fourteen.
I cash in my rain check with Emil the night after I have dinner with Rafaela. It’s the same night she goes out with my brother, and that’s a coincidence, but once Emil and I are sitting across from each other at the sushi restaurant, I realize I couldn’t have planned it better.
I was up this morning before the sun peeked over the mountains. I barely slept last night, even after I saw Lionel with my own eyes and knew he wasn’t having an episode. He isn’t humming with extra energy, but he hasn’t slipped into the dark well of depression, either.
Yet.
He’s irritable. I stared into his eyes for so long that he turned away, told me I could get out of his room if I was going to keep treating him like he was sick.
I’m here with Emil, but I can’t stop thinking about Lionel for more than a few moments at a time. Emil fills those moments with kindness. He told me I looked pretty when he picked me up, just before he kissed me right by my lips but not on them. He opens my car door every time we get in and out but he doesn’t mind when I hold the door for him at the restaurant. His hand lightly touches the small of my back as we’re led to our table and it’s a small gesture, but I like that there’s no mistaking we’re together.
“I know you’re going to offer to pay half,” he says while we’re looking at the menu. “But this is my treat, so get whatever you want.”
“How are you so sure I’d offer to split it with you?” I ask, raising an eyebrow.
He laughs. “Because you’re you, Suzette. You’re one of the most stubborn people I’ve ever met.”
“Me?”
He laughs again and takes a sip of water. “Come on.”
I lift my chin. “Give me one example of when I was being stubborn, Emil Choi.”
“Took you this long to go out with me, didn’t it?” He’s looking down at his menu, but there’s no concealing that grin.
“What? You never asked me out until this summer!”
“Suzette, you knew I liked you. I did everything but ask you out.”
“Well,” I say, and then stop. Because he’s right, and I don’t want him to be right.
“We’re here now,” he says easily. “That’s all that matters, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I say, grateful that he’s not pressing the matter.
We order an unreasonable amount of sushi with a large bowl of edamame. I don’t realize how quiet I’ve been until Emil says, a piece of unagi roll balanced in his chopsticks, “Everything okay?”
His face comes into focus as if I’ve just noticed he’s sitting here.
“Yeah, sorry.” I swirl more wasabi through my bowl of soy sauce. “I…”
Lionel being off his meds is the biggest thing I’ve ever had to hide and it’s heavy, a weight that’s been stacked on my chest since the moment he confessed. I need to tell someone else. I need someone to talk to when I start to worry too much. And Emil seems safe. He already knows so much about my family, and me about his.
I take a quick breath. “Lion went off his meds a couple of weeks ago and I told him I’d hang on to them and he’s seemed fine, but last night…” I swallow, nervous that Emil is going to lecture me on how stupid I’ve been. “Last night, I was out and he asked for them and I didn’t see his text until it was too late.”
Emil’s eyes widen. “Too late? Is he okay?”
“Yeah, I mean, not like that. But now he says he doesn’t want to take them, that it was a false alarm. What does that even mean?”
“I’m guessing your mom and Saul don’t know about this,” Emil says, but he nods before I can answer him because of course they don’t know.
“I feel like I should tell them. Because of how Lionel was last year.… But then he’ll be so mad at me, and I finally feel like we’re back to where we were before I went away.”
“How has he been? Have you noticed anything different?”
“Nothing that makes me too nervous,” I say. “But it’s not always easy to know how he’s going to react or when his mood is going to change, and I’m scared. When things were really bad with him, when he was on the wrong meds and we didn’t know he had bipolar… he was saying some really scary stuff.”
“I didn’t realize things got that bad with him.” Emil sets down his chopsticks and looks at me, his face serious. “My parents didn’t tell me. They said he was missing so much school because he was sick. And it wasn’t hard to figure out that it was something with his mental health, but… I didn’t know any of the details.”
“I didn’t know about your Ménière’s,” I say after a pause. “Not until you told me.”
“Well… I asked your parents not to say anything.” He meets my wide-eyed stare with a sheepish look. “You were so far away and couldn’t see that I was mostly the same person and… I don’t know, I guess I didn’t want you to think I was weak, or whatever.”
“Do you think that about Lionel?”
“God, no,” Emil says so forcefully that a woman at the table next to us glances over. “I think he’s strong as hell. The Ménière’s is shitty and I hate it, but people see my hearing aids and they know something’s wrong and they accept it. It’s not the same for him.”
Lionel said as much to me once, how so many of the same people who are quick to empathize with physical disabilities don’t understand why someone with depression can’t just get up and get on with their day like the rest of the world. It’s like they need a receipt that proves someone is actually going through some shit before they can care about them.
I slide my hand across the table until our fingers are touching. “I don’t think you’re weak, either.”
Emil takes my hand in his and squeezes. “Thanks.”
I squeeze back.
“So, what are you going to do about your brother?”
“I’ll tell Mom and Saul if things get bad.” He doesn’t say anything, but I feel him wanting to say something, so I keep talking. “Lionel said I’m the only one he trusts.”
“Yeah, but… some secrets aren’t worth keeping, right?”
