Yolk(45)

I look down at his feet when he reappears.

He’s wearing what is tantamount to Uggs.

“Um.”

He opens a shoe cabinet crammed with sneakers and pulls out another pair of fur-lined boot moccasins. They’re conspicuously smaller. Either his mom’s or dedicated for overnight guests from dating apps. “I highly recommend them.”

“Thanks.” I slide my feet in. I wish I could take off my socks, but I don’t know whose feet have been in these. Still, they’re toasty. “Nice place.”

He takes my coat, hangs it up, then walks across the living room. “Thanks,” he says, and cracks the window.

Even the honking of the cars outside sounds New Yorkier than usual. I take a closer look at the movie posters. Truffaut, Kurosawa, Maya Deren.

He has a Wong Kar-wai In the Mood for Love poster. Of course he does. “I love that you have the French edition.” I’ve stalked the poster on eBay since freshman year. It’s the one that features Maggie Cheung on one side of a brick alley and Tony Leung on the other. Both with their eyes downcast, and Tony’s shadow doing what his body can’t and touching her. It’s devastating.

“I can’t take credit,” he says. “If you’re feeling a commotion in your loins, it’s my mom you’re attracted to.”

“Commotion?” Loins?

He smiles and shrugs. “This is mostly her stuff,” he explains. “Except the books.

“Okay,” he says, washing his hands in the kitchen sink and drying them on a red-and-white-striped towel. “Not to be all, I’m going to slip into something more comfortable, but I’m going to slip into something more comfortable.”

He pads into his bedroom and closes the door partway.

“Hungry? Thirsty?” he asks when he returns in gray sweatpants and a hoodie.

I eye his cozy ensemble longingly.

He smiles knowingly and shakes his head. “You want sweats?”

“No, I’m okay.”

“Lies.”

“Okay, fine, I want sweats so bad I’m willing to, like, purchase them from you.”

He goes back to his room and emerges with an exactly matching duo. “I hate mismatched sets,” he says, and I smile, thinking about my socks. “These are on loan.” He places the pile in my hands meaningfully. “I’m tired of getting robbed for my staples.”

Again, I can’t help but be curious about all the other women he’s had over. Whether the slippers and sweats are a part of some move or M.O.

“Thank you.” I raise them, as if toasting him. “Is that the bathroom?” I point down the hall past the kitchen.

The bathroom is small and perfect, with even more plants and an old claw-foot tub.

I barely recognize myself in the mirror. My face is oily. My eye makeup smeared. I open the medicine cabinet, locate some mouthwash, swish, gargle, and spit it out, and feel marginally better.

When I close the mirrored door, I realize I deliberately avoided reading his prescription bottles.

Shit. I like him.

There’s a pump dispenser of face wash on the sink, and as much as I want to scrub my face, I still have some sense of decorum. No one’s seen me without eyeliner since I was twelve. My face disappears without it. I don’t have a double eyelid, and Mom and Dad refused to let me get the surgery even though in Korea it’s basically as much a rite of passage as a bat mitzvah. I wash my hands, running warm water over them for a while. And then wash around my eyes and brows with my soapy fingertips like a lunatic.

Peeling off my jeans that are so tight I can never get them off without rolling them inside out, I realize how filthy and sticky I feel.

“Um…” I crack open the door, cringing. “Can I take a shower?” I grit my teeth. Maybe I should remind him again that I’m not homeless so that he’ll extra, really be convinced that I’m homeless.

God, he thinks I’m a grifter.

I shiver, remembering the puke. How that must have appeared.

“Knock yourself out,” he says. I turn on the hot water and hear a tap on the door.

I crack it, hiding behind it. He hands me a towel. “You’ve got to run the water while you press inside the little spigot guy to make it come out of the showerhead,” he says.

“Thanks.”

“It’s old and cranky.”

“Thanks,” I squeak.

I pull back the shower curtain. Not only is the tub spotless, but there’s a powder-blue rubber mesh over the drain to catch hairs. I’ve seen these exact ones in the household appliance section of H Mart. I smile picturing him tossing it into his shopping basket or else his Mom sending it to him in a care package with the same lime-green square exfoliating washcloth that I keep meaning to use but don’t.

Even with his fancy parents who speak fluent English and a sister in the Peace Corps, Patrick isn’t above the stupid blue hair catcher. I feel like squeezing his face into mush.

The spray of hot water is a miracle. I’m so grateful for this moment no matter how the rest of the night goes.

When I put on the sweats, I feel like weeping.

I find Patrick in the kitchen. He’s wearing black reading glasses, with a tea towel on his shoulder and his sleeves pushed up. I study the thick lines of ink on his forearms without staring directly at them. I feel another commotion. Definitely in the loin region. “I’m making spaghetti aglio e olio,” he says. “Or aglio e olio e pepperoncino. I guess.”