Ten
I organized a car and driver today through Luxe, and Gregor, who had now finished with an earlier job, is waiting to take us to the next destination. We greet each other as I introduce Jihoon and put my tote on the seat between us. I’ve known Gregor since a small incident involving another one of Luxe’s clients last year, and we get along well.
Jihoon pulls off the mask and rubs behind his ears. “You’ve put so much work into this.”
“I liked doing it for you.” I glance out the window at the people passing by on Bloor Street. It’s always busy in this stretch, with people grabbing coffee or buying mangoes and flowers at the corner stores.
Gregor drives us to the weekend farmers market that is our next destination. The summer harvest is on display under the high warehouse ceiling, and Jihoon walks between tables of corn on the cob and rustic baskets of beautiful frosted plums. I buy him a goat cheese and roasted butternut squash panini and take him to a picnic bench by the ponds.
I drink my cider as he looks around. “What is this place?” he asks.
“Reclaimed industrial space. They used to make bricks here, so we’re sitting in the old quarry.”
We check out the pond when we’re done, a picturesque view of overlapping water lilies. A ripple catches my eye, and I point at it. “A snapping turtle!”
Two things happen at the same time. Jihoon turns, and my outstretched hand hits him square in the chest. He falls back, arms shooting out as he tries to regain his balance.
He’s going to fall into the water. I am such a bad host. This is why I never have guests.
Then he does this wild superhero twist and sort of leaps back onto the boardwalk. I can’t even describe it. It’s like a gymnastics move. He’s a little wobbly, and I grab his shirt and haul him away from the edge.
Bad move, Ari, because now his hands come around my waist, and he steps into me. I can feel the warmth of his body against mine. I haven’t been this close to a man for a year, let alone a man like Jihoon. He’s so different from the ones I usually meet, who might as well be spit out from the same factory. They all like craft beer and Jet Skiing at the cottage with guys they met in university, who are all like them.
My face tilts up and his down, and his hand slips lower to tighten on my hip.
“Daddy, look, a turtle!” The squeal of a small child, in combination with the appearance of many other small children flanked by frazzled, coffee-clutching adults, breaks my reverie. I step back, carefully, but Jihoon follows me.
“Ari,” he says, watching me intently.
I shiver when he says my name like that. Before he can continue, a kid Naruto-runs down the boardwalk with her arms extended behind her, chanting, “Birthday, it’s my birthday.” It’s anarchy, and I take the opportunity to disengage.
I’m fairly sure, like in the high-90s percent sure, that Jihoon was going to kiss me, or he would have, had it not been for the mask he wears everywhere. I need to think it through because, wow, I want that, too. I also have to be certain. Flirting is fun and fantasizing is fantastic, but kissing is a whole different level. It changes things. Exactly how done is he with his ex?
“The game,” I say with the least amount of desperation I can manage. There was no game for this stop, but I need a moment to corral my thoughts into their usual tight order.
“Right.” Now he moves away, and I have to restrain myself from closing the distance between us. Be smart, Ari. Consider the consequences.
I think fast. “The point goes to the first one to see a water animal. Frog, fish, heron, duck, or turtle. Start on the count of three. Eyes closed until we count down.” I wait until he obediently squeezes his eyes shut. He’s so cute. I want to kiss him tenderly and romantically and then wrestle him to the ground.
“One,” I say.
“Dul,” says Jihoon.
“Three.” We both open our eyes and start scanning. Jihoon bends to gaze deep into the murky depths, and I do my best to not check him out and risk my inappropriate rubbernecking being reflected in the water. It’s a losing battle because he’s right in front of me, black jeans clinging to every curve.
I yank my eyes back to the water as my heart rate slows from the dual shock of nearly sending Jihoon into the pond and then having him pressed against me. Jihoon, apparently engrossed by the search for fauna, seems unperturbed by the incident, so I follow suit, pushing the mess of thoughts to the side. Nothing can happen, nothing should happen, so I need to concentrate on being a good host.
Too bad the way he felt against me, and the way he looked at me, is something I can’t easily forget.