“Ours are.”
“Why?” he presses me. “What’s so special about your secrets? He could get really sick, Suzette.”
My blood runs hot. Maybe irrationally so, but I don’t like him talking as if he knows more about Lionel’s illness than me. “Don’t you think I know that?”
“Hey, hey,” he says in a quiet voice. “I’m sorry. I just don’t want you to regret this.”
“I can’t betray him, Emil. He feels…defined by his bipolar. Like he’s lost himself somewhere in all the meds.”
He nods but says nothing.
“Emil. You won’t tell your parents?”
“I’m not a dick.” He gives me a small smile. “Are we cool?”
I say yes and return his smile.
Later, when Emil brings me home, we tread the perimeter of the house, sidestepping Mom and Saul in the living room, and go up to the tree house.
I climb up first and feel around in the darkness for the lantern we usually keep by the doorway. Lionel must have moved it. Emil is right behind me, and before I can tell him to wait for me to find the light, his hands are on my hips. Turning me around to face him. I can’t see him, but I can tell he is smiling, just from his energy. I like the moment before we kiss; his warmth becomes my warmth, and its combined force envelops me before I even touch him, like we’re in a cocoon built for two.
Emil gathers my dreads in one hand and pushes them away from my shoulders. His lips start at my neck and graze across my earlobe, and my skin ripples with goose bumps as his mouth meets my own. We stand in place for a while. A breeze skips across the night, lighting on our skin and fluttering the chimes above the back porch as we kiss.
We feel our way across the room and onto the futon, and then we’re lying down. I silently marvel at how Emil’s lips can touch mine in the softest, sweetest way, and then in the next instant leave me breathless. We pull apart after a while and we are still. The room is s
oftly lit by the dim moonlight filtering in through the windows, and I look at the outline of Emil beside me, run my fingertip along his temple and over the hearing aid behind his left ear.
I trail my finger down his neck and shoulder and along the soft part of his arm until he shivers. He lightly catches my arm by the wrist and pulls it toward him, and I rest my palm flat on his chest, against his heart.
“Suzette,” he says with an ache in his voice.
It’s cool up here, almost cold, but I want to be as close to him as possible, so I begin to unbutton his shirt. Once the buttons are undone, he shrugs it off and peels off his undershirt, too. I sit up and turn my back to him, holding my dreads up with one hand while I gesture with the other to the zipper that falls down the back of my dress. Emil has it undone in seconds and, when I point to the clasp, my bra, too.
I slowly push down the top of my dress and toss my bra to the floor, and I almost wish the moon were hidden behind clouds tonight because when I turn back around he’s looking at me so intently that it makes me self-conscious. I want to cross my arms over my chest; no one has seen me without clothes on since Iris, and she was the first. But I sit here, completely still, and I let him look at me.
I breathe out as he touches my breasts, first with his hands and then with his mouth. It feels so good that I moan softly, and I’m embarrassed at being so audible, but he kisses just above my navel and says my name again. I lie back and his hands move to my thighs, to the hem of my dress and then under it. He bends his head to kiss between my legs and I jerk away.
“Sorry,” he says, sitting up and moving his hands away from me.
I sit up, too. “No, it’s okay. I’m…”
“It’s cool if you’re not ready. Sorry if that was too fast.” He keeps his hands clasped together in his lap. “I didn’t mean to push you into anything.”
“You didn’t. I’m just…”
Do I explain how it wasn’t too fast but how that reminded me too much of Iris, and how jarring it was to see her face when I liked, so much, what I was doing with Emil?
I don’t have to tell him about her. It wouldn’t change anything between us, either way. But I trust Emil. So much that it freaks me out, thinking about how open I want to be with him. Maybe I won’t overthink the physical if I tell him.
“The last person I was with was a girl.” I pause in case he wants to say something, but he just waits for me to continue. And in that pause I wonder if I would have stopped him if he were Rafaela; I wonder if I would have been uncomfortable, if I would have felt the need to explain why. “She was my roommate at school and we’re not together anymore and… we had sex. I liked her. And I think I like girls.”
“Okay.” Emil nods. “Okay,” he says again. “But it feels like what’s been going on with us… you seem into it. Is this…?”
“I’m into it.” I place my hand on top of his, still firmly glued to his lap. “I just wanted you to know because… I’m still figuring things out. And if I’m weird about some things, I don’t want you to think it’s because of anything you’ve done.” I swallow. “I like you, Emil.”
He looks down at my hand before threading his fingers through my own. “Good. Because I like you, too. A lot, Suzette.”
He leans over to kiss the apples of my cheeks. Then he presses his mouth to mine, just as the wind chimes dance their way through a new song.
fifteen.
The next morning, my mother offers to drive me to work and I’m probably happier about that than I should be. I don’t want to talk to Lionel about his date because I’m feeling strange about what happened with Emil. We didn’t have sex, but we would have, if I hadn’t stopped it.
