10.
We spend the rest of the week like that, just enjoying each other.
Some days we venture out and go on adventures.
Other days it’s much more low-key. I’ll spend most of the morning and afternoon writing and she’ll sit there reading on her Kindle, curled up in the deck chair with her feet tucked under her like a cat.
I smile every time I see her flipping pages because it’s usually my books she’s reading.
Sometimes I watch her face while she reads.
She doesn’t know I’m doing it. She has this habit of pressing her lips together when something surprises her and then relaxing them slowly when she recovers.
“I can’t get enough of them,” she says. “I mean, they’re kinda soapy, but I’m really starting to fall in love with these goblin girls.”
“They creep up on you,” I say. “They’re more endearing than they appear at first.”
“Mostly, it’s just cozy,” she says. “That’s what I really like. You can just curl up and spend time with the characters.”
“Yep, that’s pretty much the appeal,” I say. “Nobody’s reading Thurston Kade for the prose. It’s the vibe, the feeling. That’s what makes it worth reading—if it is.”
“I don’t think that’s all there is to it,” she says. “Your stories have more heart than you realize.”
I shrug.
“You’ve got to put something in between the sex scenes to make the whole thing fit together.”
She gives me this intense stare. Less a frown and more like she’s trying to make my head explode.
“You’re a good writer,” she says. “Take the compliment.”
“Thank you.”
We fall into this steady routine that’s so cozy I don’t want it to end. We spend every day together, growing closer, just taking every moment as it comes. When my next Thai lesson rolls around, I can’t wait to see Meena and tell her all about it.
She’s already there when I arrive, which is normal.
What’s not normal is that she’s not on her phone.
She’s just sitting there, hands folded on the table, looking at nothing in particular.
She’s wearing this pale yellow wrap dress with thin straps, a small knot tied at the hip that makes it sit open just a little along one side.
Hair down, small gold earrings, a little more eye makeup than usual.
Not a lot—just enough that you notice it compared to the days you didn’t notice anything at all.
The kind of outfit you wear when you thought about it before leaving the house.
I file this away the way I always do with Meena, which is to say without doing anything about it.
I’m grinning, already telling her in Thai that I’ve got a secret. She turns her face up and I see it immediately; a look of pain she’s trying to hold inside. Her hands stay flat on the table.
“What happened?”
“Khun Mike, I have to stop our lessons,” she says quietly. “I’m very sorry.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
She tells me that her mother is sick and she’s leaving Phuket to take care of her.
She’s from the north of Thailand, a small village in the mountains near a town called Pai.
Her family is very poor. Her brother lives nearby but he’s not able to be of much help because he has to work and can’t stop to take care of her.
In Thai culture it’s usually daughters who are expected to move back home and care for parents when they get older.
The son keeps working. The daughter comes home. Nobody questions it.
“But how will you support yourself if you don’t work?” I ask.
“I don’t need money a lot,” she says. “I will cook for my grandmother, simple meals. She have one house and I can stay there and save money on rent.”
She says this practically, like she’s already made the calculation and arrived somewhere settled. Her hands are still on the table, not fidgeting.
“Meena, I’m so sorry about your grandmother,” I say. “Of course I understand why you can’t stay, but are you sure we have to stop completely? Maybe we could do video calls and study that way.”
“I’m not sure about my schedule,” she says. “Some days maybe I cannot have class. That not fair for you, Khun Mike.”
“Don’t worry about that,” I say. “I’ll keep paying for the tutoring sessions twice a week. We can figure out when to talk when we both have time.”
“Really?”
“Yes, please,” I say. “I want to keep studying with you. I understand your grandmother is your first priority. That’s fine.
We can be flexible. I understand you want to be fair to your students.
But you should think of yourself now, too.
You need an income, and it will give you something else to focus on. ”
She wipes away her tears quickly, like she doesn’t want to be seen doing it, and smiles.
“Thank you, Khun Mike,” she says. “That’s a good idea.”
“No pressure,” I say. “You can always cancel if you need to. Mai dtong greng jai na.”
Which means something like, you don’t have to worry about bothering me.
