I moved closer, in case they decided to settle this with fists.
Finally, Andrew spoke, “I am sorry that you’re involved. You’ve always been respectful toward me. But I’m not sorry that you’re breaking up.” His voice tightening, Andrew smiled without humor. “Unlike you, I’m a selfish asshole.”
Jaws tightening, Clayton ignored Andrew’s taunt. He looked at me, his eyes both hurt and resolute. “Call me if you change your mind.” With that, Clayton opened the door and walked away from me.
Both Andrew and I watched the door close slowly behind Clayton. We kept staring at the door, even after it clicked shut. The click seemed so final.
Different emotions floated through me—confusion, sadness, guilt that I had ever let Clayton’s and my relationship progress so far. Above all, there was a dark anxiety when I thought about the future. My perfect world was crumbling. How am I going to tell my parents that I let Clayton go?
From the corner of my eyes, I saw Andrew sink back into the chair, his body bent and head down. We were alone.
I shivered. Was it fear or anticipation? I didn’t know.
I was considered an expert in training machines to understand the human language—both the words and the context around the words. Using advanced analytics to parse through a doctor’s unstructured instructions to create an easy-to-understand visual of how much medication a patient should take and when? Doable.
This situation with Andrew? I didn’t understand, and I didn’t have words, nor a path to solve it.
Three weeks ago, I had a perfect fiancé and was content in that relationship, looking forward to the future. Two weeks ago, I had learned that I was planning for a wedding that could land me in jail for bigamy. Twelve days ago, I had impulsively bought a ticket to Chicago to confront my not-ex-husband and ended up in his arms. Today, I was sort-of-but-not-really single, with no fiancé, and a definitely-here-husband.
You’re free. What the heck was I going to do now? More importantly, could I handle whatever the wreckage came after? Because there was definitely going to be major metaphorical bloodshed and carnage.
I looked from the door to Andrew. Instead of staring at the floor as I had expected, he was staring at me with unmistakable hunger. In a fluid motion that surprised me for a man his size, he strode forward and was in front of me before I could suck in a breath.
“Tia?” he whispered, his voice a low strum across my body.
Too close.
“Tia?” he repeated. I saw the ask in his eyes.
This was my chance to tell him to leave, to remind him that there was only doom for us. Leave before we could do anything stupid, before I could make another mistake. I didn’t need more heartbreak in my life. I needed to make smart decisions. Kissing Andrew was not smart. Kissing Andrew was stupid.
For goodness’ sake, I had just broken up with my fiancé ten minutes ago. What kind of person was I to even think about kissing another man?
Stop thinking about kissing Andrew. Stop, screamed my brain as I closed my eyes and leaned toward him.
Yes, yes, yes, shouted my body.
“Wait, Andrew.”
Immediately, Andrew pulled back as if burned.
What are these words popping out of my mouth? Get back in and kiss the man. That was my first thought as I took a step groggily back from Andrew. I felt like a comet who had hurled too close to his orbit and was at risk of getting sucked into his gravity, forever meant to circle around him, at his will.
Uh-oh, what have I done? I had pushed away Clayton, my safety net, and the regrets were making a revengeful comeback.
Lifting my head, I looked up at him in question. Andrew was staring at the bed behind us, his jaw tense, as if he too was unsure. Taking a deep breath, he looked down at me. I gasped at the hunger and possession in his eyes, defying me to deny the chemistry between us.
Chemistry—physical, emotional—had never been an issue with us. Even when we were younger, our chemistry had been great. But this was something unexpected.
What did he want? He said he wanted to try again, but how serious was he? Was this really about me, about us, or a middle finger to Clayton and what he represented?
“Andrew?” My voice was soft, hesitant and husky.
“Shhhhh. I need a moment to calm down, and your voice reminds me of sex.”
Well. I smiled, despite my warring thoughts.
