Chapter 8 #2
He did not answer. He looked at the wet of the sidewalk between his shoes. He looked at the back of his right hand, the knuckles split clean. He looked at the awning. He looked anywhere I was not.
"You still have someone following me."
He did not answer.
"We talked about this. You told me you understood. You told me you would stop."
"I am sorry."
He moved to take my hand. I stepped back. One full step. His hand stayed in the air the length of a breath. He brought it down to his side.
"This is not healthy. You are not thinking. I cannot have the people I love getting hit because I'm the one in the room. I will not."
"I will change. Tell me what to do and I will do it. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
Both his hands went to the sides of his head for a second and dropped.
He looked ten years older than he had looked when he had come through the door of the restaurant.
The split on his knuckles had a thin line of blood at the corner and the rain was doing nothing to it. His coat was soaked at the shoulders.
"I don't want to talk to you right now."
"Chloe..."
"Don't follow me. If your man so much as walks me to my door, I call the police. Do you hear me?"
He nodded once. He did not trust his voice.
I turned. I wiped the heel of my hand under one eye and then the other before I let myself push the door of the restaurant open.
The bell tapped. The room was not staring.
The room was looking at its own bowls on purpose, the way a room of people who have been somewhere themselves will look at its own bowls.
The owner was already at the booth by the window with the first aid kit open on the table.
I made my mouth move in Korean.
"Gomawoyo. Joesonghaeyo."
He shook his head once. He told me in Korean to take care of my cousin. He brought back a clean cloth from behind the counter with ice wrapped inside it and set it on the table at my elbow and went back to the front without a sound.
Jacob sat up against the back of the booth.
The cut at the inside of his lip had stopped.
The bruise rising at his cheekbone was already going purple at the shape of a thumb.
His eye was clear. He watched my face come down the aisle the way he had watched my face come up a sidewalk on a small purple bike a hundred years ago.
I sat across from him. I took an antiseptic wipe out of the kit.
I tore the foil. I leaned across the table and held his chin between two fingers and cleaned the corner of his mouth in short careful strokes.
He did not flinch. He let me work. I lifted the cloth of ice to the bruise at his jaw and held it there until his hand came up under mine to take it, and then I took a small adhesive bandage out of the kit and peeled the back and pressed it over the place at his lip where the skin had broken.
He watched me through it.
"So. You love him?"
I did not look up from the bandage.
"Yeah. I do."
"Even after that."
"I hate what he did. I love him."
"You're going to forgive him?"
"I already have. That's the part that scares me."
He made a soft sound at the back of his throat, half a laugh, half a breath.
"If you didn't love him you'd be calling the cops and a locksmith. You wouldn't be putting Neosporin on me."
"He has to think about what he did. He has to sit with it."
"He will." He looked at me. "He looked like he was already sitting in it on the way out the door."
He pushed the bowl of rice an inch toward my hand. He picked up a strip of bulgogi off the grill and laid it on a lettuce leaf and set the leaf at the edge of my plate without making a thing of it. He waited until I had eaten the bite before he said the next sentence.
"The last boy you brought home in eighth grade was the one who could not look at you without his eyes finding the floor."
"Andrew."
"Andrew. Whose mother cut his hair with a bowl."
"You're being mean."
"I'm being honest. Look at the upgrade."
I felt the smile come up at the corner of my mouth before I had decided to let it.
"He's not an upgrade right now."
"Talk to him tomorrow. Not tonight. Not in this. You both need to come to it without the heat in your hands. Promise me you'll wait."
"I promise."
He gave me the small smile he had been giving me since he was ten. One corner up. The chip in his tooth showing through.
He paid at the front. The owner waved off a tip and Jacob slid one onto the counter anyway because he had been raised by my mother's sister. I helped him into the wool overcoat. I held the door.
The rain had gone light. The street outside was the kind of wet that beaded on the wool of his coat and sat there without soaking through.
I walked him to the corner. I lifted my arm at the first cab that came down the avenue.
The cab pulled to the curb. He took my hand at the door and squeezed once, the way he had squeezed at the airport the morning he had flown out, and he ducked into the cab and the cab pulled away from the curb and went down the avenue toward the bridge.
I watched the brake lights until the brake lights turned.
I walked three blocks to the bus.
I sat by the window. The bus pulled away from the curb.
I watched a city slide past the glass I was not really seeing, a man at a hot dog cart, a woman in a wool hat at a phone, a boy on a skateboard at a light.
My phone was in my pocket. It did not buzz.
He was doing what I had told him to do. The pouch was in my coat pocket against my hip, and the small gold bar inside the pouch was warming to the heat of me.