ultraviolence // kai anderson

a long day

present day
It's been a long day. What most people don't understand about getting to stay at home while your partner works, is that it's not all sitting on your ass twiddling your thumbs and counting the hours until your sweetheart gets home. By 10am, I'd worked on the front garden, gotten both floors of the house swept and vacuumed, and put load of clothes in the washer. By noon, I'd gone grocery shopping, put it all away alone, and folded all the clothes. By 3pm, I'd done my daily exercises, cleaned both bathrooms, fixed up our bedroom, and begun dinner prep. It's now 4pm, and I'm doing my daily cleanup of Hurricane Gregory -- empty soda cans, controllers off their chargers, snack trash on the floor just next to the trash can -- only for him to be home in an hour and reset the process.

Sometimes, rarely, I let my thoughts drift to Kai, wondering if he lives this way too, seeing as they were raised together.

Gregory is Kai's older cousin. I was introduced to both of them by Gregory's sister, Lacey, though I knew her first as the girl who sat next to me in English class. I was jealous then of her perfectly loose and natural curls, but fell for the stereotype of all blonde girls being mean and stuck up, so I kept to myself. Out of the blue one day, she invited me to sit with her at lunch, and from there we hit it off immediately. It wasn't long before she invited me to her house, which became more and more frequent, and soon enough it was an every weekend tradition.
So of course I was there every weekend that her older cousin Kai was dropped off by his parents. I was never quite comfortable enough to ask specific details, but it seemed that he had a bit of a rough home life. His mother Julie was sisters with Lacey's mother, Amanda, and Amanda agreed to take Kai off her hands for most weekends. The three of us naturally grew close over time; Gregory was around of course, but he was three years older than us and couldn't be bothered with childish nuisances like ourselves.

I developed a crush on Kai, despite my best efforts to avoid that. At times, it seemed like he reciprocated, but when it came down to it, I was rejected every time. We remained friends though still-- until Lacey's 15th birthday party.

Her birthday fell on a Saturday that year, so her parents took advantage of that and had the party that exact day. Kai had been dropped off the day before, and I showed up with all my things for my weekly sleepover. There were whispers of his parents seeming really bad off lately.

"Was Scott with Julie when she dropped him off?"
"Doesn't he usually come with her?"
"Didn't she seem upset to you? Looked to me like she'd been crying."

None of us had any idea that when Kai's mom dropped him off that Friday, it would be the last time anyone saw them alive. In the middle of Lacey's party, a life-altering phone call came to the Ross household that night. The Andersons had abandoned their only son by committing a murder-suicide.

Kai was never the same after that, understandably so, and his relationship with any and every one suffered. He dyed his brown hair black, then purple, then settled on a deep blue. It's still blue today. He lived with the Rosses still, but was hardly around. Word went around that he started experimenting with dangerous drugs then and his life only went downhill from that point forward. In perfect contrast, Gregory's luck in life became abundant. We'd been dating for a few months when he got his apartment straight out of high school. Back then, I didn't care how it happened, I was just excited my older boyfriend had a place of his own. But looking back, I find myself wondering how he did that on his family's lower-middle-class salary. An apartment may have been doable if he pushed himself, but the car? All his brand new furniture?

I shake any leery thoughts about the situation from my head and steer my mind to party planning for Gregory's 27th in a couple weeks. I know Lacey will be there, which I'm excited for. So will my mother-in-law, my little brother Jace, Gregory's boss Dave along with a couple other coworkers, and this year, Kai. For obvious reasons, birthday parties are not his favorite place to be. But this year, this time, he'll be here. In my house. Eating food that I made. Seeing the outfit I bought specifically for the occasion.

The front door opens, making me realize I've been staring at one spot on the counter for the past 5 minutes while thinking all of this. I grab a Clorox wipe and run it over the stove top just in time for Gregory to walk in and catch me doing so. I feign slight surprise at the sight of him and toss the wipe in the trash, "Hey."

"Hey," he echoes, and pulls me to him by my hip to peck my lips. The action is nothing more than muscle memory. I wait for him to ask me how I'm feeling, but he doesn't. Or how my day was, or to say the house looks nice, or I look nice, but he doesn't do those things either. Instead he says, "What's for dinner?"

I grit my teeth and say in the kindest voice I can manage, "Rice bowls."

He looks around the empty stove, "Have you started?"

I glance to the stove as well, then back to him. "You see that I haven't."

"Awesome," he lets me go and heads to the living room, onto the carpet with his grass stained shoes. Then kicks them off and leaves them where they fall. I swear my eye actually twitches.

"Really?" I decide to push.

"Y/n, don't. Please," despite the words, the request came out cold and he looked daggers at me for a split second. "I've had a long day."

Sitting on your ass in an office cubicle must be exhausting. I decide only to say, "Dinner won't take long."

His response is a silent nod. I head back to the kitchen, having completed what I set out to do when he walked in the door. Though I do have love for Gregory, it isn't the kind that a wife should have for her husband. I'm entirely aware how fucked up it is that sometimes, like tonight, I get under his skin on purpose, solely for that look he just gave.
That glare of his makes him looks so much like Kai, I can almost convince myself I'm attracted to him.