The drive to the shop isn’t long, but I’m actually glad for the time alone with Mom. We haven’t seen much of each other since I’ve been back. She keeps saying she’ll knock out a draft of her script in a few days, by the Fourth of July, and then I’m hers for the rest of the month, but part of me doesn’t mind that she’s been so busy. It’s easier to hide what’s going on with Lionel, and also what happened with Iris.
Riding along in the passenger seat next to Mom reminds me of when I was little and it was just the two of us. I don’t remember much about those years between my father and Saul, and even less about my father. But Mom talks about those years sometimes; she’ll look at me with tear-filled eyes and say how happy she is that we’re part of a unit, but that we used to make a good team. I always like when she reminisces; there’s a fondness in her voice that I never hear when she talks about anything else. Only us.
“Did you and Lionel compare dates before you went to bed?” she asks as we pull out of the driveway. We pass his car parked on the street in front of the house as we drive away.
“No,” I say, but I don’t tell her that when I heard him come home, about an hour after Emil left, I quickly turned off my bedside lamp and pretended to be asleep, even when he tapped lightly on my door and said, “Little, you awake?”
“Well, I think it’s great that he’s getting out and meeting new people.” She pauses, then: “I think you being home this summer is good for him, Suz. He seems more like his old self than he has in a long time.”
I want to feel better about hearing that from the person who sent me away because of my brother, but I don’t know which Lionel she means. The one who was supposedly on the right combination of pills for his disorder or the one who went off them cold turkey?
“I like being home,” I say. I like being here for him. But I keep that to myself because if we continue talking about Lionel and his health, I’m going to slip. I know Mom and Saul monitor his moods, but if they don’t think he’s off his meds, they have less of a reason to worry.
“The school called yesterday.” Mom stops at a red light and turns to look at me. “They haven’t gotten your dorm request. Are you not rooming with Iris next semester?”
Shit.
“Um, we haven’t really talked about it.” I look down at my nails instead of at her. “We’re both so busy, being back at home.”
“Well.” She clears her throat and when I look over, she’s smiling. “You do seem to have a lot going on here, with your new job… your new friends… your new Emil.”
“Mom.”
“Sorry.” The light turns green and we’re moving again. “What I’m trying to say is that things are different now. This summer isn’t the same as last year, and Lionel is doing so well.… What would you think about staying home for your junior year? Going back to your old school with all your old friends?”
“What?” My voice is too loud for the car, but I don’t actually believe I just heard what I did. I didn’t know they’d make it so easy on me.
“Only if you want to. We’re done making decisions for you.”
“So that means I can start setting my own curfew?” I grin over at her.
“You wish.” She glances at me with a smile of her own. “You don’t have to figure out school right now, but… soon, so we can make some arrangements. The choice is totally yours, Suz.”
When I arrive at the shop, Ora is bending over the display of tropical plants with Tucker sitting tall at her feet, his orange striped tail curled regally around his legs.
“Do I have the wrong day?” I ask, looking behind me to see my mother’s car already pulling out onto the street.
“No, just a change in plans.” Ora moves a potted plant on the table and points to it. “What is this?”
I step closer and squint at it, taking in the wide leaves and pom-poms of flowers made up of tiny blue petals. Then I try to remember everything Rafaela has ever told me about the flowers in this room. “Hydrangea?”
“Good girl. Now, how do you care for it?”
“I, um…”
Ora pats my shoulder and smiles. “You’re still learning. When you drop your things, go out back and start helping Rafaela load up the van, please. Héctor’s sick today, so you two are taking over the deliveries.”
I blink at her. �
�Really?”
Her attention is already back on the table of flowering plants, so she doesn’t look up as she says, “I can’t believe I’m trusting her with it, either, but we don’t have much of a choice. You’ll keep an eye on her?” She looks over then and winks.
“I’ll do my best.”
In the back room, the door that leads to the parking lot is propped open with a brick. I poke my head out to see the delivery van backed up as close as Rafaela could get it, with the two doors in the rear wide open. Rafaela is perched on the back ledge, looking at her phone.
“We’re really doing this?” I nod toward the tops of flowers peeking out of the crates stacked behind her.
She looks up and grins as she sets her phone next to her. Some people, once you’ve known them for a while, start to look different from when you first met them. Like their face has blurred, become a thing you simply recognize instead of a landscape of the features that once made them stand out. But with Rafaela, it’s like I’m seeing her for the first time every time. I notice each part of her like it’s the first night we met—the vibrancy of her eyes, the bounce of her curls, the soft curves of her figure and the elegant lines of ink on her arm. I was hoping that sensation would go away when she started seeing Lionel or after I realized how I felt about Emil, and yet.
“We are so doing this,” she says. “Help me get the last few packed in here?”
I take the rest of the morning deliveries from the refrigerated case in the back room and carefully hand them to her as she secures them in the van. After we leave, Ora will restock the case with any deliveries scheduled for the afternoon.
“Why are both of us going out on deliveries when Héctor does this by himself every day?” I ask once we’re sitting in the front of the van, Rafaela behind the wheel.
“Because I told Ora I didn’t want to go out by myself.” She turns the key so the engine starts up with a rumble. “And Ora would rather hold down the shop than have anything to do with this.”
Little & Lion Page 15
