WAKE (Wattpad edition)

25. Ice cream and holding hands.

{Kadee}

She woke up with a thousand second thoughts about the way she had thrown herself at Cary yesterday. God, she was stupid. He probably had way more important things to think about than flirting with her. It didn't help that she kept flashing on the way his lips felt against hers, soft and open. Like under his hard exterior, there was a whole other Cary he kept a secret. She could hardly resist a secret.

Her father was visibly surprised to find her sipping tea and checking her phone at the kitchen island so early when he came in. "Good morning, Kamiko," he said. He always sounded so dignified, like one of the men in the samurai movies he watched with her brother sometimes.

"Morning, Papa." Kadee made her phone dark and stuck it in the fruit bowl to grab if she needed later. With her friend list reduced to, like, one person who wasn't even on social media, there was nothing much she cared to look at anyways.

"How was your youth group last night?" He was meticulously peeling an orange, one unbroken curl falling from his knife.

"I didn't go." She tucked her hair behind her ear, checking his face sideways to see if this displeased him. "I spent the evening at Pastor Pete's."

"Is not Jon—absent at this time?" he asked.

"Yes. Cary was there."

"Ah," he said quietly. He carefully wiped the knife clean and dry, then opened each segment of the orange like a lotus blossom on his breakfast plate. The citrus smell burst in the air between them, bright and sweet. "Can I ask, Kamiko—how is Cary?"

She took an orange of her own, running her fingertips over the waxy bumps of its skin. It was so rare that her father would ask a question about emotions that she thought she must have misunderstood him. "He's different—than he used to be. Like the things he used to get in trouble for..." The whole neighbourhood had been politely horrified by his string of juvenile charges, and probably expected to see Cary to come out in cuffs the last time the cops pulled up at his house—instead of his father. "He's changed. I think it's better for him at the Whites'."

"I'm sure it is," her father said gravely. "It's a terrible thing for a child to suffer at the hands of their caregiver. There are marks we bear always even when it is over." She drew a breath, searching his smooth face. He had never spoken of his childhood with her before. His eyes met hers, turning up in a smile that was almost invisible. "You've done something new with your hair."

"Papa..." she hesitated, and then found she couldn't ask.

"Yes, Kamiko?"

She got down from her stool and went around the granite island, putting her arms around his slim, upright form. "Just—I love you."

This close, she heard his little noise of surprise. He put his arm around her and patted her back, saying it back to her in Japanese. She understood perfectly.

///

The text arrived after lunch. She had opened and closed the app a dozen times that day, and when the distinctive little bell chimed, she snatched the phone out of the fruit bowl to check it.

<want to come over?>

She gave a little jump, biting her lips to keep from screaming like a little girl.

<yes> she texted back. <in 20>

Her mother watched, bemused, as she did a little dance of joy around the kitchen island.

"You have received good news?" she said.

"I'm going to Cary's—Pastor Pete's I mean." She ran up the stairs to change.