by Jud Widing
“WHAT?!” Both Deirdre and Hyun-Woo started at this reaction, and she couldn’t blame them, but nor could she have helped it. She got to see Hyun-Woo every day at class, and about twice a week outside of it. Take away the class, they’d hardly have any time together!
“Also,” Nur continued, which told Deirdre she was once again about to see where one of her sister’s thoughts ended without ever getting to learn where it began, “how did you understand that?”
Deirdre relaxed. That ex nihilo “also” was easy enough to deal with. “Funny you should ask, I’ve been attending the Crabshoe School For Th-“
“Right, so have I, so why are ynnnnnnnn,” she stopped herself too late. Her mouth got too big for its britches and thought it could bypass her brain, the result being her admitting inferiority to her sister. You’ve done it again, Mouth.
Stunningly, Deirdre didn’t use the opportunity to gloat. Very matter-of-factly, she shrugged and reminded her sister, “I’m younger, I guess. It’s easier for people to learn languages when they’re young.”
That seemed an insufficient answer, given how little time had passed, but Nur could hardly pay it any attention when there were so many precedents being set. First Hyun-Woo’s hug, now Deirdre being not only reasonable but thoughtful?! Was there a gas leak in the Crabshoe School? What the hell was going on?
Knowing full well how dangerous this next move was, Nur made it anyway. “Do you think,” she asked her sister in the least imploring way she could, “you could tell Hyun-Woo that…”
OBJECTION! cried the brain.
Overruled, returned the mouth, before shaping itself around more ill-advised words: “Could you tell Hyun-Woo that I’m just…I hope we can keep…why are you smiling like that?”
“Like what?”
Well, shit.
Of course Deirdre wasn’t being nice. She was being tactical, to insinuate herself. She had probably suspected that there was something between her sister and that cute Korean fellow, and she knew that all she had to do was present herself as a plausible medium for turning “something” into a two-way bridge of communication.
Nur leapt at the bait headfirst. Rookie mistake! You’d think she’d never had a younger sister before.
The whole way home, Deirdre kept asking questions about Hyun-Woo in a mocking schoolyard croon. Ooooh, what’s he like, what’s his sign, is he a good kisser. It made her feel pathetic, because she realized she couldn’t really answer any of these questions.
She felt a powerful attraction to this guy, and she couldn’t answer a single one of her sister’s stupid questions about him, questions that were intentionally superficial. If only Deirdre knew how much she were hurting her sister…well, she might stop, but then again, she might double down.
The final humiliation was that Nur still wanted to ask Deirdre to serve as interpreter for them. It was an objectively terrible idea…and yet it would make things so much easier. She would be able to have a conversation with him. If only Deirdre weren’t so awful!
All the more reason to learn English quickly and efficiently.
Though that was neither easily said nor done.
CHAPTER 10
Feeling something that resembled – but was not – a pang of regret at her lackadaisical approach to getting Deirdre out of the house, as she had promised Aunt Amy she would, Nur spent more or less the entire weekend with Hyun-Woo. On Saturday she awoke early, ate a breakfast at which a few terse words were exchanged (Nur did her best to speak to Uncle Bernard in English, an effort for which the marble would sometimes warp into a smile, though predictably the more conversationally competent Deirdre kept shtum), and then slipped out of the house and headed into the city.
By the time Nur emerged from the Hynes station, she had made up her mind. Precisely when on the journey the mind was made up, she couldn’t say. Not that it mattered. What mattered was that Hyun-Woo was clearly not going to make the first move, which meant that responsibility fell to her. Which was fine by her; Seychelles had the smack of the matriarchy in ways even America didn’t, but that was starting to tip in her favor here, wasn’t it? Hadn’t she read that somewhere? True or not, she’d be doing her part to lean into the incipient tip. And come hell or high water, she’d be doing it this weekend. If she didn’t, it was all too easy to imagine the tenuous but vivacious bond they shared evaporating as Hyun-Woo began his first full week of the advanced classes. It was time to put up or shut up, and Nur had had more than her fill of shutting up lately, thank you very much.
The difficulty was not in the will, then, but the way. Being as averse to public displays of affection as she was, Nur needed a nice, quiet place to be alone with Hyun-Woo. So where to find one? She didn’t rule out Uncle Bernard’s house, because she never even considered it. Aunt Amy seemed like the type to be cool with it, but even if she’d lived there alone, Nur felt her tummy go runny at the prospect of rumors floating across the Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope, and into the homey halls of the De Dernberg Towers, be it ever so Hopeless.
The senior De Dernbergs had never explicitly told Nur that she was to marry a Seychellois man…but it was clear enough. They expected her to take up the reins of the business. That meant they expected her to stay in Seychelles. Unless her man were willing to relocate for her, parental approval would not be forthcoming. Which shouldn’t have mattered, except it did. Because even once Nur stopped being a direct dependent of her parents, she would forever be one indirectly, for as long as she worked at the Towers. She could always quit, of course. It’d just be a matter of finding new employment. And new housing. All without references, she’d imagine.
So Uncle Bernard’s was out in the same way that the front lawn of the White House was out; it had never been in to begin with.
