Page 5 of Angel of Thursdays

There was no checkbox for what Cassiel wanted. The app had been built for people who already understood the mechanics and only needed a body to perform them with. Cassiel was something else, and the distance between the options and his need sat there, dull and persistent.

His thumb found the app icon, held it until the small X pulsed in the corner of the icon. Instead of deleting it, he turned off the screen.

It wasn’t a shutdown.

* * *

For dinner the next day, Cassiel reheated one of his mother’s containers, ate it standing at the counter, then washed it by hand and set it on the rack to dry, because she would ask, and because she would know.

Then he settled onto bed and picked up the book from his nightstand that David had insisted he read so they could have something to discuss at the next dinner. Thirty-two asinine pages later, he set it down and reached for his phone.

He opened STDY again. The profiles were where he’d left them. He’d memorized most without intending to—not that many, filtered for men only, and none new. He stopped on one he’d glanced over before.

May H. Twenty-five, the profile said, but he looked younger. The photo showed a guy in an orange puffer jacket smiling at something off-camera. East Asian. Chinese, if he had to guess, and handsome enough. More on the cute side. A face his mother would see and think oh, he seems nice, which was the point, really. Cassiel was selecting a person based on what expression his mother’s face would make. He tapped Request Booking.

Event type: family dinner. That was easy. Date: September 17th. He typed it, deleted it, then retyped it, which was ridiculous because the date wasn’t going to change by being retyped. Duration: four hours.

Preferences: Describe your ideal companion.

The field was designed for things like tall, good with parents, can hold a conversation about at least one Winter Olympics sport.

Cassiel was going to need someone who could carry the talking while he sat there and tried to appear like a person who’d chosen another person to exist beside, rather than one who had brought a stranger from the internet to dinner and wanted to avoid hiding in a linen closet to survive the evening.

He also needed to not bring a total stranger to his mother’s table without testing said stranger first.

What he wanted to type was something like:

The dinner is not actually the point. The point is I’ve never sat next to someone without approximating how long it would take for them to make a polite excuse and leave. I would like to not need to guess, and I need someone who won’t outwardly display annoyance.

What he ended up with:

Hello. I need a companion for a family dinner. Korean holiday, extended family, probably 4-5 hours. I’m not easy company in group settings. I’ll need someone patient and comfortable not being spoken to. Ideally you will be able to improvise without being offensive. Knowledge of the culture would be helpful. I’d like to meet beforehand to see if this works. I’ll be direct about what I need. Thank you.

It was too honest in places and not honest enough in others, which was more or less how everything he wrote turned out. ‘I’m not easy company’ was short for a much longer, sadder explanation. ‘Comfortable not being spoken to’ would probably read as shorthand for ‘I’m an asshole.’ Then ‘I’d like to meet beforehand’—that was the hardest part for Cassiel, potentially not for the hypothetical taker of the task. A room with one other person in it and the bought time to find out if he could stand it.

Cassiel read it over one more time, then he sent it, locked the phone, and tossed it onto the mattress where it landed face down.

2

MAY

The current quest progress: fourteen woks since shift start and the fourteenth was kicking his ass.

May hit it with the steel wool again, elbow deep in water that had been scalding an hour ago and was now the gross yet reasonable temperature of a customer’s abandoned soup.

Behind him on the wok station, Ah-Keung was attempting to drown out Hacken Lee ming wan jau syun’ing from the radio with the hissing roar of high flame. And clanging. There was no escape from either “Red Sun” or the clanging.

May had been here since—actually when did he get here. The clock above the fire exit said 5:40. He was fairly sure it had said 5:40 before, or something close, or possibly it had said 4:15 and then bzzt and then 5:40, which meant either time had skipped or it was his brain again.

“You eaten?” Auntie Tsang materialized at his shoulder the way she always did, a five-foot-two woman who could just sort of insinuate herself into the corner of your vision without you noticing until she was in your face.

He’d eaten. Probably. There was evidence—a bowl by the prep station with chopsticks sitting across it. Someone had set them down mid-bite and wandered off, and that someone was likely May. So sure, he’d eaten.

“Yes, Auntie,” he said. This was one of their cute little conversations. She talked at him in Cantonese, which he understood through context and vibes, and he replied in English, which she understood perfectly and had no interest in speaking.

In the universal language of aunties, she pushed a plate of cut-up siu yuk toward his counter. Pork belly, skin still crackling, sliced thin, the fat layer catching light in a way that was beautiful if you were the sort of guy who found beauty in rendered pork fat, which May was, actually.

“Thanks, Auntie.”