Chapter 1 #3
Back in his apartment, without a little sister to incorrectly dictate it, the light was how he wanted it.
3000K warm white overhead, 2700K in his bedside lamp; enough to read by.
Correct temperature, correct lighting, correct sheets.
Thread count was a lie, he knew this, but even that was correct.
Everything arranged and selected, exactly as intended.
He lay in bed with his phone and watched a video about drama in the mechanical keyboard community—a group buy gone wrong, two hundred buyers out of pocket, the designer’s Discord vanished overnight.
Cassiel owned a mechanical keyboard, chosen and assembled and the matter closed, which freed him to watch other people’s crises as someone with no stake and all evening. This was his recreation: the consumption of other people’s expertise and passions and occasionally—often—their complaints.
The video ended, and before the next one could auto-play, he was already in the app store. The app’s description confirmed that STDY stood for STEADY. Cassiel downloaded it and the icon appeared on his home screen. He opened it before he could do anything sensible, like not doing that.
The profiles were people who looked like royalty-free stock images, with the occasional photo of a man holding a large fish. Most of the fishless profiles listed the expected services—plus-ones, date experiences. The app assumed its audience knew what they wanted and offered checkboxes to confirm.
There was no checkbox for what Cassiel wanted. The app had been built for people who already understood the mechanics and only needed a body to perform them with. Cassiel was something else, and the distance between the options and his need sat there, dull and persistent.
His thumb found the app icon, held it until the small X pulsed in the corner of the icon. Instead of deleting it, he turned off the screen.
It wasn’t a shutdown.
* * *
For dinner the next day, Cassiel reheated one of his mother’s containers, ate it standing at the counter, then washed it by hand and set it on the rack to dry, because she would ask, and because she would know.
Then he settled onto bed and picked up the book from his nightstand that David had insisted he read so they could have something to discuss at the next dinner. Thirty-two asinine pages later, he set it down and reached for his phone.
He opened STDY again. The profiles were where he’d left them. He’d memorized most without intending to—not that many, filtered for men only, and none new. He stopped on one he’d glanced over before.
May H. Twenty-five, the profile said, but he looked younger.
The photo showed a guy in an orange puffer jacket smiling at something off-camera.
East Asian. Chinese, if he had to guess, and handsome enough.
More on the cute side. A face his mother would see and think oh, he seems nice, which was the point, really.
Cassiel was selecting a person based on what expression his mother’s face would make. He tapped Request Booking.
Event type: family dinner. That was easy. Date: September 17th. He typed it, deleted it, then retyped it, which was ridiculous because the date wasn’t going to change by being retyped. Duration: four hours.
Preferences: Describe your ideal companion.
The field was designed for things like tall, good with parents, can hold a conversation about at least one Winter Olympics sport.
Cassiel was going to need someone who could carry the talking while he sat there and tried to appear like a person who’d chosen another person to exist beside, rather than one who had brought a stranger from the internet to dinner and wanted to avoid hiding in a linen closet to survive the evening.
He also needed to not bring a total stranger to his mother’s table without testing said stranger first.
What he wanted to type was something like:
The dinner is not actually the point. The point is I’ve never sat next to someone without approximating how long it would take for them to make a polite excuse and leave. I would like to not need to guess, and I need someone who won’t outwardly display annoyance.
What he ended up with:
Hello. I need a companion for a family dinner.
Korean holiday, extended family, probably 4-5 hours.
I’m not easy company in group settings. I’ll need someone patient and comfortable not being spoken to.
Ideally you will be able to improvise without being offensive.
Knowledge of the culture would be helpful.
I’d like to meet beforehand to see if this works.
I’ll be direct about what I need. Thank you.
It was too honest in places and not honest enough in others, which was more or less how everything he wrote turned out.
‘I’m not easy company’ was short for a much longer, sadder explanation.
‘Comfortable not being spoken to’ would probably read as shorthand for ‘I’m an asshole.
’ Then ‘I’d like to meet beforehand’—that was the hardest part for Cassiel, potentially not for the hypothetical taker of the task.
A room with one other person in it and the bought time to find out if he could stand it.
Cassiel read it over one more time, then he sent it, locked the phone, and tossed it onto the mattress where it landed face down.