What about Hyun-Woo’s place? She didn’t actually know where he lived, or with whom he was staying. Plus, well… how quickly the sun could set on even the most jovial of strolls, remember? He seemed like a consummate gentleman and all-around great guy…but there was always that off chance that he wasn’t. And she would prefer not to tell anybody where she was going, or with whom. So even if he did invite her back to Chez…whatever Hyun-Woo’s last name was (I’ve gotta have a straight-up informational session with this guy, as soon as I can get the vocabulary down…), she’d have to decline. And that would probably be seen as a great discouragement, a mixing of the messages. All the more reason to make the move sooner rather than later.
So when? Where? How?
On the bright side, at least ‘what’ and ‘why’ were easy.
They walked over to the Prudential Center and went up the eponymous tower. The views were staggering, though like the skyline of the city itself, didn’t seem like they ought to have been impressive as they were. It had something to do with being fifty-two stories above a city that seemed mostly content with four or five. The skywalk ran the full perimeter of the Pru, and the morning had the crisp clarity unique to mornings after a rain long in the offing. They could see for miles, perhaps dozens, perhaps a hundred or a thousand. It hardly seemed to matter; there was so much to see from up here, there wasn’t a chance of taking it all in. Many of the trees still held their leaves, leaves which in turn held the hues of the Promethean sunrise that had only just yielded to the more traditional blues of the afternoon, and so Boston resembled nothing so much as a handful of mighty rocks standing their ground against an endless floe of molten lava. In a matter of weeks the fire would cool and calcify, but the city would remain. And in case there was any doubt, behind them was a mini-museum full of pictures and trinkets, of which they understood the general import if not the finer details, like ‘what the hell is this supposed to be’.
So much for history: the present rolled out in all directions. There was the John Hancock building, to which Deirdre had taken a shine upon discovering that it used to shed fatal panes of glass. Up that way
was where Uncle Bernard lived, a fact that Nur was proud of being able to convey. She did have to say “my house is there”, which was 100% inaccurate because it wasn’t her house and, now that she was looking at it, Uncle Bernard’s was actually probably more that-a-way.
Hyun-Woo ran a finger across the skyline, following it around to just about the other side of the Skywalk. Eventually, it settled on a particularly flushed patch of the city. “My house is there,” he stated with a confidence that implied a more respectable percentage of accuracy. He was clearly using words he knew Nur would understand (which was considerate but, if she was being honest, also kind of obnoxious and patronizing), but something about the declarative tone made Nur think that perhaps Hyun-Woo did have his own place here. Or there, as the case may have been.
They could go there to be alone…eventually. Once she could turn Hyun-Woo is probably not a sex murderer into Hyun-Woo is probably not a sex murderer. Or, at the very least, Hyun-Woo is probably not a sex murderer, which she happened to believe was the best you could do until you’d been going steady with somebody for, oh, a few years or so.
A hundred-mile view of a crisp morning…this would be a great spot for a first kiss, wouldn’t it?
As if in response, a portly tourist shouldered up to the window next to them. Too many people. There were too many people. Nur spotted a few in loving embraces, even a few locking lips, and bully for them. She was hardly a prude herself, but still, something about public affection rubbed her the wrong way, when she would have much preferred it not be rubbing her any way, at least until they were in a space of relative privacy.
Split the difference, then. Absolute privacy would be exceedingly hard to come by. But relative privacy must be doable, right? Somewhere they could get away from the sweaty press of humanity that seemed to fill every inch of public space in an American city, somewhere they could perhaps feel a different sort of sweaty press of humanity that might, if not fill every inch of public space, then scratch the itch around a pubic space.
Depending on which way the wind was blowing, Nur could be a buttoned-up prude or a button-popping lecher. It was good to have range, she reflected as they resumed their meandering lap around the Skywalk.
So where c-
She looked down and saw it. A public space that wouldn’t be overly crowded, and as a bonus, had a cute bookend-y quality to it, ha, ha, but also let’s hope there was a great deal of book and a noted paucity of end to it.
Nur pointed down to the Boston Public Library. “Open, maybe?”
“Let’s find out,” Hyun-Woo replied with a smile, and Nur was pleased to discover that she had understood that.
CHAPTER 11
Nur was nervous. That was the sort of phrase she might come to appreciate for its loose, homonymic playfulness once she got a stronger handle on the English language, but for now would go zipping past her.
For her – Nur - nerves were de rigeur. The making of romantic moves always proceeded along well-worn ruts. The journey began smoothly, with bold bluster. I’m just gonna lean in and kiss this clown right on the mouth. In her mind’s eye, the situation played and replayed itself, with infinite variations of the central theme: Nur as unshakeable, unflappable, effortlessly self-possessed and to hell with everyone else. Nur as she wished to be seen, in short.
The next leg of the journey was always a jittering, restless one, which is why she avoided sitting down next to the object of her affections as much as possible. She got fidgety, her stomach tightened, and she wanted little more than to curl into a ball and roll into the nearest storm drain. Her limbs seemed to go cold, and the closer she came to the prospect of a kiss, the more she would shiver. It was either embarrassing, or in those cases when she managed to keep it under control, it was merely a mortifying tic that threatened to become embarrassing. Which may well have been worse, really.
