Page 81 of Angel of Thursdays

@May Huang answer fuckass

—or when Anna was coming to town and May had completely forgotten because forgetting was what May did. He groaned.

He sent I’ll be there, time and place!!! into the chat. Louis reacted with a thumbs up, Anna with a heart. May rubbed his face, dug his thumbs hard into the corner of his eyes, then blinked away the stars. He was a Guy, capital G. He was medicated, had done one difficult thing, given himself a haircut, and removed a sticker.

May opened his messages and found Cassiel’s name. The cursor blinked as his fingers hovered. He had typed Are we into this same field at Sparrow on Thursday and not completed the question. He still didn’t want the answer, but the question was no longer the only question he could ask.

May

Hey! Kinda out of the blue sorry. My sister’s in town next weekend. Dinner? She wants to meet you.

He sent it before he could second-guess. What would Cassiel think? They hadn’t spoken in ten-plus days. May wasn’t good with days but he knew the math on that one pretty well.

The three dots came up almost immediately.

OPPA

Okay. Send me the details.

20

CASSIEL

Third Street moved past warehouses and construction fencing, the T-Third tracks catching the last of the light. Dogpatch at dusk was not Cassiel’s idea of beautiful—an expanse of concrete, corrugated metal, and converted loft spaces. Through the gap between two buildings he spied a white crane reflected in black water, skeletal and distorted. He’d never had a reason to come here.

On his phone, a man in front of a bookcase was discussing the queer fascination with horror films. This did not apply to Cassiel, but he liked hearing about the topic. People who watched horror explaining why they watched horror was a different activity to watching it, and to him, usually more interesting.

The car stopped. He paused the video and removed his headphones. The sign over the door read ITAMESHI in sans-serif—unmissable. He thanked the driver, got out, and stood on the curb for four seconds before going in.

Cassiel found the table by finding May.

Three people seated, mid-conversation, at a round table near the window, already cluttered with water glasses and a bread basket and a menu someone had opened. May was in the seat facing the door, which could have been intentional. He was wearing a sage green sweater—Uniqlo women’s section, it’s called souffle actually, feel how soft—and the red scarf he’d worn in January was looped around his neck.

The shadows under May’s eyes had deepened since Seollal, or maybe the light above their table carved hollows where they didn’t need to. His hair was the most dramatic change. He had cut it himself—this much was obvious. There was a piece on the left an inch longer than the rest. Cassiel suppressed the urge to touch it. Fix it. Both.

A familiar jacket was over the back of May’s chair. Brown canvas, zip front, collared—workwear, old enough that the fabric had softened. It was too broad in the shoulders, wrong hue for its wearer’s complexion. Cassiel recognized it from the night he’d found May sitting on a concrete step with a working key he hadn’t used.

He knew the woman next to May was his sister. The resemblance was in the eyes and the mouth, the cupid’s bow the same shape. Her light brown hair in a tidy ponytail, dainty gold studs in her ears. The cream sweater she wore looked to be cashmere.

And at the end, closest to the wall: Louis, the younger brother. May talked about him often, though never in terms that felt entirely honest. He wore a distressed black zip hoodie over a black Palm Angels shirt. His hair had the same wavy quality as May’s, though it was longer. He looked up at Cassiel with dark eyes and a blank expression.

May saw him. The shift was immediate—a straightening, a false brightness that spread across his face in the span of a breath.

“Hey! You found it.” May half-stood, caught between sitting and rising, stalling in the middle.

Cassiel had nothing to do with his hands but to pull out the empty chair.

“Hello,” he said, sitting.

“This is Cassiel.” May gestured to him, a simple perfunctory gesture like someone introducing an acquaintance. “Cassiel, this is my sister Anna. And Louis, the little one.”

Anna leaned forward. She had a dimple when she smiled, the same side as May’s.

“Hi, Cassiel. I’m really glad you could come.”

“Thank you for the invitation,” he said.

“My husband was going to come, but…” Anna rolled her eyes at the empty seat beside her. “Exhausted with a migraine from the drive. He’s holed up at the Airbnb with a compress.”