With a groan, I reluctantly pressed the button to let Andrew into the building. Best-case scenario, if the elevator was busy, I had three minutes. With a panicked look around my studio which now resembled a clothing store at the end of Black Friday shopping, I grabbed a deep red sweater dress and shimmied into it. It was a little tighter than what I typically wore, and I spent precious seconds debating whether to swap it for a loose sweatshirt. This was just a casual, friendly hangout, right?
The knocking on my door, two feet away from where I was standing, shook me into action. Red sweater dress it is. I would just suck in my breath and eat tiny bites. My discarded clothes flew into my closet, and I slammed the closet door shut.
Deep breath, just a casual hangout. Hand shaking a bit, I pulled the door open. Beyond the takeout bag and bouquet of flowers, I could see Andrew’s eyes light up and his face relax into a smile. Either he was down to his last clean outfit, or he had dressed up for this casual hangout. A light blue button-down peeked out from a gray cashmere sweater over dark jeans. There was no denying it. Andrew Parker had turned out very, very well.
“Can I come in?” he asked, still smiling.
“Yes!” I shouted, before clearing my throat and repeating in a more subdued voice, “Yes, please come in.”
Even though my studio apartment wasn’t huge, I’d always thought it a decent size, with the high ceilings, big windows, especially for Boston’s Back Bay district. It was roomy enough to have a few guests over, with enough space to move around.
However, I didn’t realize until Andrew stepped inside just how close my bed was to everything. With his long legs, the bed was less than ten steps from where he was currently standing in the living room part of my studio. I glanced nervously at my bed, back to him. Was it too late to suggest going out to eat?
Whatever my worries, Andrew didn’t seem to notice. At ease, he took off his shoes and glanced around my apartment before moving into the kitchen to find plates and utensils. The ease with which he navigated my home unsettled me. I liked it too much.
From over his shoulder, he remarked, “I like your place. It feels like you.”
“What does that mean?” Was he implying that I was disorganized? Had bad taste in décor?
“Relax. I meant that it’s warm and inviting.”
“Oh,” I said, my anxiety deflating. Reaching into a cabinet, I grabbed a couple of glasses. “Water or tea okay? I have a bottle of wine somewhere.”
“Water is good,” he replied.
For a few minutes, we focused on eating. Actually, I focused very intently on sucking my stomach in, taking tiny bites, and not looking at Andrew. Since I was definitely not peeking at him, I was only ninety-five percent sure that he was staring amusedly at the top of my head.
I was absurdly nervous. How does one act with your ex-turned-still-husband after you and your fiancé broke up? School hadn’t taught me how to decode this, and Google was not helpful. Also, don’t google “heartsick” and “confused” in the middle of the night, because then you’ll end up going down a rabbit hole thinking you need to call either a cardiologist or neurologist. Or maybe a therapist to talk you out of calling both.
“Tia?” he asked, his gaze tender and soft. “You look beautiful tonight. Actually, yesterday and two weeks ago in Chicago too—I forgot to tell you. I can’t stop thinking about you.”
Whoosh. There went my breath. My eyes locked with his. In that moment, it was just us. No specters of others or the past.
Of course, my big mouth had to ruin that moment with, “I don’t know. I could lose some weight, especially on my butt and legs.”
Incredulity shone in his gray eyes, as he stated firmly, “From my perspective, I can assure you that there are no complaints whatsoever.”
With a little moan of self-consciousness, I plunked my overheated face into my hands. Andrew’s laughter surrounded me, carefree and joyful. If anyone needed to laugh more, it was Mr. Too Serious over there.
Peeking out from behind my hands, I asked, “What are we doing here?”
Pretending ignorance, he answered teasingly, “You live here. I’m eating.”
“How long will you be in Boston?”
“How long do you want me to be here?” Andrew asked.
“Don’t you have a job in Chicago that you need to get back to?” I continued my very serious game of twenty questions.
“It’s flexible. My boss, Quinn, doesn’t care where I am as long as I keep his company out of legal trouble. I only need Internet, and I have my laptop. Besides, one of my colleagues moved to Boston a few years ago for his wife and just travels as needed,” he explained. Red tinted his cheeks, his eyes not quite meeting mine.