“Fuck,” came another curse, as he turned away from me. Bracing his hands on the wall in front of him, he muttered, his voice so low that I could barely make out his words. I thought I heard something about “nondisclosures,” “state laws,” and “limited liabilities.”
“I’m the boss, applesauce!”
“Huh?” Whirling around, Andrew stared at me in confusion. “You want applesauce now?”
“No, silly, I’m pretending to be Judge Judy.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. You were muttering about legal stuff. This is a weird situation, and you know, when things get awkward, random words spill out of me.”
“You don’t have to try to lighten the situation, or be funny all the time. You don’t have to pretend. Be you, it’s enough.”
My cheeks flamed in pleasure and confusion. Sweet Andrew scared me.
There was too much to discuss, and I knew Andrew had to have questions. I had questions that I wanted to air out. But not tonight. I needed to dissect and panic by myself before I could have a real conversation with Andrew. I needed time. I needed space from this complex, intriguing man before he pulled me back in.
Without putting his hands on me, Andrew leaned down to whisper in my ear, his voice a caress against my sensitive skin. “One more thing. I want you, Tia, so badly. When, and not if, we sleep together—and I promise you, there will be no actual sleep involved—it will not be as a rebound. You will only be thinking about me. Think about that tonight.”
My cheeks were on fire. Sexy Andrew slayed me.
Nodding at his fierce promise—what else could I say—I left the hotel room with my shoes in hand. One of these days, I would part from Andrew with shoes on.
Chapter Ten
Tia
December 25, 2009 (never sent)
Andrew,
We went to Christmas Eve service last night. It was the first time I had left my house since I came home from the hospital. The doctors said that I could have “gone about my regular business” a few weeks ago, that I was recovered enough, but I had nothing to do and nowhere to go.
A few people looked at me funny during the service, but my mom must have warned them not to stare. I'm not sure what my parents told Pastor Smith or the other folks—probably that I just had a health scare and to pray for my soul. Those prayers must have done some good, because last night, when I was sitting and listening to the choir sing, was the first time in a long, long time that I thought that I might be okay. Not now, not for a while, but sometime in the future, I think I could be okay.
Ting
Zero.
That was the number of calls or texts or emails or knocks on the door from Clayton or him. I could understand Clayton’s silence. We had just broken up, and he rightly needed some time. I didn’t know if I could ever face him again after how our engagement fell apart.
But him? My phone number had been the same since high school, not that Andrew would know for sure. But he worked for a security company out in Chicago. Don’t security companies have secret ways of finding people? He had no excuse for not reaching out.
Of course, he could not want to talk to me. Was I even ready to talk to him?
What was up with that sexy promise last night?
“Ai ya ya, you’re a fool,” I muttered to myself, as I kept walking around Boston. Halloween was next week but it seemed as if the parties had started early. Candy wrappers were scattered around the usually clean streets, alongside the occasional lost sweater, feathers, and glitter from costumes.
If last night’s memories weren’t painfully clea
r, I would have thought someone had dressed up as me and doled out a trick on my life.
“Ai ya ya.” I smacked my hand against my forehead. A lady walking past looked at my messy hair and lemon pajamas peeking out from my bright turquoise overcoat, and crossed to the other side of the street.
I yelled after her, “Hey, I’m not dangerous! I just didn’t have any clean yoga pants left.” With a nervous look back at me, she half ran away from me into a nearby coffee shop.
I sighed and kept walking.
Nine hours, 55,000 steps, six cups of coffee, and one blister later, I turned the key to my apartment and fell on my couch in relief. My body was exhausted. My mind was numb enough that I could half ignore my inner dialogue. I had walked more of Cambridge and Boston than I ever had, though I couldn’t tell you exactly what I had seen.
It had been an utterly unproductive day. I was no closer to “clarity” than I had been when I woke up from a fitful sleep at four o’clock this morning. Sadness over breaking up with Clayton, confusion about what I wanted from Andrew, anxiety that my life was heading down a path where I couldn’t control the endpoint—I was battered from too many feelings. Threading through my ping-pong of emotions was the question of, what did I want?
