Chapter 5
CASSIEL
THE FOURTH THURSDAY
Cassiel had been clenching his jaw for two days.
He had received a text from his mother—a photo of pine needles and sesame filling, already arranged on her counter.
Ingredients for the rice cakes they’d be making in five days whether his jaw cooperated or not.
A KakaoTalk sticker of a bear lifting dumbbells followed.
The messages had done something to his hinge mechanism and it hadn’t released.
He had begun to grind his teeth in his sleep.
Another grunt from the coffee machine. The headphones went on, and in the peace of the noise-cancellation, he realized he was grinding his teeth again. He forced his jaw to relax.
On his phone, he resumed a video—eighteen minutes on the color of some anime girl’s hair in the original 80’s manga, versus its three TV adaptations. It was purple. Open and shut, seemingly, but the video was there and so was he.
There were five days left until Chuseok. The video ended and the songpyeon came back—his mother’s hands, the filling, the pine needles.
Then at last, the door opened.
May came in two minutes before ten, notebook in hand, backpack slung over one shoulder. His hair was haloed in the light behind him, and he was wearing an old, offensively red 49ers jersey. After ordering his drink, May walked to where Cassiel sat, the way he always did. Smiling.
Cassiel took off his headphones.
“Tuesday,” May said, before the stool had fully taken his weight. The purple Leuchtturm was already open with his scribbled notes. “What time, where am I meeting you.”
“One forty. Powell.”
“BART to Fremont.” May’s pen moved. He was oddly focused today, no diversions. “How long?”
“Forty-nine minutes. A fifteen-minute walk. My mother wants us there by three for the songpyeon.”
“The rice cake thingies.”
“The thingies, yes. Everyone participates.”
“Should I bring something else?” May looked up, blew his hair out of his eyes. Cassiel considered the question.
“My mother will say you don’t need to bring anything.”
“…Yeah, I’m bringing something.” His face brightened. “Oh, oh. Egg tarts from the place on Grant.”
“The Golden Gate Bakery.”
Cassiel was familiar. He’d read threads about its mysterious opening hours and long lines.
“That’s the one. I’m staking it out. Alarms are set. I’ve got people in the field watching.” May grinned, and Cassiel was once again looking at the gap in his teeth. “I’ll show up with the pink box, still warm, and your mom’s gonna be so impressed.”
Cassiel took a sip of his latte, resolving to purchase some mandarins in the morning as a contingency.
“So, wardrobe. You look like you know how to wear clothes. Anything I shouldn’t wear? How worried should I be?”
“You mentioned you owned a button-down. Singular.”
“Oh yes,” May confirmed, leaning forward with a glint in his eye. “Milan fashion week. Navy blue. All the buttons.”
Cassiel looked at the 49ers jersey. It was oversized and legitimately vintage, the design of the logo placing it somewhere in the early 90s, and the shape of the collar combined with the angle of May’s lean drew Cassiel’s eye naturally to the dip between the man’s collarbones.
“Wear the button-up,” he said, looking away. “Don’t bring up how the Niners are doing to my father.”
May adjusted his collar, looking down as if it was the first time he’d noticed what he had dressed himself in today, which Cassiel tracked to the natural conclusion.
“So… bad?”
“Bad.”
They went over the rest again quickly. His parents, Minju, David, Jaewon, the baby.
May tapped his rollerball against the family tree. “What’s your niece actually called?”
Cassiel had been calling her ‘the baby’ in his head since she was born. She was almost a year old, on the verge of being able to say her own name.
“Hayoung,” he said, and watched as May added an annotation next to the smallest smiley face. A vertical line. He was, Cassiel realized, slowly but surely attempting to write the hangul.
“No English name yet, respect.” May finished drawing—because he was drawing—the ? for ?. Young. “Do they call you Cassiel at home, or your Korean name?”
“My parents call me Minseok.”
“Minseok.” May tried it, and the vowels were slightly off, but not unpleasant. There was a click to the k. “Minseok-ah, Minseok-oppa?”
The familiarity should annoy him, a casually faulty understanding of his culture filtered through watching K-dramas for fun. But Cassiel had no loyalty to the hierarchy imposed by names, not in San Francisco of all places, so all he offered was an eye-roll at being called ‘oppa’ by this man.
His hand found the beads on his ring and turned one, two, three.
“You don’t call me Oppa.”
“What do I call you, then?”
“Just Cassiel.”
May tilted his head. “Not Cass? Min? Your mom’s not gonna find it weird that your boyfriend calls you your Big English Name?”
