“Uh, sure.” Ramin offered his wrists.
Jake’s little fingers tickled Ramin’s pulse points as he traced the Persian script. “Can you write like this?”
“Only a few words. I’m taking classes, though.”
He’d signed up for online Persian classes last year. He’d finally found a teacher from Yazd, the city his family came from. Most teachers taught you to speak like you were from Tehran, but Yazd had its own idiosyncratic dialect.
Ramin had never told anyone about his classes before. Learning his parents’ language—the language he remembered snatches of from his childhood—felt so personal. Plus he didn’t want to disappoint people if he never made much progress. Somehow, though, he didn’t mind telling Jake.
“You write Farsi right to left, and it’s all in cursive. Have you done cursive in school yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Okay. Well, most of the letters join up. That’s ann, ands, andr. And theneeand anothern. Nasrin.”
“What about thea?”
“You leave it out. For short vowels you have to just know what goes where.” Ramin sighed, doing his best Jake impression. “It’s really tough.”
“I bet.”
Ramin switched wrists. “And this is Sina—”
The door cracked open. Ramin and Jake both looked up to find Noah peering at them with a soft smile. “Jakey, can I talk to Ramin a sec?”
“Okay.”
Jake offered Ramin a fist bump, then scurried back to Angela’s room. Noah closed the door behind him.
“You two were cute,” Noah said.
“He’s a good kid.”
“Yeah. When he’s not being a pill, at least.”
Ramin didn’t know what to say to that. But being a parent was probably a lot harder than just showing off tattoos and talking about Spider-Man. And explaining to your ex-wife why there was a strange man sleeping in your room.
“Sorry if I made things complicated.”
“Don’t be.” Noah swallowed. “I told Angela we might be kind-of-sort-of… seeing each other.”
Ramin’s chest tightened.
Werethey seeing each other? Was that what all this meant? If that’s what Noah wanted, was that what Ramin wanted, too?
Seeing each other?
It also freaked him the fuck out, but one crisis at a time.
“How did she take it?”
Noah snorted. “She’s not always good with unexpected changes, but she’ll come around.”
That sounded like it went badly, then.
“But she already knew you were bi… right?”
“Oh yeah.”