I see movement on the shore. It’s a duck. Could be a mallard, might be a canvasback, but I’m no biologist, and those are also the only duck species I know. “Duck,” I say with great pleasure.
He swivels to look. “You win.”
Jihoon’s such a graceful loser, I feel bad about my triumph over gaining a worthless point in a meaningless game I created. “We’re tied.”
I make a tally mark next to my name in my notebook and try not to look at him. He’s standing close, closer than he needs to be, and watching me with those big brown eyes. An orchestral song should be playing in the background as a montage of us laughing slides in over our faces.
Think first.
I step back. “Ready for the next place?”
“Lead the way.”
Gregor drives us to Graffiti Alley, a dingy, stinky back laneway that runs parallel to Queen Street West. Puddles of rainbow-flecked water fill in the cracks of the broken asphalt and reflect the magical murals that cover walls, doors, and garages. I hand Jihoon a special mobile phone and the new earbuds that Yuko left in the car for me. I owe her big. “Audio tour.”
He takes my hand and presses one of the buds into my palm. “We’ll experience it together.”
We linger in that dirty, fantastical lane listening to a woman narrate the stories behind the graffiti: the tags, the motifs, the artists. Some have already disappeared, painted over by new ideas. Beside me, pressed close because of the earbuds, Jihoon has a blissful expression, and he occasionally hums to himself and types notes into his phone. He’s utterly lost in the experience, and I have that sweet feeling of getting it perfectly right. My work at Yesterly and Havings is intellectually satisfying, but that’s about as good as it gets. None of my colleagues ever seem contented by what they do because it’s more about winning for the win’s sake. This is about—and I mentally squint at this—being happy. I get a little of what Jihoon was trying to say the other day about art and meaning.
“Ready for the final point in the game?” I ask when the tour ends. “It’s an easy one.”
“I am.” He takes out his earbud and waits.
“Find the painting that best represents your life. Two minutes on the timer.”
He looks around. “There are so many.”
“If you’d like to forfeit, I’ll take the final point for the win.” I pull my hair around to the front of my shoulder.
He stiffens. “Hana, dul, set, let’s go.”
After thirty seconds, I’m cursing myself. This is too revealing, too vulnerable. I see a school of fish with one going the opposite direction, but that’s Phoebe, not me. I move on to a cubist landscape of a tree on a hill and consider it before deciding that, although I don’t know what it means, it’s not me. When the timer goes off, I’m standing in front of a purple silhouette of two little girls in short dresses holding hands and looking at a high wall. If Phoebe and I had been closer in age, would our relationship be different? Would we have been able to confide in each other to build something that could have evolved past our shared DNA?
“Ready?” Jihoon calls.
I turn quickly away from the image. There’s no point wondering about what-ifs when we have the relationship we have.
“Yes.” I look around and point at the tree I saw earlier. “That’s mine. I’m the tree, and I like overseeing everything.” That’s a safe response.
He looks at me as if he knows I’m hiding something, then steps aside. Behind him is a door, a real one, and it’s been painted with two doors, each of which open to two more, and so on until the doors are the size of dimes. It’s hypnotic.
“Why?” I ask.
Jihoon stands in front of the image, tracing the thin red outline of one door with his fingers. “Every time we go through one door in life, there’s two more closed ones to choose from.”
“What if you choose the wrong door? Do you go back?”
He doesn’t look away. “No. You keep going and hope the next one is the right one.”
The air is raw in a way that makes me jumpy. When my last boyfriend broke up with me, he said I had the emotional intelligence of an eggplant—I paraphrase but also couldn’t argue with the sentiment. I’m out of my depth here, like there’s something I don’t understand and saying the wrong thing will tarnish whatever it is.
I clear my throat and decide to leave it rather than risk going deeper. “You win,” I say. It’s not even a question.
He gives me a deep bow. “You were a worthy adversary, but I humbly accept my triumph.”
At least he’s an amusing winner. “Dessert?” I ask.
He gives the alley a final look and nods. We get back in the car, and I keep up a running commentary as we drive. We pass a restaurant with an old-school diner sign. “Hana had a crush on one of the servers at that place.”