“Huh.”
It was a lot to take in. Was he offering to stay in Boston while we figured this out? My head was reeling, and I alternated between excitement to see what might happen between us and horror over how far my life had veered off my safe and predictable path.
The risk-averse part of me trumped. “What about getting a divorce?”
“What’s the urgency? You don’t think there’s something between us that warrants exploring, now that we’re both single of sorts?”
I opened my mouth to say something sarcastic. Then, sighing, I went for the truth. “I do feel something. I’m also terrified. We did a lot of damage to each other before. I’m not sure it’s worth the risk to try again.”
The gray in his eyes dimmed, as he leaned back into his chair and crossed his arms. Immediately, I wanted the easygoing, laughing Andrew back—the man who flirted with me and called me beautiful.
In a flat voice, he said carefully, “We were eighteen and nineteen when we tried before. I’d like to think we have both matured. We don’t have to commit to a lifetime again, but why not use this opportunity to put any second thoughts and questions away? Give me a month where you fully commit to exploring this thing between us, and at the end of the month, I’ll sign whatever you want me to sign—no arguments.”
“A month?” The idea intrigued me. A defined duration was less scary. Maybe I needed to see how badly Andrew and I would end up again, before I could come to my senses. And do what at the end of the period? Tell Clayton that I’m sane again and beg him to take me back? The thought didn’t hold as much appeal as it should have.
“One month—no holding back,” Andrew repeated.
“How about a week?”
“Ten days.”
I nodded. I could do ten days. Two hundred and forty hours. Surely that would be enough to remember all of the issues we had. And short enough to not get my heart broken.
Elbows on his knees, Andrew leaned forward. I could easily see him at a boardroom, wrestling contracts to favor his clients. “I don’t want you to disappear and come back in ten days, saying that you tried. Here’re my terms: I’ll stay in Boston the whole time, and we’ll see each other every day.”
“Every day!” I squawked.
His voice dipped. “We don’t have to be handcuffed to each other all day. But I want to see you every day.”
Before I could linger too much on the thought of handcuffs, I scrambled for reasons to turn this proposition down. My mind immediately found one. “What about Charlie?”
His expression closed as he said through his teeth, “What about Charlie?”
“In Chicago, it sounded like she was still in your life. This is already messy. I don’t want to intrude on anything.”
“I’m not dating her.”
His voice was final. If he went back to her once he signed the divorce papers, it wasn’t my business. Not. My. Business. At. All.
“What do you expect us to do together?” I asked.
“I don’t know. What normal people do—dinners, breakfasts, movies, checking out the city, talking. I’m sure we can come up with some ideas,” Andrew said, shrugging his broad shoulders.
“What about, um, you know …?” I gestured wildly between us and the bed that was too, too close.
&
nbsp; Andrew’s eyes heated even as his voice remained steady. “You mean sex? Do I want to fuck you? Yes.”
At his crude words, my insides liquefied and warmth pooled low in my belly. His deep voice was even lower, his words vibrating in the air around us, creating a cocoon around us.
Voice dropping to a hoarse whisper, Andrew continued, “I’d want you in your bed, on that couch, on the floor, against the walls, in the shower. I want evidence of us all over your home. However, am I expecting it? No. You set the pace for us. I’m just asking that you don’t hold back for the next ten days.”
I nodded, relieved that he was giving me control. And what control have I ever exhibited around Andrew? My mouth parted a little. “When do we start?”
With a triumphant gleam in his eyes, Andrew moved closer to me so that our faces were just inches apart. “Now.”
My breath coming in faster, I waited in anticipation for the inevitable sparks. It was too soon. You’ll never be ready, so why not jump in anyways? I needed more time to prepare, to fortify my heart, to … My eyes fluttered shut, as I gave into my needs.
Thump! Thump!
We stared at each other in confusion, frozen in our chairs. The jolting sound came again, spurring me into action. As I jumped off my chair, I called out, “Hello?” My voice sounded unfamiliar, huskier than usual, as if I had just woken from sleep.
