Chapter 20 #3
He hadn’t expected that. He wasn’t. He was full from the carbs and his stomach felt leaden. But he didn’t want to say no, didn’t want to call a cab yet.
“Sure.”
“Let’s get boba,” May said, already walking. They walked south on Tennessee, May’s hands in the pockets of Cassiel’s jacket.
May led them to a blue building on the corner of Twenty-Second and Tennessee, string lights along the window.
A boba shop, small and warm, with low frosted glass pendant lights, a neon menu board casting purple on the ceiling.
There were two other customers at the window bar, both on their phones.
The music was acoustic, quiet enough that Cassiel could hear the steamer.
May ordered—taro for himself, a chocolate mint smoothie for Cassiel—and fished a red envelope out of his back pocket. He took out a twenty, paid, put the change back and slid the envelope into the inside pocket of the bomber.
The oddity wasn’t the envelope. Cassiel knew what that was—a Chinese New Year tradition.
But May was frugal. In all their outings he had never paid for the two of them.
Often he would refuse to buy anything at all.
This red envelope money was different, or May was different, or the situation was different.
They sat against the wall, below one of the low lights.
“Anna’s partner,” May said, fiddling with his straw. “William. —Will. He was supposed to be here but Anna said he had a big day driving in from Sac and was so wiped. Which is just—You show up for dinner with your wife’s brothers even if you’re a little sleepy, right? Come on.”
Cassiel sipped his smoothie, the cold sliding down his throat. May rarely talked like this about other people. He usually made excuses for them, frequently in ways that Cassiel found frustrating or confounding.
“It did sound like a weak excuse,” he agreed.
May clicked his tongue.
“Maybe I’m just being an asshole. It’s the whole… The car accident, did I tell you?”
“No.” Not in any detail beyond the fact that it had happened.
“It was right after Anna’s wedding. Me and one of the groomsmen, on the way back from the reception.
We got rear-ended by a coupe on the 101.
Three years ago now.” May was looking at the table.
His thumb traced the rim of his cup in slow circles.
“I guess she thinks it’s her fault, and he’s just kinda awkward about it. ”
Three years. May had been twenty-two. Anna’s hand on his arm at the dinner, the way she hovered. The worry reminded Cassiel of his mother.
“She planned the whole thing,” May said. “Venue up in Sonoma. Drove us all up. The driver ran a red on the way back. I was in the back seat. I don’t remember the actual… impact. Just krshshsh like the world exploding and then the hospital.”
He turned the cup in his hands. “Lou saw. Which is fucked up. He was in high school. Wouldn’t tell me what it looked like. —The guy I was with got it a lot worse, but he’s walking now. So.”
May exhaled.
“…I didn’t tell you that?”
“No,” Cassiel said. He hadn’t asked. Hadn’t needed to, really, just filled out the details from the words car crash and assumed the rest back when that had seemed like enough to figure out what May was.
May’s index finger traced circles on the rim of the cup until it was clean of condensation and Cassiel kept watching until he couldn’t keep watching.
“Cassiel.” The voice was soft.
“Hm?”
“Are we still together?”
Cassiel’s thumb went to his ring and remembered again that nothing was there. He had had six days to get used to the absence and was not used to it. He had longer to get used to whatever this was between them and that was worse.
“I… think so,” he said.
“Oh,” May replied, blinking rapidly. He gave a twitchy smile and nodded, cleared his throat.
His hair was falling forward on one side.
It was above his collar—Cassiel’s collar—and mussed, curly, tucked behind one ear and falling loose on the other despite the hack job.
Cassiel reached across the table to try and brush the loose curl behind May’s ear, but it wasn’t long enough. The hair bounced back.
This left his hand at May’s temple and May’s eyes dropped to it. Cassiel let his hand fall away.
“You kept saying it was too long,” May said. “So… I cut it.”
“It’s not an improvement,” Cassiel told him, earning a laugh that unsettled the pasta in his stomach. He looked down at his drink. “The chocolate mint at Sparrow is better.”
“Yeah?” May grinned. “I was there on Thursday.”
“Why?”
May shrugged. “Just… my alarm went off and I thought, ‘Fuck it. What else am I doing?’”
“Do you want to go?” Cassiel ventured. “Next Thursday.”
“Mm, maybe.”
“Your brother said ‘maybe’ is your ‘no.’”
“It’s a maybe.” May rolled his eyes, grabbed for the chocolate mint, and Cassiel allowed it, allowed May to stab his own straw into it and take a slurp, mixing the taro residue into his drink, an act that once would have been inexcusable. “—It’s pretty good? I mean, for choco mint.”
“And what’s wrong with choco mint.”
“I don’t think we can go down that route, Cassiel. I don’t think this survives that debate.”
Cassiel took his drink back.