Chapter 16 #2
“I don’t know.” May pressed the heel of his hand against his eye.
Cassiel wanted to bat it away, pull it away, tell him to stop it, his eyes were already red.
“I was playing with Jaewon. Everything was—normal, then I felt… wrong. I went to the bathroom, needed to… splash my face or something. But then I was on BART and I had to go somewhere and I guess I got confused because it’s Chinese New Year. ”
There were tears in his eyes but his expression hadn’t changed.
“I went to my mom’s,” he said.
May’s mother. The woman who was ‘not great.’ The house Cassiel couldn’t find. May had gone there. Not here, not first.
“The head injury thing,” May said. “It does this sometimes. I get—I’m there but I’m not there. Like I can see everything fine but none of it’s real. And usually it’s like, a minute or two and it goes away. Tonight was… longer.” He rubbed his face. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. Your mom—I’m sorry.”
“You got confused and went to your parents’ house,” Cassiel said, trying to make sense of it. His hands were numb.
“Yeah. I got chicken.” May pressed his hands against his cheeks, smearing the tears. “I—My mom let me in and I had some food and… that’s when I sort of, I came back. And I realized I shouldn’t be there and I thought, I should call you, but what would you say?”
He laughed shakily.
Cassiel gritted his teeth. There were a lot of things he wanted to say and he couldn’t say any of them even though the worry that had been churning inside him since he realized May was gone had now curdled into a blunt rage sitting in his throat and he had no choice but to swallow it down, to control it.
“We need to go inside,” he said.
May followed him through the gate, up the stairs. They went inside. The hallway, the shoes coming off—May’s placed against the wall, Cassiel’s dress shoes beside them. The bedroom lamp came on, and May stood there, and Cassiel did not want to be standing there.
He went to the kitchen and filled the kettle, waiting in the galley for the water to boil. His hands moved through the automatic sequence. Mug, loose leaf, tin on the shelf. May’s Otagiri mug, the Pink Lady. He filled it. The kettle clicked off. He carried the tea through.
May was sitting on the edge of the bed, the borrowed jacket still on, his hands in his lap. He looked at the tea and then at Cassiel and took the mug and wrapped both hands around it and didn’t drink.
“I’m—”
“Stop saying you’re sorry,” Cassiel said, not because it wasn’t owed, not because he thought it was insincere, but he just didn’t want to hear it. “Drink.”
“Okay.” May took a sip, winced at the heat, then set the mug down on the nightstand.
Cassiel rubbed at his ring, thumb grazing hard over each bead, not looking at him, then sat down on the bed.
“You came here instead of your place. Because you wanted to explain.”
“No,” said May. “No. I was scared. I couldn’t call you. I couldn’t go back to Fremont. I didn’t want to go back to my place. That—It felt worse. Fuck. I don’t know, Cassiel, I wanted to see you. I thought… if I was here it’d prove I was still real. Or something.”
“‘Or something,’” Cassiel repeated. “I’m not a tool you use to confirm your reality against, May.”
“I know that, that’s not what I—”
“Drink your tea.”
He stood, heading through the French doors, then sat down on the couch with the lights off. Through the doors he could still hear May’s breathing, uneven, catching. Not asleep. Shifting, a creak of the mattress, then a slurp of tea.
Cassiel took out his phone. Three missed calls from his mother.
He sent a voice recording: He’s here. He’s fine. I’ll call tomorrow.
Her response arrived in under a minute, a sticker of a crying bear holding a small chicken.
He put the phone down and breathed out. The thinking was working now—not the circling from the car but something with edges, something he could hold.
May had a condition. The condition had symptoms, triggers, a frequency.
These could be measured and if they could be measured, they could be addressed.
He stood up and walked back into the bedroom.
May was where he’d left him. Jacket still on, two more sips taken from the tea. He looked up.
“You need to see a doctor,” Cassiel said.
May’s hands tightened on the mug. “I have a doctor.”
