Page 58 of Next Time Will Be Our Turn
“My little Hazel tree,” I said, nuzzling her cheeks. Less chubby but still adorable and rosy and utterly kissable.
Parker was going to UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. Papa would resume his old role at the clinic without Parker around, and we were relatively confident that the clinicwould continue chugging along modestly while Parker was away. When Parker had decided on UCLA back home, I’d worried that it meant he’d want to rent at Westwood, but I needn’t have worried; the rental prices there were beyond ridiculous, and it didn’t take much convincing from my end to get him to agree that we should find a place in Pasadena. Iris kept a lookout, and the moment she told me there was a vacancy in her building, I pounced on it.
The day we arrived, after all the unpacking was done, Iris took us out to Mi Piace at Old Pas for dinner. It was a nice place, but I was jet-lagged and tired from unpacking, so I hadn’t bothered dressing up. Parker was looking dapper as always; he was a natural businessman through and through, and I was aware of how rumpled I looked next to him. I didn’t care though. I’d done the impossible. I’d pulled all the strings that could be pulled, played all of my cards, and I was here, back in LA, the place where I felt most at home, and nothing could possibly rattle me right now.
Nothing, that was, aside from seeing a ghost from my past. Her blond hair was the first thing I noticed, glinting under the soft lights. Then her face, slightly older but somehow completely unchanged. The smile that rounded her cheeks and hid her eyes as she held Hazel’s little hand in such a familiar way. She must’ve sensed me then, because she looked up, and I was plunged into those blue eyes of hers, ocean and sky blue, the color of an LA morning. Everything around us faded into silence. The only thing I was aware of at that moment was her.
Ellery O’Shea.
She stood, and the height of her overwhelmed me. I craned my neck to take her in, and my body remembered that, yes, thiswas the angle my neck got used to back then because I was always gazing up at her, always studying the perfect angles of her face, trying to memorize every bit of it.
There wasn’t even a sliver of a second where we felt uncertain. Both of us grinned at the same time, then laughed, and it felt as though nothing had changed between us. In the blink of an eye, we were both dumb kids back at PCC, hanging out and doing dumb shit.
“Tulip!” she said, and before I knew it, her strong arms were around me, and I was engulfed in the achingly familiar scent of her.
God, that hug. It felt like coming home after years of wandering about, lost and alone. By the time we parted, my heart was beating significantly faster and I was slightly out of breath. I was grateful that the restaurant was dim enough to hide the redness of my cheeks. I turned around, and part of me was taken aback to see Parker. Oh god! Of course. Parker.
“Parker, this is Ellery, my…old friend.” The term didn’t do her justice, but it was also the most apt label I could think of. She was, and had always been, nothing more than a friend. I glanced at Ellery, suddenly feeling shy, and said, “This is Parker. My husband.”
She was a good four or five inches taller than him, a fact that I felt guilty for noticing as they shook hands. I could tell Parker was slightly taken aback by Ellery. Like most Chindo guys, he was mostly comfortable around women who were petite and soft-spoken and dressed in a way that was not at all masculine. So Ellery, tall, blond, broad-shouldered, and wearing jeans and a button-down shirt rolled up to her elbows was far, far out of Parker’s comfort zone. And seeing his discomfort was strange,both off-putting and affirming at once. I wanted to apologize on his behalf, explain to Ellery that it wasn’t her, no, she was magnificent, it was him, and not just him, but the entirety of the Chinese-Indonesian community that placed so much importance on conformity.
Iris was watching us with a playful, wicked grin on her face. “Surprise!” she said, coming over and giving me a one-armed hug. “Oh man, you should see the look on your face.”
I closed my mouth. Hadn’t even noticed it was open, really. I shook my head at her, dazed. “I don’t understand—how? What?”
“Ellery moved back here, hmm…two? Three months ago?”
“Three months ago,” Ellery said.
“And we’ve hung out a handful of times.”
I blinked. This was so bizarre there were no words to describe it. My sister and Ellery hanging out? Since when? Back when we were at PCC, they barely said two words to each other, and now Ellery was here and they seemed like they were friends and Hazel obviously loved Ellery and, oh my god, what the hell is going on?
We sat down. I was in the seat adjacent to Ellery’s, and I found my gaze repeatedly flicking back to her as though there were a magnetic pull between us. I kept having to tear my eyes away from her face and force myself to focus on other things—my husband, for one. My niece. My sister.
“So, what’ve you been up to, Tulip?” Ellery said.
Parker frowned. “Tulip?”
My cheeks burned. Somehow, having Parker find out about the nickname felt bad, like he’d just caught me doing something awful. There’s nothing wrong with a nickname between friends, I reminded myself.
“It’s what I called her back at PCC,” Ellery said. She laughed. “Oh, it used to annoy you so bad.”
“It only annoyed me because I couldn’t come up with a nickname for you! Aside from Bellery, which is pathetic compared to Tulip.”
Parker gave a half-hearted laugh. Iris leaned closer to him and said, “Parker, it’s so wild that you’re here for business school. That’s amazing. Tell me about the application process. I heard it’s really tough.”
Business school applications had taken over our lives for the past year, and Parker was only too happy to dive into the specifics. While he did so, I stole glances at Ellery. She really was here, right next to me, her presence unbelievably real. I could feel the very molecules in the air between us vibrating with the physicality of her. Ellery was here.
“Um, so,” I said, “um. How was London?”
Ellery turned to face me and her lips pursed into a small smile. There it was, the smile that said she was barely holding back a laugh. Everything inside me lurched. I loved that smile so much. Every time I saw it, I wanted to say more, do more, just to tease the laughter out of her. “Yeah, it was okay. I liked it.”
“Very exotic place, London,” I said.
The smile grew into a grin, and I felt a flush of pleasure deep in my belly.
“Oh yeah, the most exotic. Unlike Indonesia, which is so basic.”