“Did anything happen?”
“Hana spilled a drink on him and then knocked a plate of fries on the floor because she was nervous. She never even got his name, and we didn’t go back.”
He looks out the rear window at the restaurant. “Why did she like him?”
“Why does anyone like anyone? Pheromones. Good hair. How their mouth tilts when they smile.” Like his does, but I steadfastly avoid looking at him.
“You believe in love at first sight?”
I laugh. “Hana wasn’t in love with that guy. If she were, she would have stayed and made the best of it.”
“I believe in it.” Jihoon sounds intense.
I brush off a red thread stuck to my shirt. “Then I hope you find them.” I keep my voice light, but I’m uncomfortable with the conversation. Jihoon’s a good person. I want him to be happy, but the thought of him falling in love with someone makes me unjustifiably upset. It’s like we’ve built a strange little world, the two of us. I’ve even started coming home earlier from work to see him, and every time I open the door and he’s there, my heart gives a happy hop that’s not in the slightest diminished by knowing he’s only here for a limited time. In fact, that might make this easier. It’s like our summer fling. I’m Sandy and he’s Danny. Sort of. I could never pull off those skintight satin pants.
Soon we arrive at Uni-Land, a hole-in-the-wall store in a quiet side street.
I lean over the front seat. “Gregor? You in?”
He stares out the windshield. “Ms. Hui, you shouldn’t tempt me while I’m working.”
“You know it’s Ari, because Ms. Hui is my mother. You love ice cream. Green tea or birthday cake?”
He laughs and bows to the inevitable. “Birthday cake. Extra sprinkles.”
“Be right back.”
Jihoon follows me out, eyebrows lowered as he considers the narrow street. “We eat here?” I understand his concern because it’s not the most prepossessing of vistas.
“There.” To the left is a small, curtained door and behind that, fantasy. We walk into a gumball of an ice cream store, swirls of pink and mint green punctuated with dark blue unicorn heads displayed on the walls. I found this taiyaki place on a city stroll and had been instantly enchanted. I hope Jihoon likes it.
He does, and I smile as he sleepwalks toward the display of cones, which are filled pastries shaped like fish instead of the usual regular or waffle. “You go first,” he says, eyes flickering from one option to the next.
I order for Gregor and get a custard-filled green tea ice cream for myself. Jihoon ponders before ordering the unicorn special, a multicolored extravaganza complete with little pastel-pink mochi ears and a golden horn.
Once we get our orders, I point my chin to the far wall, where two women pose with pursed lips and thrust-back hips to take shots of their ice cream. “Photo wall,” I say. “Want to take one for your social media?”
“No.” The brisk response is so unlike the usual calm Jihoon that it takes me aback. Noting my reaction, he looks at me from under the lowered brim of his hat. “I’m taking a break because of my aunt.”
“Of course.” Hana would kill me if I let her mom find out Jihoon’s here. At least one of us remembered.
Back in the car, he pulls off his mask. All three of us eat in bliss and then try to mop up the stickiness with napkins that shred on contact. Gregor starts the car, muttering under his breath when his palms stick to the steering wheel.
I give up and run my hands down my pants, leaving paper fluff along my thighs. “Did you have fun today?”
“You must be excellent at your job,” he says seriously. “You know how to pleasure me.”
I know that English is his fourth language—he mentioned he also speaks Japanese and Mandarin—but his phrasing makes the blood rush to my face. “Some lucky guesses.”
“No.” He shakes his head. “You took a conversation we had and matched it with your knowledge of the city to make something perfect. You pay attention to details.”
“I feel bad for not spending more time with you,” I admit. Take that, Hana. I can be a good host.
He smiles. “Thank you for a beautiful day. I could forget my worries.”
I look at him curiously. “Did it help you, though?”
Jihoon turns to me, and I lose my breath when he looks into my eyes. “It did. It was inspiring.” Then he looks out the window, leaving me to concentrate on his jawline, which, no joke, is casting a shadow. I want to run my hand along it.
Oh no. No. It’s been a long time, but I know this feeling. It’s a crush. I have a crush on Jihoon.
Damn.