He held out his hand. “Give me the other side of the street.”
“You’re walking, too?” she asked.
“Why not? The candidate is my uncle.”
Despite that fact, he had not walked a precinct yet. His focus had been to raise money for the campaign.
She handed him the voter list with the odd-numbered houses while she kept the list with the even numbers. She then handed him some doorhangers.
“I’m guessing we’re supposed to talk to the voters who haven’t been identified as voting for Gordon or the other candidates,” she explained, looking over the lists. She laid out a plan for how they could cover the precinct with minimal overlap of walking.
It was the perfect day for precinct walking. Sunny but not overly warm. It was hard to beat autumn weather in the Bay Area, especially in the East Bay, which tend
ed to be sunnier and warmer than the city.
Ben would have preferred to walk with Kimani, but this was about helping Uncle Gordon. However, he found he enjoyed looking at her from across the street, seeing her smile as she greeted a resident and hearing her enthusiasm as she talked about why Gordon would make a great mayor.
“I’ll have Bataar bring us some lunch,” he said to her after they had been walking for two hours. “What would you like?”
“Whatever you feel like getting,” she replied.
She sounded cheerful and relaxed, perhaps feeling safe that he wouldn’t try anything in broad daylight. She was wrong, of course, but he liked her current mood too much to mess with it. For now.
After walking another hour, they took a break for lunch. Bataar had returned with Korean rice bowls. They sat down on the sidewalk. Bataar had already eaten and chose to sit in the car.
“What is this?” Kimani asked, poking at the cabbage with red sauce with her chopsticks. She had gone back to her old way of holding the utensil.
“Kimchi,” he answered. “It’s an amazing food. Full of probiotics.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Are you going to make me eat it?”
“Don’t tempt me,” he replied as he tried to focus on the food.
She flushed, and clearly decided it was best she took the initiative to try the kimchi.
“Okay, not great, but not bad,” she deemed. “Crunchy and soggy at the same time. I like that it’s spicy.”
And he liked that she wasn’t completely adverse to trying new things, including the raw egg that he’d had for breakfast their first morning at his place in Pacific Heights. Eumie would have rolled her eyes and gagged at the thought.
Noticing that she struggled with scooping up the rice with her chopsticks, he wrapped an arm around her and placed his hand on hers to show her a better grip.
“Anchor the bottom stick so that it doesn’t move,” he explained. “You’ll get much better leverage that way.”
Her fingers slipped, sending grains of rice flying into his face.
“Jesus, I’m sorry,” she giggled.
He stared at her. Her smile. The brightness of her eyes. Her laugh.
I want to fuck you so bad right now.
She seemed to know his thoughts, and tried to dispel the mood by asking, “How long did it take you to get the hang of using chopsticks?”
“Hard to say,” he answered, picking the rice off his shirt. “I’ve probably been using them since I was two years old.”
She brightened. “I wonder what you were like at two years old?”
“Difficult. My older sister wasn’t too keen on me. She said I was always pulling her hair, and my mother said I cried a lot. Supposedly she tried to work from home but couldn’t get anything done.”