Page 10 of Square Waves (Big Fan #2)

IX

By the time I make it home, it’s after midnight. The air has gotten colder, and the wind bites hard against my skin as I jiggle my key in the lock of my parents’ front door. It can be a little sticky, and I’m relieved when I feel it turn.

But when I push to open it, it won’t budge. I give it a little shove, and then a harder one. And then I realize: There are two locks, a regular one, and a dead bolt. I always throw the dead bolt on when I come in. But tonight, I left out the back door. Which uses its own key. One that I don’t have.

Fucking fuck.

I walk through the back gate, just to see if I somehow left that entrance open. Obviously, I didn’t.

I lean my forehead against the cool pane of glass there, peering into the dark house. “Let me in,” I mumble. “Just... let me in, okay?” It doesn’t.

I check my bank balance, and the number is exactly what I knew it would be.

I get paid pretty well for a nonprofit, but I rarely have much of a cushion.

Each dollar has started to feel more meaningful without a sense of how long I’ll keep this job and what I’ll do next if I don’t.

I get a full-body chill as I contemplate just how much I’ll shame-spiral if I call a twenty-four-hour locksmith, which will almost certainly run me a few hundred bucks.

Then another idea dawns on me. If it works, it would be far cheaper. Well, except for the cost to my pride and dignity. But I’ve been known to throw those away for less.

I steel myself, pull out my phone, and text Leon—or the number I assume is his from the group text Willa sent earlier this week. Hi. Any chance your miseducation has included learning how to pick locks?

I immediately wish I could unsend it. If he says yes, then I have to move that apology up by forty-eight hours. If he doesn’t, I’m out my pride, dignity, and however much a professional charges.

I sink down onto the front steps and pull my dress over my knees as best I can while I wait. A few minutes later he writes back, Are you admitting that you need me for something?

Beggars can’t be choosers. Yes.

Your parents still at the same house?

My face warms that he remembers. They are. Send me your address, and I’ll send you an Uber .

Twenty-five minutes later, Leon’s stepping out of the Uber.

He’s appropriately dressed for the weather, in the same outfit he was wearing earlier plus a shearling-lined denim jacket.

I feel exceptionally stupid in my little dress, my teeth starting to chatter now.

Like a girl who doesn’t know how to take care of herself.

I have my speech all ready to go, and I launch into it before I can lose my nerve. “Listen, I was gonna say, I feel like I owe you—” I start, but Leon waves me off.

“Don’t apologize just because I’m doing you a solid.”

“I’m not just saying this because—”

“How about this: Don’t apologize at all, okay? We were both moody today. It was dumb.” He looks like he wants to say something more, and his eyes clock the goose bumps on my arms. But he just sighs, and I feel like I should let him get this over with.

“Okay. Well, it’s, uh, the door in the back is the one I was hoping you could—”

“Lead the way.”

I walk him through the little yard, and he climbs the steps there to see what he’s up against. I stand at the bottom stair, trying not to hover while he works.

The stupid feeling I got earlier blooms and grows in my chest, its heat the only warm part of my body.

I’m desperate to do something to break the tension between us, to make this feel even 5percent normal.

“Can I at least apologize for interrupting your Friday night?”

That gets a little laugh out of Leon. He’s been squatting in front of the door, staring down the lock; now he pushes his hair out of his eyes and glances up at me. I don’t think I’m imagining that he gives my bare legs a quick scan.

“To be honest, I needed an escape,” he says. “So technically, we’re both helping each other out.”

“Oh.” I lean against the railing, shivering at the bite of the metal. “What were you escaping from?”

“My sister was doing a set at an open mic night earlier.” I was expecting Leon to arrive with a full tool kit or something, but he pulls a couple of bobby pins out of his pocket.

One he opens into a wide angle; the other he turns into a hook.

“She was pretty good, actually. But our parents came, and she made some jokes about being second-gen and not feeling super connected to Korean culture, and that hurt my mom’s feelings.

And then they got into a huge fight, so I had to take Ruby out for drinks after to calm her down. You know. Family stuff.”

He eases the hook pin into the lock and starts feeling around. For what? I wonder. When did he learn to do this? Why?

“That was good of you. To take her out.”

