Brooklyn slid by in soft yellow. She gave me the turns in a low voice. Left here. Right at the next light. The third building, the one with the green door.
She lived on the second floor of a walk-up with a stairwell that smelled of someone else’s cooking and a hallway lit by one tired bulb. Her door had three locks. She used all three. I noted which one she turned first.
The apartment was the size of my closet at the compound.
It was hers in every inch. A small couch with a thin wool blanket folded along the back. A rice cooker on the counter with the timer light still glowing soft red from this morning. A line of three small plants on the windowsill, the leaves turned toward the glass. A photograph in a black frame above the radiator, Chloe younger by some years with a small round woman in a blue cardigan, both of them squinting into a sun I could not see. Her grandmother. I knew the face. I had watched it through a screen door once.
She set her bag on the hook by the door without looking at the hook. She slipped her boots off and lined them up under the bench with the toes pointed in. She washed her hands at the sink for the count of twenty. She pulled rice from the cabinet under the counter and rinsed it in a metal bowl the way a woman rinses rice when she has rinsed it three thousand times, the heel of herhand pressed to the grains, the water going from milk to almost clear in three changes.
She pulled pork belly from the fridge. Gochujang. A jar of kimchi from the second shelf. A head of green onion. She moved a pan to the burner and let it heat without saying a word.
I leaned against the counter and watched her.
"Stop staring. I feel awkward."
"I am staring."
I did not pretend it was anything else. I shifted half a step toward the window so the line of my body did not corner her against the stove, and then I stayed where I was. She glanced sideways at me and I caught the glance and she caught me catching it and the corner of her mouth went up again. She turned back to the pan.
The pork belly hit the heat and the kitchen filled with the sound of fat learning a new shape. She layered the kimchi in after it, a slow practiced pour, and what came up off the pan was the kind of thing a person makes for themselves on a tired night. The rice cooker clicked.
"Where are your plates?"
"Above your head."
I reached up. Two bowls, two small plates, the cheap kind that come four for a dollar at the market on Eighth. I set them on the counter beside her. The kitchen was small enough that my shoulder was close to hers when I plated, and I did not move it away. She did not move away either. She spooned rice. I spooned the pork and the kimchi over the top. She set two pairs of chopsticks across the bowls.
She turned to lift her bowl and I was already turned to her.
I lifted my hand and set my palm along her jaw. The same hand. The same set of it I had laid against her cheek in the back of the car two nights back when she had been asleep and warmand not mine to touch. She was awake now. She knew where my hand was. She knew where her face was inside it.
"Can I kiss you?"
She went still under my palm. She did not look away. Her pupils widened the small amount a pupil widens when a body is deciding.
"No."
I did not pull my hand back at once. I took one breath with my palm where it was. I felt the small pulse under her jaw against my thumb. Then I dropped my hand. Clean. No drag of the fingers, no last brush along her chin.
"Let’s eat then."
I picked up both bowls and carried them to the small table by the window without making a thing of it. I set hers at the chair that faced the room. I took the one that faced the door. I waited for her to sit before I sat.
She told me no. She told me the truth. Good.
She sat. She took her chopsticks. She watched me take a first bite the way a woman watches a man eat her cooking for the first time, ready to wave off whatever I said.
The food was good. The kind that only comes from hands that have done this since they were small.
"This is very good."
She did not believe me yet. Her face said so. But the corner of her mouth went up the way it had on the sidewalk.
"You don’t have to say that."
"I do not say things I do not mean. You will learn."
She ate for a moment. The window behind her had the kitchen light doubled in it and her face doubled with it.
