“I meant don’t move to Hong Kong. Because I can’t.”
“I don’t think I asked you.” There was a hint of amusement to his voice, like he thought she was being funny. Mara lifted her head to glare at him, and Jay’s face moved from amusement to concern. “Wait. Are you asking me to stay?”
“Not to pressure you, I promise.” Although it was too late, wasn’t it? “I just thought, if you were looking for something to live for. It could be this. You and me.”
“Mara…” She didn’t know what to make of the way he said her name. But she refused to let him get a word in right now, not when he’d opened a floodgate inside her, and she needed to let it out.
“You’re worried about disappointing me, or not loving me the way I need.” She placed her now empty bowl on the table in front of her. “But you’re not giving yourself the chance, either. Or giving me the chance to find out for myself if we would be a good fit together. Because I’d like to know.”
She didn’t want to look up and attempt to guess what he was thinking. But she just really, really wished he would hold her a little tighter, make her feel smaller so the things she said didn’t have to feel so big.
“They wouldn’t call it falling if it didn’t require you to be brave,” Mara pointed out. “Or if you didn’t lose control a little.”
“You want me that much?” Jay asked, his hand sliding back down. “It’s been three nights, Mara.”
“It’s been three months for me,” she admitted, looking up this time to face him and the truth of the way she felt. “Three months where I sat in that flower shop, waiting for the one that you promised me to walk through the door and fall in love with me. And I was going to be okay with being your failed vector. But the moment I decided to stop waiting, you showed up.”
He tried to speak, but all he managed was to open his mouth and make a small noise. He seemed surprised that she was saying this all out loud. She’d planned to go the completely opposite direction with this, but instead all she wanted was to exhaust every option, every word she had in her arsenal to come to a conclusion about all of this.
“So here’s the thing, Jaysohn. I’m not looking for forever. But I think I could find forever in you.”
His mouth hung slightly open as they looked at each other.
It was such a mundane thing, to speak truths to someone who had taken it all, who had listened to it all and gently volleyed back their own. But Mara felt like her world shifted in that moment. Like this was a moment in time that was to be marked, mostly because she’d given power to her feelings by sharing them. Bravery must always be acknowledged, even if it was just for her.
He smiled. Mara could spend pages and pages of a journal chronicling Jay’s different smiles—the ones he gave when he was being polite, when he was trying to hold in a laugh, when his happiness was a small, warm feeling and when he was so happy his face rivaled the sun in its brightness. But the truly incandescent Jay smile, the one that melted away Mara’s fears and made her think this was going to be okay? It was probably her favorite. It was the one he gave her when he first kissed her, the one he gave her now that she’d showed him her heart.
He touched her cheek and, still smiling, kissed her. He tasted like birria, but then again, so did she. “I’m staying.”
Mara’s jaw hung slightly open, too dazed from the kiss and everything to process what he said. “What?”
“You think I could rent out this place for forty-five thousand?” Jay mused, doing a piss-poor job of pretending that he didn’t notice Mara’s confusion. “Or is that too low? I mean, it has furniture, so that should count for something. I probably need to find a broker, which means I have to butter up Mary June Ang from the admin office, and I am so bad at buttering her up. She’s into those fourth-gen K-pop kids. I justcan’t.”
“Jay,” Mara exclaimed, resisting the urge to poke his side.
“Can you believe my bosses wouldn’t give me a relocation package to move to Hong Kong? Basically the offer was to work in Hong Kong for the same salary, which, why would I when the money stretches farther here? And it’s not like they actually need me to report to work. I have several colleagues who stayed in Europe and Australia and they were never asked to RTO.”
“Are you really not moving?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said, deliberately being evasive as he started to pop his shoulders, his neck, like he was dancing. “I’m a movement machine.”
There was no talking to him then. And she had run out of words to say, reasons to make and arguments to give. What was it that Shakespeare said? “Shut up, and let me kiss you”? Probably.
“Jay,” she said, putting her hands on his cheeks. If she was pressing just a little more to get him to stop talking, she wasn’t going to deny it. But it did force him to look at her and blink innocently. “Shut up.”
And he did. Not only did he shut up, he kissed her back. Deeply and fully wrapping her up in his arms. It felt like he was trying to pour his entire soul into his kiss, trying to bring her close and never let her go. They continued kissing, moving closer until Jay knelt over Mara, the coffee table pushed back a little so he had room to put his knees between her thighs. So she could look up at him with dazed eyes and swollen lips. The sunlight was on his face still, and the moment would stay in her mind forever, the day Jay said he wanted to stay.
“What did you call yourself? A failed vector?” he asked, chuckling as he handed her back her glasses after cleaning them off with his shirt. “I haven’t stopped thinking about you since I kissed you that first night. I was so sure I did it wrong.”
“I don’t think there’s arightway to use a magic power that could just be coincidence,” Mara teased, wrinkling her nose to push her glasses just a little higher. “But Jay. You didn’t fail. In the corniest way, your kiss magic is still a thing. It just worked on both of us.”
He kissed her again, and Mara could feel that he was torn between continuing to kiss her and smiling, which she remedied by making out with him even harder.
“I know we need to talk more.” He brushed a thumb over her cheek. “But I want to give this a try. I want to give this all I can, as much as I can.”
“Good.” Mara nodded. “Because I want that, too.”
And suddenly, Mara knew Jay wasn’t going to let her leave his condo right away. He swung himself off of her and stood up, holding out a hand for her. Mara let him help her stand, and he ended up stumbling slightly backward when he popped up, and she pulled him back to steady him.
