Page 71 of Better Hate than Never

When I don’t answer him right away, he doesn’t seem to mind, doesn’t pressure or heckle me. He just cracks a few more eggs, then sinks his hands into the eggy lake in its flour valley and crushes half the yolks on the first kneading squeeze.

I never got the “food porn” concept, but if this is it, I do now.

Some kind of pained noise must leak out of me, because Christopher peers up, a furrow etched in his brow. “What is it?”

“I...” Riveted by the pasta-making porn, I search for words I don’t have.

He glances down, following my line of sight, then swears quietly under his breath. “My watch.” He lifts an egg-and-flour-covered hand in my direction. “Would you take it off?”

I stare down at his messy hand, his wrist where his pulse pounds steadily. Gingerly, I take his wrist and draw it closer, so I have a better angle to undo the buckle. Christopher observes me as I take off his watch, unusually quiet. I’m careful as I turn it over, examining the face, knowing, as I search the catalog of my sharp visual memory, that it’s familiar. “It was your dad’s.”

He stares down at it resting in my palm. “Yes.”

“I think that would make him happy. I think... he would be very proud of you.”

Christopher’s head snaps up. His eyes meet mine, and the impact hits me like a tuning fork, reverberating through my body ina bone-tingling hum. “Proud of what?” he finally says dryly. “My soulless capitalist success?”

I hear it in his tone, half humor, half plea—Be gentle with me. Don’t toy with me, not when it comes to this.

Regret carves its way through me, sore and sharp. For the first time, I understand something I didn’t before—I’m not the only one who’s been hurt in our messy past. Along the way, I hurt him, too.

Holding his eyes, I tell him, “Perhaps calling you a ‘soulless capitalist’ was a slight exaggeration. Perhaps... I’ve realized I assumed the worst of you and your company. And perhaps recent events, particularly my time at your office today were... illuminating.”

A small, satisfied grin tips his mouth, makes his eyes glow like dawn breaking through a sea of autumn leaves. “Illuminating?”

I tear my gaze away and force it back down on the watch, examining its face. “When you take people’s picture, they do best when they’re relaxed. I’ve learned to make conversation with people to put them at ease, and when I talked to your team today, when they shared their relationship to their work and their values, what the firm does to support them and what it believes in...” I shrug. “What they said, what you told me yourself, made me see things differently. I have a lot of respect for it. I think your dad and your mom would, too. They’d both be immensely proud.”

Christopher stares at me so intensely, I feel it like sunlight heating my face on a bitter-cold day. I can’t keep myself from peering up again, meeting his eyes, any more than I can stop my heart from thudding against my ribs.

“Thank you, Kate,” he says quietly. “I’m not always sure about that.”

“Why not?”

He shrugs, eyes down on the flour as he traces his finger through it. “I’ve done a lot of things differently from my parents, different from how I imagine they’d have liked me to. I overhauled and restructured my family’s company. I haven’t been to mass in a decade. I’m thirty-three, unmarried, no kids.”

Carefully, I set down his dad’s watch, far from the flour and eggs. “Just because you’ve made choices different from them doesn’t mean they wouldn’t admire you and be proud of you. If I’ve learned anything by living in places whose culture and language aren’t mine, it’s that differences don’t have to hold people at a distance if we’re willing to try to understand each other. Our similarities are much vaster than what sets us apart—we just have to want to see them.”

A thoughtful frown tugs at his mouth as he sinks his hands into the eggs and flour again, then says, “I can’t imagine doing that.”

“Imagine doing what?”

He shrugs, working the eggs into the flour. “Going all those places you’ve been to. Not knowing the language well or the social expectations, how to get where you want or who you can ask. It sounds like chaos.”

I hop off the counter, stepping beside him at the sink to wash my hands. Maybe I’ll try this pasta-making thing after all.

“Itischaos,” I tell him, working a soapy lather through my fingers. “But my brain loves that chaos. When there’s too much ‘same’ in my life, it’s like I’m suffocating, like novelty is air and I’m gasping for it. When I end up somewhere I’ve never been before, hearing unfamiliar words and sounds, seeing new sights; when roads are other directions, and food’s texture is unexpected, and music I’ve never heard before plays so loud it rattles my chest, I feel like I can breathe again, like my skin fits right over my body, like that perfect feeling when you float on water, and you’re weightless, and you hear your breath in your ears, your heart pumping life throughyour body, and the world feels like nothing and everything and just as it should be, all at once.”

Christopher stops kneading. A furious flush heats my cheeks. I just rambled. Again.

Rambling is a lifelong habit, and one people haven’t often been kind about, the refrainKate talks too muchfollowing me wherever I went as I grew up. I learned to shut up around people who resented my rambling not because they were right but because I didn’t want to waste myself on people who couldn’t appreciate me as I was.

Conversely, with my people—my family, the rare fast friendships I’ve built—I’ve always felt safe to ramble, trusting those who love me to love my brain and how much it makes my thoughts spill into one another and out of my mouth, sometimes strange, sometimes funny, always honest and real andme.

But Christopher is in some unnerving no-man’s-land. He isn’t a stranger. He isn’t family, no matter how muchmyfamily says otherwise. He isn’t a friend, either.

And even though, as I scroll quickly through the lengthy catalog of his offenses over my lifetime and come up short of any memories of Christopher shaming me for how much I talk sometimes, I’m nervous, not knowing how he’ll respond.

I shut off the water and hide the heat staining my cheeks by turning my back to him, drying my hands.

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