown, waiting for me to speak.

“I didn’t have some kind of injury before. I was sick.” My nausea increases until I’m almost dizzy, and I force the ugly words out. “I had testicular cancer, and they had to remove one. Some people would say I’m only half the—”

She presses her fingers to my lips to silence the rest of my words. “Don’t say that.”

I’m not done. There’s more to drag into the open. But my eyes are watery, and there’s a fist lodged in my throat. No matter how many times I swallow, it refuses to go away. I don’t want to be like this in front of her. I want to be the person she thought I was, a confident motherfucker who wouldn’t give a shit about any of this. But I do give a shit. I want to be enough—for her, for me, for the people in my life.

She touches my face like I did to her earlier, her eyes creased with concern. “Does it hurt?”

“Not at all. I’ve been healed and cancer-free for a while now.”

A brilliant smile stretches across her face. “That’s the best news.”

“Not quite the best news. I don’t look the way I should down there. It’s not—”

She breaks into laughter, surprising me. Honestly, it burns a little.

“Sorry, I’m not laughing at you,” she says. “But really, I don’t care what you look like down there. I’ve read books where women are obsessed with how a guy’s balls look, and I never understood it. ‘Nice’ ones, ‘not nice’ ones, they’re all the same to me. I don’t, uh, know how to appreciate them.”

I could get angry, I realize. Her words are insensitive in a way. But I know she doesn’t mean them to be. She wants me to know that she doesn’t care if I’m more lopsided than I should be, that it really doesn’t matter to her.

So I let it go.

I choose to be angry at the situation, at cancer, and not at her.

I imagine her puzzling over elaborate descriptions of hairy balls, maybe looking at a mosaic of scrotums as she tries to understand their appeal, and I can’t help being amused. She has a point. Before I had the surgery, my doctor encouraged me to get a silicone prosthesis to replace what they were removing, and I said no. After having cancer, I didn’t want fake junk in my junk. I told myself that I could handle looking different and no one cared anyway. But that was before, when I hadn’t lost anything yet. After the surgery, I felt vulnerable in a way I’d never experienced. I still haven’t gotten over it.

But I want to. Maybe I’m finally on my way.

“You keep talking about these books that you’re reading,” I say. “What kind of books are they?”

She purses her lips, stubbornly silent, though a smile hints at the corners of her mouth, and I sigh and touch my forehead to hers.

“Let’s do this—you and me, together—and see what happens,” I say.

“Okay.” That’s all she says, but that’s more than enough.

Now that we’re not talking, the roar of the fountain in the lagoon fills my ears. I’m aware of Anna, the building around us, the rippling light above us, and the night beyond.

Everything, every single thing, is absolutely perfect.





EIGHTEEN





Anna

WE GRAB FALAFEL AND PITA SANDWICHES FROM A FOOD truck and eat them as we walk by the marina, where the sail-less masts of the boats point toward the sky like upside-down lollipops. We talk about octopi and joke about the possible places where we might find one hiding along the shore. Like usual for us, we end up kissing, but when Quan touches me, his hands feel like ice on my skin. I don’t want him to die of hypothermia, so I insist we call it a night.