Chapter 4 #2
Last time the fog had been thick and the room had been dim and May had been late and compensating for that, so the details of Cassiel had come in fragments between his own yapping. Today May was early and the light was better and he could see the Gay Angel of Thursday in all his glory.
He was dressed smartly in a blue sweater under a well-fitting navy jacket that emphasized his shoulders.
Which were wide. Monolids, strong jaw, a tidy haircut that probably cost more than May’s last grocery run.
Basically, he was K-drama hot and May was determined to be cool about it.
May shifted his attention to the other man’s hands, in a chill way.
They were on the table and Cassiel’s thumb was doing a thing with his fidget ring, turning turning turning.
May, who was also a chronic fidgeter, decided he liked this.
“Hey!” May dropped onto the stool. “I’m early. I’d like credit, please. Write it down.”
“You’re fifty-fifty. But noted.” Cassiel’s hands did not move to note anything, but May decided to let that go.
His coffee arrived at the little window in the wall, which was still a novelty the second time.
He fetched it, grinned at the barista, and settled back on the stool.
He took a quick sip of the latte and put it down on the table before pulling the yellow notebook from his jacket and setting it between them.
“Okay, what’s the agenda? More intel on your family, or are we getting into the cover story?
” As he said it, he realized he hadn’t written anything down about their cover story last week.
Then he remembered, looking at the cover of the notebook between them, that he’d written both ASS and GAY ANGEL, and if last week was anything to go by, Cassiel was definitely going to see that.
He reached back into his backpack and pulled out his purple notebook instead.
“Cover story,” Cassiel said, either not noticing the swap or not caring. “We have the basics. We should fill it in.”
“Right.” May flipped to a blank page and clicked his pen. “So. We met at Lau Kee. I was working. And you came in because…”
“A friend recommended it.”
“Which friend?”
“Lauren.” Cassiel glanced down at the notebook.
“Okay, great. Your friend Lauren, who has great taste, told you about Lau Kee, you strolled in for lunch and I…” May paused. “Actually, here’s the thing. I’m usually out back. I wash dishes.”
“You were on your lunch break,” Cassiel supplied. “In Chinese restaurants, workers eat in the shop.”
Broadly speaking, this was true. In any Chinese place May had ever been to, this was true, and it was true for Lau Kee too.
“Oh, so you are a Chinatown guy.” May grinned. “Okay, so… You’re eating. I’m also eating. Our eyes meet across the room. One of us is struck with Cupid’s arrow, a voice from on high saying, ‘You must speak to him before the chance is lost!’”
Cassiel blinked at him slowly, then lifted his choco mint latte to his lips and took a long drink.
“We’ll say that was you,” he said.
May laughed and started writing: Met at LK on break I SPOKE FIRST obv. CHARMED INTO DATE. “How long ago are we talking? How long have we been together?”
“Long enough that bringing you to Chuseok isn’t inappropriate. Short enough that it’s reasonable I haven’t told my family about you yet.”
“Right. You didn’t want to tell your folks because you didn’t know if it was going to last, type thing.”
Cassiel spun the beads on his finger once before nodding.
“Okay,” May said. “How about… a month and a half? Not a long time, but long enough that it’s starting to feel like it could be real enough, and this big family thing’s a test.”
“A month and a half,” Cassiel repeated. “That would be early July.”
He wrote it down. “Early July. Happy birthday America.” He clicked the pen twice. “Okay, so your mom’s going to ask what we do together. Last week you told me you go three places, which was a lie, because you were sitting in a fourth one when you said it.”
“…Four places, including this one.”
“In our fiction, let’s make that six. Lau Kee and my place. We don’t need to invent anything wild. Simple stuff! We get coffee, we go for walks. That’s believable for you, right?”
“Yes.”
“Do I feed you?”
Cassiel looked at him as though May had non-sequitured into strange new territory.
“Your mom’s going to want to know. I work in a restaurant; it’ll come up.”
“Then yes. You feed me.”
May scribbled that down. This really was fiction, because May could not even feed himself.
“What do I feed you?” he asked.
“I don’t have a preference.”
