Five
Liem
The next morning, Bri still looks down, but she hides it well beneath her usual sunny disposition. It doesn’t take much convincing for her to get a massage from the hotel spa on her piece-of-shit ex’s dime. While she’s gone, I move forward with my plan.
“Liem, my buddy!” Sai answers with his usual glee. His light accent always comes through when he is at ease. “How is life as an engaged man? Do you need a reference for your fancy New York job?”
Of course he would start by giving me shit. He never wanted me to leave, but he is a hopeless romantic at heart. “Hi, Sai. I messed up.”
“What’s wrong, my buddy?” he asks. I can hear the enjoyment in his tone.
“I have to come home, and I was wondering if you’d let me have my job back.”
His pause is rife with surprise. “You want to come back?”
“I never wanted to quit, Sai. But my plan didn’t work out. Nat said no.”
“She said no?”
“She broke it off before I could even ask. Now I’m stuck here on my own with no partner, no job, no place to live, no—”
“Yes.” He stops me from spiraling.
“Really?”
“I would love to hear you grovel more if you want, but yes, of course you can have your job back.”
“Are you serious?”
“You are my best and most favorite employee. You know that.” I do. He makes that glaringly obvious, to the chagrin of everyone else on our team. “If I’m being honest, I haven’t submitted your resignation paperwork yet.”
“You haven’t?” Relief washes over me like a hot shower after a long day. Unrecognized tension leaves my muscles. “Thank you so much.”
“When will you be back?”
I hesitate to say more, but I won’t give up on helping Bri. “That’s the thing. I need to ask you for another favor.”
“Tell me.”
“Would it be possible for me to start back next Monday?” A few more days would let me stay with Bri until she goes back to LA.
Bare minimum, I can keep her company until she leaves the hotel.
Either way, it would give me time to pay her back for all the help she has given me.
“There’s something I need to do before I leave. ”
Sai hums as he considers it. “I suppose you could waste all your vacation time, or . . . you could work remotely from New York. You’re still on payroll, and your benefits are intact, including your housing stipend. Stay for a month.”
A month? That’s much longer than I planned. This is an unexpected variable thrown into an equation I was about to solve. “Seriously?”
“I’m the best, I know. Express your appreciation of my generosity in the form of securing the FBC account.
” A venture capital firm in Manhattan he’s been trying to get since January.
I can never remember the names that create their acronym, so in my mind, I call them Finance Bros Corp.
Don’t tell them. “Do what you do best and close it so we can beat Dickerson’s revenue this month. ”
Sai’s archrival on the racquetball court and head of the cybersecurity solutions team.
Our departments are always in some invisible competition over profits.
Sai divulges too much to me, which is how I know their competition has nothing to do with end-of-year bonuses or profit shares.
Sai hates him, as he should. Dickerson is literally a dick.
“Stay there for the month, land the account, and talk to Natalie,” Sai says. “You can still convince her to come back to you if you try hard enough. It worked for me.”
That’s not what I want to hear. I finally started to believe there is a world where I can exist without her and be happy.
Reopening that door would . . . I’m not sure what it would do.
It’s farfetched to think I could ever convince the notoriously decisive Natalie to change her mind.
And knowing me, I’d still try. Unless Bri is here to stop me. I would need her to stop me.
And there it is, standing right in front of me. The perfect excuse to let me help Bri. Make her think she is helping me.
“Deal,” I agree. “I’ll be back on our morning calls on Wednesday?”
“Perfect. Hey, Liem.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m glad you’re back.”
Deep down, I am too, but not for the reason he thinks.
Not a minute later, the door swings open and Bri walks in, almost catching me in the act. Her face bears a grin and a glassy sheen. It takes me a moment to figure out her hair isn’t pulled back, it’s down. And different.
“Hey,” she says when she sees me. “Ignore my face. I’m pretty sure I have a snail’s shit on me. It feels amazing.”
“You changed your hair,” I say, wondering why she’s burying the lede.
“Yeah. You inspired me.” She turns around and brushes her fingers over her new bangs.
The rest falls like a lion’s mane, framing her face in tight, defined curls.
She must have chopped off inches. “They had a stylist downstairs who looked as young as you, and I told her to do whatever she thought was best. Do you like it?”
