Her heels were a raw, bloody disaster.
“Jesus Christ, Rosemary.”
“They look worse than they feel.”
“I’ve seen climbers with frostbite and chilblains and every fucking thing you can think of whose feet look better than this.”
She yanked on her foot and nearly succeeded in pulling it out of his grip. “That’s enough, thank you.”
“No, come on.”
“You said my feet look worse than frostbite and chilblains and every fucking thing.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.” Kal loved how the word fucking sounded coming out of her mouth. He put the knuckle of his thumb against the arch of her foot and dragged it back and forth. “Settle down, princess.”
She stiffened her spine. “I will not.”
He rubbed her foot, digging into the small muscles behind her toes. She sighed. “I’ll let you do that for a moment. Though it’s only going to make it worse when I put my shoes back on.”
Kal didn’t want to think about her putting her shoes back on. Their day together was almost over. She would leave in the morning. That was reality.
Also reality: he’d promised Rosemary he would help her with her book project. He would help her because he couldn’t stop her, and because some perverse part of him wanted to, even as he knew that trying to help her with this project was no more intelligent than taking a shovel and pushing it into the earth at exactly the spot where you’d buried the body.
He switched to the other foot. Rosemary had closed her eyes. “You should get back to that sweet apartment and put your feet in the tub with Epsom salt.”
Her eyelids opened, and there was that cool blue gaze, taking his measure. “What did you like to do when you lived here?”
“I do live here.”
“I mean when you were younger. What do the youth of Queens do with themselves?”
“Same things everybody else does, I guess. Eat, hang out, go to events and stuff. Nightclubs.”
“I haven’t been to a nightclub since I was my daughter’s age.” She wiggled her feet. “You should take me out dancing.”
His phone pinged with an incoming text. Kal glanced at it, then swiped through the password screen to read what Sangmu had to say.
Where are you?
Everybody’s been hanging out at the restaurant since the prayer thing.
Mom wants us to have a big family dinner.
She says you have to come and are you bringing the girl?
Kal set Rosemary’s foot down in his lap and texted back, Her name is Rosemary.
Sangmu texted him the emoji for black Santa, followed by a thumbs-up, followed by a birthday cake. He had no idea what that was supposed to mean, which was standard operating procedure with Sangmu on text.
“Who is it?”
“My sister. She says the family’s having dinner, and my mom wants you to come.”
“What time?”
“I don’t know. Hang on.”
He texted his sister, and when she responded he relayed to Rosemary, “Seven o’clock.”