“I’m sorry.”
“No, it was beautiful…I felt…not alone.”
There’s a beat where he just watches my eyes. “Me too.”
I feel so close to him right then. Us lying on the logs. Fishing with our hands.
“Tell me the rest, Ann.”
“Well, fixers talk, journalists talk. I suddenly had myself a reputation for zero objectivity. Overly emotionally involved, the kiss of death. There are plenty of other hungry journalists to send for a story. I was also out of money, so I couldn’t even freelance it, which means going out and doing a story on your own dime in hopes of selling it to somebody. And the biggest thing was that I couldn’t think straight. It was like, the kitten was the biggest detail. A detail as big as the sun.”
I go on. Me coming home career-less and more or less friendless.
“You saved the kitten.”
“I got it to this mountain village.”
“Did it make you feel better?”
“No,” I say.
“Does telling it make you feel better?” he asks.
“Not really,” I say. “You listening makes me feel better, though. The way you look when I tell you. Everyone in the world thought it was sad and fucked up, including me. But you don’t.”
“I don’t,” he says softly.
Something cool brushes between my thumb and forefinger. I grip and pull. A fish wriggles in my hand. I’m so startled I let it go. It splashes back out, back into the water.
Kiro is laughing.
“It’s not funny!”
“You caught a fish with your bare hands, Ann.” He grins. “Who’s the savage now?”
I dangle my hand back in the water.
Kiro stretches back out in front of me, facing me.
Birds sing above—long, elaborate calls. Animals rustle in the leaves up and down the bank.
It’s peaceful. I pull my hand out of the water now and then when it feels too cold. I flex my fingers. Shake it out.
And it comes to me that that’s probably what hurt him the most with the reporters at the hospital—not their aggressiveness or the lights and flashes, but the way they made him less than human. A bizarre object for the consumption of the nation.
I don’t know what to say. I want to apologize on behalf of all journalists, to tell him he’s amazing, but I know it won’t mean much to him. Words never do.
So I reach out to him. I hook my pointer finger to his.
He looks into my eyes in that honest, unselfconscious way he has. Something wild and good sparkles through me.
The connection of our gazes feels more intimate than fucking. More dangerous than the mob. We lie there like that, fingers hooked, hands trailing in the water.
He smiles. “You remember when I was lying there and you said, ‘oh fuck you, you fucking faker’?”
“Oh my God. That was such a jerky thing to say.”
He stares at my knuckle where our fingers hook. He stares with that fierce intensity of his, then he leans forward and brushes a kiss onto it.