“My sister is a drama queen.” Leon rolls his eyes, but I can tell it’s loving. “I’ve been refereeing her fights with my mom since I could talk. Typical middle sibling stuff, always trying to be the peacemaker.”

I think of Leon as a kid, attempting to solve problems he was never going to be able to solve. Paralyzing himself with how hard he was trying to fix things.

He finds what he’s looking for in the lock, and I hear a faint but audible click .

“Did you get it?”

“That was just the first one,” he says. “It’s gonna be a few minutes. You were at Willa’s yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“How was it?”

I shrug, but his back is to me, so he can’t see. “It was a good party.”

“Did you have fun?”

“That’s an annoyingly perceptive question.”

“You know me, Cass.” Another faint click . “You can always count on me to be annoying.”

I sigh. “No, you’re not. I meant that you—” He’s working faster now, and a third click comes right on the heels of the second. “I’m annoyed because you caught me being evasive.”

He pauses to turn around and raise an eyebrow.

“I know.” Then he goes back to the lock, and I make myself let him focus.

He keeps probing at it, patient, and for some reason, I can’t breathe.

It’s like my body is remembering what it’s like to be the thing beneath his capable hands, and there’s nothing I can do to stop its response.

He releases a fourth click , and then a fifth, before levering the lock into a turn.

The door pops open. I’m in.

Leon withdraws the pins and puts them back in his pocket.

“Do you just carry those with you everywhere you go?”

He laughs, and his dimple shows. “No, you got lucky. Since my hair’s been getting long, I’ve been using them to keep it out of my face when I’m working at the wheel or whatever.”

That’s painfully cute. “Oh. Well. I’m glad you had them.

And I know you don’t want an apology, but I do owe you, like, a drink or something.

” I say it out of habit—because it’s the thing you offer people who’ve done you a favor.

But Leon looks uncomfortable, and I wonder if he thinks I’m asking for an encore of our night out together.

Trying to fuck my way out of our newly awkward dynamic.

“Sure. Sometime.” Leon shoves his hands in his pockets. He’s about to leave. He’s already rejected my attempt to talk once, but I know that if I don’t take this chance to try again—this weird midnight encounter, with no one around to witness us—I’ll regret it.

So instead of stepping aside to let him pass me, I say, “Can I ask you a question?”

He nods.

“Did you really... did it really bother you, the way I was to you back in high school?”

A brief look of surprise passes over his face. At first, I think he’s going to make a joke. Blow me off. But then he nods again.

“I didn’t know.”

“I didn’t want you to know.” He sighs. “And you weren’t wrong about me, exactly, which is partially why it pissed me off. I was kind of a little shit. A slacker, and a stoner, and—whatever—that’s the show I put on. I did waste a lot of people’s time. Including my own.”

I tap my fingertips against the railing. Being an adult is so much more complicated than I ever could have imagined when I was young and certain about everything in my life.

“Willa says you were a perfectionist.”

“I got in my own way, that’s for fucking sure.”

“But then you stopped. Doing that.”

“Did I?”

I expect him to be smirking, but he looks serious.

Like maybe he’s just as lost as I am. And as desperate for someone to tell him he’s doing okay.

So I say, “It seems like you did. I mean, you’re so.

.. good at things. And reliable. You do more for the store before lunch than I do all day. And when I needed help, I called you.”

Leon refuses to smile. But I watch his eyes warm at the compliment. “I like being handy,” he says, and I can hear the pride in his voice. “Being able to make things better.”

“Yeah. It’s”—it pains me a little to admit this, but I do—“It’s cool.”

A breeze brushes by us, and I shiver.

“You should get inside,” Leon says.

“I should.”

This time, he’s the one who pauses. “Any chance you want that drink... now?”

We open my parents’ liquor cabinet, and I contemplate the rows of bottles in front of us, but none of them seem at all appealing. “I feel like I’m in high school,” Leon says. “Raiding your parents’ booze.”

“Listen, I feel like I’m in high school all the time now.”

“You know what I really want?”

I blush, and I’m grateful he isn’t looking at me.

He takes off his jacket. “Remember when you made us grilled cheeses after that party at Ellery’s junior year?”

