Thirty-two
Liem
How am I supposed to not fall in love with Bri when she makes me feel like this? I fear I may be on my way down already.
Our second wind hit us hard after dinner.
It’s two in the morning, and we’re still going at it, getting a month’s worth of connectedness in one night.
Raw, spooning her, stroking it right where she wants me, listening to her cries of pleasure each time I do.
Every flinch, every breath captivates me.
The gape of her lips when I’m in the right spot, catching her lip between her teeth when the pressure builds, one hand fisting the sheets, the other holding my hip.
Not guiding me, just reciprocal touch. She’s a sopping wet mess, as she always is.
I’m happily drowning while watching her float in the blissful waters.
Her legs tighten, but her cries remain the same. She needs more.
My fingers interlace with hers while my other hand slips between her legs. I kiss her neck, cheek, lips, easing her into the orgasm that is about to shatter her.
She clenches so hard I slip out, plenty of wetness exiting right along with me.
I watch the magic before pushing back in and letting her grip onto me while she rides the orgasm.
While the sight and sounds are almost enough to make me lose it too, her body brings me over the edge.
I moan while my passion floods out of me and into her, the overfill falling onto the sheets, ruining them in the best way.
We pant in the quiet of the room. Now, I’m spent. Drying her off with the towel I laid down is as hard as sprinting a second after waking from a nap.
Still high on oxytocin, I can’t keep the words from spilling from my lips onto the delicious skin of her neck. “I love you so much.” I go still, wishing I could grab the words from the air and shove them back down my throat.
She reaches behind me, scratching her fingers against my head. “Why did you say it like that?”
“Because I love you. But I’m not in love with you.” I think. “But I really, really love you.”
We’ve been avoiding this conversation all night. “Is that the reason you want to move?”
“It’s a lot of reasons.”
“Like what?”
Like I’m miserable when I’m away from you.
Like I’m only surviving between phone calls.
Like If every job is going to be this way, why not take one where I can at least come home to you?
“I might lose my job soon anyway, my mom is gone most of the time, my dad still won’t talk to me but wants my money, and you’re . . .”
She cocks her head to the side. “I’m not there?”
“Yeah.”
“And all of that makes you want to move to a new state?”
“Why not? It worked in Brooklyn.”
Her gaze falls from mine. and she rolls away. “Does that sound familiar at all?” I don’t respond, confused. “You’ve never given up your job and moved to a new state to be closer to someone you love?”
Fuck. She thinks I’m repeating history, giving up everything as a grand gesture of love when all I want is to be close to her. “It’s not like that.”
“Isn’t it, though? You act like you’ve already made up your mind, and it doesn’t matter what I say.
Like you don’t care that I’ve asked you to wait.
” Her tone is borderline frantic. She drops her head back with a sigh.
“My goals matter to me. Yours should matter to you too. You told me not to let you repeat the mistakes you made with Natalie. And what did you do with her?”
Hearing her name makes me tense with discomfort. “I gave everything up to go be with her when she never wanted me.” I couldn’t see what was happening while it was happening. Bri is the one who made me see it. “This is different.”
“You want to uproot your life to move closer to me when we aren’t in a relationship, and when I never asked you to do so. How is that different?”
Why does my chest hurt so much right now? I am terrified of losing our connection in all of its forms. If we stopped having sex, I would miss it, but I would be okay. If I stopped getting to see her, it would fucking wreck me.
I ask my biggest fear. “Are you saying you don’t want me here?”
“That’s not what I meant.” Her expression softens, and she touches my face again, driving in her words of comfort. “I don’t want you to shrink yourself to fit in my life because I can’t grow enough to be part of yours. Not wanting you to repeat the past is me caring about you.”
“I know it is. But there was so much more that confused me before I made the decision to go to New York. This is not the same situation. At all.”
“Explain, please.”
I squirm, the painful memories palpable against my skin. I can tell Bri anything—I’ve already told her too much tonight—but this . . .
This one hurts.
“Real talk?” I ask.
“Real talk.”
“The reason I thought Natalie and I were committed wasn’t because of my sex-love intimacy confusion shit. It was because . . .” The words don’t want to come out of my mouth. I have to take a deep breath to loosen the grip in my chest and let them through. “I got her pregnant.”
Bri’s eyes widen for a split second before she turns down the volume of her face. “Oh.”
“She didn’t tell me at first. She ghosted me for a few weeks, and when I confronted her, she told me. But . . .” If the beginning of the story was painful to tell, the ending is excruciating. “She lost it right after.”
“Shit. I’m sorry. For you and her.”
“I completely understood her hesitation to tell me since we were only, like, six months into whatever our relationship was . . . but it was a hard situation to go through.”
“I’m sorry, babe. Is that something you wanted? To have a baby with her?”
There wasn’t time for me to consider that when I found out, so I didn’t. “I don’t know.”
“Are you sure?” she asks. “When you think about it, do you feel more disappointed or relieved?”
“Neither. It hurts. That’s all.” Admitting that is a relief.
Bri runs her hand over my head over and over as if she wants the emotional release for me as much as I do.
“That’s why I thought she wanted a future.
She wanted to have a baby with me. Then I wanted what she wanted because I thought that meant she wanted me. ”
Bri presses a kiss to my forehead. I close my eyes, focusing on her lips rather than my urge to cry over a past I can’t change—hating that I ever put Natalie in that position and made her go through that pain.
“You’ve grown so much since I met you,” Bri says.
“I have?”
“Yes. Do you remember the day I got your suitcase back? How desperate you were to get an explanation from her? And now here you are, able to identify how you felt and how that affected your decisions.”
She’s right. She always is. And I hate it.
