I’ve made a huge mistake. I realize it as soon as I hear a loud clang from the hallway, and I pull away from Kai with a jolt.
“Scotty,” I realize, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. He must have finished checking on the orangutans and reentered Ape House.
“What’s—” Kai starts, but I shush him and only speak again once I hear Scotty’s footsteps leading toward the break room and away from the nursery.
“This was a bad idea,” I say, scanning the hallway to check that it’s empty. I let Bad Lucy get all kinds of ideas in her horny little head about Kai’s biceps and triceps and delicious-smelling hair, and I succumbed to the dark side.
“We should not have done this,” I tell him, panic rising in my chest. If Scotty had seen me kissing Kai, our romance would be the talk of the zoo tomorrow, and my name would be synonymous with hookup drama instead of professional expertise.
I got lucky, this time.
“I should go,” I continue, smoothing the front of my ridiculous vest. “You should go. We should both definitely go.”
Kai raises an eyebrow at me. “Well, I’m pretty sure one of us should stay and tend to the baby gorilla. And since you’re the one who works here, it should probably be you.”
“Right,” I say, crossing my arms over my chest and trying to slow my pounding heart. “I stay. You go. Me: baby gorilla. You: anywhere else.”
“Are you okay?” Kai asks, reaching out to touch my shoulder. “I’ll admit, it’s been a while and I’m a little out of practice, so if I, like, bit you or something, I’m really sorry.”
My brain gets tripped up over the revelation that it’s been a while since he kissed anyone, and before I can ask him what a while means—two weeks? four months?—I force myself to lock Bad Lucy up and throw away the key.
“No,” I assure him. “It was nothing like that. I just absolutely, positively cannot kiss you again.”
The kiss was good; it was too good, actually. Kai’s lips were full and butter soft, and the way he stroked my cheek was a strong indication that he’s very good with his fingers.
“Um, okay,” he says, his brow furrowed in confusion. “But if I, like, scraped you with my teeth at all—”
“You didn’t,” I insist. “Your teeth were perfect. The kiss was perfect.” It was the almost getting caught that ruined it and brought me back to reality.
Kai’s characteristic smirk returns. “Perfect, huh?”
I roll my eyes, annoyed at myself for letting my budding crush get the best of me. I need to get our relationship back to safer ground, and I need to do it fast.
I grab my phone from the hay, and Zuri lets out an annoyed pant but doesn’t leave her spot near the mesh.
“Look,” I tell Kai, trying not to remember how good his hands felt on me. “I’ve done the whole workplace romance thing before, and it’s a terrible idea. I mean, one second I was meeting the new vet at Ozzie’s cataract surgery, and the next thing I know, he’d signed us both up for emails from Pottery Barn Kids. I won’t let that happen again.”
I think of what I learned the hard way from Nick: that commitment seems like an okay idea until it blows up in your face, leaving you with a stack of moving boxes and an extra fifteen pounds of post-breakup ice cream weight.
“Please don’t compare me to Nicholas New Balance,” Kai says. “It’s downright offensive. I saw him at the manatee pool this morning wearing Croakies. Croakies.” His tone is light, joking, and frustration simmers in my stomach. Does he not realize how close we just came to disaster?
“I’m serious,” I insist. “What if Scotty had walked in on us kissing? God forbid, what if Phil had? I’d be endless fodder for the zoo rumor mill. When Nick and I broke up, everyone from Norm the security guard to Elle’s interns knew about it by the next morning. And we’re nobodies! Can you imagine what would happen if people thought Lucy from Primates was fucking Kai Bridges?”
Kai flinches. “I never said anything about fucking.”
I barrel on undeterred, even though I’m not sure which one of us I’m trying to convince. “I’ve spent my whole life dreaming of a chance like the one Phil’s given me this summer. The senior keeper spot is finally within my reach, and I won’t sacrifice my shot at it for—”
“For what?” Kai asks, his eyes blazing. “For an overhyped, overpaid, egotistical moron?”
The hurt in his voice slows my roll. “That’s not what I meant.”
“So what did you mean?” he asks, scooping up his duffel and slinging it over his shoulder. “Because if you want to act like that kiss never happened, fine. I can handle that; no big deal.”
The words sting even if I said them first, but Kai’s not done.
“But if you really believe I’d ask you to sacrifice your shot at a promotion for me, then your opinion of me hasn’t changed at all since we met. And if that’s the case, we had no business kissing in the first place.”
I shake my head, wishing I could get him to understand my position. “You don’t get it,” I tell him. “No matter what happens this summer, you’ll still be Kai Bridges. You’ll still have millions of fans and a passport full of stamps and people who scream ‘Wowza!’ at you everywhere you go. You won’t have to worry about student loans or proving that your work actually means something. I have no such luxury.”
I point to Keeva, who’s trying to catch the stray bits of popcorn Zuri drops through the mesh. “They mean everything to me,” I say. “This job, this zoo, these animals, they’re my whole world. And if I screw that up, it’s game over.”
“Your whole word, huh?” Kai shakes his head. “I’m going to tell you a secret, Lucy. Your world is as big as you make it. One day you’re going to wake up and realize that your life is only small because you made it that way.”
His words hang heavily between us, and I take a step backward.
“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” he says, reaching for my hand.
I jerk away from him. “Yes, you did.”
I was stupid to think, however briefly, that we had enough in common to understand each other. What could Kai Bridges, born with the world at his feet, know about making mine bigger? Absolutely nothing. I can’t believe I told him about Karina and my eleventh birthday. I can’t believe I told him what it was like to be abandoned. I thought that maybe, because of what he went through with Taji, he could understand.
I was wrong.
“You may think my life is small, but at least I earned it,” I tell him. “Everything I have, I worked my butt off for. And if I had a mother who wrote a masterpiece like Majesty on the Mountain, you can bet I’d have read it.”
“Majest— What are you talking about?” Kai asks.
I wish I could say I’m surprised that he doesn’t get it. “That first day we met after the Critter Chat,” I explain. “You said I was wrong about Dr. Kimber’s nickname. I wasn’t. So don’t tell me how to make my world bigger when you can’t even recognize that you got yours on a silver platter.”
Kai holds his jaw taut, like a rubber band about to snap. “Is that what you want to hear? That you were right and I was wrong?”
I remember what he said when I overheard his phone call at Huli Huli: I want things to be different. Well, I want things to be different, too, and I won’t let one misguided moment of false intimacy threaten my odds of making that happen.
“I want my book back,” I tell him. “And I want to forget the kiss ever happened.”
And for perhaps the first time since we met, Kai doesn’t try to argue with me.
“Done and done, Lucy.” He strides past me, his body a knot of muscle and tension, and when he leaves the nursery, he doesn’t stop to look back.