Yes, I’m Brian, the guy you met at the party last night, the one who couldn’t speak a single syllable of Vietnamese to you. Yes, you, you’re Linh. I wasn’t sure if I had the right Facebook profile. You remember seeing me at the auditions back in September? Yes, I was the skank who ripped my shirt off at the end of the performance, and I remember you were the intimidating blank-face ghetto-looking one with the hat. No surprise that you made it and I didn’t. So what do we do besides dance? You’re going to go into pharmacy—how Vietnamese—I’m going to be an English teacher—how unVietnamese. But that’s okay because I can still cook Vietnamese food, chả giò or cháo gà, crunchy or creamy, you name it, and yes, even phở. Oh, you want me to make you nem nướng cuốn? A little too complicated, not my specialty, but maybe later on. You gettin’ hungry now? Well here’s a webcam photo of me eating a plate of cơm gà (and making a cute face).
By now we flirted, and by now, we exchanged numbers. A few text messages and a few 2 AM phone calls later, you arrived at my doorstep after your rehearsal, sweaty and hungry.
You stepped inside, and under the kitchen light I saw you so differently, because for the first time I saw you outside the context of another mundane house party, or unmasked from the grainy pixels of a webcam, allowing me, on a conscious level, to finally see and realize the connection that had silently and serendipitously strung us together. I wondered if you saw what I saw.
You dropped your backpack off in my room, and I noticed that you had stuffed it with an extra change of clothes, a toothbrush and Crest toothpaste, and a case for your contact lenses. I thought to myself, did you plan on staying over? I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to ask. If it happened, it happened, I figured. For now my focus turned to cooking the two of us dinner, so to the kitchen we returned.
“Pork chops? That’s not very Vietnamese.”
But the white rice steaming in the rice cooker in the corner made it Vietnamese enough. I dropped three slabs of pork chops into an oil-filled pan, and you and I stood back to watch as bubbles danced and climbed up the sides of our dinner. We didn’t speak much; the sizzling and splashing blathered on while we, on the other hand, found meaning through the occasional but much anticipated brush of physical interaction. Never having fried my pork chops before, I’d prod them with a plastic spatula until you wrapped your fingers around my forearm and brought it to the side, where I could drop the spatula onto a clean plate.
“It’s okay Brian. They’re not going to go up in flames if let them sit for more than thirty seconds.”
Nonetheless, the cycle of my prodding and his grabbing continued, and it got to the point where it felt like a mating ritual: slow and subtle, profound and provocative. Half an hour later, we finally plated our pork chops and rice, and we retreated to my room where we sat on my bed to eat and watch X-Files in the dark.
At first, with our food untouched, we sat separately, anxiously resistant and only permitting ourselves to be joined by the balls of our kneecaps, but as each grain of rice and every slice of pork disappeared off our plates, another inch up our outer thigh met. And once our entire dinner rested in our stomachs, I found your head resting on my shoulder—no words and no more resistance; it just happened. And from shutting off the TV and cleaning up the dirty dishes, to brushing our teeth and taking out our contacts, we ended lying side by side in my tiny twin-sized bed, warm underneath my blankets; it just simply happened.
You were the first to speak out to the ceiling.
“Come to my team’s Halloween party this Saturday.”
Saturday? That was in two days.
“You’re not going to make me drink are you? I can’t drink because just two or three shots of any alcohol will numb my body. I once tried to pull and grab at my balls and felt nothing. Isn’t that a shame? I can never have drunk sex.”
“Aww but it won’t be fun to drink without you!”
I turned on my side to face him. “I might take a shot or two. Where’s the party at?”
“I’m hosting it at my place in Murrieta.”
“Murrieta? I went there once for a party too, but that was one and a half years ago. Murrieta’s really in the middle of no where, isn’t it?”
You chuckled and turned on your side to meet me, face to face. We gazed into each other’s eyes, where once again I found the intimate connection that we had initiated at the party, the connection that had evolved since then and now unveiled itself so vibrantly to me in the dark, silent room, and I knew you saw it too, because as we inched closer, I felt your arm creep underneath my side and crawl up my back as my arm found the same way up yours. Once our noses met, I closed my eyes in anticipation of our big first kiss, but I had to stop myself from coming any closer and left it up to you to close the gap between our lips. Would you do it? I wondered. I had always felt too shy to be the one to make the first move, the first kiss.
Turned out we didn’t kiss. The pressure on the tip of my nose lifted as you pulled away and rolled onto your other side, facing away from me. Instead, with my nose now buried in the soft bristles of hair on the back of your head, we spooned. And we’d neither kissed later that night nor in the morning.
It had only been a week. We weren’t rushing. I knew that you Linh, would be a keeper.
So as long as I didn’t fuck up.
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