Say, hypothetically, I realized that I wanted to be with Andrew, did he want the same? After his impromptu visit to my office and last night, I was confident that he wouldn’t mind a romp in bed. Or against a wall. However, despite our two almost-kisses, I was not a one-night kind of woman. I couldn’t have a meaningless fling without expectations.
Or say, hypothetically, I decided I wanted to go back to Clayton, which was so clearly what I should choose. Could we ever get over the specter of Andrew’s and my first marriage? If Clayton was the right choice, shouldn’t I feel worse about how our engagement ended? Instead, I felt guilty about not feeling guiltier.
Thinking more was not going to solve anything, apparently. Tired of wallowing, I got up to grab a pint of ice cream from my freezer. No point in spooning some into a bowl when, let’s face it, I was going to eat all of the ice cream tonight anyways. Sitting cross-legged on the rug, my back leaning against my bed with a blanket over me, I opened up my phone. I shot off a selfie of myself eating ice cream to Pippa to assure her that I was alive, and reluctantly dialed my parents. Fifteen missed calls and twenty messages on WeChat, the Chinese texting service my family used, were leading indicators that my parents were about to show up at my doorstep armed with food, a plane ticket to Colorado, and a never-ending lecture.
“Wei?” I greeted my parents when they picked up.
“Ting Ting, ni zai nai er?!” shouted both my parents into my ear.
“At home,” I answered, putting them on speakerphone, so I could free my hands to continue eating my cookie dough ice cream.
“Who with you?”
“Mei you shui.” I shook my head at my phone. Even over the phone, I could feel the tension lessening, as they mentally sighed in relief.
“Where you go today? You not there when we come to apartment,” my dad repeated their earlier question. “You too busy, not spend time with us today? We go home tomorrow.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were resting. I just took a walk around Boston. It was a nice day out,” I said.
“Dai mao zi ma?” asked my mom, concern in her voice.
Smiling slightly at her question, I fibbed rather than worry her about exposing my head to the cold and getting sick, “Yeah, I had a hat.”
“Hao, walking very healthy. Good job,” my mom told me. Now that they were assured that I had not been kidnapped either willingly or unwillingly by Andrew, they had moved on to more important things. Like wearing hats, and how I needed to stop sitting so much and exercise. It wasn’t as if they wanted me to lose weight—they didn’t really believe in diets. But they did believe in the importance of moving around.
When I first started my job, I had told them that I did exercises all the time—my brain was doing all sorts of stretches and mental sports. They had stared stonily at me through WeChat’s video chat and muttered something about kids in America these days.
“… zhu yi shen ti, yao bu yi hou shen ti …” My parents took turns lecturing me about staying healthy. In a few minutes, this litany would devolve into their typical lecture about the future. Over the years, their lectures had switched from warning me that I would wind up working at a zoo, cleaning monkey poop if I didn’t listen to them, to ending up in the hospital if I didn’t take care of my body.
“Uh-huh,” I agreed robotically to the value of eating fresh vegetables daily even as I took another giant bite of ice cream.
Half listening, I opened up my work email. I tried not to be one of those people that worked around the clock, but I made concessions to check my email on weekends for any frantic notes from students freaking out over upcoming tests. Last year, when I had first started teaching, one of my students had accused me of “having it out for her since day one” because I “took, like, forever” to respond to her emails. What was the saying? An apple a day kept the doctor away. Well, ten minutes of work emails on the weekend kept the bad teacher reviews at bay. Eh, not as rhyme-y, but whatever.
“Mm-hmm,” I responded to my dad’s question about something.
Seeing no desperate emails as I quickly scrolled through my inbox, I was about to start browsing my library for a good book when my heart stuttered. Sandwiched between an announcement about a department lunch and an invitation to speak at a local conference, was an email with the simple subject line of, “Hi” from an A. Parker. It wasn’t the same email address that he used when we were younger, but how many A. Parkers did I know? Hands trembling a bit, I touched the email to open it.
