Page 42 of Angel of Thursdays

Tissue paper. Fancy. May hurriedly pushed it aside and it revealed a shirt. Light blue oxford, button-down collar, definitely cotton. It was nicer than anything he’d buy for himself. The fabric was thick, the stitching looked tidy to his eye, and the label showed it came from somewhere local. Fancy.

There was a note in the same orange pen:

Happy early Christmas! Don’t be weird about this. XOXO L. B. Heineken

May, determined not to make it weird, ran and held it up in the bathroom mirror. The light blue did something to his skin tone that his navy had never managed. Lauren had seen his single dress shirt at the birthday party, probably smelled the sales rack on him, and staged a fashion intervention for a guy she’d met in person twice. This was something a nosy, weird person did, and May appreciated it. He didn’t bother questioning how she knew where he lived.

He folded the shirt back into the box as neatly as he could manage. Christmas, he decided. The dinner would be the debut.

He wandered back into his living room and lay on the couch for a while, humming to himself.

* * *

The next day, Kevin Chao called him.

“Wu! Dude!”

The name was a punch in the stomach. No one called him that anymore. The only person who even called him Wuyue anymore was his mother, and right now she wasn’t calling him much at all. Teresa Ma had chosen that name for herself when she came to the States, then given her children Chinese ones and expected them to answer to them.

The raw files arrived in a Dropbox link and May opened them on the kitchen counter with the same laptop from college, the fan whirring like a small animal in distress. His hands found the shortcuts before his brain supplied them: compression, EQ, noise gate. Muscle memory, as he’d hoped, and that worked for everything but his attention span. So he compensated. He had the System now. He worked in chunks, stitched together, checked against the green notebook where he’d written the timestamps. It was slow. It was Wuyue’s, and it was May’s.

He’d had another booking on Friday, a company holiday party, rooftop bar in SoMa. The guy’s name was Dimitri and he had a fun accent and he laughed at all May’s jokes. May had danced the dance, followed him around, chatted to everyone he saw with a festive-looking hat. He’d also had two cocktails on the company’s dime because he wanted to know what ‘butterfly pee flower’ was. It was purple, and it tasted like purple. He was slightly let down to find out, after texting Louis in the very clean bathroom, that ‘pea flower’ had an ‘a’ in it.

Afterward, he’d taken the bus home, skipped his meds because of the alcohol, slept magnificently, and STDY would be paying him for that, too.

The STDY notification came that evening. Payment received—$160.00. Client: Cassiel L. Session: Dec 5. It sat on his lock screen, still Cassiel’s face, the same picture May had snapped at Sparrow. The notification banner landed right across Cassiel’s forehead like a price tag in reverse. It wasn’t for the birthday party. It wasn’t for the kiss. Those facts didn’t stop the gross feeling. May swiped the banner away hastily.

Now it was something like dinner time. May put Mariah on, ’tis the season and all that, set his phone inside a mug, and decided he was going to cook.

He pulled out the cutting board and the bell peppers he’d bought optimistically on Sunday, and he fulfilled the promise by cooking them. He ate at the counter with the pan still hot, peppers slightly charred how he liked them, and the kitchen smelled oily and garlicky, and May felt like a real boy.

A THURSDAY IN DECEMBER

The place Cassiel worked was on Clement, just eleven blocks from May’s place. He’d walked the whole fifteen minutes. The fact of it: that Cassiel’s other life existed fifteen minutes from May’s actual life, that every Thursday he’d been riding forty minutes across the city to sit in a café with someone who worked fifteen minutes from his front door—would have been funny if it weren’t also making his chest tight in a way he associated with things mattering too much. Or acid reflux.

Linden & Pratt occupied the ground floor of an old building with iron bars in the windows. It had a dark green awning, gold lettering, a window display featuring watches on velvet stands and a tiny card that read HOROLOGY & REPAIR in a font that doubled as an eye test. The door was heavy as May pushed it open, the bell above it brass and quiet. He stepped inside and the scent rose. Metal polish, old wood, something dry and papery underneath, like a library for little steampunk critters. Lamaria was at the front desk and waved.

A bald Black man in an army green vest emerged from an office with a sandwich in one hand, stepping into the low light from the gooseneck lamps. He looked to be maybe in his forties or fifties or possibly sixties. It was hard to tell.

“You’re May,” the man said, chewing. “I’m Peter.”

“Hi Peter! He talks about you,” May said, shaking his hand.

“No he doesn’t,” said Peter, leisurely dragging out the ‘o’ in ‘no.’

“No, he doesn’t,” May confirmed.

Peter snorted and gestured toward the back bench with his sandwich. “Casio, your guy’s here.”

Cassiel was at the far end of the space, mostly obscured behind shelving, sitting at a workbench. His back was to the door, shoulders curved forward, a loupe clipped to the frame of his glasses. May had never seen him in glasses. He moved closer.

Cassiel’s hands were inside something small. The fidget ring was off, set on the bench on a little tray next to a row of screwdrivers. May, who had spent weeks if not months paying attention to Cassiel’s hands, stood in the doorway and let himself look.

This was Cassiel without the café, without the family, without the cover story or the app or the bench seat with the line to the door. This was the room he’d built for himself, and he was right inside it like a watch’s guts inside a case, every little part where it belonged.

Cassiel set the tweezers down and turned on the stool. The loupe came off but the glasses stayed. Behind them, his eyes found May and did that thing they’d been doing since the night of his birthday. Softened. Widened a little. Reminded May of boba.

“You walked.”