Her haircut brings out the best of the features she must have been hiding before. Her button nose, dramatic full lips, big eyes, the pretty angle of her jaw and the line of her elegant neck. How have I not noticed that Bri is beautiful? Maybe the breakup is starting to look good on her.
“I love it,” I say, holding back the details of how much. “It looks great. Seriously.”
“Thank you,” she sings, still turning side to side to give me angles. “Maybe I’ll start wearing a hoodie every day and get some cute glasses next.”
Is she talking about me? “I don’t wear a hoodie every . . .” I trail off when I think back and remember I have indeed worn a hoodie every day I’ve known her. “Well, fuck.”
“That wasn’t a dig, babe. I love your style.”
Warmth comes to my face as if she’d just hit on me. I’ve never been called “babe” before or been told my style is anything other than tech nerd remix. Both feel nice.
“Do you still want to come to the museum with me?” She switches subjects like she didn’t just give me one of the biggest compliments of my life. “If I don’t go to the Guggenheim while I’m here, I might actually die.”
Not exactly my vibe, but Bri wants to continue our tourist adventures before we leave. My conversation with Sai could change that. I’m too nervous to bring it up yet.
“Yeah, let’s go.”
~
The museum is one hell of a building. We spent a while outside marveling at the building itself before going to see the art.
We went through three exhibits that almost made sense to me, but now that we’re away from paintings of people and landscapes, I’m completely lost. I don’t function well outside of the logical and literal.
Art seems to be the first interest Bri and I don’t have in common.
She lingers in front of an oversized painting of squiggly lines and stick figures, her eyes drinking it in like words on a page, telling her exactly what it means to say.
“I don’t get modern art,” I admit. “Like, how is a dangling string of lights an artistic feat?”
Her lips tilt into a smirk, and I have a feeling she’s about to read me.
“Contemporary art isn’t meant to be looked at; it’s meant to be felt.
” She loops her arm through mine and pulls me with her.
“The ‘art’ isn’t always the technical prowess of putting it together, it’s a visual depiction of a message. For instance, this one.”
She stops us in front of a wall with two analog clocks side by side. Nothing else, just two clocks, one ticking and one not.
“If you’re seeing it for what it is rather than understanding the expression, it’s two clocks. But when you learn that one clock represents the artist’s partner who was diagnosed with HIV during the AIDS epidemic of the eighties, you might start to see it differently.”
The abstract is abstracting a little too hard for me to decode. “I still don’t get it.”
“The artist wanted the two clocks to be installed side by side, perfectly in sync. While their time was ticking by—the dreaded countdown to when his lover’s life would end—they were together,” she explains.
“Some interpretations say that, eventually, both clocks are destined to stop. Here, his lover’s clock has stopped, while the artist’s is still going, ticking down until it ultimately stops as well, the seconds counting down until they can be in sync again, in death. ”
I watch her eyes swim with thoughts while I hang on her every word. “You get all that from this?”
“Yes,” she says simply. “While one clock is still moving, I like to think that when they read the same time, it’s those moments when grief takes hold of you.
When the loss feels present, no matter how much time has gone by.
For a split second, we remember when they were still with us, and the pain of losing them hits the same as it did then.
Yet we keep going through the motions, day after day. ”
I grip my chest, emotions aching beneath my hand and clouding my vision. “Well, fuck. I get it now.”
“It’s not about the clocks,” she says.
“It’s not about the clocks,” I agree.
She takes me past a few more pieces, but I don’t care to see them. Her mind, her outlook on life, is all I want to decipher.
“How do you know all this? Are you an artist?”
“No, I just love being in museums. I don’t really care what’s in them, I love the way they feel.”
To me, without the art, this place would be a white-walled box. “Explain.”
“When my mom was sick, the hospital was right next to a few museums and galleries. I’d go there when I needed a break from the anxiety. They became my meditation space,” she says. “My dream was to design them, but I never quite got there in school.”
“Why not?”
“Life was life-ing hard during undergrad.”
Somehow, I understand exactly what she means.
Not that I had a life that could have been life-ing in college.
School was a distraction from the life I didn’t have.
I dove headfirst into classes, ended up getting a dual bachelor’s in computer science and business, then got my MBA in tech management.
Being directionless ended up directing me to a very specific career.