Quan stretched his head from side to side and rubbed the back of his tattooed neck. “That’s the big question, isn’t it? No one knows. I don’t think he knows.”
She didn’t know what to say to that, so she looked down at her phone.
“Why the tears?” he asked, sounding so nice she almost started crying again.
“Some news. I knew it was bad, but I had the hope anyway, and then …” She shrugged.
“News about what?”
“Scholarship, to go to college here. I did not get it.” She tried as hard as she could to keep her tone light and even, but her voice wobbled at the end anyway.
“That was your plan? To get a scholarship and student visa?” he asked.
She nodded and pasted a determined smile on her face, bracing herself in case he laughed at her like the people at the community college probably had.
“Khai loves you, you know,” he said instead.
She stiffened like lightning had struck her, and her heart skipped one beat, two beats. “He told you that?”
“No,” he said with a twist of his lips. “He didn’t tell me that. Well, not with words. But I can tell. You know he’s autistic, right?”
That word. She remembered hearing it before. “Yes, he told me.”
He searched her face. “Do you know what it means?”
She fidgeted with her phone uncomfortably. To be honest, she hadn’t thought about it much. “I thought maybe the touching. There is a way to do it.”
“That’s part of it, but there’s more. His mind is different—no, it’s not a sickness. The way he thinks and also the way he processes emotions are not like most people.”
That gave her pause. Yes, he was different, but his differences weren’t unpassable obstacles. At least, she hadn’t found them to be. To her, Kh?i was just Kh?i, and she accepted him the way he was.
The thing she still hadn’t been able to accept was the fact that he didn’t love her, that he didn’t accept her.
As if he could read her mind, Quan said, “Khai loves you. He just hasn’t figured it out yet.”
She had difficulty believing that. Love wasn’t complicated. You either felt it or you didn’t. There was nothing to “figure out.”
Quan’s gaze turned penetrating, and he asked, “Do you want to find out once and for all if he does? I know how.”
Her pride told her to say no, she’d given him enough chances. But her heart had to know. Feeling vulnerable, she said, “Yes, how?”
He looked her directly in the eyes and said, “If it doesn’t work, you’ll end up married to me. Willing to gamble?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Khai stared at the Evite on his phone in a dazed stupor. He had to be dreaming—no, not dreaming, nightmaring. This couldn’t be real.
YOU’RE CORDIALLY INVITED TO
Esmeralda and Quan’s Wedding
Saturday, August 8th
11:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m.
San Francisco, CA
PLEASE RSVP BY AUGUST 7TH
Who the hell sent their invitations out the same week as their wedding? No one, that was who. He was probably still in bed, hugging Esme’s pillow close because it smelled like her. The scent had been fading, and he didn’t know what he’d do when it was gone altogether. Start cuddling up with the dirty laundry she’d left behind maybe.
His phone buzzed with an incoming call as he stared at the Evite.