Chapter 8
Nothing goes according to plan.
I was going to gently kick Ellis out the next morning, with the grace of a seasoned lover, then go about my usual Sunday-morning routine: coffee (drip, healthy heaping of half-and-half, no sugar) and breakfast (scrambled eggs with chives and a slice of sourdough) by nine a.m.; yoga on the deck; laundry and a deep clean of the kitchen and bathroom before lunch.
All while thinking back fondly on my hot one-night stand with a twenty-eight-year-old.
But I didn’t know we’d reach for each other in the middle of the night, that he’d have me gasping on my back more than once in the early hours of the morning.
That, at the crack of dawn, feeling him curled up behind me, we’d move together in a dreamlike state, until both of us were exhausted and passed out.
It’s been a while since I’ve slept with someone, so I want to chalk up this obsessive state to neglect. But a voice in the back of my head is telling me that this is good. That this level of good has maybe never happened to me before.
When we actually wake up, it’s almost noon. And we only get up because Betty is literally screaming at us from the other side of the closed bedroom door.
“Oh, shit.” I scramble into a sitting position, the light unnaturally bright in my room. “I have to feed Betty.” It’s been years since I’ve overslept this hard. I didn’t even know my body was physically capable of it.
But I’m gently pushed back down. I’m about to protest, like, I really need a sex break, my guy. But he just presses his lips to my forehead and gets up from bed, pulling on his crisp cotton boxer shorts. “Where’s her food?”
He proceeds to feed my horrible bird, then makes coffee in the kitchen as I stretch out under my soft comforter, my body a giant relaxed noodle.
I’ll take the coffee, then politely nudge him out.
The coffee arrives in a hand-thrown mug, a speckled brown and white one with an enormous and uncomfortable handle. A souvenir from Marcella’s ceramics phase. I take it from Ellis with a grateful smile. “Mm, thank you.”
He places the half-and-half and sugar bowl on my nightstand. “Not sure how you like it, so brought the usual suspects.”
“Thanks,” I say, pouring some cream into the mug, then peer at him over my cup.
This guy looks great in the morning. His hair is tousled, shirtless in white boxers.
Who even wears white undies? Risky as hell.
His cheek has a red crease, and I reach out to touch it without thinking.
He leans into it and something tugs low in my ribs. I try and ignore it.
“Your house is a real house,” he says as he stretches with zero self-consciousness and I tear my eyes away from the delicious sight. “You have an espresso machine and a wine fridge. What else is lurking in your bespoke cabinetry—cloth napkins?”
His tone is teasing but not mocking and I smile. “I might even have scissors specifically for cutting poultry.”
His eyes roll back in bliss, and I laugh. Suddenly, Betty swoops in. “Hey!” I yelp. “How’d you get out?”
Ellis looks sheepish. “Um, I let her out. She looked so sad when I pet her.”
“Don’t let her fool you,” I say. Then pause. “Wait, she let you touch her?”
“Yeah.” He looks at her fondly as she lands on my dresser, preening in front of my mirror.
I look at her, at how comfortable she is around a new person. “That is very strange. She never lets anyone but me touch her. Many a friend has left here with broken skin.”
Her feathers fluff up in pride. Ellis looks surprised. “Really? She let me hold her, too.”
“What?” I am quite literally shook. “That’s…she barely tolerates my touch.”
“What can I say? The birds love me,” he says, joking.
But I assess him. Something about him brightens up every space he’s in. My room feels different with him in it. Betty is certainly basking in it. And try as I might, I can’t quite kick him out.
So we end up spending the day together. Even though it’s legit afternoon by the time we get out of bed, we make eggs and eat them on the deck, the afternoon sun feeling good.
He marvels at the views of the canyon, the comfort of my red loungers.
When a hawk flies overhead, his jaw drops.
“It’s fucking incredible that you found this house. ”
I think about people his age and how impossible it is to buy a house in Los Angeles proper unless you are obscenely wealthy. My house is modest, but it’s special. “I didn’t actually find this house. I grew up in it.”
He looks at me in surprise, one of my baseball caps shielding his eyes from the sun. “Really?”
“Yeah, with my mom.” I realize that it’s impossible not to talk about the big things when someone’s in your home and very curious about everything about you.
He’s worn me down, this one. The food coma and sun conspire to make me talk too much.
“Well, I kind of grew up here. She died when I was eight, and so I had to live with my grandparents after that. But they kept the house and saved it for me so I could decide whether to keep it or sell it once I was an adult. I kept it.”
I don’t look at him, but I can feel him looking at me. He’s quiet for a moment. Then his hand reaches over and squeezes mine. “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you,” I say. And even though I’m used to people’s sympathy and I’ve had decades of training for it, Ellis’s gesture still touches me.
That tug in my ribs is pulled tighter. “Maybe it’s weird to live in the house that you grew up in with your dead mom, but it’s also my strongest connection to her.
” I point to the hillside full of blossoming shrubs.
“Those plants, for example—her favorite.”