Drunk grilled cheese sandwiches were my high school specialty; they’re still one of the only things I’m good at cooking. “I do.”

“You wanna make me one of those instead?” Leon puts on a puppy-dog face, and I laugh. I could use a snack myself.

Which is how I end up slicing cheese and hunks of butter in my parents’ kitchen at one in the morning. Leon gets us glasses of water and hops up to sit on the counter, watching me at the stove.

“This is nice,” he says.

“It is.”

“We can be nice to each other.”

My heart seizes with a memory of just how nice. My gaze darts up at him, to see if he’s thinking what I’m thinking, but Leon is busy inspecting the package of oatmeal that’s sitting on the counter. Probably for the best.

Neither of us says anything else until both of our sandwiches are on plates, sliced diagonally, and we’re sitting across from each other at the kitchen table.

Leon takes a bite of his. Then he puts it back down on his plate and props his forehead on the heels of his hands as he chews.

“Fuck, Cassidy, this is as good as I remember,” he mumbles.

“And I was probably high when I had it the first time.”

That startles a laugh out of me. “Oh, you were definitely high. I remember worrying that the couch was going to smell like weed in the morning.” That was probably the only other time Leon was ever here: after a bunch of us bailed on a party when a rumor went around about the cops being on their way.

My parents were out of town, we were in the neighborhood, and people came over to mine while we tried to figure out what to do next.

“Did I get you in trouble?” Leon asks now. His dark eyes are full of mischief.

“No.” Not like that, anyway .

It’s as if he can hear what I’m thinking. Leon smirks before he takes another bite of his sandwich.

“You know, I went to Bryce’s birthday party a few months ago,” he says after a minute.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. It was fun. But it was also—it felt like everyone there was so adult.”

“I mean, we’re all—”

“We’re all twenty-eight,” he says. “But there are a lot of different kinds of twenty-eight. Some of us are living with partners, buying houses, starting businesses. Some of us don’t even know which of those things, if any, we want.”

He glances at me, but his gaze flickers away too fast for me to really read it. Still, it occurs to me that Leon is offering me something. And that I want to offer him something in return.

There’s no reason for me to trust him with this, exactly. But I do. “Did I ever tell you why I’m back?”

“I don’t think you did.”

I still can’t believe the first person I’m admitting this to is Leon fucking Park.

“Well. It’s because I’m so burned out, I can barely do the most basic tasks.

A couple of months ago, it was time for my annual review, and I was trying to fill out this questionnaire.

It was going okay—strengths, weaknesses, etcetera.

And then it was like, What are you most looking forward to in the coming year?

” I take a deep breath. Even the memory makes my throat thick with tears.

“And I just... didn’t have an answer.

Not at work. Not outside of work. My boss must have, uh, sensed that, because she put me on leave for three weeks.

But I think... I think I can’t go back there.

And I have no fucking idea what I’m supposed to do next.

Which is to say: I don’t feel any more adult than you do. ”

Leon ate while I talked; now he puts his sandwich down. “I’ve been thinking. Maybe we should call a truce.”

“A truce?”

“I know there’s a lot that’s happened between us. But while we’re in the store, or with Willa, or even just, like, if something like this happens again—we can just. You know. Be normal. Not just ignore each other. Actually be nice. Actively.”

I consider this as I wipe my greasy fingers on a napkin. I already promised Willa that this wasn’t going to be an issue before I started. But this sounds like something verging on friendship, however temporary. Possibly even a chance to start fresh.

Maybe Leon and I don’t have to keep poking every bruise we’ve ever left on each other’s egos.

We can accept that it has been a long time.

That we’ve both grown—or tried to—even if we don’t feel grown-up, exactly.

And we can try to make the next week and a half not just bearable but actually pleasant.

“Yeah. Let’s do it.”

“Shake on it?” Leon offers me his palm. For a second, I want to say no. Touching him feels like crossing a bridge—like once I start, I might not be able to stop.

But that’s silly. It’s just a handshake.

I reach across the table, and his skin is warm against mine. I feel calluses I only half noticed, that night in his apartment. It doesn’t have the same wild electricity of that contact; instead, there’s a steady hum of pleasure, zinging under my skin.