Like a Best Friend | ✓

chapter twenty-two

On Friday morning, the start of our penultimate full day here in Paradise, I wake up with a twinge of a headache and the sensation that I have something to be anxious about. That's how I've woken up most mornings for the last week or so, the lingering dread that comes with holding onto a secret that's killing me, until I roll over and see Kitty next to me and it all comes rushing back.

I drank too much and spilled my guts when I promised myself I would wait until we were home, and I learned that I should've done that the moment I realized I was in love with her. Would've saved a lot of heartache.

As though it's a byproduct of my anxiety rather than how many cocktails I had last night, my headache dissipates at the sight of Kitty. My head is clear for the first time in days, unmuddled by alcohol or stress or unrequited love, and instead I have a bubbly feeling in my chest, like I am filled with helium and could float away on this feeling. I can't keep the smile from my lips as I get up to use the bathroom, even as I brush my teeth, grinning around my toothbrush; I glide across the floor, my feet wanting to dance back to Kitty. I stop by the hotel phone first, though, and call down to order breakfast in bed. I don't want to leave this room any time soon.

Kitty doesn't wake up until the food is delivered, stirring as I set it out on the coffee table – bagels and cream cheese and pancakes and syrup and orange juice and coffee, everything we could need for a day of piecing together everything that led up to last night.

"She is risen," I say, raising my hands when she rubs her eyes and looks up at me, hair in her face from her lopsided pineapple. "How do you feel about breakfast in bed?"

Kitty sits up, lips pursed. "I feel that it's a very good way to start the day. Look at you, all bright-eyed. Good night?"

"I slept like a god and woke up next to a queen," I say, "so, yeah. Pretty great night." I load up a tray with a couple of buttered and cream cheese laden bagels, a plate of warm pancakes covered in syrup and berries, and two large coffees drowning in hazelnut creamer.

"I think I'd sooner be a princess than a queen," Kitty says as I get back into bed next to her, the tray between us. "Less responsibility, cuter dresses."

"Whatever you say, princess." I kiss her and she smiles against my lips.

"I have morning breath."

"And last night you had jalapeno cheese fries breath," I tease. "You think that's gonna stop me wanting to kiss you?"

"I hope not." Her warm hand is on my cheek, her lips on mine. When my glasses get in the way, I take them off, and I have to stop myself from getting too frisky when my knee knocks the tray and I almost spill hot coffee over both of us.

We've done a one eighty since yesterday morning. From eating separately, an undercurrent of tension between us before things blew up, to sharing pancakes in bed, Kitty's toes against my calf under the covers.

"When you asked me to come here with you," I start, once I've eaten half a bagel, "were you hoping something would happen between us?"

"Oh, we're talking tachlis today, huh?"

I nod, used to Kitty's Yiddishisms after all these years. I don't want to tiptoe anymore.

"Yes," she says, a single blunt affirmative. She is careful not to get cream cheese all over her hands as she spreads it onto her bagel. "I wanted to, I don't know, scope you out?"

"Scope me out?" I laugh. That makes me sound like a wedding venue. Plenty of which Kitty and I scoped out over the last year.

"Yeah. I wanted to see if you had the same feelings?" She looks up at me. "But I couldn't get a solid read on you. After a decade, I thought I knew you inside out but every time I thought you might be giving me a sign that you liked me that way too, you'd then give me some kind of opposite signal. Which, by the way"—she points at me, narrowing her eyes and pouting her lips—"is not good for my poor heart."