Love Interest(71)

I frown, deeply disturbed by the poignancy of his psychoanalysis. “Well, who the hell are you, then?” I ask.

Alex laughs. “A guy in your bed doing his level best to worship your body. Fuck if I know the rest right now.”

“Then how come I’m supposed to know?”

“You’re not,” Alex groans, still laughing. “Never mind. It’s not that deep.”

I harrumph, rolling our bodies so I land on top of him. “You’re being difficult.”

“Me?” His hands settle on my waist. “You brought this up.”

It’s annoying that I know what he means—about me finally wanting change to happen. Moving to New York was the most unsteady I’ve felt since I was little. Conquering that fear of the unknown, mastering it, unlocked something inside me I haven’t been able to tamp down since. Not only that, but it’s brought me this awareness—this knowing—of Mom and her choices. Completely of my own will, I’m making the same ones, and I think that’s the reason I’m so close to cracking open what she always wanted for me.

I lay my head on Alex’s chest and listen for the sound of his heartbeat. It quickens, then evens out again. His fingers stroke my hair.

“Tell me things,” I say.

“What things?” he murmurs.

“Stories.” I close my eyes and gulp. “Just … you know.” I don’t finish my thought.

Alex clears his throat. “What do you want to hear about?”

“Go chronologically. That’s how stories work.”

“Not always,” he muses. The vibration in his voice hums against my cheek. “Sometimes stories happen in reverse, or they’re told out of order.”

His words trigger a half-formed thought: that our stories are happening in reverse. Maybe it was inevitable we’d cross paths eventually. It feels like we’re traveling the same road from opposite ends. When Alex was born, the stuff that made up his soul had already been scattered into a million pieces. He never knew any existence but how to be everywhere at once, and only now is he figuring out what he means when he says the word “home.” But I was born in a barely cracked eggshell, careful with my steps, terrified I’d falter. Taking my ever-loving time to learn how far and for how long I can bear to go.

I smile sadly, cheeks pinching up against his skin. “Okay, then. Tell me stories however you want.”

“What if I want to go chronologically?”

“Now who’s being difficult.”

“Still you, Simba.” He nestles his head deeper into the pillow. “Anyway, here’s a story about the first sweet potato I ever ate from a street vendor and how it made me into the man I am today.”

He paints me a picture of his childhood: waddling barefoot through a wood-floored apartment, toy in one hand, green crayon in the other. His mother, always at her desk, hair in a bun, a steaming cup of tea on the coaster, writing pieces for whoever wanted them about a single Korean American woman who grew up in Queens and saw South Korea for the first time at age twenty-eight.

“Did you ever get to read anything she wrote?” I ask.

“A few pieces my aunt hung on to before we moved to Seoul. The rest are probably recycled coffee filters by now.”

Alex describes their upper-middle-class lifestyle, supplied by a father he only ever saw in sporadic bursts. He tells me he remembers his parents smiling at each other, but sometimes fighting, too. He never knew what any of it was about. What he knew was he and his mom spoke English at home and Korean in public, and he loved baked sweet potatoes so much, it became the only way his mother could console him if he was the slightest bit ornery.

Her name was Charlotte.

Alex tells me about the Korea International School where he went for elementary. How he hates to think about it because it’s tainted with all the sting of his mom getting ill, of her dying. But Charlotte Yoon never let Alex see her at her sickest. She never prepared him to expect a world without her, and it still makes him angry to this day.

He tells me about her funeral in Queens. His aunt, cousins, a grandfather who isn’t alive anymore, and strangers whose faces he never raised his eyes far enough to see. For years after that, he felt guilty every time he loved his aunt’s cooking because his mother’s had always tasted like ash.

I hear about the moment Alex got back to the States. He was at the airport being shepherded by a flight attendant when his father appeared before him just like he’d done a dozen times before, and said this:

“‘I can’t be the type of parent she was,’” Alex repeats for me, his eyes glazed with memory. “‘But I swear I will never turn my back on you.’” He shifts beneath me. “And he lived up to it.”

There are stories about boarding school. Pulling back from speaking Korean. Figuring things out about money, how much of the stuff Alex had tangential access to. Researching his father on the internet. Staring at a picture of his wife, blond and white and prim faced, and feeling confused, even disoriented, and kind of angry for her in a way that surprised him.

He tells me about his first kiss at Choate with a student who was two years older than him.

“Were you popular?” I ask.

“There were hardly enough students to know.”

“So, unpopular.”

Beneath me, he scoffs. “Adriana in the eleventh grade certainly didn’t think so.”