Page 16 of Angel of Thursdays

“…Yeah, I’m bringing something.” His face brightened. “Oh, oh. Egg tarts from the place on Grant.”

“The Golden Gate Bakery.”

Cassiel was familiar. He’d read threads about its mysterious opening hours and long lines.

“That’s the one. I’m staking it out. Alarms are set. I’ve got people in the field watching.” May grinned, and Cassiel was once again looking at the gap in his teeth. “I’ll show up with the pink box, still warm, and your mom’s gonna be so impressed.”

Cassiel took a sip of his latte, resolving to purchase some mandarins in the morning as a contingency.

“So, wardrobe. You look like you know how to wear clothes. Anything I shouldn’t wear? How worried should I be?”

“You mentioned you owned a button-down. Singular.”

“Oh yes,” May confirmed, leaning forward with a glint in his eye. “Milan fashion week. Navy blue. All the buttons.”

Cassiel looked at the 49ers jersey. It was oversized and legitimately vintage, the design of the logo placing it somewhere in the early 90s, and the shape of the collar combined with the angle of May’s lean drew Cassiel’s eye naturally to the dip between the man’s collarbones.

“Wear the button-up,” he said, looking away. “Don’t bring up how the Niners are doing to my father.”

May adjusted his collar, looking down as if it was the first time he’d noticed what he had dressed himself in today, which Cassiel tracked to the natural conclusion.

“So… bad?”

“Bad.”

They went over the rest again quickly. His parents, Minju, David, Jaewon, the baby.

May tapped his rollerball against the family tree. “What’s your niece actually called?”

Cassiel had been calling her ‘the baby’ in his head since she was born. She was almost a year old, on the verge of being able to say her own name.

“Hayoung,” he said, and watched as May added an annotation next to the smallest smiley face. A vertical line. He was, Cassiel realized, slowly but surely attempting to write the hangul.

“No English name yet, respect.” May finished drawing—because he was drawing—the ㅇ for 영. Young. “Do they call you Cassiel at home, or your Korean name?”

“My parents call me Minseok.”

“Minseok.” May tried it, and the vowels were slightly off, but not unpleasant. There was a click to the k. “Minseok-ah, Minseok-oppa?”

The familiarity should annoy him, a casually faulty understanding of his culture filtered through watching K-dramas for fun. But Cassiel had no loyalty to the hierarchy imposed by names, not in San Francisco of all places, so all he offered was an eye-roll at being called ‘oppa’ by this man.

His hand found the beads on his ring and turned one, two, three.

“You don’t call me Oppa.”

“What do I call you, then?”

“Just Cassiel.”

May tilted his head. “Not Cass? Min? Your mom’s not gonna find it weird that your boyfriend calls you your Big English Name?”

The word ‘boyfriend’ sounded natural out of May’s mouth and that in itself was unsettling. He had used it before, in the first meeting, the definitional push, I’m going as your date—but here, on the fourth Thursday, the word had acquired… furnishings.

“I call you May. That’s your Big English Name. She might have an opinion. She has opinions on everything. That will be a minor one.”

May laughed softly and closed the Leuchtturm. He twirled his pen in his fingers once, twice, then tucked both the notebook and pen into his backpack.

Four Thursdays worth of preparation were numbered and annotated in May’s scrawling hand in that journal now, stress-tested to Cassiel’s own satisfaction.