It wasn’t candlelit romance or anything, so he didn’t know why his mom bothered. Most of the time, they heated up containers from the fridge and ate like scavengers. Other times, Esme cooked, and he had to turn on the exhaust hood and open all the windows to vent the smell. While they ate, Esme made strange comments about work, current events, and whatever random things were going on in her head, and he tried to ignore her, mostly unsuccessfully. After dinner, he exercised and watched TV on low volume while he worked on his laptop. She used the time to torment him in new and creative ways.
On Tuesday, Khai found his socks rolled up the long way and stacked in his drawer like cigars. On Wednesday, she blasted Viet pop on her phone while she color coded the foodstuffs in his pantry, making it impossible for him to concentrate on the TV or anything, really. On Thursday, she wiped down the baseboards, wearing that oversized T-shirt, no bra, and a pair of his boxers. They were his underwear, for fuck’s sake, not shorts, and they didn’t even fit her. She rolled the waist down so many times she might as well have walked around in her panties.
By Friday, he was having fantasies of cramming her on the next plane back to Vietnam. He couldn’t find anything in his house, he wasn’t sleeping, and he was so sexually frustrated his molars hurt. He would seriously consider bribing her to leave if it weren’t for his mom and her threats. No way was he doing this a second time.
Late Friday night, he was in bed, staring at the darkened ceiling and imagining Esme waving happily at him from the curb at the airport as he accelerated away, when the door to the bathroom, which connected their rooms, jerked open. The soft glow from the bathroom’s night-light spread into his room, casting a dim light on Esme’s tear-strewn face as she stumbled onto the foot of his bed.
He sat upright and swiped the hair from his face. “Are you okay? What—”
She crawled across the bed and straight onto his lap. Her arms wrapped around his neck, and she trembled as she held on to him tightly. Breaths quick and ragged, she pressed her wet face to his neck.
He held himself as stiff as a mannequin. What the hell did he do? He had a crying woman latched onto him like an octopus. He couldn’t help recalling that the blue-ringed octopus was one of the most venomous animals in existence.
Don’t upset the octopus.
After clearing his throat, he asked, “What’s wrong? What happened?”
She hugged him harder, like she was trying to crawl straight inside of him. He was so used to keeping people away he hardly knew what to do with someone so close. Fortunately, this kind of firm touch was acceptable—he liked proprioception and deep pressure. But hot moisture drenched his bare skin, disturbing him. Tears, not deadly neurotoxin, he reminded himself.
“They took her from me,” she said against his chest. He didn’t know why he assumed it was a her. Pronouns weren’t gendered in Vietnamese, so she could very well be talking about a him. There wasn’t a good reason why he should dislike Esme crying about a man. Her trembling worsened as a sob tore from her throat.
“Who took who?”
“Her father and his wife.”
Okay, that didn’t make any sense. He was ninety-nine point nine percent positive she’d had a bad dream. It had been a long time since he’d had any nightmares—while inconvenient, sexual fantasies didn’t qualify as nightmares—but back then, only one thing had made him feel better. He closed his arms around her and hugged her.
An uneven sigh warmed his chest, and she sagged against him with a murmur. Almost instantly, her trembling faded. An unusual kind of satisfaction spread through him, better than perfect increments of time or whole dollar amounts at the gas station.
He’d taken her sadness away. He usually did the exact opposite to people.
For long minutes, he continued hugging her, reasoning she needed time for the calm to stick. But maybe he liked holding her, too. There, in the near darkness of his room, it was okay to admit to himself she felt good and smelled good, like his soap but feminine, soft, no fish sauce. He enjoyed the weight of her body on his. She was better than three heavy blankets. He might have rested his cheek against her forehead.