“What happened tonight wasn’t—” He stopped. Readjusted. “What you described sounds like something that’s getting worse. The frequency, the duration. You should tell your doctor.”
“I have told my doctor. Post-concussion syndrome, they know about it, I have the—” May gestured vaguely at his own head. “The whole file. MRIs, CT scans, the works. It’s documented.”
“Then they should know it’s escalating.”
“It’s not escalating, it was one bad night—”
“One bad night that had you leaving my house without saying anything, wandering the city for hours, and left you sitting on my step in the dark. You couldn’t tell me where you were going. You couldn’t tell yourself.”
May set the mug on the nightstand. The click was careful.
“I know what I did, Cassiel.”
“Then you know you need to see someone about it.”
“Okay, you know what happens if I go back to the doctor? I’m two hundred dollars out of pocket and my doctor says, ‘May, you should drink more water and get more sleep. Have you thought about therapy?’ And—”
“That’s one or two STDY bookings. You should be taken seriously. I’ll—”
“What, go with me? Like you’re my dad?” May’s voice cracked on the word. “I know I fucked up, Cassiel. I’m really, really fucking sorry. I know what I did.”
“I’m not saying you don’t know. I’m saying we should have a plan for when it happens again. So I know what to look for, so I can—” The ring was clicking. He was clicking it. Couldn’t stop. “You should tell me when you feel it starting. So I can prepare.”
The words left his mouth and he heard the amplitude error—a fraction off true.
“So you can manage it.” May’s voice had dropped. The quietest Cassiel had heard from him, an echo of their argument on Christmas night but rougher.
“So I can help,” Cassiel said.
“So you can manage me,” May said. “Because you want a version of me you can plan around.”
The sentence scalded. Cassiel’s ring went still.
He should have said That’s not what I want. What came out instead—
“My father drove forty minutes from Fremont,” he said, because he was thinking of the man who had left him the instruction to drink something warm. He’d made the tea. “He didn’t ask questions. He picked up the keys and drove.”
May heard something else. Cassiel saw it happen, saw the flinch, tiny and suppressed.
“I know,” May said. “I know he drove, I saw his car. I know I walked out on your mom’s dinner and left Jaewon and—God.
I know what it means and I know sorry isn’t good enough but I can’t be good enough right now.
And you’re telling me your family’s worry is proof I need a plan. ” May’s voice was thin now.
The apartment was quiet. No piano through the wall, no traffic, nothing to fill the space between them.
May’s face was wet again. They’d dried on the step and they were back. The disconnect was back—tears tracing down from the corners of his eyes, breathing unchanged. May was crying and his voice was level, his hands on the bed still, as though the crying was happening to somebody else.
“I should go,” May said.
“Stay.”
“No.”
“May—”
“This is me telling you.” May stood. He was already moving for the hallway, already reaching for his shoes. “I’m not up and disappearing. I’m going home before I make it worse.”
Cassiel stood in the doorway and his fingers were gripped tight around his thumbs and the word stay was in his mouth again.
May put on his shoes. Zipped the jacket. He straightened up and looked at Cassiel from the hallway, tired and lucid. Choosing this.
“I’ll text you when I get home,” May said.
The door closed. The lock turned—May’s hand, from outside, pulling it shut gently, slowly, like a teenager sneaking out of the house or a thief quietly escaping. Or like Cassiel’s boyfriend who had something wrong with him and didn’t want help and didn’t want to stay.
Cassiel stood in the hallway. Then he walked into the bedroom and picked up the mug from the nightstand. Lukewarm. He carried it to the kitchen and poured it out. Washed it and set it on the shelf where it still belonged, a house within a house.
He walked back through the bedroom, through the doors, into the living room. The bay windows held fog and the faint orange of the streetlight, and the fire escape was a black skeleton against the glass.
He sat on the couch and slumped back into it. On the table beside his elbow, the Midori notebook sat with the cat sticker facing up. Two lists on the inner page, only blank pages after.
He closed his eyes and waited for the text.