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S o We Went for Thai

“S ee? I told you these were much better noodles than what that Executive Chef made!” Helena crowed delightedly as she spooled some crinkly glass noodles into h er mouth.

“Yes, but that was never going to be much of a stretch,” Rafferty argued before he tucked the same thing into his o wn mouth.

They were sitting on a pair of stools, like at the outdoor eatery kitchens in Asia, at one of Helena’s favorite places on Little Thai street. The street itself wasn’t actually officially called “Little Thai” street, but all the locals called it that, probably for marketing reasons, and every sort of Thai food could be found on that street so it fit. There was even an Asian grocery store at the end of the street that catered not only to the restaurants but to patrons who wanted to try to capture those flavors at home. Or could at l east try.

To Helena, this felt more like a date than their meal at the Tower Top Restaurant. They had a perfect pair of seats, right in front of the outdoor heater that was going at full blast against the winter night. While perched on their stools with big ceramic bowls before them, their feet were crossed together at the ankles, so they could touch and eat with both of their hands at the same time. It felt like she was playing footsie with him, and to anyone else not them, that was exactly what it looked like, but she also didn’t care. She was enjoying herself too freak ing much.

The food itself was her favorite. Glass noodles, made from bean sprouts, with shitake mushrooms, slivers of carrot, bamboo shoots, green onions, and little slices of green bell pepper, tossed with shrimp. Mild ly spicy.

Rafferty scooped some floppy mushrooms into his mouth, fumbling with his chopsticks. “Dammit,” he muttered when he lost one, managing to catch it with his bowl.

“It’s not so easy, is it?” Helena teased, delicately plucking one of his mushrooms to feed it to him from her own chopsticks. He ate, even as he shot her a black, annoyed look that she just couldn’t take seriously anymore. He had returned once more to a normal-looking guy, and she had never felt safer than when she was with him.

Carefully, she helped him reclaim his chopsticks and guided his fingers to hold them properly again. “I can’t believe in all your years of cooking, you never once needed to make Asian cuisine.”

“It just never came up,” he admitted, his eyes wandering over to the cooks behind the bar itself, stirring, sautéing, and flipping their woks full of colorful vegetables and differe nt meats.

One of the cooks came up, his eyes smiling as big as his mouth, to set a small plate of fried dumplings between them with a soy dippi ng sauce.

“You want to learn how to make all this, d on’t you?”

“I am not worthy,” he said absent-mindedly, and Helena slapped his knee with an open palm, making him jump.

“Hey, stop that,” she chided gently. “It doesn’t matter if you’re worthy or not. It’s about living and you’re currently alive, so live now while you can.”

He eyed her but didn’t argue as he slid another mouthful of noodles into his mouth, more or less with the chopsticks. With his face slightly turned like that, she could see the bruise forming around his left eye. It was clearly red and swollen. She wanted to touch it but knew that it would only cause him m ore pain.

“We should get some ice on your eye,” she noted, hovering her hand over it.

“I’ll be okay. I’ve had far, far worse,” he said. “When I rest tonight, it wil l vanish.”

“And that is far, far from the point,” she replied. “I can’t believe you just took the punch like that.” She scraped at her own bowl, capturing a shrimp in her chopsticks that had been hiding inside a small lump of noodles. “Also, thank you, by the way, for protecting me. That was something you didn’t ha ve to do.”

“Yes, I did,” he sai d softly.

Catching the note of confession, she shook her head, pressing on the idea. “No, no, you didn’t. You could have let me get hurt. You chose to protect me. Therefore, t hank you.”

“If something happens to you, I lose my link to this ‘city,’ and I have to go home. So it is in my self-interest to keep you as safe as possible,” he said.

Narrowing her eyes at him, she huffed, perturbed that he had maneuvered out of her argument. She had to think fast. “It would also be in your self-interest to let me believe that you saved me out of the goodness of yo ur heart.”

“Yeah well,” he shrugged, “I suck a t my job.”

“And you like me.”

“And I like you.”

They met eyes then, both acknowledging what they had just admitted.

Helena grinned, finally hearing what she wanted to hear.

“And maybe you love me?” Helena asked, teasingly, pushing for more.

He looked down then and back at his bowl. “If I did, it would be the worst thing in the world for you.”

And they were back to that old saw. “How so?” she asked.

“You’re not letting this go, are you?”

She shook her head. “Oh absolu tely not.”

He sighed, then attempted to use his chopsticks to pick up one of the dumplings to feed her with as a way to shut her up. “Because loving someone like me can only end in heartache and tragedy. And you don’t dese rve that.”

“You have no idea what I deserve,” Helena said darkly, catching the dumpling in her mouth before he lost control of it. They needed to get better at feeding e ach other.

“There is nothing you don’t deserve,” Rafferty stated as if it were just a fact, not giving compliments. “You are a truly good, decent, honest, caring person, who for some unfathomable reason is messing with things she shouldn’t, all out of a sense of honest compassion that doesn’t exist in this world. Do you really understand you are such a unique thing in all of creation? Even the good people, some really good people, are tempted by the kind of power you have at your fingertips. For the right reasons, for the right intentions, they will call us to serve, and it will inevitably go horribly, horribly wrong in the end because most of us are actually effective at our jobs.”

“So my continued survival is also dependent on you being really incompetent at yours. The fact that you haven’t been working and manipulating things to get me to make the wrong decisions and fall for that temptation of abuse you keep ex pecting?”

He growled and murmured something she couldn’t make out but got th e gist of.

But she was winning, and she was not going to let this go. “Maybe … the state of this current relationship has more to do with both of us and our choices than one of us being nearly saint-like i n virtue?”

Grumble, grumble , grumble.

“And I’m not talking about me.”

“What? Why would you…” He scoffed, clearly frustrated. “What do you have to be so down on yourself about? What could you have possibly done that would force you to see yourself as anything other than the pillar of annoying virtue that you actu ally are!”

“I’ve killed somebody.”

She wanted to be flippant about it, but it still hurt to admit that non-secret out loud. The sensation of needles piercing her throat made it hard to swallow the mouthful she stuffed in after her declaration. She expected Rafferty to laugh at what she said, or dismiss it, say she was exaggerating, but he didn’t. He sat there looking at her hard, and that was actually worse because she hadn’t been prepare d for it.

He beli eved her.

“You must feel so betrayed,” she said out loud, naming the thing she feared most in that moment. “But it’s true. I caused someone to die. So there you go. I’m not the pillar of virtue you th ink I am.”

“Tell me,” he said, his voice rumbling low. A thrum of wrongness crested off of him, rolling through the food eatery. Everyone there seemed to feel it and reacted to it like a wind had blown through, even though the air was still.

“I think it is going to snow,” the young cook who had brought them their dumplings said, looking unsettled as he leaned forward to glance up at the dark starless sky. “We are going to pull everything in and shut the doors.” He gestured to the pair of doors on the building they occupied that could be pulled in and turning the open air of the eatery into a closed contained building, especially on a winter night l ike this.

“It’s okay. We’re about done,” Helena said, having completely lost what was left of her appetite. “Can we have a to -go tray?”

The cook nodded and returned with a pressed wax-lined takeout bowl that she dumped hers and his lefto vers into.

“Thank you, again,” she said to the cooks who all waved at her with smiles as they closed in the shop.

Rafferty followed, his eyes never leaving her, boring into her, as she refused to loo k at him.