“Lucy? Are you in there?” A knock sounds on the door, and I scramble to flush the toilet.
“One second!” I bark as someone knocks again. “I’ll be out in a sec.”
I turn on the tap and splash cold water on my face, and when I glance up to look in the mirror, my reflection looks like Mischa Barton’s sweaty ghost in The Sixth Sense.
“Lucy?”
Grumbling, I wash my hands and fling the door open to find Kai waiting in the corridor, one fist raised to knock again.
“Can I help you?” I ask. What I need right now is alone time with my feelings and a bottle of mouthwash, not a condescending earful from America’s Jeep-driving golden boy.
“Are you all right?” He’s removed his Crocodile Dundee–esque hat, and he runs a hand through his mussed hair in a way that would have Trudy salivating.
I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. “I’m fine. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to feed the gibbons and start preparing the nursery.”
I move to strut past him, but he shifts sideways to block my path.
“Lucy, I n—”
“What?” I hiss, worried that I’m gearing up for another round of vomit. Whatever he wants to say—I’ve never seen someone crash and burn so hard; I’m going to blast an Auto-Tuned clip of you saying “pseudopenis” all over social media; what happened out there is just the first course of revenge for what you said at the picnic, and I’m gonna serve up hot dishes all summer—I don’t have the energy to listen. I need to feed Titan and Snowdrop, then retreat to my office to lick my wounds and game-plan a way to salvage my standing with Phil.
“If you followed me in here to gloat,” I tell Kai, “don’t waste your time. You can’t possibly make me feel worse.”
A scowl crosses his face, and he furrows his brow. “Gloat?”
I forgot he wasn’t a big reader. “Yes. To gloat. You know, to rub my failure in my face and tell me I deserve it for what I said at the picnic.” I twist my features into an imitation of Kai’s deep smirk and try to mimic his lilting accent: “Ahoy there, little lass, but did you really think you could insult me without penalty? I’m Kai Bridges, friend of bottlenose dolphins and the royal family, and you’re a right little nobody. Wowza!” I run a hand through my ponytail with a flourish like I’m auburn, silky-haired Kai, but I didn’t brush the knots out after my shower this morning, and my fingers get tangled up.
“Wowza,” I repeat lamely, wrestling my fingers from my hair.
“You sound like the Lucky Charms leprechaun,” Kai says, looking more bewildered than offended. “With a dash of pirate thrown in.”
“Sick burn. Mind if I go do my job now?”
He doesn’t even try to hide his smirk. “I’d rather hear you try to imitate me a bit more. And just so you know, I’m not friendly with the entire royal family. Just the princes.”
“Right. Well, you and the princes can have a big laugh at my expense. You win, okay? You humiliated me. Frankly, you could have just ratted me out to Phil and saved us both some trouble.”
The flicker of amusement in Kai’s eyes vanishes. “I humiliated you? I’m sorry, but did you or did you not refer to me as a homeless-looking D-list celebrity?”
“As I already explained,” I say through gritted teeth, “the concept of celebrity is complicated. And I apologized. Besides, if what I said bothered you so much, why didn’t you just tell Phil? He’d have fired me without a second thought.”
“Because I’m not a snitch,” Kai says evenly. “And because I don’t let personal feelings interfere with my work.”
“So why did you make me go first today?” I ask, my voice growing louder. “I told you I wasn’t comfortable on camera, so you knew I’d be a disaster. You set me up!”
“Yes, Lucy,” Kai says dryly. “It’s all my fault. I forced you to trip over a skateboard and relay facts about hyena penises. How very callous of me.”
“Pseudopenises,” I retort. “And you made me go first because you knew I’d suck.”
“Did it ever occur to you that I was trying to help?” he asks, crossing his arms over his chest. “That I heard what you said about not liking cameras and figured that standing around watching your coworkers go first would only give you time to panic? That maybe I’m not just a regular, run-of-the-mill asshole after all?”
His questions slow my roll of rage, and I can only stare at him in response. The truth is, I was so certain Kai was set on revenge that I didn’t consider other possibilities.
“Right,” he says after a beat. “That’s what I thought.”
What Elle said to me at the picnic—He was probably just jet-lagged and exhausted when he met you, Luce—rings in my ears. What if Kai’s telling the truth, and he actually was trying to make today easier for me? What if I’m the asshole here?
“Whatever,” I say, rubbing my eyes in frustration. “It doesn’t matter now. We both know I was a disaster.”
“Yes, you were,” Kai agrees, sounding more matter-of-fact than malicious. “But I can help you get better.”
“Trust me, you can’t.” And after the names I called him, I’m not sure why he’d want to.
He raises his scarred eyebrow at me. “I’ve hiked Mount Kilimanjaro with a fractured ankle and spent a week on an ice ridge of the East Antarctic Plateau. I think I can teach you to relax in front of a camera.”
He’s so cocky that it makes me want to scream, just like it did when he so confidently—and incorrectly—accused me of being wrong about Dr. Kimber’s nickname. A man who can’t be trusted to know basic facts about his own mother has no chance of shaping me into a docuseries superstar.
“Are you always so sure that you’re right about everything?” I ask, jutting my chin out toward him.
He smirks. “Are you always so afraid of a challenge?”
I gasp as if he’s cursed at me. I’ve been called a lot of things—a workaholic, a commitment-phobe, even a disappointment—but no one’s ever accused me of being a chicken.
“You don’t know anything about me,” I say, stepping an inch closer to him. I can only hope that I reek of vomit and the bonobo exhibits I power-washed this morning. “I live for challenges. I eat them for breakfast.”
I’m aiming for a badass, chew-him-up-and-spit-him-out vibe, but I sound like an actress from a corny action movie.
