Helen Hoang - The Bride Test

Esme nodded, feeling numb.

“You just crossed, didn’t you?”

There was no need to clarify what she’d crossed or where she’d been before. Esme simply nodded again. With how the lunch hour had gone, it had to be painfully obvious that she was new to the country.

The lady reached across the table and squeezed Esme’s hand. “It gets better over time. I was a lot like you when I first came.”

Esme almost told her that she was only guaranteed to be here for one summer, but she thought better of it. She didn’t want to explain things and change this woman’s kindness to judgment. And what kind of impression was she making, sitting and drinking tea when she was on the job? She got to her feet, and as she continued wiping tables where she’d left off before, she said, “Thank you, Cô. I’m sorry about the papers.”

“My name is Quyền, but call me Miss Q. That’s what my students call me.”

“You’re a teacher?”

Miss Q held up the papers she’d gathered off the floor. “That’s right. This is my students’ homework.” Then her face brightened, and she said, “You could join my class. I teach English in the evenings. The summer session just started.”

Esme sucked in a surprised breath, and her towel froze in midswipe. Her first reaction was excitement. She would love to go to school again, and it would be so nice not to be embarrassed when she spoke to customers, and—

No, she told herself firmly. Evenings weren’t for school. They were for seducing Khải. Besides, it was better to save the money for Jade. That was why she was here, after all. For Jade (and her dad). Not Esme. She couldn’t justify it if it was just to make herself happy.

“I don’t need it,” she said finally. “I can manage like this.”

A polite smile touched Miss Q’s lips before she put a ten-dollar bill on the table, packed up her things, and got up. “Good-bye, then. If you change your mind, the adult school is just across the street there.” She pointed out the window at the squat white building on the other side of the busy street and left.

Almost wistfully, Esme watched her dodge her way across the street without using the crosswalk. She didn’t notice the stray sheet of paper on the far side of the room until the lady disappeared into the school.

Esme went to pick up the paper and found it covered with a handwritten essay by a person named Angelika K. She started reading, and kept reading, and stood there like a statue until she’d finished the whole thing. Then she stared out the window at the school.

Was Angelika K. going to school to benefit others? Or was she going just because she wanted to?

Over the following week, a new routine developed for Khai. In the mornings, they had breakfast. Khai ate whatever Esme forced on him, and she gleefully gorged herself on tropical fruit. They went to work, and he picked her up around six in the evening. That was the busiest time at the restaurant, but his mom insisted she had things covered. Khai suspected she just wanted him and Esme to have dinner together.

It wasn’t candlelit romance or anything, so he didn’t know why his mom bothered. Most of the time, they heated up containers from the fridge and ate like scavengers. Other times, Esme cooked, and he had to turn on the exhaust hood and open all the windows to vent the smell. While they ate, Esme made strange comments about work, current events, and whatever random things were going on in her head, and he tried to ignore her, mostly unsuccessfully. After dinner, he exercised and watched TV on low volume while he worked on his laptop. She used the time to torment him in new and creative ways.

On Tuesday, Khai found his socks rolled up the long way and stacked in his drawer like cigars. On Wednesday, she blasted Viet pop on her phone while she color coded the foodstuffs in his pantry, making it impossible for him to concentrate on the TV or anything, really. On Thursday, she wiped down the baseboards, wearing that oversized T-shirt, no bra, and a pair of his boxers. They were his underwear, for fuck’s sake, not shorts, and they didn’t even fit her. She rolled the waist down so many times she might as well have walked around in her panties.

By Friday, he was having fantasies of cramming her on the next plane back to Vietnam. He couldn’t find anything in his house, he wasn’t sleeping, and he was so sexually frustrated his molars hurt. He would seriously consider bribing her to leave if it weren’t for his mom and her threats. No way was he doing this a second time.

Late Friday night, he was in bed, staring at the darkened ceiling and imagining Esme waving happily at him from the curb at the airport as he accelerated away, when the door to the bathroom, which connected their rooms, jerked open. The soft glow from the bathroom’s night-light spread into his room, casting a dim light on Esme’s tear-strewn face as she stumbled onto the foot of his bed.