His eyes get wide. “Oh. I get it—that’s why you’re named Cassia.”
“What?” I look at him in confusion.
“That plant, it’s called Feathery Cassia.”
I look at the yellow flowers, my throat feeling tight. “Really?”
“Yeah. What a cool name for you.”
My eyes catch his and we smile at each other. I feel the tug in my ribs again and try to distract myself from the feeling. “What are your professional thoughts on my very remedial gardening skills?”
He looks at the various potted plants I have on the deck—some olive trees, bougainvillea, and tomatoes. There’s a seed tray of geraniums waiting to be put into a bed. “It looks great. Very, uh, color coordinated?”
I laugh. “Listen, I have systems.”
“I can tell. You had your records organized alphabetically. Which I noticed because you have them shelved with labeled dividers like a very normal person.”
“Thank you,” I say with a sniff.
I find him gazing at the geraniums. “Why don’t we plant those today?”
“What?” I ask. “Oh, no. I don’t have the right soil and the ones that haven’t bloomed yet—I forget what color they’re going to be so I don’t know where they go.”
Ellis stares at me.
“What?”
“Get up, we’re doing this.” He stands and holds his hands out to me so I’ll take them. “We don’t need fancy soil and it’ll be fun for the blossom colors to be a surprise.”
“Um, I don’t know…”
He takes my hands and pulls me to my feet. “Listen to the professional.” I grumble but follow him over to the plants, where my gardening supplies are laid out. He tosses me some gloves but doesn’t wear any himself. When he pushes his bare hands into the dirt in my bed, I gasp. “But your hands!”
“Cass, god made dirt so dirt don’t hurt.”
I laugh. “Wow, haven’t heard that one in a while.”
He loosens up the dirt throughout the bed, the baseball cap pushed low on his forehead.
“Nothing feels better than this to me.” It’s weirdly sensual the way he is touching the soil, and I clear my throat and grab a cobrahead to help him loosen up some of the roots that have managed to stay in the bed.
After we do that, he has me take out the geraniums and place them where I want them on the bed. “And remember, they don’t have to be tidy rows. Just try to have them spaced out evenly.” He’s very confident as he orders me around, but it’s not annoying somehow.
When we’re done, we stand and look at our handiwork, sweaty and a little out of breath. He has dirt smudged across his forehead and up his arms. That was a lot of geraniums. “Now, you just need to water these every few days and watch them thrive.”
“Even in this old soil?”
He shrugs. “If they look like they’re struggling, we can add some compost and stuff.
” The “we” isn’t lost on me, and I wonder, just for a second, if there will be another time when he’s over again.
After that manual labor, I’m starving. So, dusting off my old spare bike for Ellis, we ride down to a taco truck at the bottom of my hill.
Then the tacos make us want beer, so we swing by a liquor store and grab a frosty six-pack of Modelos and crack them open on my front porch.
We talk about his childhood growing up in Queens, his older sister who used to beat up kids who looked at him funny.
She’s now a personal trainer with a wife and three kids.
“Ah, that explains it,” I say when he talks about her.
“Explains what?”
“You have little-brother-of-a-sister energy.”
He laughs. “Okay.”
“It’s a compliment. They are the best guys to date,” I say with a grin.
“Date?”
“You know what I mean,” I say with an eye roll.
He shows me photos of his nieces and nephew, and I genuinely look at each one with interest. They have his amber-flecked eyes and sweet expressions.
And, in a moment of complete surprise, I see a future for him with his own children, and I know he’ll be a wonderful dad.
I can’t tell if this is a face-reading thing or just an intuition thing.
Either way, I am spooked by it and change the subject to his pet turtle who enjoyed swimming in the toilet.
In turn, I talk to him about my grandmother, Sunny, and Emoni.
He wants to know everything about them and then admits to me, “I might be a little obsessed with old Asian people.” I find out his Chinese grandparents died before he was born, and he’s always had this idea of an extended family that would nourish his Chinese roots.
He’s envious that I had this matriarchal force my entire life, that my Koreanness is woven into me naturally.
That I keep a rice cooker on my counter all the time, that I can understand Korean fluently even if I speak it like a toddler.
As the afternoon sun grows low in the sky and the bougainvillea starts to turn golden in its light, he sets me on top of the kitchen counter and reaches under my linen dress.
He gets down on his knees, and I feel the breeze kick in through the open windows as I press back against the vintage cornflower-blue tiles and close my eyes.
Which means that it’s impossible, yet again, to kick him to the curb.
This is my birthday treat, I tell myself.
This is what turning forty deserves. When it turns dark, I turn on the firepit on the deck and we sit in a chair together, me in his lap with a giant blanket wrapped around us.
I’ve made us martinis with thinly sliced lemon peels curled into them, the glasses frosty and beading by the fire.
We inevitably start kissing, under the stars with an owl hooting from a treetop deep in the canyon.
The cold air feels like a baptism on my skin, the surface of my body intensely hot. I welcome it.