Chapter Seven
Seven
Julian has bought me not one, but two espresso machines, as a text from Pamela confirms (OMG this super hot guy just dropped off an ESPRESSO MACHINE at the reading room and said it was from you!
Thank you thank you thank you Sean! Don’t tell Haoran but this is why you’re my favorite!), one for the clinic, and another for the cath lab upstairs.
They’re not just any espresso machines, either, but ones that cost six hundred dollars (I checked) and come with a milk frother.
In the small card he enclosed inside the bag, he writes: You’re someone who I think could be special to me.
Sorry for behaving in a way that might have made that hard to believe.
In exchange, a way to ensure that you never start your days uncaffeinated again.
This is too much, I text back. I’m already bewildered enough by the fact that I seem to have been cured of the malady that’s been ailing me for the last week, but Julian’s generosity pushes me right over the edge. I don’t like not knowing what’s waiting for me down below.
It’s nothing, he responds. See you tonight.
I meet Julian at the Gundis, a Kurdish restaurant in Lakeview: one of his favorites, he says.
It’s cozier than I expected, the kind of place that you’d only know about through word of mouth and cavorting with locals.
I spot him from the window, speaking enthusiastically to his waiter, who laughs as he places down rolled cutlery.
When I open the door, it takes me a moment to realize they are not speaking English.
I settle into the seat across from him, cross my hands on the lacquered table.
“Are you Kurdish?” I ask.
Julian gives me an inscrutable smile.
“Lovely to see you again too, Sean, I had a wonderful rest of my day, thanks for asking,” he says.
“I’ve just been wondering where you’re from,” I ask. “I can’t place you. Ethnically, I mean.”
“Why do you have to?” Julian asks, a twinkle in his eye.
Because I don’t understand you at all, I want to say, and I think a little cultural guidance could point me in the right direction.
“I’m just curious,” I say instead. “I want to know why this place, of all the spots in the city, gets into your top slots. And why you can speak the language.”
Julian takes a hesitant sip of his water.
“I’m neither Kurdish, nor was I speaking it.
That was Turkish, which Devram, our waiter, is, and which I only speak conversationally, because I studied abroad in Istanbul a while back.
” He clears his throat. “And I like this restaurant because it reminds me of a café in Besiktas I used to frequent. There’s a lot of overlap between Kurdish and Turkish cuisine, and it’s nostalgic. ”
Every time Julian opens his mouth, he reveals a piece of history that makes putting him in a box even more impossible.
A wealthy orphan with a vaguely British accent whose short twenty-seven years on the globe have taken him across continents and helped him amass more wealth and experience than people twice his age?
Nothing about his story feels quite real, like he’s been plucked out of a fan fiction written by an overenthusiastic horny fandom queen crafting her ideal leading man.
I ask him a few more questions and learn that Turkish is actually his eighth language; he’s also fluent in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Bengali, and Arabic and apparently can get around in Bengali and Tagalog too.
“I’m so confused,” I say out loud. I know that Julian wants me to be impressed, and I am; I know just enough Spanish to get through a clinic visit with a native speaker, but the moment someone asks me about my hobbies, I draw a blank. “You’re so young. How did you learn so many languages?”
Julian smirks.
“I have a natural talent for it, and so I’ve indulged in it some,” he says. “And I’ve had great teachers. Tutors. International schools. Travel.”
“Okay. Well, please don’t get offended—”
“Great place to start,” Julian interrupts.
“But what are you then?” I press on. “White?”
Julian grins, wolfish.
“Do I look white?”
I squint at him. I’ve never met a person more impossible to categorize.
I’ve seen Italian men who look like Julian, but I also have light-skinned Black cousins who resemble him too.
Middle Eastern, mestizo, all would be plausible.
I could even see Southeast Asian; he’d probably look right at home in the middle of a salu-salo.
It doesn’t escape my notice that the languages he names are all predominantly spoken by groups of people he could conceivably resemble.
“Maybe?” I say. “I don’t know. There might be a little seasoning in there. I just don’t know if it’s sumac, garam masala, or Cajun.”
This makes him laugh.
“I’m a bit of everything,” he says cryptically, regarding me through long, thick lashes. Sultry, I realize his eyes are. A little sleepy, like he’s just been roused from bed. “And given my whole family is dead, I don’t have much in the way of a detailed history for you.”
Right. Tragic backstory.