“Ting Ting? Shi Baba he Mama.”
“Oh crap!” I looked frantically at Andrew.
His gray eyes narrowed as he stared at me. Standing up, he asked, “What do you want to tell them?”
Thump! Thump! The knocking came again from outside my door. My parents must have followed another tenant into the building, to bypass the intercom downstairs. There was no way to pretend that I wasn’t at home. Knowing my parents, now that they knew that I was at home, there was no way they were going to leave.
My eyes settled on my closet. Grabbing Andrew’s shoes and throwing them at him, I took his hands and dragged him over. When we got to the front of the closet, he cursed. “Hell no. I’m not hiding in a damn closet from your parents!”
“Shh! Please? Please?” I pleaded. I didn’t know what I was going to do if he remained stubborn. “I know we have our deal, but my parents—they’re not going to understand. I don’t want them to worry. Please?”
“Two weeks,” he bargained.
I nodded, happy to agree to anything to avoid further conflict. With a stony face, Andrew squeezed himself against my hastily tossed clothes and closed the door.
Taking a deep breath, I patted my hair and straightened my dress. Forcing a smile on my face, I opened my front door. “Mama, Baba.”
With arms full of bags and what looked suspiciously like rolls of toilet paper, paper towels, and Saran Wrap, my parents barged in. With a gruff hello, my dad dropped his bags in the middle of my apartment before sitting on the couch with his phone. Probably to check WeChat. He worked with Chinese investors who tended to impatiently pepper him with questions about their real estate investments regardless of the time difference.
Whack.
My mom gave a firm pat to my back, a reflex after years of trying to get me to improve my posture. Requisite back slap out of the way, she started taking groceries out of bags. “We bring you some food. You eat more vegetables and fruits.”
Thrusting a roll of paper towels at me, she continued, “We buy for you. You too busy.”
“Thanks,” I said accepting their gifts, while simultaneously glancing surreptitiously at the closet to make sure that Andrew was staying put. “I have things delivered. Next-day shipping is pretty handy.”
She looked skeptically at me and my millennial ways that didn’t require me to actually verify that toilet paper was toilet paper before purchasing it. Seriously, who had time to go to actual stores these days and lug back detergent and Kleenex boxes, when you could just subscribe and have everything automatically delivered every few months?
Suddenly, my mom stopped doling out presents like a practical Chinese Santa Claus and glanced at me suspiciously. “Why you have nice dress?”
“You’re always telling me that I need to stop wearing sweats.”
“Pippa eat meat now?”
“Huh? No, she’s actually vegan,” I replied, confused at the non sequitur.
Finger pointed at the half-eaten butter chicken and lamb vindaloo on my small dining table, she cocked her head. “You say you go to dinner with Pippa today, no? Who this eat?” Face brightening all of a sudden, she asked hopefully, “Clayton here?”
I shook my head. Ai ya ya. I hadn’t even thought about what I was going to tell my parents. It felt too real to tell them that Clayton and I had broken up, and that I planned to embark on a two-week something with Andrew. I already knew what my parents’ reactions were going to be, because they would say exactly the same thing that my diminishingly rational brain was screaming at me. Tia, you’re crazier than a bag of salted cashews! Then, my parents would finally do what they had threatened to do throughout my childhood when I misbehaved—send me to a Chinese boot camp in the rice paddies. Or worse, look at me in disappointment.
Both threats scared me, never mind that I was supposed to be an adult and didn’t need their approval. Which is why I kept my mouth firmly shut.
Still in the afterglow of the engagement party, my mom ignored my muteness. “Oh, Ting Ting, party so good. We so happy. You do good job, catching Clayton. If no Clayton here, who eat meat?”
By now, my dad had apparently deemed our conversation interesting enough to tear his gaze from his work messages. Darn my mom’s memory for everything I’ve ever told her about my friends. My gaze shifted between their overly curious eyes, before I elaborated, with my fingers crossed behind my back to counter my lie, “Well, yes, Pippa did come over here, and she accidentally ordered chicken. She thought it was, um, tofu! After she tried some, she realized that it wasn’t tofu, and um, left to find um, vegetables.”
