Page 39 of Angel of Thursdays

“Hey.” May’s voice, slightly hoarse. He came to the railing and stood beside Cassiel, six inches away, or more. His breath made small clouds. The navy button-down was not a coat and his shoulders were already climbing. In the dim light, Cassiel could see the evidence of cold on his skin and through his shirt.

“You should have brought a jacket.”

“I left my good one somewhere. It’s fine, I’m a red-blooded American male.”

They stood. The party hummed behind the glass. A neighbor’s window showed a television, a blue-white flicker in the glass.

“So,” May said, “the secret.”

Cassiel watched as he reached into the back pocket of his jeans. He produced a slim CD case in clear plastic. On the front, he had written in purple Sharpie and handwriting that Cassiel recognized from the notebooks. It was dense, slanted, slightly too large for the space it occupied:

FOR CASSIEL — DEC 7

“It’s—okay, I know this is—” May’s voice had shifted into nervousness and he was now talking even faster to compensate. “I know this is a broke-person gift and I wanted to get you something real but then I didn’t because I don’t know what clock-dentists want and if I got you a watch thing I’d get the wrong one and you’d know it was wrong or it was shitty, and I thought about getting you clothes or something but who am I kidding, right⁠—”

“May.”

“—so I made you this, which is a mixtape, yes I know it’s a CD, but ‘mixtape’ has connotations and more importantly, legacy, and ‘mix CD’ is what a divorced dad⁠—”

“May.”

“Right! Okay. I—Okay. Cassiel, you look like a guy who owns a CD player. No offense.”

May’s cheeks were red now from the cold or something else, and his hands were shaking, so Cassiel took the case and inspected it. The Sharpie was slightly smudged on the F of FOR, where May’s hand had dragged across it before the ink dried.

He opened it. He’d scrawled on the disc in the same purple: POSITIONS ON AMPLITUDE — VOL. 1. A folded piece of paper was crammed in where the liner notes would go. Twelve songs. Artist, title, and beside each one, an annotation in handwriting that got smaller as the writer ran out of room.

The first track was Teresa Teng. He recognized the name, couldn’t read the title, which was in Chinese. May’s annotation: grew up listening to her, maybe you’ll like.

He read down the page.

Track six: Fiona Apple — “Daredevil.” The annotation: don’t laugh, this is me!

Track nine: Tori Amos — “Winter.” The annotation: chorus punches you in the face (positive)

Then at the very bottom, track twelve: Chuu — “Heart Attack.” And beside it: minseok oppa attacking my heart (JK)

For something so silly, it almost stopped him dead. But he controlled his expression.

It wasn’t about the individual choices, though those were good—it was the sequence. The way the tracks moved between languages and decades. The annotations shifted key. There was an offering, then an exposure, landing on a joke that wasn’t, circling back to the song itself. May had listened to these songs in order, over and over, adjusting the sequence until the movement was correct.

Cassiel knew this process. He performed it every day; the sequencing of small, precise things in deliberate order until the mechanism ran true. May didn’t know he was speaking horologist and May was still talking, busy making the gift less.

“—I burned it at the library because my laptop doesn’t have a disc drive, obviously, it’s not 2004, and the librarian gave me a look but she also helped me find a blank disc so I think she was on board⁠—”

“I own a Marantz,” Cassiel said.

May stopped, tilted his head.

“A CD-63 MkII KI Signature. I found it at a Goodwill for thirty dollars. The original retail was over a thousand. It uses a CDM-12.1 swing-arm laser assembly, which was the last generation before Philips switched⁠—”

Then May kissed him.

A cold hand came to the side of Cassiel’s jaw—the left side, fingers against his ear, palm on his cheek, calluses from the kitchen rough against his skin—and May leaned in across the six inches that had been maintained for months and closed them. The word switched was in his mouth and then May’s mouth was there instead, and the CD case was between them, pressed against Cassiel’s chest by the proximity of May’s body.

May’s lips were cold from the deck air and then warm. The gap in his front teeth was a thing Cassiel could feel—a tiny asymmetry against his own mouth. The kiss was not smooth. It was slightly off-center, the angle corrected after the first half-second, May’s nose bumping his, and the correction—the small physical recalibration as their faces found the right arrangement—was better than precision. Precision he understood. This was better.

The CD case pressed sharply against his breastbone. Cassiel shifted it to one hand. His other hand came up, just a second delayed—and found the front of May’s too-thin button-down, the fabric bunched at his side. He held on because the ground beneath him was shifting.