Chapter 10 #2
Lauren answered it. Cassiel heard the voice before he saw the person—bright, loud, already saying something that would start on the porch and end somewhere in the parlor.
Then May was in the doorway. He was wearing the navy button-down, the singular formal garment in what Cassiel had identified as a wardrobe organized by which clothes were closest to grab from the floor rather than occasion.
The same one he’d worn to Chuseok, to the other dinner, and the same blue canvas shoes.
No coat, which was wrong for December yet consistent with everything Cassiel knew about May Huang’s relationship to preparation.
He was carrying a plastic bag with three bottles of Tsingtao visible through it.
“Happy birthday.” May smiled. The gap, the canines, the eye crinkle. “I brought beer and a secret.”
“I don’t drink beer.”
“The beer’s for Lauren. The secret’s for you.”
May handed the bag to Lauren, who examined the bottles.
He crossed the parlor to Cassiel’s corner, close enough that Cassiel could smell the cold still clinging to the button-down, and something faintly citrus underneath.
May’s left hand went to the back of his own neck, a brief, hard press, and dropped.
“I’ll come find you for the secret later,” he said, and then he was off, making the rounds as if this was his party. Cassiel watched him walk into the kitchen, saw him standing with David and Minju.
Cassiel was talking to Lauren’s roommate about the fireplace—the flue and the tile work, whether the harlequin pattern was original or a later addition—when he looked up and saw May across the room with Lamaria.
May was peering at one of her earrings while Lamaria found something on her phone.
Her prints, probably. Cassiel couldn’t see the screen from his corner, but he could see Lamaria’s posture change, how she leaned in, her free hand moving as she talked about her work.
When May paid attention to you, it changed you. A panoptic effect, only not so sinister. Cassiel had felt it. He was watching it happen to someone else.
A while later, near the bookshelves, Lauren and May found each other. Cassiel couldn’t hear how it started—something about the shelves—but May’s voice carried.
“—I mean, everyone’s seen a Star War. It’s not even a nerd thing anymore.”
“You’d be surprised.” Lauren tilted her head toward the window seat. “Cassiel’s only seen one.”
“I’ve seen four,” Cassiel said.
Lauren didn’t look at him. “You’ve seen one, four times.”
May’s laugh carried across the parlor.
Cassiel looked out into the night, still in his window seat, the ring’s beads clicking.
May moved through the room and the distance between them varied—ten feet, twenty, three, when May came back to check on him with a “you good?” and a tap to the side of the window seat that vibrated through the wood into Cassiel’s thigh.
Duration: 0.3 seconds, negligible pressure, the vibration lasting longer than the touch.
* * *
He went outside at 9:15 because he needed it.
Lauren’s back deck was wooden-planked, narrow, overlooking a shared garden that in summer had tomatoes and in December had mud and ivy and the bare skeleton of someone’s raised bed.
A stone bowl with rainwater sat on the railing.
The backs of neighboring Victorians were lit: kitchen windows, bedroom windows, implications of other people’s evenings.
The fog was close but not down, hanging above the rooflines.
He leaned on the railing and breathed. The cold was good.
Forty-four degrees, he’d read on the forecast. Inside, the party’s noise dulled to a hum, and the December air sat in Cassiel’s lungs and needed him for absolutely nothing, because cold air had no sentience, no need to congratulate him on time passing.
Then, the kitchen door opened behind him and closed with a squeak, followed by soft footsteps on the planking.
“Hey.” May’s voice, slightly hoarse. He came to the railing and stood beside Cassiel, six inches away, or more.
His breath made small clouds. The navy button-down was not a coat and his shoulders were already climbing.
In the dim light, Cassiel could see the evidence of cold on his skin and through his shirt.
“You should have brought a jacket.”
“I left my good one somewhere. It’s fine, I’m a red-blooded American male.”
They stood. The party hummed behind the glass. A neighbor’s window showed a television, a blue-white flicker in the glass.
“So,” May said, “the secret.”
Cassiel watched as he reached into the back pocket of his jeans. He produced a slim CD case in clear plastic. On the front, he had written in purple Sharpie and handwriting that Cassiel recognized from the notebooks. It was dense, slanted, slightly too large for the space it occupied:
FOR CASSIEL — DEC 7
“It’s—okay, I know this is—” May’s voice had shifted into nervousness and he was now talking even faster to compensate.
“I know this is a broke-person gift and I wanted to get you something real but then I didn’t because I don’t know what clock-dentists want and if I got you a watch thing I’d get the wrong one and you’d know it was wrong or it was shitty, and I thought about getting you clothes or something but who am I kidding, right—”
“May.”
“—so I made you this, which is a mixtape, yes I know it’s a CD, but ‘mixtape’ has connotations and more importantly, legacy, and ‘mix CD’ is what a divorced dad—”
“May.”
“Right! Okay. I—Okay. Cassiel, you look like a guy who owns a CD player. No offense.”
May’s cheeks were red now from the cold or something else, and his hands were shaking, so Cassiel took the case and inspected it. The Sharpie was slightly smudged on the F of FOR, where May’s hand had dragged across it before the ink dried.
He opened it. He’d scrawled on the disc in the same purple: POSITIONS ON AMPLITUDE — VOL. 1. A folded piece of paper was crammed in where the liner notes would go. Twelve songs. Artist, title, and beside each one, an annotation in handwriting that got smaller as the writer ran out of room.
The first track was Teresa Teng. He recognized the name, couldn’t read the title, which was in Chinese. May’s annotation: grew up listening to her, maybe you’ll like.
He read down the page.
Track six: Fiona Apple — “Daredevil.” The annotation: don’t laugh, this is me!
Track nine: Tori Amos — “Winter.” The annotation: chorus punches you in the face (positive)
Then at the very bottom, track twelve: Chuu — “Heart Attack.” And beside it: minseok oppa attacking my heart (JK)
For something so silly, it almost stopped him dead. But he controlled his expression.
It wasn’t about the individual choices, though those were good—it was the sequence.
The way the tracks moved between languages and decades.
The annotations shifted key. There was an offering, then an exposure, landing on a joke that wasn’t, circling back to the song itself.
May had listened to these songs in order, over and over, adjusting the sequence until the movement was correct.
Cassiel knew this process. He performed it every day; the sequencing of small, precise things in deliberate order until the mechanism ran true. May didn’t know he was speaking horologist and May was still talking, busy making the gift less.
“—I burned it at the library because my laptop doesn’t have a disc drive, obviously, it’s not 2004, and the librarian gave me a look but she also helped me find a blank disc so I think she was on board—”
“I own a Marantz,” Cassiel said.
May stopped, tilted his head.
“A CD-63 MkII KI Signature. I found it at a Goodwill for thirty dollars. The original retail was over a thousand. It uses a CDM-12.1 swing-arm laser assembly, which was the last generation before Philips switched—”
Then May kissed him.
A cold hand came to the side of Cassiel’s jaw—the left side, fingers against his ear, palm on his cheek, calluses from the kitchen rough against his skin—and May leaned in across the six inches that had been maintained for months and closed them.
The word switched was in his mouth and then May’s mouth was there instead, and the CD case was between them, pressed against Cassiel’s chest by the proximity of May’s body.