Twenty-One
“I don’t know why you can’t just be happy,” Helen says to her mom over FaceTime. “It sounds like it was really nice.”
Her mom is calling from the road after leaving the farewell brunch of Helen’s cousin’s wedding in Canada, to tell her that the wedding was beautiful but felt more like the wedding of a work friend’s daughter than family.
“Not enough Chinese people,” Mom says. “Everyone is French; everything is French. I think your cousin is embarrassed to be Chinese.”
Helen rolls her eyes and pulls up her cousin Alice’s tagged photos on Instagram.
“She put up a neon double-happiness sign and they had a lion dance, that’s pretty Chinese, Mom.”
“It is not the same. I know her mother is a little sad, even if she is happy. You would not understand.” Helen thinks Mom’s right about that, at least.
Back in college, when she had vague aspirations of being a great voice on the American literary-fiction scene, she wrote a lot of short stories about the quiet tragedies of immigrant-kid assimilation, of the sense of disconnect she felt every time they visited her parents’ hometowns in China over the years, of the way she’d catch her grandparents tsking at her in their native Cantonese and not being able to understand them because of decisions her parents made before she was even born. She thinks sometimes if she ever wanted to pivot, she could still write an entire book of poems about all the ways she breaks her mother’s heart in a day.
“When you get married, just make sure you invite more Chinese people,” Mom is saying. “My sister is so sad. All she has is your uncle and me and Dad.”
“Uh-huh,” Helen says, “I will keep that in mind.”
“You will keep that in mind, ha! You don’t even bring anyone home for us to meet,” Mom says. “At least Alice is married.”
Helen nods at this entirely logical leap to being Team At-Least-She’s-Married Alice.
“I bring friends home all the time,” Helen says, and it’s mostly true. Her friends in New York still rave about the soy sauce salmon Mom made for them three years ago.
“You know what I mean,” Mom says. “A special friend.”
“Oh, a special friend,” Helen says, and thinks impossibly of Grant and the breakfast he made her this morning. She’d been impressed by his ability to poach an egg. “Mom, you spent two and a half decades telling me to focus on school and work and not to think about boys. Maybe the reason I’m not married is because I’m such a guai nui.”
Such a good girl. It’s one of the only Cantonese phrases she knows, the one her parents and her grandparents would say to her as a compliment—when they were in front of their friends, when she did something they approved of, when they were reassuring each other in hushed tones after the funeral that Helen would never do something like this.
Helen has always been a good girl. She remembers her frustration watching Michelle move through the world and finding ways to upset everyone, all the time. She had envied it a little bit too—the idea of just not caring seemed so foreign to her, she sometimes couldn’t believe they had the same parents. She recognizes an uncharitable feeling of resentment rise against her little sister, even all these years later.
You had it so much easier than me, Helen thinks. You had me. And you still couldn’t stick it out?
Helen’s mom is in the middle of a monologue about the tragedy of having a daughter who claims to listen but doesn’t, really.
“It’s the natural order of life, Helen, your children are supposed to grow up and start a family and have children of their own,” Mom says. “You need someone in your life too, to take care of you when Mom and Dad aren’t here anymore.”
“I can take care of myself—I do take care of myself,” Helen reminds her. “I’m doing really well.”
“I know, I know,” Mom says. “Such a modern woman.”
Helen sighs. “If I ever meet someone who’s worth bringing home, I’ll let you know,” she says finally. “Just let me live my life in the meantime.”
“Hmph,” Mom says, as if that’s up for negotiation too, and Helen closes her eyes against the impending headache and wishes things were just a little bit easier.
Grant fiddles with his phone and tries not to interfere as Helen moves through her kitchen, looking slightly frazzled as she opens drawers looking for random tools.
It took them two weeks to get to the point of home-cooked meals, because they’d always become too preoccupied with other activities from the moment she stepped through his door and then it’d be too late and they’d be too exhausted to whip something up from scratch. Stop trying to distract me, he’d said this morning, heading straight for the kitchen. I bought eggs just to make you breakfast.
She insisted on returning the favor for dinner and he gets the distinct impression that she feels vaguely competitive about it.
“We’re doing salmon and rice, and green beans with a black-bean garlic sauce,” she announces. “I thought about doing this tomato-egg thing that’s really good, but it doesn’t work as a side dish for only two people. Maybe for breakfast, though.”
He thinks about suggesting they invite more people over then, but abandons the idea when she hands him a glass of white wine and kisses him on the corner of the mouth in a casually possessive way that tugs at some secret spot hiding just under his ribs.
“I’m linking to your Bluetooth system,” he says, and puts on a random playlist for cooking at home.
She looks up at him over her shoulder, with a sudden grin. “Is this the ‘cooking with friends’ playlist on Spotify?”