To: [email protected]
Subject: Hi
Hi,
What are you doing tonight?
Andrew
My heart thumped as I stared at the screen. I typed quickly, then erased, then typed … Ai ya ya, I tossed my phone away.
“Ting Ting?” came my dad’s muffled voice against a furry pink pillow. “You okay?”
Digging into the pile of pillows on my couch, I grabbed my phone and practically yelled into the speakerphone, “Zai jian! Got to go.”
“With Andrew?” asked my mom suspiciously. Darn, she could still read me like a book, that astute woman. It’s as if she raised me or something.
“Maybe dinner with a friend,” I said vaguely. “Zai jian.”
“Pippa? Hao, hao, good. She a good friend,” my mom said approvingly. Crisis averted.
“Who’s Pippa?” asked my dad to my mom. He was the worst at remembering names. “The pharmaceutical girl? You should be friends with her. She CEO of own company.”
“No, that’s Kat—”
“You has cat? You should have my grandbaby first, then pets.”
“Bu shi de, aiya, Kat shi …”
“Okay, I’ll let Mama explain. Got to go. Zhai jian!” I clicked the red button on my phone before I ended up having to draw charts of my friends and acquaintances for my dad.
Taking a deep breath, I looked back down at my half-written email. Urgh, I deleted what I had written, typed out a message, and hit send before I could change my mind.
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Hi
Hi,
My number is the same as before.
T
Two minutes later, my phone rang. Without glancing down at it, I picked up, “Wei, Mama, Baba, wo ming tian zai geng ni da dian hua, hao ma?”
A voice cleared on the other side before speaking, freezing me with its husky timbre, “Hi, Ting Ting.”
As if to lessen its effects on me, I yanked the phone away from my ear. Nope, my heart was still pounding. Taking a deep, fortifying breath, I said slowly, “Hi, Andrew.”
“I’ve always loved listening to you speak Chinese. There’s a melody to it.”
“Huh,” I said stupidly. What a great conversationalist I was. Thinking hard,
I managed to squeak out, “I wasn’t sure you still had my number in your phone.”
“I don’t. I erased your number,” came the short reply, before he admitted quietly, “I didn’t forget it.”
A warm glow filled me up, lifting my cheeks into a smile. Never mind that he had tried to erase me from his life. I couldn’t fault him for that, as I had tried to do the same. Shyly, I whispered, “I’m glad.”
“Do you want to have dinner?” There was a streak of uncertainty in his voice.
My voice was casual, belying my pleasure. “I could eat.”
“My colleague Dan said that there’s a great Greek place near Seaport. I could swing by in thirty minutes to pick you up.”
“Huh.” Images of Boston traffic on a Sunday evening floated through my mind. Food wouldn’t be in my tummy until eight at least, and I was a grumpy hungry person. Plus, what if someone who knew Clayton and me was at the restaurant? A shudder ran along my spine. I was not ready to explain our relationship status to busybodies, especially when I was still trying to find answers myself. “How about takeout?”
“Takeout?” Andrew repeated, sounding a little disappointed. Recovering quickly, he amended, “Sure, um, do you have a favorite place? I’ll give them a call and pick it up on my way to you.”
Twenty-nine minutes later, my apartment was somewhat clutter-free, and I had showered and had on my fifth outfit. It also felt as if I had run a marathon, from running like a maniac around my little apartment. My closet was bursting with clothes, yet I had nothing, absolutely nothing to wear. Was it too late to call the restaurant to tell them to lose our order so I could try a few more outfits?
Bzzzzzzz. Bzzzzzzz.
Yelling like my inner Tarzan, I leaped over discarded dresses to press the intercom button. Out of breath, I shouted, “Who’s there?”
“Butter chicken, lamb vindaloo, and naan. Lots of naan.”
Give Love a Chai (Common Threads Book 2) Page 8