The most frustrating part about this whole rigmarole was that kissing was still not that big of a deal to Nur. But that was an intellectual position, and she had never been able to actually act in a way that reflected how she felt.
Stop being nervous, she ordered herself, achieving the same results she’d have gotten issuing that command to her sister (though without reply by way of a desperate, barrel-scraping swipe at wit or sarcasm).
The third and final stage of the journey, well…she hadn’t gotten there yet.
For now, she and Hyun-Woo were wandering the reading room of the Boston Public Library (BPL, as the local toughs presumably called it). It was tall and silent, but not an abandoned silence. It was a crowded silence, heavy with concentration. Every clearing of the throat, each turning of the page, sent a shock wave of sound rippling up to the vaulted ceiling, where it colonized, birthed echoes, and let gravity bring them back down. There was a direct correlation between the amount of noise someone made and the depth of the focus with which they were drilling in to their book. You could tell from looking at them that the quietest people weren’t actually reading – they were trying very hard to not make noise, and a book happened to be open in front of them.
Their footfalls rolled through the hardwood hall like approaching thunder, as they strolled between long polished desks at which green reading lamps outnumbered readers by a solid 4:1 margin.
“Literate” is how Nur would describe herself. Not a frequent reader by any means, and certainly not a speedy one. She enjoyed a good book here and there, but mostly there: reading was rarely a diversion for the home. She found it more useful as a way to pass the time in waiting rooms or on public transit. Nor was Nur religious in the least. Her parents were Roman Catholic, which all but guaranteed that Nur wouldn’t be. Almost all of her friends had Roman Catholic parents, and almost none of those friends shared the faith of their elders. It was a wonder the religion survived.
Despite being neither religiously nor literarily inclined, the only thought Nur could sustain about this place was that it was like a cathedral. Not necessarily from an architectural standpoint (though it was big and had open spaces, which sounded like a cathedral to her; incidentally, she wasn’t architecturally inclined either), but in the sense of being a larger symbol for an abstract concept that gave people succor. Now that e-readers were a thing, books, much like gods, were everywhere. You didn’t have to go to the library, any more than you had to go to church (well, that didn’t apply to Catholics, actually). But you could, and she could understand why people did, if that was their thing. The advantage of a library, of course, is that membership is free, and there’s more than just the one book.
Her fingertips were cold. Was her jaw chattering?
STOP BEING NERVOUS.
Hyun-Woo started to lead her past a much smaller room off of the nearest hall. Quietly, she fell back a step and slipped behind him through the door into that room. That way, he would come to her, and she would be waiting for him.
Was it weird to be self-consciously constructing a romantic moment? Isn’t that what romance was all about? It was certainly capable of arising spontaneously, but there was often an element of calculation in it. Couples don’t just happen to wind up atop hills at sunset, or on a gondola beneath the stars. One or both of them decide “this would be a lovely, romantic experience”, and then do it. That was normal. Right?
stopbeingnervous
Planning only gets one so far, though, and apparently planning had gotten Nur into a small room full of technical manuals for large machinery. Not as romantic as a room full of, like, ancient maps of a flat world, or erotic woodcuts from the twelfth century. But, silver lining, also a room less likely to be visited by unwanted interlopers.
Or Hyun-Woo, apparently. She had positioned her back to the door, hoping he might come up behind her, gently lay a finger to her shoulder, and with just the slightest pressure and a hint of his nail, trace a line along her arm as he wrapped his own arms around her. For a minute or two, nothing of that sort ha
ppened. And then; nothing continued to happen. So she let slip the façade just enough to shoot a glance (sultry as she could make it) over her shoulder.
The room was empty, save her. Where the hell was he?
She turned and poked her head out of the room, looking left and right down the hall. No sign of him anywhere.
The best-laid plans go to waste, but this wasn’t a very well-laid plan. Though it was a plan to get well-laid, eventually. There was another English turn of phrase Nur wouldn’t be able to appreciate for quite a little while.
Back in the reading room, Nur scanned the downcast heads for one with that familiar slick of jet-black hair. No Hyun-Woo. She doubled back to that room of technical manuals and continued to the hall on the other side. Not there, either.
Where the hell was he?
As she was walking back to the reading room for a second survey, she found him. In the technical manual room. He didn’t appear to be searching for her, unless he expected to find her in a thick leather-bound volume with what appeared to be a monster truck engine on the cover.
He looked up and smiled that smile of his. She stomped up to him, clapped the book shut, and put it back on the shelf. The face he made was so innocently clueless, Nur nearly laughed right at it. Instead wrapped her arms around his neck and made the last leg of the journey to Smoochville: say fuck it and go for it.
That’s how it always was. She thought about it thought about it thought about it until her head was positively ringing with neurotic self-doubt, right up until the moment when she said fuck it and went for it.
Because once that happened, she’d be able to think straight, and remember that kissing isn’t such a big deal after all.