I wave her off. “I’ve never lived with a guy before.”
“But he’s Jake,” Kendra says. “He’s like the best one.”
I smile. “He is.”
“So, problem solved.”
I get home to my apartment a little after nine. I drop my sweater on the couch and pad into the bedroom. I sit down on the floor and reach under the bed. My fingers find it quickly. It’s not big, maybe two feet by two feet—a box. My box. Filled with paper. There are postcards and fortunes from inside cookies, and the corner of a rolled-up newspaper.
Peter, five weeks.
Josh, six months.
Stuart, one night.
They mark out my life in units of time. Days, weeks, months, years. I take the last piece of paper out of my bag, the one I’ve been carrying around since I met Jake, five months ago, now.
I place it inside.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Tae, two years and two months.
Tae and I met my junior year of college, on a boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. We had both signed up for this orientation-at-sea thing, where you sailed out to Catalina Island, off the coast of Southern California, and spent the day there. It was part of a marine biology prerequisite, which I definitely was not majoring in, but it seemed like a nice excuse to get off campus.
Tae was not impressed. He was premed, barreling toward Stanford medical school, and did not have time for any unfocused hours on the ocean.
When I first encountered him, he was arguing with the TA on the boat. “I thought this was a biology dive. Do you mean to tell me we’re sailing to Catalina forrecreation?” He made the word sound dirty.
The TA, her name was Kensington—I remember becauseeveryone called her Kenny, like theSouth Parkcharacter—told Tae that the trip was educational in nature and necessary to pass the pre-req biology class, which he was taking.
Tae grumbled into a life jacket.
There were maybe twelve students on the boat, all in. While everyone gathered inside and toward the back to add vodka from their book bags into their lemonade, I sat in the front. Boats always make me nauseous—something I’d forgotten.
Tae came up to me and held out a towel. “This seat taken?”
I gestured next to me; he spread the towel, and sat.
“Pinch the spot between your thumb and forefinger,” he said, without looking at me.
“What?”
“You’re seasick; it helps.” He gestured to me with his own hand. I tried on mine.
“Here,” he said. He took my hand in his and pressed down on the pad of my thumb. There was a sensation of sharp pain, like a spasm, and then I felt the pressure shift slightly out of my abdomen.
“That actually works.”
“Indeed,” he said, still holding my hand. He kept his thumb pressed on mine, more or less, until we got to the island.
Tae was direct. He’d grown up in a home with immigrant parents, who were both doctors themselves. He didn’t have a lot of time for conjecture, or frivolity. He loved science—the cold, hard facts of life. He was passionate about the environment—encouraging me to recycle, refusing to get coffee to go, unless he had his stainless steel cup. I drew the line at composting in my campus apartment—or my roommate did.
“This isn’t a commune,” she’d said when Tae brought over a plastic bin and chucked a banana peel inside.
He was witty, too. His exacting nature translated to his thoughts. And he was dazzlingly handsome—tall, lean, with just the right amount of musculature and a face that was so symmetrical I used to joke with him that he came out of a test tube. His physical perfections would have been grating if it weren’t offset by his severity, his humor, his beautiful and dogmatic way of looking at the world.
After the Catalina trip we began hanging out, as friends, at the medical school library. Tae lived in a shitty student house that was basically a stone’s throw from his classes. If I wanted to find Tae, I knew where to look. He was either at the grad library, or in the lab. And if neither of those were true, he was home, sleeping.