“And lunch,” I add, hoping it’ll make my previous comment sound cooler. It doesn’t.
“I know more than you think.” Kai steps a fraction closer to me, too, and I wish he were still wearing his dumb hat so I could reach up and knock it off his head. “I know you haven’t missed a day of work in four and a half years. I know you write the most detailed observation logs I’ve ever read, and that you’ve been named Employee of the Month nine times. I know you’re the only primate keeper who stores an air mattress in her office in case she needs to stay overnight.”
“Excuse me, who gave you my observation logs?” I demand, hating the self-satisfied look on his face. “When were you in my office?”
I haven’t always been obsessive enough to keep an air mattress in there. It started two years ago when Zuri came down with an intestinal blockage that almost killed her. After her emergency surgery, when things were touch-and-go, I couldn’t bear to leave her side.
“I know you’re the only keeper who doesn’t appear on the zoo’s YouTube channel,” he continues, ignoring my questions. “I know that while your colleagues travel to Rwanda and Uganda to study gorillas in the wild, you’ve never done so much as a two-week stint at the Cincinnati Zoo. I know a senior keeper’s retiring at the end of the year and Phil wants to give you that job, but he worries that your colleagues have something you don’t: nerve.”
The accusation strikes me like a lightning bolt. It’s not my fault that I don’t belong on center stage like Jack and Lottie and Raquel from Small Mammals, who make regular smiley appearances on Good Day Columbus! with vervet monkeys and porcupines in tow. It’s not my fault that the thought of leaving Zuri for a month to fly off to the jungle makes my heart pound in fear that something terrible will happen to her while I’m gone.
But I don’t tell him any of that. Instead, I pull my ponytail tighter and fix him with a steely glare. “Oh, I’ve got plenty of nerve.”
“Then prove it. Meet me at the nursery tomorrow at one. I can spare thirty minutes to work with you.”
How very generous of His Royal Kainess to spare a whole half hour on a lowly peasant like me. I suppose I should bow at his feet and kiss the ground he walks on. But I don’t care how many times he’s hiked a mountain with his eyes closed or whatever braggy bullshit he’s on about; I’m beyond anyone’s arrogant tutelage.
“You can’t help me,” I insist. “You’re better off trotting back to Hollywood instead of wasting your time.”
“Hey, I’m the one with the Emmys here,” Kai says, and I wonder just how many times a day he polishes his shiny trophies and tells himself he’s pretty. “Not you. So you don’t have to like me, Lucy, but don’t tell me how to do my job. Either show some nerve or stay in your lane.”
I’d love to show some middle finger, but I think back to what Phil said at the meeting this morning: You don’t take risks. You don’t put yourself out there. Kai might come across as a cocky, self-obsessed jerk, but he’s basically telling me the same thing Phil did, and the realization that he just might be right hurts worse than the nausea bubbling in my stomach.
“Why are you offering to help?” I ask. “After everything you overheard me say about you, why do you care if I improve?”
He shrugs. “What you said at the picnic doesn’t matter to me. It’s no skin off my back if some zookeeper in Ohio thinks I’m overrated. But your glaring on-camera incompetence makes you a challenge, Lucy Rourke, and I’m not afraid of those.”
His dismissive description of me as some zookeeper in Ohio makes me wish he’d get stomped on by an elephant, but I can’t protest. Because in comparison to Kai’s star power, that’s all I am, and while he might be an absolute tool, he’s not wrong. I am incompetent when it comes to the camera. And that pisses me off even more than Trudy haranguing me about Nick.
“You don’t know who you’re dealing with,” I say. It’s not a threat; it’s reality. He has no clue that I’m incapable of improving my media skills.
Kai fiddles with the sleeve of his oxford, and it strikes me as deeply unfair that he has such thick forearms. He deserves puny pencil arms and a pancake butt.
“Neither do you, Lucy. But you’re about to find out.”
“Whatever you say, Crocodile Dundee.” I strut past him, ready to do some actual work and then find a pillow to scream into.
“Hey, I need your mic,” Kai calls after me. “That’s the whole reason I followed you inside.”
I was under the impression that he’d followed me inside to check on me, and the clarification only annoys me further.
“Here.” I try to slide the mic off, but it gets stuck on my top button.
“Stop before you break it, please.” Before I can protest, Kai moves closer and reaches for the wire. I drop my hands, lest my fingers cross paths with his, just as the earthy scent of campfire and sandalwood hits me again. It’s a light, calming aroma, and if Yankee Candle bottled it up and sold it in stores, I’d buy a hundred wax melts and deny it as long as I lived.
Kai’s assistance makes me feel like a three-year-old who needs Mommy to help button her coat, and I refuse to look at him as he untangles the wire. He wrangles the mic off me but accidentally brushes my collarbone with his fingertips in the process.
I jerk away from his touch, but Kai only tucks the mic into his pocket and gives me a breezy “Thanks, Lucy,” as he heads for the exit.
If looks could kill, the one I give his back would strike him dead.
“I eat challenges for dinner, too!” I yell at his disappearing form, not caring that a docent entering the building stares at me like I’m unhinged. “And I want my book back!”
My heart pounds as I head toward the gibbon exhibit, and even when I reach Titan and Snowdrop, whose high-pitched songs are loud enough to be heard throughout the zoo, all I can hear is Kai taunting me, accusing me of fearing a challenge. The allegation ignites a fire in my belly and sets my teeth on edge as I grab a bucket of figs from the gibbon building kitchen and carry it toward the animals.
Because I may not have an Emmy or an edge-of-your-seat tale about almost losing a leg in the forest, but I know one thing: regardless of what Kai says, my lane is wherever the hell I want it to be. And we’re bound for a head-on collision.