After leaving the skatepark, I quietly admitted to being hungry after only eating a granola bar the entire day. After scolding me for not eating a balanced meal in the morning, we found ourselves scouting Gabriel's Wharf for a restaurant and because we were both indecisive we spent the majority of the time going back and forth between Mexican and Italian cuisine. I was leaning more into something spicy but fearing the shits that would come along with it.
In the end, Kai is irritably dragging me into the pizza parlour and I cannot help being amused by how fed up he looks.
Inside the pizza parlour, we get ushered to a table for two in the outside section of the restaurant. The low chatter from the people around us mixes into an indecipherable hum. Taking a deep inhale, the smell makes my mouth water in anticipation.
After ordering our respective pizzas, Kai and I fill the silence between us with random conversations. Throughout it, I'm able to make him laugh several times and when he manages to catch me off guard with his randomness, he seems proud of himself at my snort of hilarity.
Once my pepperoni pizza is in front of me, I don't even have to be told to dig in. He ordered a vegetable pizza. I'm guessing it has something to do with his religion, about not boiling a kid in it's mother's milk.
"I haven't had Mexican in such a long time," I say to him after averting my gaze from my device. "Now I regret not going for it."
"You can never go wrong with pizza though."
"Not wrong."
"Also, I kind of scarred myself when I was younger with Mexican food."
"How so?"
"This one time, I tried to impress a girl by eating the most enchiladas in one sitting. Let's just say, it did not end well. My arse was on fire that entire night. Un caso brutal de diarrea."
I burst out laughing, having to cover my mouth lest anything escapes past my lips and scoldingly I state, "I'm eating."
"Sorry."
Throughout the consumption of my meal, my gaze keeps flickering outside to check how low behind the horizon the sun has hidden and then worriedly, I check my phone to see if my mum has called me yet. Each time, I'm surprised to see that she has not, not even once. I don't know if that is even scarier than if she would just call me and yell my ear off.
Should I call her just to tell her that I'm okay?
"Everything okay?" Kai muses when he catches me and this causes my gaze to waver away from staring at my phone worriedly. "You keep checking your phone like you're concerned about something."
When I see the sauce staining the corner of his mouth, I grin humorously and after grabbing a serviette from the table, I quickly lean over to dab the substance off. Willingly, he tilts his head to the side to allow me to.
Once seated in my chair again, I say to him, "My mum hasn't called me to shout at me yet."
While gulping the last of his pizza slice down, he asks in bemusement, "Isn't that a good thing?"
"I don't know. It just kinda feels like that moment before a jump scare. You know it's coming, but you still tense up and then the jump scare happens and you're no longer scared anymore."
"What do you mean by that?"
"As in, I have a fear of the unknown. I have no idea what my mum is thinking right now at this very moment and that in itself is fucking terrifying."
"You wanna go back home?"
"I don't want to go back home. I'm having lots of fun hanging with you," I say and a smile breaks out over his face, "But I do have to go back home because she will kill me if I arrive late at night."
Nodding understandingly, he politely calls our waitress to our table and when he hands her his credit card to pay for the both of us, I tell him to later on tell me what his account details are so I can transfer him half the money. With an amused grin, he instead says I'll pay the bill next time we hang out. Because this is an excuse to hang out with him again, I just concede with a nod.
"Can I just say," the waitress speaks almost hesitantly and we both look up at her curiously when her lips tilt up slightly, "you two make a really cute couple?"
My mouth parts and I'm too stunned to speak.
"Oh, thank you," Kai says while accepting his credit card back from her and I furrow my eyebrows in wonder, pondering what he's actually thanking her for, the credit card or her comment.
While strolling down the footpath back towards the car park outside Queen Elizabeth Hall, Kai is again showing me some more tricks on his skateboard and when he nearly ploughs into a crowd, they cuss him out and apologetically, he bows at them before speedwalking back to me with his eyes widened like a deer caught in headlights and I can't contain my chuckle.
Then I take one last picture of him as he stands in front of the railing overlooking the river down below. When he asks to see it, I jog over to him to show him the photo.
While glancing down at it, it suddenly grows brighter than it used to be and my eyes shift up to see that most of the lights around us have just been switched on. In awe, I blink slowly. I didn't think this place could get even prettier, but it truly has.
"This place is so beautiful," I quietly relay to him while leaning against the railing, glancing down at the river, the sound of water down below splashing against the rocks hitting my ears.
"Yeah, I actually forgot how beautiful it gets. You should see it at night time." He pulls himself up and carefully sits on the railing.
"Maybe once I get settled into university and I don't have to adhere to a curfew anymore, you and I can visit this place again and stay into the night."
"Yeah. Maybe."
A silence begins to stretch between us, a comfortable silence which allows us to take in the mesmerising scenery around us. When I agreed to come to South Bank with him just to see him skate, I could not have predicted how relaxed I would feel around him nor how much fun I was going to have with him. He's so... normal but in the best way possible. I don't know how to describe it. It's so weird, I can barely wrap my head around it.
Tilting my head to the side, I look up at him.
The warm light kisses his face and he has this relaxed smile on his lips, it seems like he's not even consciously doing it. When his eyelashes flutter shut and he turns his head to meet my gaze, our eyes lock fervently and that familiar feeling from before at the skatepark flutters within my stomach. A delightful heat simmers against my skin. Then all I hear is my heartbeat picking up and it is loud against my ears.
Oh, God...
"Have you," I clear my throat and rapidly my eyes open and close as I try to draw away from whatever that was, "have you ever had feelings for someone?"
Slowly, he bobs his head up and down even though he looks perplexed at me asking him that so out of the blue.
"How many?"
"How many people have I had feelings for?"
"Mm-hmm."
A contemplative noise leaves the back of his throat and after counting on his fingers while soundlessly mouthing the names of the people he has liked, he eventually says, "Five. No, six." Thoughtfully, he looks up. "Five or six."
"Have you ever," I pause and then with a mysterious smile I end my question with, "been in love?"
For a few seconds, he just stares at me and intimately he says, "I have."
"What does it feel like?"
He seems slightly caught off guard by my question and stammers, "Oh, uh... that's a loaded question."
I bob my head up and down understandingly.
He recovers from his shock pretty quickly after rubbing his hand across his nose. "It's almost like finding a missing piece that you weren't even looking for because you didn't even know it was missing. It's also this weird blend of uncomfortable longing when they are not around you, but the moment you lay your eyes on them again, everything suddenly makes sense, you know?"
I quirk my eyebrow in agreement when really, I don't know.
"And it feels warm but not just any kind of warmth though. Like autumn warmth, yellow, orange, red."
My eyes widen in surprise at his description of love and I feel my breath stuttering in my throat the more his words ring around in my head. His version of what love sounds like has my heart palpitating. "Wow, I have never heard anyone describe love like that before. It's an oddly specific feeling."
"Well, I mean that's my personal view on it. I feel like it's different for everyone though." Then he looks over at me curiously and muses, "Why do you ask? Are you in love?"
"I don't think I could fall in love with someone I wasn't in a relationship with first and I have never been in a relationship so..."
"So you're telling me right now, you're not painfully longing for someone?" he asks in a jesting tone, the very same playfulness glimmering in his jade-browns.
"Not while I'm with you," I say truthfully.
His eyebrows flick up and his eyes enlarge. With a surprised laugh, he averts his gaze and I don't miss the pink hue that is warming up his cheeks. "You can't just say things like that so casually."
"What?" I ask, genuinely wondering if what I said was crossing the boundary.
Shaking his head with a smile, he murmurs, "Nothing."