He sat upright and swiped the hair from his face. “Are you okay? What—”

She crawled across the bed and straight onto his lap. Her arms wrapped around his neck, and she trembled as she held on to him tightly. Breaths quick and ragged, she pressed her wet face to his neck.

He held himself as stiff as a mannequin. What the hell did he do? He had a crying woman latched onto him like an octopus. He couldn’t help recalling that the blue-ringed octopus was one of the most venomous animals in existence.

Don’t upset the octopus.

After clearing his throat, he asked, “What’s wrong? What happened?”

She hugged him harder, like she was trying to crawl straight inside of him. He was so used to keeping people away he hardly knew what to do with someone so close. Fortunately, this kind of firm touch was acceptable — he liked proprioception and deep pressure. But hot moisture drenched his bare skin, disturbing him. Tears, not deadly neurotoxin, he reminded himself.

“They took her from me,” she said against his chest. He didn’t know why he assumed it was a her. Pronouns weren’t gendered in Vietnamese, so she could very well be talking about a him. There wasn’t a good reason why he should dislike Esme crying about a man. Her trembling worsened as a sob tore from her throat.

“Who took who?”

“Her father and his wife.”

Okay, that didn’t make any sense. He was ninety-nine point nine percent positive she’d had a bad dream. It had been a long time since he’d had any nightmares — while inconvenient, sexual fantasies didn’t qualify as nightmares — but back then, only one thing had made him feel better. He closed his arms around her and hugged her.

An uneven sigh warmed his chest, and she sagged against him with a murmur. Almost instantly, her trembling faded. An unusual kind of satisfaction spread through him, better than perfect increments of time or whole dollar amounts at the gas station.

He’d taken her sadness away. He usually did the exact opposite to people.

For long minutes, he continued hugging her, reasoning she needed time for the calm to stick. But maybe he liked holding her, too. There, in the near darkness of his room, it was okay to admit to himself she felt good and smelled good, like his soap but feminine, soft, no fish sauce. He enjoyed the weight of her body on his. She was better than three heavy blankets. He might have rested his cheek against her forehead.

Her breathing evened out, and her sniffles grew farther and farther apart until they stopped altogether. She shifted on his lap slightly, and he realized he was aroused, wildly and embarrassingly aroused. Shit. If she wiggled anymore, she’d notice for sure.

“Are you done?” he asked.

She pulled away and scooted off his lap, thankfully missing his raging erection, and he rubbed his chest where her tears had dried.

A long silence followed. She started to talk several times but held back. Finally, she whispered, “Can I sleep here tonight? At home, I sleep with Má and Ngoại and … I won’t touch you, I promise. Unless you want …” Her eyes glittered mysteriously as she gazed at him.

Unless he wanted what? Wait, did she mean sex? No, he didn’t want sex. Actually, he did. His body was enthusiastic about the idea. But mind over penis and all that. Sex was tangled with romantic relationships in his mind, and because he wasn’t suited for relationships, it only made sense to avoid the sex. Besides, touching was complicated for him. Hugs were mostly okay, but anything else was likely to be a problem. It was bad enough he had to give his haircutter instructions for how to manage. He didn’t want to do that with a woman before the act.

He looked at the empty half of his large bed. The blankets were completely undisturbed, pristine. And he liked them that way. He always felt a certain accomplishment when he woke up in the morning and didn’t have to make the other side of the bed.

Rubbing at her elbow, she edged away from him. In a small voice, she said, “Sorry, I’ll go—”

He pulled the blankets down. “You can sleep here, I guess.”

Dammit, what was he doing? He didn’t want her sharing his bed. But she looked like she was going to start crying again. She wasn’t supposed to be sad. Esme was always happy, always smiling.

She covered her mouth. “Really?”

He swiped the hair away from his forehead. This was a horrible idea. He could already tell. “I might snore.”

“My grandma snores like a motorcycle. It doesn’t bother me,” she said with a big grin.

There it was. Her smile. It was important somehow. Muscles relaxed that he hadn’t been aware of tensing.

She crawled under the covers and plopped her head down on the pillow, lying on her side so she faced him. He stretched out on his back and stared up at the ceiling. They were a good arm’s length apart, but his heart threatened to go into cardiac arrest anyway.