I eye his cozy ensemble longingly.
He smiles knowingly and shakes his head. “You want sweats?”
“No, I’m okay.”
“Lies.”
“Okay, fine, I want sweats so bad I’m willing to, like, purchase them from you.”
He goes back to his room and emerges with an exactly matching duo. “I hate mismatched sets,” he says, and I smile, thinking about my socks. “These are on loan.” He places the pile in my hands meaningfully. “I’m tired of getting robbed for my staples.”
Again, I can’t help but be curious about all the other women he’s had over. Whether the slippers and sweats are a part of some move or M.O.
“Thank you.” I raise them, as if toasting him. “Is that the bathroom?” I point down the hall past the kitchen.
The bathroom is small and perfect, with even more plants and an old claw-foot tub.
I barely recognize myself in the mirror. My face is oily. My eye makeup smeared. I open the medicine cabinet, locate some mouthwash, swish, gargle, and spit it out, and feel marginally better.
When I close the mirrored door, I realize I deliberately avoided reading his prescription bottles.
Shit. I like him.
There’s a pump dispenser of face wash on the sink, and as much as I want to scrub my face, I still have some sense of decorum. No one’s seen me without eyeliner since I was twelve. My face disappears without it. I don’t have a double eyelid, and Mom and Dad refused to let me get the surgery even though in Korea it’s basically as much a rite of passage as a bat mitzvah. I wash my hands, running warm water over them for a while. And then wash around my eyes and brows with my soapy fingertips like a lunatic.
Peeling off my jeans that are so tight I can never get them off without rolling them inside out, I realize how filthy and sticky I feel.
“Um…” I crack open the door, cringing. “Can I take a shower?” I grit my teeth. Maybe I should remind him again that I’m not homeless so that he’ll extra, really be convinced that I’m homeless.
God, he thinks I’m a grifter.
I shiver, remembering the puke. How that must have appeared.
“Knock yourself out,” he says. I turn on the hot water and hear a tap on the door.
I crack it, hiding behind it. He hands me a towel. “You’ve got to run the water while you press inside the little spigot guy to make it come out of the showerhead,” he says.
“Thanks.”
“It’s old and cranky.”
“Thanks,” I squeak.
I pull back the shower curtain. Not only is the tub spotless, but there’s a powder-blue rubber mesh over the drain to catch hairs. I’ve seen these exact ones in the household appliance section of H Mart. I smile picturing him tossing it into his shopping basket or else his Mom sending it to him in a care package with the same lime-green square exfoliating washcloth that I keep meaning to use but don’t.
Even with his fancy parents who speak fluent English and a sister in the Peace Corps, Patrick isn’t above the stupid blue hair catcher. I feel like squeezing his face into mush.
The spray of hot water is a miracle. I’m so grateful for this moment no matter how the rest of the night goes.
When I put on the sweats, I feel like weeping.
I find Patrick in the kitchen. He’s wearing black reading glasses, with a tea towel on his shoulder and his sleeves pushed up. I study the thick lines of ink on his forearms without staring directly at them. I feel another commotion. Definitely in the loin region. “I’m making spaghetti aglio e olio,” he says. “Or aglio e olio e pepperoncino. I guess.”
“Beg your pardon?”
He laughs. “Pasta.”
The kitchen’s tiny, with high white cabinets and insultingly abbreviated counter space, but it’s the kind of room that’s perfect for entertaining, the way it opens into this little nook where he’s set up a café table. It’s the sort of cubby that never puts on airs, where if the host is gracious and organized, cooking becomes a collaborative activity. Everyone chopping on whatever available surface, drinking and eating without a sense of imposition or resentment or slavish, burdensome labor.
Basically, the opposite of the way my mom cooks.
I try not to move into his apartment in my mind. It’s while attempting not to picture us in matching aprons making pancakes that my eye lands on an old egg timer shaped like an avocado sitting on top of his counter.
I pick it up. It hums lightly in my hand. I didn’t know I had a hole in my heart in the shape of an avocado egg timer.
I glance at him again, utterly charmed. Between this and the handkerchief, why is he so adorable? Why the fuck can’t he use his phone timer like everyone else in the world?
“Guess an egg was too on the nose?”
“It would be depraved to have an egg complicit in another egg’s demise,” he says distractedly, checking his pan.
“God forbid a chicken,” I observe.
Finally, he turns to me and appraises my outfit. I smile goofily.
I feel ridiculous. He holds his hand up for a high five. I reach over and slap it. “We look like Japanese game-show contestants.”
“We look like a million bucks,” he says. Suddenly everything is easy. Comfortable. It’s as if we shucked off some film of self-consciousness when we both put on house clothes.
When the timer goes off, I watch closely. He spoons a little pasta water into his pan of garlic, adds olive oil and bits of red pepper. In deft, economical movements, with a tea towel in hand, he drains the spaghetti, gives it a good shake in the colander, and dumps the pasta into the pan, making it sizzle. It smells dementedly good. When he looks back at me, his glasses are fogged. If I were braver, if this were a movie, I would step forward and polish his glasses with my sleeve. He removes them and smiles.
He piles two blue-rimmed bowls with nests of noodle. “Whatever you don’t want, I’ll eat,” he says, and hands one to me. He wipes his glasses, puts them back on, and opens the drawer by the stove.
“Fork or chopsticks. I could do either.”
I marvel at his lack of self-consciousness or formality. Nothing he does is showy. It’s a quiet kind of confidence that’s unfamiliar to me. I grab forks for both of us.
“There’s Parmesan in the fridge,” he says. “And parsley in the blue thing.” I’m standing between him and the door.
I find that I’m holding my breath when I open the fridge. There are cans of LaCroix and beer. Oat milk in the door. A rotisserie chicken from the supermarket. There’s also a squat jar of kimchi, a tub of red pepper paste, and a stack of plastic containers with various prepared banchan.
I’m torn between the relief and this stirring, sparkly almost triumphant other feeling. It’s a revelation to open the fridge door of a Korean person who isn’t related to me.
See, I don’t fucking worship white-people things, I want to tell June.
“Right there,” says Patrick, pointing at a dedicated drawer in which there’s a Saran-wrapped wedge of cheese. And, as promised, in a blue-topped container, there are green sprigs. I open it. There’s parsley with a white paper towel lining the bottom. I can imagine him so vividly, carefully blotting the fronds after washing them and it makes my insides evanesce. I want to give his parents a plaque.