“Since we’re playing this game, Sean Sullivan,” Julian asks, “what are you?”
“Black,” I say with a laugh. When he gestures for me to elaborate, I do. “Hyde Park, born and bred. My momma’s house is thirty minutes away, down Lake Shore. But her parents are from down south.”
His smile is restrained, an almost smug tilt of his lips.
“You mean you’ve been in the city all this time, and I’m just finding you now?”
“Well,” I say. “Have you spent much time south of the Loop?”
“You say that like you already think you have an answer to that,” he drawls.
“It’s a fair judgment, I think,” I say. “You feel very North Side.”
The sound Julian makes is half bark and so unlike him that I almost laugh too.
“What could possibly make you say that?” he says, shaking his head in disbelief.
I gesture in his general direction.
“How you dress, for one,” I say.
Julian looks down at himself as if he can’t quite remember what he’s wearing.
He’s ditched this afternoon’s sweater, and his current outfit, consisting of a white shirt and navy trousers, is so finance-bro adjacent that he’d stick out anywhere south of Thirty-Fifth.
If it weren’t for his inscrutable ethnic-ness, I’d write him off as the kind of guy who thought Hyde Park was full of bullet holes instead of bumbling university students.
“That’s not fair,” he complains. “I had a meeting today with the board of trustees at your hospital. I couldn’t exactly come in streetwear.”
The image of Julian dressed in the bold, unstructured styles that are in vogue among his peers almost makes me crack up. Instead, I pick up the piece of information that he dropped for me and ask, “Why were you meeting with the board of trustees? Are you working with them?”
Julian makes a gesture that is half nod, half shrug.
“Kind of,” he says. “It turns out that when you give an institution a lot of money, they like to keep you involved so that you consider giving more.”
I raise an eyebrow.
“Oh? Your aforementioned philanthropy at work!” I exclaim. “Is there going to be a wing named after you? Will I be headed into work next month at the newly christened Conrad Catheterization Lab?”
Julian gives me a wry smile.
“Didn’t give quite that much,” he confesses. “But next time you go in, search among the plaques on the walls outside your cafeteria. Who knows. You might find me there.”
His manner of speaking, cocky but matter-of-fact, tells me that he isn’t bragging, exactly. Having wealth so unconscionable that he can give enough away to put a dent in a hospital’s funding goals is simply a fact of his life.
“You’ve got to be the youngest person in that room,” I muse.
Julian shrugs.
“Not always,” he says. “There are some lawyers. And the young old-money socialites whose only job is to be the face of their family’s charity work.”
“You say that with derision,” I observe. “You don’t relate?”
“I don’t,” he says. “Most of them are the family misfits. As long as they show up every few months, wear a suit, and smile for pictures, they can spend the rest of their lives snorting lines and going to forest raves.”
“Sounds like they’re also people of leisure,” I taunt, calling back to how he’d described himself only a week before.
The irreverence is gone from Julian’s expression now; his gaze turns razor-sharp. I feel pinned by it, like it’s diving through my sweater and nailing me to my chair.
“What are you insinuating, Dr. Sullivan?” he says.
“I’m not insinuating anything,” I say innocently. “You clearly want to differentiate yourself from your peers, and I just want to understand why.”
Winona would call what I’m doing now “self-sabotage.” I’m taking a needle to his defenses, jabbing at the soft parts to see what makes him flinch, and it’s unkind, and maybe even rude, but I can’t help it.
I want to know who Julian Conrad becomes when he feels disrespected, whether he raises his voice or demeans or belittles, if his indelible charm is actually conditional.
I want to know if my sneaking suspicion that he’s a fraud has any validity or if I’m just cynical and hypervigilant.
And it’s working. Bit by bit, Julian’s veil—the one he wears to convince me that he is toothless, that he is a cub with a crush and not a wolf on the hunt—is falling, and I am ravenous to see who he is underneath.
More interesting still, I can see that he likes this.
Brandon might think I am self-righteous, but Julian is hooked into me, staring me down with a lethal mixture of disdain and interest that reminds me of the version of him I briefly met in the conference room of his gallery.
The one who looked like he might just swallow me whole.
“I identify innovation,” Julian says. “I take risks on people with big ideas and help them turn them into reality. I take money and turn some of it into more money and convert the rest into art and homes and resources. Those people,” he takes a vicious swig of his water, gulps, places down his glass firmly, “are not my peers.”