Chapter 8 #2
I retie my apron twice before I go out. I don't know why. It doesn’t need retying. I’m not even really working. My hands just need something to do while my brain scrapes up the motivation to walk across the shop and sit down across from him.
He watches me cross the room. Doesn’t look away, doesn’t do the polite thing of finding something else to focus on while I approach.
(Because he’s not polite.) He just watches, and when I pull out the chair across from him and sit down, he looks at me focused because he’s already thought through this conversation and knows how he intends for it to go.
(Which makes one of us.) I’ll just wait for him to tell me ‘how inappropriate it was to turn up last night, that there’s nothing he can do, and he wouldn’t if he could, that he’s filed a complaint with the building and I’m being evicted.
’ (Okay, that last one might actually be a stretch.)
“You’re here on a Sunday,” I say, because it is the most neutral available observation.
And better than talking about anything I cried about last night.
Mostly because I don’t want to cry again now.
Despite his more casual attire, it looks like he has been awake for a while, like he has been working for a while.
Monday through Thursday I know his routine, first because he is here, and at night because I can hear.
But today? I didn’t even know people like him existed on a weekend.
“So?” he responds. Genuinely dry, like it’s the dumbest question I could have asked. Back to the tone of all our other interactions.
“You’re never here on Fridays or the weekend,” I say, while picking the chipped polish off my thumb nail.
Bright blue I did this morning, but by the time I walk home tonight it will be gone and I can layer something else over it like a makeshift tie-dye.
“Saturday and Sunday, makes sense, because you aren’t a ‘weekend guy’ but where do you go on a Friday… ”
“I’m aware of my own schedule, Louisa.” The espresso machine hisses somewhere behind me, and it sounds like it could be hissing my name like he is. Chandler and Toby are definitely watching this for different reasons from different hiding spots behind the counter, both with a good view.
“I called someone last night,” he says, and the shift in his tone is subtle but immediate.
“A date? An escort?!”
“A friend,” he corrects, not taking the bait of my desperate distraction of any mention of last night.
At some point between me leaving his apartment and now, while I was sitting on my living room floor opening every letter that looked important and then lying awake staring at my ceiling rehearsing catastrophes, he was on the phone with people.
For me. Because he said he would and apparently he is, among other things, a man who does exactly what he says.
“He and I spent this morning on the phone with an immigration attorney he knows.” Hudson continues.
“He handles situations like this one.” His voice is low and measured, preparing to deliver information that matters as I feel my stomach sink into a part of my body I didn’t know it could inhabit because of news that’s only been half-received.
Waiting for the other shoe to drop. In this case, expecting the shoe to be thrown at my face (or maybe eaten by an elevator) with ‘There’s nothing I can do.
Pack your bags and never contact me again. ’
“And…” I say carefully. Both because of the rest of the sentence and the person delivering it.
“Your options are severely limited.” It’s said without apology, no sympathetic preamble or cushion to absorb the blow, because he is not a man who delivers difficult news softened into something more palatable, especially for me. My feelings would be hurt if he wasn’t so consistent.
“But there are options?” I say it as a question. “The word options implies, well, options.” (Not just a ‘See ya, Lou-ser!’ that I’m expecting.)
“You can leave voluntarily and accept a multi-year bar. You can stay and get caught.” My face pinches with each ‘option’ he presents.
“An employer can sponsor you, but given your employment situation, you’re not considered exemplary by the relevant definitions,” he says so cleanly, no editorializing.
The facts in a line, I can imagine him for a moment in a courtroom laying out information just like this. Undeniable.
Not considered exemplary is perhaps the meanest way to phrase it I could have imagined.
But neither the bureaucracy nor my brooding neighbor care about feelings.
I’ve heard it my whole life from teachers, coaches for sports I never was good at (obviously), and of course, my parents.
I know that’s not what Hudson means, but it doesn't make the idea of ‘unexemplary’ sting any less.
Maybe I’m not exemplary in the ways my dad was, the way that had us all moved here for his career.
Or the way Theo is on a rugby pitch, truly being fawned over by hoards of people.
Maybe that’s why I like to perform privately behind the sanctuary of a closet door and only involve myself in other’s lives when invited through their headphones.
Because they never really know it’s me. And even still, I am not exemplary, whoever I’m portraying is.
Maybe the United States government is right, I don’t have anything to offer this country or anyone in it.
It’s a terrible thought, even worse as it becomes the thing I feel undeniably, that the place I have called home longer than anywhere else, where I got my first period, had my first kiss, my first job (and maybe last) could have deemed me unworthy of my life here because I am not ‘exemplary’ by a standard defined by some legal code for capitalism.
“So…” I drag out, doubtful of what he could have to offer. I try to jump to the end, the way I always do, before someone else can hand it to me. “I should start packing.”
He shakes his head, slowly, just once. Cautiously deciding how and when to deliver what will clearly be a knockout punch.
“There is an option.”
Singular.
He picks up his coffee, takes a sip, sets it down like he needed it to prepare for what comes next. Something is happening in his expression, not discomfort exactly, but a careful arrangement that suggests this next part is being handled with more deliberation than anything he’s said to me before.
“What exactly are you proposing?” My hands come up to cover my face, trying to limit the embarrassment of him watching me fall apart twice in the last twelve hours. I don’t need him to be the audience for this misery, and I don’t need the criticism for it.
His hands close around my wrists, not quickly in a way of reprimand, but slowly as one brushes hair from someone’s face.
(I really read a lot of romance novels.) His fingers wrap around my wrists, and I’m reminded how large they are.
He draws my hands down with the same firmness I felt from him last night.
The message in the movement is clear, that he has decided I can’t hide, and he will sit here as long as I need to accept that truth.