Page 28 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
Jacob was already half on his feet by the time I was halfway down the aisle. He had cut his hair. The long curl at his forehead I had teased him about at fourteen was gone. He had a wool overcoat folded onto the booth beside him and a button-down open at the throat and the small chip on his front tooth he had carried since the morning he had tried to skate down three steps at thirteen. He came around the table and he wrapped me up the way he had always wrapped me up, one arm at my back and one at the top of my head, and I let my face go into the place at his shoulder I had been putting it since I was small.
"You shrank."
"You got tall in Singapore."
"That's airline food. It pulls a man up at the spine."
He sat me on the inside of the booth. He slid in across from me. The grill set into the table was warming. The banchan was already out, six small white dishes, the kimchi he loved and the bean sprouts I loved and the small dried anchovies our grandmother had spooned onto our rice when we were too small to ask for them.
"How long?"
"A month. I fly back at the end of it."
"Catch me up."
He did. He told me about the apartment on the twenty-second floor with the view of a harbor that lit up at night the way a circuit board lit up. He told me about the woman at the noodlestand at the bottom of his office who had learned his order in the second week. He told me he had stood at passport control at one in the morning and watched a man in front of him fall asleep on his feet.
"You cut your hair."
"My mother cried."
"She would."
"You look good, Chloe. You look like you finally figured out which way is up."
"I'm getting there."
He picked up his chopsticks. He laid two strips of bulgogi onto the grill and the sizzle rose between us. He nudged the kimchi dish two inches closer to my hand because that was what he had always done.
"Are you seeing somebody?"
The strip of beef I was reaching for paused a half second over the grill.
"Yes."
"Look at that face."
"What face?"
"That one. The one that isn't telling me a thing."
"I'll tell you. Just not over the first round of meat."
"Fair."
I ate. He ate. The owner came by with a small dish of egg roll cut into rounds and set it down without a word and went back to the front. Jacob talked about our grandmother's youngest sister, who had been calling him on a video app from her kitchen at five in the morning her time to show him the persimmons on her tree. He talked about the friend from college who had bought a dog and named the dog after a poet. He made me laugh twice before I had finished my rice.
He set his chopsticks down. He reached into the pocket of the coat folded next to him on the booth and brought up asmall black velvet pouch and slid it across the table between the banchan.
"What is this?"
"Open it."
I pulled the drawstring. A small gold pendant slid out into my palm on a thin chain. It was a simple shape, a small flat bar with a single character cut clean through the middle of it. The character for water. Soft at the top and curved at the bottom. He had remembered it had been my favorite since I had drawn it over and over on the back of my homework in the fourth grade.
"Jacob."
"I picked this up in a market in the second week. The woman who sold it to me said it was for someone who has finally gotten herself together."