She laughs. A small laugh, but the real one.
“You are very good student,” she says.
“Number one, right?” I say with a smile.
“Yes, really!” she exclaims. “Many students give up after two or three month. They say Thai is so hard to learn. Impossible. They give up. Why?”
“It helps when you have a great tutor.”
She thanks me and I can see the relief that this brings her.
Her shoulders drop and some of the tension she was carrying just falls away, like she’d been holding a breath for the whole morning and finally got to let it out.
She reaches for her latte for the first time since I sat down and wraps both hands around it.
After that, we chat for a while about Pai and the villages around it.
She tells me in Thai about the local culture there, that the people in the mountain villages have their own traditions different from city people in Thailand.
Since her people have been on the borders of bigger empires for centuries, they’ve had to learn a lot about different languages and cultures, which is why she studied English in school.
“You can come see,” she tells me. “Come stay with my family.”
“Really? You would let me stay in your home?”
She insists. I have to. She warns me that the home is very simple but the views from the hills are amazing.
It’s peaceful and the weather is cooler than Phuket in the winter.
I tease her that Thailand doesn’t have winter but she tells me in all earnestness that it sometimes gets as cold as fifty degrees Fahrenheit.
I smile and try to look impressed. I promise I’ll come see her, and then add that I’ll bring my new girlfriend.
“You have a new girlfriend already?” she says. Her expression shifts—a small recalibration, quickly covered. “Explain, please!”
I start to tell her about Thalia, the girl I caught swimming in my pool.
Her reaction surprises me. She says that I should be careful with this girl.
Any girl who would sneak into a stranger’s pool is wild and maybe not trustworthy.
It’s a pretty normal reaction—honestly, I’m not sure why I didn’t have it myself before.
The relationship feels different from the inside.
I already trust Thalia completely. Maybe I shouldn’t, but I can’t help it.
I haven’t felt this way since—well, since I got my heart broken the first time.
She’s a really great person, I insist. Sweet, loyal, so supportive. I don’t have all the words in Thai to express what I want to say, but I manage to communicate the way I feel more or less without falling back on English.
Meena smiles. Whole guidebooks have been written about the Thai smile—the way it’s shaped the culture, all the different things it can mean.
Thais don’t just smile when they’re happy, and I’ve lived here long enough to know that.
I’m not sure what this one means. There’s something behind it she isn’t saying, or isn’t going to say.
She folds her hands back on the table and looks at them for a moment, and I get the sense that the subject of Thalia is now officially closed.
Eventually we realize we’ve been talking for an hour and a half and it’s time to stop. She thanks me again and tells me we’ll have another lesson as soon as she can get settled back home. I tell her not to worry, that we can always work something out.
I ask if she needs help moving, but she tells me the apartment she’s been renting is very small and she doesn’t own much so it’s no trouble leaving. She’ll miss Phuket, but since she has friends here she has a reason to come back.
“Sut yord!” I say, which means something like, awesome!
Meena says goodbye and I grab an iced coffee to bring home to Thalia. I tell her about Meena and what she told me.
“That’s too bad about her grandmother,” Thalia says. “It’s not fair that the responsibility falls on her shoulders just because she’s a woman.”
“Yeah, I know,” I say. “I’m grateful that my parents are healthy, but that won’t be true forever. Someday I’ll have to move back to help out.”
She sips her coffee thoughtfully. We’re out on the porch in the shade, the afternoon light going gold across the pool. A lizard runs the length of the border wall and disappears into the birds of paradise.
“She doesn’t have a boyfriend, right?”
“Nope,” I say. “That makes it easier at least. She doesn’t have to end a relationship here just to move back home.”
“It sounds like Teacher Meena was into you a little bit,” she says.
“You think?”
“Think about it. She probably could have been doing video calls the whole time, right? I mean it would have been more convenient for both of you not to have to meet in public every time. But she wanted to get coffee with you. She wanted to show up in person and spend an hour talking to a guy who anyone watching would have assumed she was on a date with.”
“I don’t know about that,” I say. “I mean, it would have looked like she was teaching me Thai, which she was. She always acted professional. Friendly, but professional.”