“You absolutely do. You are a preferences guy. What do you eat when no one’s looking?”
Cassiel sighed, flicking the beads on the ring again. “Rice. With something on it.”
“Inspiring. Okay—I bring you siu yuk rice from Lau Kee. Best thing on the menu. You’d never had it and it changed your life.”
“Did it.”
“Permanently. You’re a different man. A better one. You’re welcome.”
They filled in the rest, the tiny details a family might poke at because families are nosy.
May wrote it all down in the purple notebook, blue ink on off-white, and by the end, the page held a whole relationship—two guys who met at a restaurant in Chinatown, who got coffee and went for walks and shared food and were taking it slow because one of them was private and the other was patient.
They’d written a sort of fairytale together, and the session, if May was calling it that, had reached a natural conclusion.
May’s latte was cooling and Cassiel’s own was half-finished. The café had filled, two more tables occupied. A man with a big hat outside passed the window lugging a cello case.
“Hey, can I ask you something?” May said.
“Is it about my name.”
“No—though, actually, tell me.”
“The angel of temperance,” Cassiel said. “I wanted to stand out. At the time.” He lifted his thick brows as if to challenge him, and May sensed it before it came: “Were you born in May?”
Devious.
“Yes,” he sighed. “God damn it. May 15th. Actually, write that down. You’re my fake boyfriend, you should know my birthday. And yours?”
“December 7th,” said Cassiel. He tilted his head to the side ever-so-slightly. “Write that down.”
May rolled his eyes and scrawled it underneath his other notes, circled it, then looked back up at the man who was still watching him with those inscrutable dark brown eyes.
“—I was going to ask about the fixing watches thing. How’d you get into that?”
“I studied civil engineering,” Cassiel said. “I worked at a firm in Seattle for a year after graduation. Then I took a watch apart during the pandemic and decided to go to school for it. Horology is… indoors and quiet. I like it, so I do it.”
“You went to Time School?”
“…Watchmaking school. Yes.”
May scribbled down Time School and Seattle and as his pen lifted he felt it, the bubble going up around him. He heard his voice say something, a follow-up question. And then Cassiel asked if he knew what a hairspring was, and he shook his head.
Cassiel talked about movements. Something called amplitude, something called beat error, tweezers designed for doing stuff with coils.
May listened from within the bubble, which Cassiel did not notice.
He followed maybe a third of the mechanics involved, but knew that the mechanics weren’t actually important.
And through the bubble—through, through, not just past—was where Cassiel’s hands were supposed to be.
Cassiel’s hands moved in precise gestures, a thumb and forefinger demonstrating a grip, his wrist rotating to show an angle. The fidget ring glinted in a flash of light outside of the bubble.
May asked, so Cassiel answered, continued to answer, and the answering naturally assumed May meant the asking, and the assumption never bothered to ask hey, do you actually want to hear this?
This was just a man talking about the thing he loved with the same directness he brought to everything else. And that directness, aimed at May, sitting across a small table with their coffee going cold—
May touched his jaw. Two fingers. He touched the inside of the bubble and popped it.
“…and that’s more satisfying than stress-testing a dam.”
“Dam,” said May, like an idiot. “Sounds time-consuming.”
Cassiel’s mouth twitched in a way that wasn’t quite a smile, more like a placeholder for where one might go if it ever got permission from the rest of the face.
It was there and gone, but May caught it, and May still didn’t understand a thing about clockwork even after all that, but he understood smiles.
“You should do that more,” May said.
“Do what?”
“The—” He circled a finger at Cassiel’s face. “Forget it.”
May’s phone buzzed in his jacket. The eleven o’clock reminder, the one that told him to leave for the bus if he was going to make his shift. He reached in and thumbed it off through the fabric without pulling it out.
“Do you need to leave?” Cassiel asked.
“Nah, not yet.”
The light from outside was bright enough now that Sparrow’s white walls seemed to gleam, and a warm wash of light spread across the surface of the table.
May moved to the front of the store and ordered a mint chocolate latte. Not his style, not his drink, but in that moment, he wanted it.