Page 16 of A Crazy Kind of Love
“Exactly. Everyone there treated me as a curiosity. I asked them about their foods and other customs, and they were all eager to repair my ignorance. But really, just seeing where Dad came from—the people he looked like, the places he’d known before—gave me a sense of connection to that other half of me.”
I didn’t know how he was doing it. I’d never talked so much about my dad to anyone but Zion. But Micah seemed genuinely interested.
“I’ve never been to India. What was it like?”
“Beautiful. Dad showed me around his city and took pictures of me in front of this amazing temple. And he showed me these gorgeous beaches on the Arabian Sea. We drove up into the Pon-mudi hills. There’s a reason Kerala is known as God’s Paradise. I fell in love with the whole region.”
I left out how much I wanted to stay and grow up with a true dual heritage. And I left out the fact that the whole time we were there my grandfather, a man so stern I never could call him the more familiarAcha-cha,didn’t look me in the eye once. I could hire a therapist to talk about all that. It was nice to remember there had been some good times, too.
“You make it sound irresistible. Now I’d like to see it for myself.”
“It is. I can’t believe you dragged all that out of me. Are you sure you’re not a reporter?”
He laughed. “I’m naturally curious.”
“My coworkers all told me you were easy to talk to.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Did they? What else do they say?”
I hedged. The answer to that question could get ugly. “Leonard says you’re cagey.”
“Oh, cagey. I kind of like that. I always figured that, behind closed doors, they’d say I’m easy prey.”
“Yeah, kind of. But in a good way.”
“There’s a good way to be easy?”
I adjusted my seat belt. He waited, so I expounded as sweetly as I could. “Andy says you’re savvy because you’re so open that anything you say loses value to any specific outlet. And yet, they obviously still all seek you out.”
He considered a beat. “So tell me this. Why’d you decide to become a pap?”
“Oh. Well . . .” I wasn’t expecting a sort of Spanish Inquisition.
“I mean, I don’t mean to judge, but you haven’t been here that long, so I was wondering if you came up here specifically for that job.”
I cleared my throat. “I did try to find other jobs, but the market for straight journalism is tough right now.” I looked down and picked some invisible lint off the end of my shirt. “But a friend of mine from college works there and got me an interview.”
“Ah, nepotism,” he teased, not condescendingly. “You just wanted to work in New York City, eh?”
I nodded. “I need the job. It pays the bills. It beats flipping burgers.” The statement hung in the air, and I thought Micah couldn’t have forgotten what it was like to be broke and barely making it. “Can I ask you a question?”
He smirked. “I thought you were off the clock.”
“I am. But I’m curious. What went down between Eden and Andy? It must have happened before I got here, and nobody’s ever mentioned it to me.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sure that for Andy, it’s hardly memorable. But for Eden . . . Let’s just say that she and Adam are still together despite the articles he ran about her.”
“Oh. That bad, huh?”
“Eden thinks so. She fails to remember that Andy couldn’t have reported dirt if she didn’t have anything to hide. And it all worked out, right?”
“You approach things entirely differently, don’t you? I mean, I’m here with you now, so you clearly aren’t afraid of the media.”
He shrugged. “Eden holds a grudge, but I figure it’s the times we live in. Tabloids aren’t going away, so why not just be up front and open?”
I could never resist playing devil’s advocate, and he’d taken my position, so I rebutted with Eden’s point of view. “That only works until you have something you want to keep private. Maybe you’ve never had a secret? What would you do if you did?”
“That’s the thing. I live under the assumption that there are no secrets. It will all come out. I might as well be the one talking about it first, right?”