“Do you know it well?” he asks dryly, taking a sip of his wine and thinking she looks fucking adorable right now.
“I listen to it all the time when I’m cooking with friends,” she confirms. “I like looking up really specific vibes and then putting on someone else’s playlist for it. This is one of my favorites.”
He feels himself mentally tuck this information away, information that will be useless to him in a few months’ time but he’s fairly certain will stay lodged in his brain for much longer.
“What are you most looking forward to this week?” he asks, as she manages a beeping oven. “And what are you most dreading?”
“Meeting the pilot director in person,” she says. “Supposedly she’s really cool and young and Suraya convinced the studio to take a big swing on her. And dreading . . . the notes call with the studio on Thursday. They hate me.”
“They don’t hate you.”
“I’m like an extra limb they have to deal with—they never know what to say to me before Suraya gets on the call,” Helen says, spooning steaming rice into bowls. “It makes me feel like two inches tall.”
She drops a bowl of rice on the ground, then yelps.
“Hm,” he says, getting up from his seat to help her in the kitchen. “I thought maybe you would say you were most looking forward to seeing me back in the writers room.”
When he reaches the other side of the kitchen island, she grabs him by the collar to kiss him against the sink cabinets.
“You’re so fucking corny,” she murmurs against his lips, and he can feel her smile.
After dinner, they sit outside on the fake grass on the floor of her balcony. He leans against the wall and she drops between his long legs to lean back against his chest. His body seems to hum slightly with the contact and he bends to press his nose into her neck, a gesture he’s identified as one of her favorites by the way she always lets out a breathy little sigh as she nudges back with her cheek like a needy cat.
“You’d make a good boyfriend,” she says to the air.
He pulls back from her neck suddenly.
“Thanks,” he says, unable to keep the sharpness from his voice.
“What are you doing on this balcony with me instead of being all boyfriended up with some nice, appropriate girl out there?” She gestures vaguely at the street and the Santa Monica Pier ahead of them. She turns her face to look up at him shrewdly. “What’s your damage, Grant Shepard?”
He laughs shortly.
“Well, my therapist says I have anxiety,” he says. “And a fear of being unworthy.”
Her hand squeezes the heavy arm that’s draped over her shoulder, and her thumb brushes his forearm in a quick, reassuring sweep.
“That’s not so bad,” she murmurs. “You could get over that, I bet.”
He drops his head back into her neck and she releases another shaky little sigh.
“You think I should get a girlfriend?” he murmurs into her neck.
“Only one who deserves you,” she says, her voice low and soft. “I could vet the candidates for you.”
“What about you?” he asks, and his stomach gives a funny flip like he’s on the ancient, rickety roller coaster ride on the pier.
She’s silent for a moment, and her voice is quiet when she finally speaks.
“You mean, why am I entangled in this sexy situation with no real future instead of finding a nice young man to settle down with?”
That’s not what he meant at all, but he waits for her to answer her own question.
“Guess I’m just not ready to be healthy yet,” she says finally. “Someday, though.”
Grant frowns at this puzzle of a sentence. He has a feeling if he were to examine it further, it’d fall to pieces, and maybe this fragile thing between them would too.
“Helen,” he says finally, kissing her shoulder. “Stop talking absolute shit. It’s too late and I’m too tired to keep up.”
She laughs and tilts her head up so he can kiss her on the lips. It’s a slow, lazy kiss, but somehow—and he isn’t sure who starts it—it becomes hot and searching. It feels like they’re arguing, and when she turns to cup his jaw in her hands, he stands and pulls her up with him, until she’s trapped between his body and the wall.
She kisses his neck, then looks up at him with some soft something in her eyes, and it feels like shrapnel lodging in his gut. His hand lifts to brush her hair from her temple, then slides down to palm her left breast. She gasps, and he frowns, squeezing harder, pinching her nipple.
“Am I hurting you?” he asks, his voice low.
She shakes her head, and bites her lip.
“I like it when you hurt me a little,” she whispers, and his lips come crashing down on hers, harsh, bruising, wanting. He thinks maybe if he kisses her long enough, he’ll chase away the taste of bitterness and hurt, though where that’s come from, he isn’t sure.
“Helen,” he murmurs against her mouth. “I don’t want a girlfriend.”
She nods, whimpering slightly as he nips at her lower lip.
“And I don’t want to talk about this ever again,” he says, his voice ragged. “Understand?”
She doesn’t answer, chasing after his lips insistently, so he pulls away, resting his forehead against hers. “Did you hear me?” he says.
“Yes,” she says. “I heard you.”
She captures his lips again and he kisses her back this time, and for the rest of the night, the conversation consists only of soft gasps and each other’s names.