Page 8 of Angel of Thursdays

From the front desk, Lamaria’s voice confirmed Mr. Waters’s three o’clock.

Cassiel’s mother called on Tuesday and asked about his jacket inventory for fall, as if he didn’t have his jacket rotation down to an art by now. Lauren sent a single text—saaauuuuurrrr…? He did not reply. She sent a follow-up in the form of a gif of a man shrugging, which he had no response to either.

On Wednesday night he couldn’t sleep. The muscles between his shoulder blades pulled tight, which he attributed to his posture at the bench. He attempted to resolve this with some Poy-Sian oil that David had brought back from a Thailand trip.

Smelling like menthol, he started a video about the world record history of something called Wii Sports Resort Golf. The stakes were enormous to the people involved and all Cassiel could focus on was the concept of chasing a smaller and smaller number to no meaningful end. At some point the video ended and the phone sat on his chest with the STDY icon visible, and the room was completely dark, and he was still not asleep.

THE FIRST THURSDAY

Cassiel arrived at the café on Irving at a quarter to ten because arriving at ten would have meant potentially arriving at the same time as May H.

The café was called Sparrow and it was his choice of location. He’d been coming here since Peter recommended it to him off-hand two years ago. It was a narrow hole-in-the-wall with a plum purple storefront.

Orders were placed at the front and a few minutes later a barista in the back passed the coffee through a window cut into the wall. This was an arrangement Cassiel had found on the first encounter to be efficient and pleasing, and his opinion had not changed since. The lighting was appropriately warm, the espresso machine far enough from his chosen seat that its noise stayed firmly in the background, and the music they played often had no lyrics.

Cassiel ordered the house chocolate mint latte and took the bench seat against the back wall, sight line to the door. His headphones were stashed in his messenger bag, for once not around his neck.

His shoulders were practically at his ears again. He discovered this when his next breath came up short. He corrected the posture but it didn’t last. The muscles climbed again, confirming the problem was not his posture, and that unsettled him. He shifted his gaze to the clock above the door—cheap, white, battery-powered, likely inaccurate.

The door opened at eight past. The fog came first, then the person.

May H, three exclamation marks, located the table with a wave and a smile that was immediately going to be a problem. Wide, with a slight gap in the front teeth that hadn’t been visible in his profile picture, canines sharp, a little pronounced. Cassiel had been looking at the mouth too long. He made himself track outward to the dark eyes, double-lidded. A mole on the left cheek. Hair more dark brown than black, slightly wavy.

The man was wearing a brown flannel over a red tee, with sneakers that had once been white. He was slighter in person than in the photograph, and looked younger than twenty-five.

The man pulled out the stool across from him with a scrape and sat.

“Hey—Cassiel?” He said it the way Cassiel said it, with the emphasis on the last syllable. Most people went for the first. “May. Sorry, I know I’m late. The bus was a whole… ride.”

“That’s fine.” It wasn’t fine. He should have messaged if he was running late. But Cassiel was not making it an issue.

May smiled, which showed the teeth again, and Cassiel wasn’t sure what to make of that. May dropped his elbows onto the table, hands held together.

Sparrow’s energy had been low and private, and Cassiel had liked it, chosen it for exactly that, but now there was someone in it whose frequency did not track. Cassiel could not be annoyed by this because he was the one who’d asked that someone to be here.

“So,” May said. “Hi, nice to meet you. Have you already ordered? Wait, yeah, of course you have. —Do you mind if I order before we go over the thing?”

A greeting, a question, a correction, and a second question, and Cassiel had not been given time to answer a single part of it. He watched May cross back to the counter where he said something to Jonas the barista that Cassiel couldn’t hear. Whatever it was, it earned a smile. It was the kind of thing he had watched people do his entire life and could not reproduce even if he wanted to.

May’s coffee appeared at the window. He was up and back with it before any more silence could build up. He held the cup in both palms, his fingers thin, nails trimmed short. There was a small scar on his hand, a line of white against the skin. Cassiel looked at it for a beat before returning to May’s face, which was watching him back.

“The dinner is on September 17th,” Cassiel began. He had notes on his phone just in case, but in reality had no need for them. He did not need notes for his own family. “It’s Chuseok, the Korean harvest holiday.”

“Oh—yeah, I’m Chinese, it’s the Moon Festival,” May said quickly, mid-sip. He set the cup down. “Mid-Autumn Festival. My family does it too.”

He didn’t follow up with and that’ll be a problem, so Cassiel carried on.

“It’s at my parents’ house in Fremont. My mom, my dad, my sister, her husband, and their two children. Extended family might come; no one will know until the day of. My mom will ask where you’re from and what you do. If you stop eating at any point during the night she will take it personally.”

“I can eat,” May said.

“My dad won’t say much. He’s quiet, but friendly. My sister is nice. She’ll make it easy for you.”

He’d texted Minju the week before—might bring someone to Chuseok—knowing that telling Minju was telling his mother on a delay he didn’t have to manage.

“She knows you’re bringing someone?”

“She knows.”