Page 14 of Angel of Thursdays

“Then yes. You feed me.”

May scribbled that down. This really was fiction, because May could not even feed himself.

“What do I feed you?” he asked.

“I don’t have a preference.”

“You absolutely do. You are a preferences guy. What do you eat when no one’s looking?”

Cassiel sighed, flicking the beads on the ring again. “Rice. With something on it.”

“Inspiring. Okay—I bring you siu yuk rice from Lau Kee. Best thing on the menu. You’d never had it and it changed your life.”

“Did it.”

“Permanently. You’re a different man. A better one. You’re welcome.”

They filled in the rest, the tiny details a family might poke at because families are nosy. May wrote it all down in the purple notebook, blue ink on off-white, and by the end, the page held a whole relationship—two guys who met at a restaurant in Chinatown, who got coffee and went for walks and shared food and were taking it slow because one of them was private and the other was patient.

They’d written a sort of fairytale together, and the session, if May was calling it that, had reached a natural conclusion.

May’s latte was cooling and Cassiel’s own was half-finished. The café had filled, two more tables occupied. A man with a big hat outside passed the window lugging a cello case.

“Hey, can I ask you something?” May said.

“Is it about my name.”

“No—though, actually, tell me.”

“The angel of temperance,” Cassiel said. “I wanted to stand out. At the time.” He lifted his thick brows as if to challenge him, and May sensed it before it came: “Were you born in May?”

Devious.

“Yes,” he sighed. “God damn it. May 15th. Actually, write that down. You’re my fake boyfriend, you should know my birthday. And yours?”

“December 7th,” said Cassiel. He tilted his head to the side ever-so-slightly. “Write that down.”

May rolled his eyes and scrawled it underneath his other notes, circled it, then looked back up at the man who was still watching him with those inscrutable dark brown eyes.

“—I was going to ask about the fixing watches thing. How’d you get into that?”

“I studied civil engineering,” Cassiel said. “I worked at a firm in Seattle for a year after graduation. Then I took a watch apart during the pandemic and decided to go to school for it. Horology is… indoors and quiet. I like it, so I do it.”

“You went to Time School?”

“…Watchmaking school. Yes.”

May scribbled down Time School and Seattle and as his pen lifted he felt it, the bubble going up around him. He heard his voice say something, a follow-up question. And then Cassiel asked if he knew what a hairspring was, and he shook his head.

Cassiel talked about movements. Something called amplitude, something called beat error, tweezers designed for doing stuff with coils. May listened from within the bubble, which Cassiel did not notice. He followed maybe a third of the mechanics involved, but knew that the mechanics weren’t actually important. And through the bubble—through, through, not just past—was where Cassiel’s hands were supposed to be.

Cassiel’s hands moved in precise gestures, a thumb and forefinger demonstrating a grip, his wrist rotating to show an angle. The fidget ring glinted in a flash of light outside of the bubble.

May asked, so Cassiel answered, continued to answer, and the answering naturally assumed May meant the asking, and the assumption never bothered to ask hey, do you actually want to hear this?

This was just a man talking about the thing he loved with the same directness he brought to everything else. And that directness, aimed at May, sitting across a small table with their coffee going cold⁠—

May touched his jaw. Two fingers. He touched the inside of the bubble and popped it.