A chirp sounded on my dad’s phone, pulling his eyes back toward the screen. Shaking his head as his index finger drew characters on the phone screen, he said, “In China, when I a little boy, poor people eat vegetables. She family has so much money. She has money to eat meat.”
“It’s a choice nowadays, and she doesn’t—”
Not distracted and definitely not convinced, my mom contended, “Where your ring?”
“It didn’t quite fit,” I hemmed.
“Clayton no take it and fix it before?” she countered. Ai ya ya, too astute and too good of a memory.
“It still needs some adjusting,” I insisted, shoving my hands into pockets that didn’t exist. Why didn’t dresses automatically come with pockets, like guys’ pants?
As if just noticing that my apartment looked too neat for me, she looked around my place as if it was a crime scene and she was the TV detective charged with solving the episode’s mystery. I half expected her to start looking under my bed or behind my curtains. “Where Andrew is? He fly to Chicago?”
Sheer willpower kept me from looking over my shoulders at my closet, as my heart thudded in my chest. Faking calm, I shrugged lightly. “I think he has some business in Boston.” It wasn’t a lie technically.
A huge sigh came from my mom. There was a reason why I didn’t play poker. I could calculate odds for poker hands easily, but my face would bankrupt me. Try as hard as I could, I was pretty sure I had not fooled my mom.
A second sigh from her. “Ting Ting, ni yao xiang dao ni de jiang lai.”
“I am thinking of my future, trust me,” I assured her, even though I could not predict with any confidence that this whole “experiment” was going to take me to a place that my parents approved.
More nervous than I had ever seen her, my mom started moving around my studio, picking up books, rearranging my shoes, wiping invisible dust off of my kitchen counters, constantly in motion. In the middle of her frenzied activities was my dad, well-intentioned but oblivious, and me, so obviously aware of the cause of
her anxiety. I braced myself for whatever uncomfortable topic she was preparing herself mentally for.
“When I in university, I have a boyfriend. Before your daddy,” she started as she got close to me, and I groaned internally. There was nothing more awkward than to hear about your parents’ prior relationships, especially when the other was within listening distance. “All so exciting. I worry so much—ta bu shi hen wen ding. Then I meet your daddy—”
“And let me guess, he was the opposite and so steady.”
“Yes. I choose your daddy, and look now—good life. Sometimes, you need lot time to love. You know Andrew many, many years. You know Clayton only little. You choose Clayton,” she stressed.
“I could be happy with Clayton,” I agreed.
“What is problem, then?” She looked very confused.
Welcome to my world of mental turmoil. Thinking through my words carefully, I said, “What if Clayton and I are better as friends? What if our love doesn’t grow? I don’t want to have regrets or question whether I made the right decision later. I want to have as much information as I can.”
Looking over at my dad to make sure that he was still occupied, my mom stated matter-of-factly, “Andrew is good-looking boy, hen shuai. He tall and strong.”
“Mama.” My face burned, as if I had swallowed a shot of Sichuan peppers.
“I’m not young, but I see, I understand,” said my mom, with another huge sigh. “You smart girl. Use your nao dai”—she tapped the side of my head—“and choose happy with Clayton. Forget Andrew and past. He too messy. Okay?”
Chapter Eleven
Andrew
December 16, 2008
Ting Ting,
I took three showers yesterday, and I still feel gross. I went to Denver for my dad’s parole hearing and saw him face-to-face for the first time in eleven years. Maybe his lawyer’s letters got to me—I’m ashamed to admit that I almost believed my dad. Then I saw his eyes in the courtroom. They were dead eyes. He smiled at me as if he was including me on the secret that he was just fooling everyone. I’m glad the judge denied parole. I wouldn’t want his type of evil anywhere near us. I’m glad you listened and didn’t join me in Denver. I wouldn’t want him to know you existed—not because I want to hide you—I just don’t want him to somehow hurt you.
Give Love a Chai (Common Threads Book 2) Page 9