The word ‘boyfriend’ sounded natural out of May’s mouth and that in itself was unsettling. He had used it before, in the first meeting, the definitional push, I’m going as your date—but here, on the fourth Thursday, the word had acquired… furnishings.
“I call you May. That’s your Big English Name. She might have an opinion. She has opinions on everything. That will be a minor one.”
May laughed softly and closed the Leuchtturm. He twirled his pen in his fingers once, twice, then tucked both the notebook and pen into his backpack.
Four Thursdays worth of preparation were numbered and annotated in May’s scrawling hand in that journal now, stress-tested to Cassiel’s own satisfaction.
They left Sparrow at half past ten. The fog had thickened while they were inside, the far end of the street visible only as an implication.
They stood by the flower box, blocking the view out the front window for anyone else inside. Cassiel turned in the direction of the bus stop and May stretched, arms overhead, backpack jostling, and the 49ers jersey rode up past his belt.
“Tuesday,” May said, over his shoulder. “One forty. You nervous?”
“No,” Cassiel answered, and it was something akin to the truth, because his jaw had stopped clenching at some stage.
“Great, me either.”
Then May turned north toward the 29 and Cassiel toward Irving for the N. The distance opened between them in the fog, and Cassiel stood on the sidewalk for five seconds longer than the route required, watching the red of the jersey disappear into the mist.
CHUSEOK
May stood beside him in the promised navy button-down, which was more Nordstrom Rack sales section and less Milan fashion week, but it was tucked in, tidy, and it fit.
He had switched out the dirty sneakers of Thursdays for a pair of blue canvas shoes.
His hair was roughly symmetrical today. May had greeted him at Powell Station with an enthusiastic, three exclamation mark wave, and a pink bakery box cradled preciously in his other arm.
The egg tarts inside the box were still warm even now, the scent of the custard sweet and eggy through the cardboard. Beneath it, he could catch a whiff of May’s aftershave, which was probably advertised as ‘fresh.’ It was bearable.
“You’re quiet,” May said.
“I’m frequently quiet.”
“Quieter than your regular quiet.”
Cassiel’s hand was flat on his thigh. He was not stimming.
Both palms pressed against the fabric of his trousers, fingers spread, grounding through surface area.
The station echoed around them—an announcement in the wrong cadence and someone’s alarm chirping from a distance at an interval that on a routine day would have driven Cassiel into a quiet frenzy.
“My mother is going to be very happy,” Cassiel said.
“That’s good, right?”
“Hm.”
May shifted the bakery box to his other hand. “I’m good with moms.”
“I know.”
The train came in nine minutes, which was worse than eight and better than the eleven he’d been calculating.
They sat in the middle car, two-seat side, Cassiel at the window.
The pressure changed in the Transbay Tube, the car rattling through the deep section, and May was beside him, warm and present, smelling clean and artificially sweet and for once not a trace of Lau Kee’s oil on him.
May had pulled out his phone, flipped it to landscape mode, playing some kind of turn-based game Cassiel didn’t recognize. He played in silence for a minute, maybe two, and then locked the screen and put the phone down on his thigh and sat in the quiet.
On his own phone, four texts from Lauren, timestamps suggesting a slow build since noon. He read them, typed On the train. He brought egg tarts, and put the phone away.
The East Bay opened up outside the window—the dry hills, the highways wider than anything in the city, the light different here, warmer, less filtered. Fremont in fifteen minutes.
“May,” he said.
“Present.”
“Thank you for coming.”
May turned his face to look at him. The smile was different; smaller, boyish, no teeth. “I mean, you’re paying me.”
“Still.”
“Still… Yeah. You’re welcome.”
* * *
The smell hit at the door. Sesame oil and garlic and something caramelizing—the galbi, probably. His mother always started it early.
Cassiel and May took their shoes off at the entrance. Four pairs were already present: his father’s loafers, his mother’s flats, Minju’s boots, David’s sneakers. Jaewon’s sneakers were kicked sideways against the wall. May placed his blue canvas shoes neatly beside the existing row.
His mother came around the corner from the kitchen with a towel over her shoulder and stopped. She looked at May. She looked at Cassiel. She looked at May again.
May bowed—shallow, casual, exactly right—and held out the pink bakery box with both hands. “Thank you for having me. I brought egg tarts. They’re a little cold now, but they crisp up nice in the oven.”
His mother took the box with a happy sigh and was already opening it.
“He’s handsome, Minseok-ah,” she said to Cassiel. “Which church does he go to?”
“She says welcome,” Cassiel translated.
“I heard handsome,” May said. “I got that one.”