“I want to see you more often too, but I don’t want you to confuse the relationship we have or force it into something it can’t be.” Bri loops her arm under mine, moving us to lie chest-to-chest. “Your friendship is everything to me. So is gaining my independence. I can’t lose either.”
“You won’t.” I hug her back, only so she can’t see my face when I lie to her. “This is different from last time.”
~
The next day, Bri’s shift overlaps my flight time, and I can’t defend a five-hour wait at the gate. She’ll go to work, and I’ll stew in my feelings for two hours before I leave.
She’s showered, dressed, and ready to leave me. “I wish I could take you to the airport.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I say. “I’ll be fine.”
She hugs me tight, her head on my chest beneath my chin. “We’ll make it through the holiday, then I’ll see you on my birthday, right?” She can’t stop the tears from reaching her voice.
You could let me stay. You could let me give you time for your dreams to come true. But you won’t.
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” I say, not convinced I’ll survive that long without her. “No idea what to get you, though, since you’re going to have a new job that you love, that cute green apartment, and a new cat.”
“I’ll always accept cake.” She laughs through her tears, then kisses my cheek, driving in the knife. “See you soon, Hoodie. Love you.”
I can’t let myself say the words before she runs off, leaving me to bleed confusion from a wound we both caused.
~
I have barely any time to recover before having to go back to Tacoma and see my family.
Thanksgiving shouldn’t even be a holiday, let alone a requirement to spend time with people you don’t want to see.
The whole point was supposed to be about bringing people together for a day and giving them a chance to remember what matters most, but all I’m thankful for right now is the wine I brought to the function.
Mom is back in town to help with the restaurant during the takeout rush, then she is going right back.
She should be here for Christmas, then May and I will go with her to be with Grandma for two weeks around Tét.
In the meantime, my only blip of joy will be when Bri lets me go see her for her birthday.
After our last conversation, I’m not sure she’ll see our visits as time together rather than an attempted repeat of Brooklyn.
Leaving felt wrong. I don’t like how our last visit ended. I don’t like how we disagreed about my intentions. I don’t like that I didn’t get to kiss her before I left. It’s eating me up inside.
At least the wine is good. I lost track of what glass I’m on, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I polished off most of the bottle by myself. I don’t have to drive, so who gives a fuck? Being around my dad, surrounded by my nonchalant mother and sister, makes my skin crawl.
I’ve set aside my feelings for so long I believed they didn’t matter. My issues stem from my abandonment, the feeling that my dad never cared enough to be in my life. Only when I followed someone else and fed off their happiness did I feel comfortable in my own world. But that wasn’t my world.
I don’t want to be with Bri because I want her love.
I want to be with Bri because I love her.
She wants me to decide who gets to be around me, to choose who gets to be my family.
Choosing to be with her is what she has been telling me to do this whole time.
I know what I’m doing. She’s the one who needs to catch up.
“The restaurant is short this month.” My mother’s leading sentence pulls me back into the conversation. She places a hand on my forearm. “Can you help us cover the utilities for November?”
“No,” I say. All three of their heads swivel in my direction. Oh, I said that out loud? “We’re in the middle of layoffs at work. I got a big pay cut,” I explain. “And I don’t want to.”
“Liem,” my mother scolds. “We need a little help.”
“I don’t want the restaurant to fail either, Mom, but I can’t swing it anymore. It’s your restaurant and I’m not a bank.”
“It’s nothing for you,” my dad says quietly.
I stare him down, waiting for him to look me in the eye when I know he won’t.
“Nothing” is thousands of dollars. The real nothing is the relationship I have with him.
“It’s a lot for me, actually. And a lot more than you deserve.”
Finally, he looks at me, confusion stitched across his face. I’m drunk, bothered, and set on proving I’m in control of my life’s narrative. We’re doing this.
“We’re family by technicality at this point, Dad,” I say. “You left, then when you came back, you never tried to make amends, you only asked for money. I grew up without you. I went to school and fell in love for the first time without you. Do you even care?”
“Of course he cares,” my mom says.
“Then let him say it.”
Dad stares at me, the hint of some emotion displayed in a quick frown and the twitch of a furrow in his brow. “I care.”
“About what?”
“You and May. I’ve apologized for what I did.”
“To whom?” I challenge him.
His eyes shift back and forth between mine as if trying to read the script of what I expect him to say. As always, he has nothing.
My mom places her hand on my arm. “Liem, this really isn’t the best time.”
“Then when is? It’s been five years.”
“Let him talk, Mom,” May backs me up.
“You came back. I get it. You should have spent every day apologizing to May for not accepting her, for making her feel like there was something wrong with her. But I needed my dad too.”
Dad doesn’t say anything. His eyes are cast down, mouth tilted into a frown; for the first time in a long time, he seems to be listening. Maybe he hears me now.
“I don’t need anything from you anymore, Dad. I really don’t. So stop expecting anything from me.”
The silence that follows is awkward to say the least. I tip my glass back, draining the rest.
Finally, May breaks the silence. “So, is there any cobbler?”
Mom and Dad exchange a look then leave the table together to fetch it.
May squeezes my arm, giving me a proud smirk. “Did that feel good?”
“Yeah. It kind of did.”
She shares my shit-eating grin for a moment, letting me bask in the catharsis of speaking up for myself and setting a boundary. Then I bask in the reality that I just told off my dad in front of my mom.
“We should probably go, though, right?” she asks.
I push away from the table to stand. “Yeah, we should.”
We run out of the house, jumping into May’s car. On the way back to the city, I start a text to Bri and hesitate. I’m not sure where our boundaries lie anymore.
“Not to get mushy or anything,” May says, “but I like the new you.”
I do too. And I have less than a month to show that to Bri.