Duped into my worst nightmare—a party where I don’t know a soul except the most social person invited. He’s going to leave my side immediately to catch up with his college friends, and I’m going to have to get drunk and suck it up.
He pulls a multicolored sweater vest with tinsel off the rack. “Do you like this?”
“Sure,” I grumble. “Now, can youpleasetell me how you really feel about the wait?”
Something flashes in Alex’s eyes—annoyance, and possibly fear—and that’s when I finally get it, one sentence too late: this is him coping.
“It’s out of my hands.” His voice cracks harshly, resolve breaking. “I did the best I could. I can’t control what other people think, how they react. I can’tmakepeople care, okay?”
“Okay,” I whisper. “I’m sorry.”
He drops the sweater and pinches the bridge of his nose. After a second, he reaches out to grab my hand and pulls me in, threading his fingers into my hair and slipping his arm under my blazer to clutch at my waist. “No, I’m sorry. I just…” He exhales. “I know myself. Ihaveto let it go now, or it’s going to ruin me later. Holding on to things I wish I could change never got me anywhere.”
I get this mental flash of Alex building himself a castle. Walls of rough, impenetrable stone stacked together in a fortress to protect himself. But at the end of it all, he leaves the front door wide open. Waiting for someone to knock.
In this moment, I want to be whatever it is he needs most.
“Do youhaveto let it go like Elsa had to let it go?” I ask. “Because if so, might I recommend…” I step backward, out of his arms, and point to theFrozencostumes hanging beside the reindeer antlers.
His face twists. “Imaybecould have fit into that dress when I was six. Isn’t this a store for preteens?”
“But you loveFrozen!” I protest. “At least get the Olaf T-shirt.”
Alex rolls his eyes. “I can’t believe I told you about that.”
“About how you watchFrozenjust to feel something?”
He glowers. “At least I don’t compulsively order a dessert I don’t actually want every time the waiter brings out a dessert menu without asking me first.”
My jaw drops. “I never told you that!”
He smirks. “Brijesh told me. I asked him about your fatal flaw, and that’s the answer I got.”
I blanch, betrayed. “Why were you asking about my fatal flaw?”
“So I can exploit it.” He rolls his eyes. “Obviously.”
In the end, I get a seven-dollar pleated maroon skirt, snowy-looking knee-highs, and a green button-down sweater. Alex gets that atrocious vest and the Santa hat.
We break up our subway trip to the Upper East Side with a stop in Koreatown—a small stretch of blocks near the Empire StateBuilding—and go to a barbecue spot, randomly selected by Alex based on nothing other than “gut instinct and the fact that a fifteen-minute wait feels promising but not daunting.”
Inside, he makes me create a shared note on my phone, where I type out all my allergies. He considers them for a moment (sesame being the trickiest culprit), and then orders for both of us.
The meat comes out raw, and our waiter tells us about each selection before he cooks it on the hot plate in the middle of our table. It’s kind of awkward at first, the waiter just standing there cooking while Alex and I watch, but eventually, Alex starts telling me about Seoul dining, regional Korean foods you can’t get here, and American staples harder to come by over there. I’m shocked by the list of things he’d never heard of until he moved to Connecticut. The waiter listens in, too, offering up his own opinions, and at one point they both start slipping into Korean.
Then we receive the banchan, some of which I am familiar with (read: kimchi and cucumbers), some of which I am not (read: gamja salad). Truthfully, I’ve only had chain-restaurant Korean food before (read: bibimbap with steak and a fried egg on top), which I admitted to Alex on the subway here. Now he’s watching me try everything, face attempting to conceal his curiosity, asking me if I’m still hungry and ordering more meats and banchan accordingly. Normally when I’m anxious about something, my appetite deserts me, but the food here is so amazing that I leave the place stuffed.
When we’re through with dinner, he presses an unsolicited kiss to my temple.
“Why did you want me to come tonight?” I ask on the subway up to Lexington and Eighty-First. My fingers fiddle with the hem of my cheap skirt, already unraveling. “Also, should we do some sort of feature inBite the Handabout the Christmas impact on fast fashion?”
Alex looks down at my fingers picking at loose threads. “I wanted you to come because I miss you,” he says, and my stupid heart acts like it just inhaled a Red Bull vodka spiked with an espresso shot.“I am both terrible at saying no to things and selfish, so this is my solution.” He smiles at me apologetically. “And about holiday-driven fast fashion—I like it. You should pitch that to Gus.”
I snort. “Youshould pitch it to Gus.”
Alex shifts, facing me with his body. His thumb traces the shell of my ear. “You’re doing it again,” he murmurs.
“Doing what?”
